Heights Co-Founder Dan Murray-Serter: "Turning failure into a $12M revenue business"

0:00How do you do it all? I have great partners. And that is actually kind of the secret hack. To have a great business, you need a great product and you need great distribution. We were running this company. And as you know, it was going extremely well until it wasn't. And that company was a failure. I had insomnia for six months. I did not seem to be making any progress. I went on like a journey of self-discovery. And at no point did anyone suggest nutrition. 120 pounds later, didn't even know supplements cost this much, but what the hell? Within two, three days, sleeping for the first time till 7 a.m.

0:30One thing that entrepreneurs are amazing at is kidding themselves. Anything about your product that's even nudging towards mediocrity, you're going to get found out. Hello, sir. Nice to see you, mate. Thank you for joining us. Pleasure. Feels like it should be the other way around. You're a pro-interviewer and here I am trying to interview a pro-interviewer. Unfair task. So thank you for joining us. It feels like an honour. Tell me, so many people will know you, Dad, as running the biggest business podcast in the UK. They'll know you from running Heights, which we're going to speak a lot about today.

1:01And for any founders, many of which there's about 400 people in this incredible founders network that you run here in London, how do you do it all? There is a secret hack in every single one of them. Heights, founders, a kindling media that makes secret leaders and family. I have great partners. And that is actually kind of the secret hack that people always miss. and that's also by complete I think coincidence or yin and yang or whatever I've got a different partner in every single one of them and every single one of them kind of has an aversion to social media and so what we bring to the party is in every single one of them I mean to the extent where um you know at least two of my business partners literally don't have social media I can Full stop.

1:52Not just like they don't publish stuff. They're just not on it. Any of them. And so there is that side to it where the recognition and everything that I get is, you know, only 50 % worthy of me and 50 % to the not silent to me, but silent to the world partners, if that makes sense. And so there's benefits both ways, right? Because it's good for them that I'm able to build audience. That's something that I actually gravitate towards. It's something I enjoy learning the art of and mastering. And it's something that they absolutely detest. But without those things, you can't really build a business because to have a great business, you need a great product and you need great distribution.

2:36And my partners tend to focus actually more on product in each single one of these businesses. And I focus more on distribution and distribution can be, you know, a small D and interpreted in many different ways, of course, essentially marketing communication relationship building whatever the thing is it's sort of the external je ne sais quoi of how do you take the essence of what this product or idea is whether it is you know brain and gut health supplements whether it's a community and how to connect people whether it is an interview that needs to be widely distributed or whether it is a child every single one of those things requires I think a human touch and understanding how to get the expressions of what that means and why other people should care about it into the ether so others do and on the other side of that are brilliant people who are doing probably what I what I see as the hard work they might see what I do as the hard work and that's kind of the beauty of it if you love what you're doing it should be fun I love it but let's talk about the origin of heights where did that start because um that really is I know how you spend much of your time today um but it's i think it's what people know you for and they know that you have this um this passion for brain health and for health overall and for wellness um so i'd love to hear the story tell us the origin story yeah so joel and i were best friends still are sounds terrible if i say were we were and still are best friends and we were running a company called gravel which is where we met you because you were running a company called grapple didn't confuse anybody no it didn't confuse anybody except for us because we were like how come he's successful and we're not what the hell i mean the difference between b's and p's come on that's and that's all that there was in it yeah exactly i know that's all you really brought to the table was good grammar um so we we were running this company and as you know it was going extremely well until it wasn't and had this big implosion and massive amount of learnings stress uh stuff i would never change like a lot of people think about their failures you know and that company was a failure um one of the things that happened during our journey so joel and i were working in tech and enjoying it interested in health but generally healthy guys not like obsessive or anything but broadly healthy um you know exercise eat well blah blah blah nothing crazy we both had really poor health um or really poor health experiences now joel's is with his gut health mine was with my mental health um and we often talk about this you know if you have bad gut health it's kind of embarrassing because you know talking about farts and poos is always embarrassing but at least it's funny look at that reaction right there that is exactly what happens there's a giggly five-year-old right stuck inside here right so you talk about farts and poos and awkward awkward gut uh situations and they're kind of funny and on the flip side you talk about your mental health experiences and suddenly everyone's very somber everyone's very like oh okay I better not laugh at this guy which in fairness it would be harsh to laugh at someone talking about their mental health problems but you get the difference immediately it's so interesting so Joel went on a journey to fix his gut health problems and that journey much earlier in the funnel of trying to fix it starts with nutrition and supplements of course because it really makes a lot of sense it's your gut it's your stomach here's some things to try here's some foods not to eat this is the first place you logically start And then the second place is actually psychological, right?

