Ketone-IQ: From DARPA Lab to a Gym or Cafe Near You. How to Build a Movement Around a New Technology with Michael Brandt: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down ketone IQ from DARPA lab to a gym or cafe near you, how to build a movement around a new technology. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Michael Brandt and EO Fire Studios. Michael is CEO and co-founder of HVMN, creators of Ketone IQ, and he brings ketones to the mainstream backed by 16Z and a$6 million grant from the US military. And today we talk about how to be unbusy. Most successful people have downtime.

0:35John Lee Dumas:Focus on a niche that buys from you consistently and grow from there, and then keep your temple clean and owe so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Michael and our sponsors. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.

1:20John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Michael, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:40Michael Brandt:what's up fire nation it is a honor to be here excited to share my story one thing that i believe that most people don't is you want to be as unbusy as possible i think there's this rat race of be as busy network connect as possible a little secret that i see from the most successful people i know is they just have dead time they have days with zero meetings where they are allowed to be in thought space and really dive deep and get to novel, new, exciting areas of thought that you're not able to do if you're on the hamster wheel all day. Be unbusy.

2:17John Lee Dumas:I love that being unbusy mindset because so many people are just on this hamster wheel. They're just always being reactive to everything. They're just reacting, reacting, reacting. They're never taking the time to step back, take a deep breath and say, what problems am I solving? Am I producing the right content? And I remember asking one of my mentors back in the day what his most valuable actions were every day. He's like, the time that I sit back in my chair, close my eyes, and just think. And I was like, whoa, that's not what I expected, but that's pretty darn cool. And today at Fire Nation, we'll talk about how to build a movement around a new technology.

2:53John Lee Dumas:And of course, the new technology that we're talking about today specifically is Ketone-IQ. And they are a sponsor for the month. I can tell you I've had firsthand experience with it. It is a delight for those of you that are health conscious and really want that clean boost of energy in your system. So you can sound like you are loving life as much as people like myself and Michael when we're having conversations like these around awesome topics. So many people, Michael, they dream of leaving their quote unquote corporate job, you know, whatever their version of that might be, as soon as possible.

3:32John Lee Dumas:Should we wait until we have our big idea before we leave this job?

3:36Michael Brandt:That's a great question, John. One way I think about it is like being in a relationship in your personal life. Sometimes if you know it's not going well, you don't necessarily know the next person that you want to go and date. You just need to get out of the relationship that's not working. Give yourself some space to think. So personally, I had an awesome job at Google, checked all of the boxes, except for the big one for me, which was that I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I saved what I could. I left, I took the leap. And that gave me the space that I needed to co-founder date, concept date, ideate around different topics before actually starting what is now HVMN, you know, multi-million dollar business.

4:23Michael Brandt:We do business with the Department of Defense. We have a booming business on Amazon, direct consumer, retail. We've raised over$10 million. And I did not know what I was going to do the day that I left my big corporate job.

4:36John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, this is something I want you to think about here. Michael had a fantastic job. A lot of people would have envied what he had created with his life thus far, but he had a big idea. He had a big idea and he said, you know what? This is a problem in the world that I want to create a solution for. And Fire Nation, A lot of you listening right now have big ideas. But a question I want to move into next, Michael, is how do we know if our product, if our idea, if our service that we're thinking about, how do we know if it's innovative enough to make it? One way I think about this, and another way to smooth out the bumps from maybe leaving

5:15Michael Brandt:your corporate job, as well as answering the question, how do you know if what you're doing is too innovative is I always recommend to people build a following, build an audience, get the blue checkmark on Twitter or Instagram, become a thought leader on LinkedIn, build an audience around a certain topic area and start floating out the idea or ideas that you have. And you'll start to see, like if you invent the flying shoe or you start talking about how you're building the flying shoe and you get 16 jillion responses on LinkedIn every time we talk about it, that's probably a good sign to go and actually launch the flying shoe, quit your job and raise some money and get a Kickstarter going around the flying shoe.

5:59Michael Brandt:If what you're talking about is too far in the future, and this happens with entrepreneurs, and unfortunately sometimes happens with some of the smartest, best ideas, is if you're 16 steps ahead of reality, there is such a thing as being too early and you want to be the right amount of out ahead you want to be like half a step out ahead of where the culture is at if you're too many steps ahead you're going to lose people people might not be ready for it it's like launching the first computer in 1974 like it took a decade or two decades before people even knew what a computer was so so you want to be the right amount out ahead and again one way to test that is by building an audience a community content, because that's very lightweight, right?

