ND points

I don't think any of you are actually doing the math. This system is way better. For one, summer sales and Black Fridays were just that in the past. There was no earning on top. You bought what you bought, and the discount was the discount. Now you earn points on all products you buy during the big sales on top of the discount. You can then spend those points for up to 50% off orders. This is way more than we have ever given off, and frankly a big concerning to me when you look at the numbers. We are already pricing things extremely competitively as it is. We are charging way less margins than pretty much any other supplement company, and that's because of all the costs that go into making them the way we do, and the overhead to run our whole operation. Our overhead is frankly staggering. We have the overhead of companies making 5X the revenue we do. Just my 90 employees alone is a crazy payroll number, and I have a lot of masters and PhD scientists working now. Our lab operations budget alone is larger than the budgets of many of our competitors. Just taking into account solvent use, standard use, other consumables, and maintenance on our equipment is crazy. The capabilities we have come at a very large cost. I think they are worth the cost, and obviously a lot of people here do as well, but I don't think many realize just how high those costs are. Now my goal is to over time amortize those costs over larger numbers of sales. This will help smooth out the fixed overhead on a per-unit basis. However, that is proving harder than it sounds, because most consumers don't care about what I care about. They don't care about lab testing and scientific validity. They don't care about trying to push the science forward like we are. It's a struggle every day to try to find the customers that do care about that mission enough to support us. Hopefully over time we will reach more and more new customers, and the financial equation starts tipping in a more comfortable direction. For now, it's a delicate balance. Nobody but me would run things this way. Any other business owner would come in here and hack and slash all these programs away, because they are really hard to financially justify at our size. However, I am passionate about it, and I believe we can make it all work in the end. I am also stubborn and don't give up, which is honestly probably why we are still here. For reference, we have given out $40,000 in rewards since last Saturday. This are not small amounts of money here, and we have to account for all this on our books.

So anyway, back to the rewards. Let's say you are at platinum tier, as many people here will be after the sale, or at least soon. Plus, it's base 10, so the numbers are easier, and we have to calculate what future sales are going to look like. Let's say you spent $1,000 at the summer sale. I realize that's a lot for many people here, but we had brand new customers place a $3,600 first order with us over the sale, so we have to make the numbers work all the way from small to big. So let's say you were already at platinum and spent $1K. That's $100 in rewards points. Let's say we release a new product in a month that looks really cool to you... or hell, we release two new ones that look cool. Let's say they are both $60. That's $120 in new products. Prior to this rewards system, you could buy them and use the 10% off code. That's a $12 savings. You spent $108. Now with the new system you have $100 in credit. The products are $120. You have $100 in store credit. You use the points to get a $60 off $120. Now you have saved $60 and only spent $60. That's 50% off the second order instead of $10. You've saved a lot more than you would before. Not only that, you earn more points on the remaining spend! So you used $60 of your $100 in credit, and you earned another $6 in credit. You are left with $46 in credit. So before you would have saved $12. Now you have saved $60 and still have $46 in points. Now your 90 days resets. Then let's say in another 2 months we do the same thing. We release another two awesome products. Both are again $60 to make it easy. Scenario before you buy again, use the 10% off, and save $12. New system you get the $40 off $80 code, and save $40 on the $120, and this time earn another $8. You are left with $14 in points. You saved 33.3% on your order, and earned more points.

Old way: You save $24 on orders placed between sales, and spent $216 to try the four new products. You save an average of 10% off your next two orders, because it was just 10% off both.

New way: You save $100 on orders placed between the sales, spent $140 to try the new products, AND YOU STILL HAVE $14 IN POINTS! You saved $76 more than you would have, and the average discount off your two next orders was 40%!

Now that's with someone who placed a $1,000. The lady that placed the $3,600 order has a ton more points. We have to ensure the program makes sense the whole way through. This is why we have to set it up the way we did. I spent a lot of time going through all the scenarios, and game theorying this all out. This is not a hastily thought out system. I did a lot of work to set it up.

Now what if you want to place a larger order in between sales? Maybe you don't want to just spend $120 on the next order. Surely the 10% off coupon code would be better, right? NOPE! You have $120 in rewards. You can use that for a coupon for a minimum of a $240 order. If you used the $120 off $240 coupon, you would have to spend $1,200 on the second order just to be at the same level as the existing coupon. So anywhere between $240 and $1,200 in order total, you are still coming out ahead of the current system. Plus, you will earn more points on the remaining spend from that order! So even if you want to place an order for more than double what the points you currently have is worth, the cutoff point where the old coupon is better is so high up, it makes zero sense for 99% of the people. This is to say nothing of being able to earn more points from inviting people to buy from us that don't know us, or getting points on your birthday, or the plans we have to earn more points that we will launch soon.

So the idea that this system doesn't reward people is batshit insane to me. There has never been a time where you can get an average of 40% off two orders from us. The numbers work at lower amounts, too. They're not as crazy as when you get to platinum. Again, I am making assumptions on things to show the math as easily as I can. There are a million scenarios it could be. However, in the vast majority of scenarios, you are going to come out ahead with this new system. So much so that I am really worried that the system is not going to incentivize the one time customers enough, and the economics are going to tip against us. We really need it to get more one-off customers to decide to come back for it to all average out. I hope that happens, and I think that will happen, but it might not.