6:05Is it stress? Are you sleeping? Well, it's all these things. On the flip side, my journey, I had insomnia for six months. So I literally couldn't sleep. And I had lots and lots of different mental health issues in my 20s and early 30s. But I'd always gone on like a journey of self discovery for them. Or also, you know, at times just being patient. You know, I had depression for a couple of years. And, you know, I tried medication and I tried lots of different things. but I also sort of understood that this might be my life and what you feel when you're depressed is I hope it's not because actually I'm not that person and I've never identified with being that person I'm very glass half full as you know but you sort of know that this isn't you yeah and that actually if you positively continue exploring the different ways to get over it it might happen and that is what happened to me you know just time and confidence and positivity from within and reading a lot with insomnia I did not seem to be making any progress so as a man the stereotype is you know you're always trying to fix things you know it was the classic men and women talking and you're like well what do I'm going to do about it like just listen you're like how's that going to solve anything but actually people aren't always looking for you to solve things well if you're a man uh you know you are trying to just fix yourself rather than listen to anything so So you jumped straight into solution mode.

7:27And I went to the doctor and he recommended me sleeping pills. But because I'd already had antidepressants and stuff, I know the effect of pharmaceutical. You're basically with a lot of this stuff. And I'm not anti antidepressants. My mum is on antidepressants and they've been very helpful for her. However, you know, I think they're a terrible, terrible first choice that anyone should. I think they should be right down the bottom of the list. and that you should be encouraged to try all the other things first. However, in the UK, the way the NHS is set up, the way GPs are set up, the way everything is set up is directly connected to pharma.

8:04And this isn't like some pharma conspiracy chat, by the way. It's more that pharma saves lives. And so you're a doctor, you're hospitals, you're learning medicine, you're now practicing, you have a problem, I'll give you a prescription. That is completely fair and reasonable. And in 99 % of things, that's actually a very healthy, good solution. It's saved billions of lives. however when it comes to your mental health slightly more complicated because yes an antidepressant can help you and yes a sleeping pill will make you go to sleep yeah clearly neither of those things is addressing any underlying reason why you feel that way and so this time because I'd had my antidepressant experience I didn't want to take the sleeping pills and so I sort of suffered with my insomnia for ages and I went to a therapist and sleep therapist.

8:51I tried calm and I tried sleepio and CBT therapy and you name it. I went on like a journey of self-discovery. And at no point did anyone suggest nutrition at any point, no one, no professional. And then I was having dinner with a friend who I met through founders actually. And she was like, have you heard of brain health? And I was like, yeah, I mean, my grandma died of Alzheimer's and she was like, no, no, like brain health as in like you, you have brain health. And it sounds to me like you've got a brain health issue. Maybe you should go and see a dietician and I was like I don't understand how these things are possibly connected equally kind of at the end of my tether I haven't slept in months so I'll do anything so I went to see a dietician the dietician I explained to her what was going on with me all the things I tried which in fairness made it very easy for her to say well you know there's an enormous thing here that you haven't tried right and that was nutrition and nutritional intervention so she recommended to me omega-3s b vitamin complex and blueberry extract and i'm a white british male meaning that i'm insanely cynical um and skeptical of everything and think i know better of course and impervious to instagram ads from influencers telling me i need supplements so i needed an expert like her to actually convincingly tell me this is literally my job um you may have heard that supplements don't work and you may believe these things but the nuance in all of this is actually that most supplements don't work and the reason they don't is actually more to do with the marketing loophole that exists in the world yeah which is that you can put in the minimum amount that you need to and make the same marketing claim as the scientific dose which is what i'm telling you you need right and the highest quality product that makes the right amount and makes the perfect product can only make the exact same claim as the people who raced at the bottom and put nothing in their can.