6:38We're not talking heavy machinery,

6:41Michael Brandt:supply chain. We're talking about LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads. Get the concept and the content and the community going around what you think you want to do, see what's hitting or not, and let that guide your innovative journey.

6:52John Lee Dumas:Such great, valuable insights here at Fire Nation. I love the whole aspect of crowdfunding. I've used crowdfunding multiple times. In 2016, I thought people wanted a physical journal to help guide them through their goals, something that they would actually physically write in every single day to hold them accountable. But at the same time, it's like, do people really want something physical? I mean, everything's all digital these days. Ran a Kickstarter campaign,$453 ,000 in sales of a potential$39 journal later. Yes. Validation. Yes. I went and created it. Yes. I made it happen. And then I did that the same, uh, same thing again, the following year and the following year utilizing that let's prove it first and then invest.

7:34John Lee Dumas:Now, I do also love the phrase, Michael, the riches are in the niches. Do you believe this?

7:41Michael Brandt:I believe it through and throughout, especially for that early phase of an entrepreneurship. You'd rather have a thousand super fans than a hundred thousand people who like kind of know you and have kind of heard about you. You'd rather have just a niche of people that is buying and using your product every darn day because from there you can spread out. You need power in the niche. You cannot go mainstream and dilute too early. I think that's fool's gold.

8:14John Lee Dumas:One thing that I definitely say over and over again is you cannot start broad and then try to adjust and go more niche after you've already launched. You've already lost that potential, that momentum. But what you can do is start Uber niche by identifying a serious problem in this world and then creating the number one solution to that problem. You can't do that in a broad niche. You can't do that in a broad area, but you can do that in a micro niche. You can become the number one solution to a real problem. And then Michael, like you just mentioned, if you're able to get some momentum, some traction in that micro niche, you can expand that niche to mainstream.

8:51John Lee Dumas:Talk about how we can do that.

8:54Michael Brandt:My company, Health Via Modern Nutrition, HVMN, we launched the world's first ketone ester drink in 2017. And our first customer on that was the United States Department of Defense Special Operations Command. So the highest performing folks in the entire world, that was our first customer. But I'll also say our product was very expensive and crazy tasting. This was not going to go on the shelf at Target. But we got a$6 million contract with SOCOM and have done a ton of field testing, have innovated on the product, brought down the price significantly, made it taste significantly better. And now we are in grocery stores and we're on Amazon and we're everywhere.

9:36Michael Brandt:But we started with that super specific high performing niche. And what we were able to see is that, hey, if this is working for Green Berets and Navy seals in the field, well, you know what? We're all doing metabolism all the time. If you're sitting at your desk thinking, if you're going on a jog, if you're trying to lose 15 pounds, you're doing metabolism. Starting from the learnings of what we learned with the highest performing operators in the world, we've been able to broaden out that story. And I'm still in the middle of my journey here. The novel is not complete, but we are seeing that that niche is now expanding out.

10:11Michael Brandt:It's like, yes, we still have the high performers. It's a core part of who we are, but we are taking the learnings that are broadening out into the nice grocery store near your house, the gym, the fitness influencer, the Peloton coach, et cetera.

10:25John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we have so many more important things to talk about all around this topic when we get back from thinking our sponsors.

10:33Michael Brandt:There's no better time to review your systems than the new year.

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11:52John Lee Dumas:Everything you need to succeed all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business. And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Michael, research and development can be expensive.

12:33John Lee Dumas:It can get real expensive real quick. So how can we leverage government grants and contracts to help fund our R &D, our research and development?

12:45Michael Brandt:Yeah, that's such a good question. And it's something that not all entrepreneurs know about, but it's a great little secret to know about. The entrepreneurs that have caught on to this, it's almost like they are playing in a different league or like they have different gas fueling their company's balance sheet. Because there's these grants, there's these contract vehicles from the United States government. There's one that's called SBIR. It is a small business innovation research grant. There's another one that is called STTR. That is a science technology transfer research contract. And these are ways that you can take what you are already going to do, find an area of the government that is interested in the research that you're producing.

13:33Michael Brandt:So if you're doing AI or you're doing something novel in nutrition or any kind of technology that is novel and interesting, if you can find a part of the government that is interested in investing into that, you can connect the dots there and basically get your innovation to be covered in part or in full by the government. You're going to have to produce certain paperwork, right? There's an endpoint there where the government maybe wants to buy it from you, which is also awesome. But you're going to have to document your work and produce a deliverable report at the end of it. But it can be six, seven plus figures to be able to get a contract that is paying for the research and development.

14:18Michael Brandt:So instead of R &D being this expensive cost center at your business, it's cash flow accretive. You are making money because you are basically doing R &D for Uncle Sam. It's valuable to the US government, US taxpayer, and you're also holding onto it for your business and moving that forward.

14:37John Lee Dumas:So Michael, there are technology companies. There are product companies. What are the differences between these two companies?

14:45Michael Brandt:That's such a good question. What's a technology company versus a product company? I would say you want to be a product company. Consumers don't like technology. It's like consumers don't actually want a GPS chip with XYZ, whatever, in their phone. You want Uber or Lyft. You don't want the megapixel this, that, whatever. You want Instagram and Snapchat. You want the product that has a really frictionless user experience. A lot of times with entrepreneurs, and I've been on this journey personally, where you start out is you invent this really cool technology. We figured out how to make the world's first ketone drink, and it's really interesting for metabolism.

15:38Michael Brandt:But that's only where it begins. That's not where it ends. It's like, okay, well, how is that as a product? What is the dose size on that? How does it taste? How does it look? How do we communicate about it? What channels of trade are we in? The technology is like people don't just want a bunch of engine parts dropped on the floor of their garage. You want a full and complete car that drives smoothly and has air conditioning and feels nice. So I would say the difference between technology company and a product company is a product company covers the gap. they close the hood on that engine so that the end product is frictionless and fun and easy to use where someone's not directly exposed to their gps chip or directly exposed to all the parts inside of their engine they're just getting you know the the nice car they're getting the bmw or they're getting uber on their iphone they're getting the experience that just works so technology is cool.

16:40Michael Brandt:It's a great place to get started. It's a great place to fundraise. It's a great place, you know, you want to invent something new, but that's where the journey begins. And what you want to do is land at a really great product experience. You don't want your consumer to even have to understand the technology. You just want them to know, hey, I love this product. If they don't know your technology, that's almost winning, right? Like you want someone to be able to use Uber without even knowing that they have a GPS chip in their phone. You want someone to be able to drive their car without having any idea how combustion works.

17:11Michael Brandt:The good products extract that away.

17:14John Lee Dumas:Usually, Michael, and this is usually, being new and unknown is a disadvantage because you haven't built that know, like, and trust yet from a consumer base. How can we actually use this newness and consumer not being familiar with us as a marketing advantage? How do we spin that on its head.

17:34Michael Brandt:We come into that all the time with our ketone IQ, where I would say 3 % of the world that knows about metabolic health and how ketones can be this really premium fuel for just about anything you're doing in life, they're absolutely obsessed. And drinking it every day, first thing in the morning, before and after workouts, nice energy boost throughout the day. But the other 97 % of the world is like, what the heck is this? What is a ketone? Why am I drinking at who is this for? Why does this taste crazy? And we use that as a secret advantage where when we were talking to buyers at retail, we flip it on its head to, hey, this is new and different.

18:18Michael Brandt:This is driving incrementality. This is not just another lemonade or another popcorn. This is not just another lookalike to what you've seen before. This is something really different and interesting another way that we use it to our advantage is this is it's awesome to be on your podcast this is probably the 50th podcast i've been on in the last few months and i'll tell you what like having something that's a little bit weird odd out of the ordinary is a lot better there's a lot more just to riff on and to talk about on podcasts than if what you're doing is you know less new less innovative like sure maybe the average consumer will grock it quicker, but you want, it's like what we were talking about earlier, the riches and niches.

19:03Michael Brandt:You want that weird thing that kind of sticks out, doesn't make sense to the mainstream, makes sense to your niche. And then there's like a story to tell around it. So when you talk to other people, there's an hour of material about what the heck your thing does. And it's new and it's interesting to people. It's not the same old thing that they've seen before.