10:49And so the industry is screwed. But if you take supplements with the right dosage of the nutrients that you need, you will feel a difference. And I was like, huh, okay. And she's like, so basically don't go to Boots or Holland and Barrett because the price is, she's, you know, she told me something very, very helpful at the time. Cheap supplements are not a bargain. You are getting the exact same amount penny per penny pound per pound as expensive supplements the difference is the expensive supplements are giving you what you think you're buying and the cheap supplements are not sort of like buying a bottle of wine for 20 quid and getting like that much wine at the bottom and the rest is water and getting that for five quid and being like what bargain it's a whole bottle of wine for five quid it's like no that's not how it works same with supplements so she explained this stuff to me with great clarity and i was like huh that is really interesting where do i go and she was like planet organic and i was like fucking hell it's really hoping you wouldn't say that um so 120 pounds later on three supplements 30 day supply of each and i was like i can't believe didn't even know supplements cost this much but what the hell and took them with a lot of hope obviously i'm desperate at the end of my tether and within two three days sleeping for the first time till 7am and kind of like mind blown like who knew and then I was kind of just angry I'm like well why didn't my doctor tell me to go and see a dietitian like dietitians are literally doctors of nutrition so they literally study in the NHS for four years and they specialize in diet and the difference between a nutritionist and a dietitian is a nutritionist generally deals with healthy people or the worried well and so anyone that follows Gwyneth Paltrow the worried well like looking to optimize or get more more anxious about how healthy I really am and then dietitians deal with sick people so the dietitian that we were speaking to at the time you know she kept explaining to me you'd be amazed how many people come here on their mental health journeys at the end of their journey if you have a gut health journey or many other things you will go to a dietitian early in that journey but mental health last resort dietitian she explained one very important framing for this your brain is psychological your mind and physiological the actual brain it's an organ right so she was like if you don't get the nutrients you need in that brain to thrive and function properly you start to impact the psychological side and you get warning signs that's just a very good communicator of the stuff she's like you get warning signs so imagine this is your house your mind is literally on fire sending you alarm signals that you have to figure it out and that's what's happened the reason you can't sleep is your mind is saying your brain's screwed so go on a journey of fixing it and she's like and as soon as you do and you start taking the nutrients that your brain's underfed and need look how quickly they went away and now you can start sleeping so she did sort of a master class and sort of breaking this stuff down really simply.

13:50And anyway, I just became so fascinated in this space because I was like, how many spaces as an entrepreneur could there possibly be left in the world where if you look at the science, there's endless amounts of evidence of nutrition and the impact of mental health and no consumer awareness. How many spaces like that probably exist in the world? Like I can't think of any, most of them is the other way around where you've got to be really good at marketing communication, but you've also got to wait for the science to catch up or you've got to invent the science. This was like, this is evidence.

14:21No one's question, no one professional questions that this stuff is true. The problem is the actual market has exploited this loophole and it's damaged the confidence of consumers. So if you can figure out how to communicate trust and quality, you'll have a high impact product that will make a difference to people and they will become lifelong customers. So it's an amazing insight. And one opportunity to spot, and for you, it's so deeply personal. When I think about it, a little reflection actually when you think about the grab all days where I imagine you were spotting an opportunity in market it was mobile apps it was fashion which wasn't your background so different what do you mean to hire well come on down you always look great how do you but ultimately it was a personal um issue it was a personal journey you went on to to form high so we'll get into the product development and um and how you built the business but on reflection and I think about you know entrepreneurs watching this having that personal pain point and trying to solve for that yeah how different to go on that journey that origin story of heights versus gravel was it on reflection for you is that do you put that success of heights down to that yeah i think there's a like firstly definitely and part of the reason for that is as you know the idea of you know starting up and exiting quickly is a myth so you're probably going to be in it for the best part of a decade or longer yeah and so anything that you're going to commit that amount of time to as the entrepreneur you kind of have to fall in love with the mission and the purpose behind it and what you're really doing because your employees will come and go they're free you are creating a cage and it can be an incredible cage that you love to live in like an aquarium or it can be an absolute hellhole that you resent every single day but like whether you love it or not like the daily processes of running a business like managing employees like angry customers happy customers that the flow good sales days bad sales days it doesn't matter what category you're in all of that stuff is going to still become your daily reality and your daily reality as a human being is still you're going to you're going to react to no matter how much meditation you do you're still going to be triggered by certain things and so if you can connect it up to a higher why that you really care about it makes the bad days easier and the good days amazing and i think like the the difference is you know i often talk about um the distinction between passion and purpose is your passion is something you do for you and your purpose is something you do for others and if you connect that then with gravel and heights with Grable I was doing it for me on the basis of um you know high growth lots of ego everyone was talking about how amazing we were as entrepreneurs eventually you're actually just excited about being an entrepreneur built yeah successful basically building something that other people care about and that is your your ego and your identity yeah um but really it's about you and then with heights it's having a personal story yes but like again having my own personal experience unlocked in such a meaningful way and then wanting to create products around that we now have 27 000 monthly customers across our two products and that's monthly subscribers right so that is actually you know a sort of slow and steady and now quite fast compounding reality but we have two and a half thousand five star reviews and the reviews are like you know so many people use words like life-changing and all of these things i'm not here for hyperbole my point is the difference is night and day like in our orders in our reviews channel on slack i'm never having a bad day i can just open that and be like fucking hell it's so cool you're at service to everyone else rather than it's amazing yeah it's amazing so it really helps to feel like you're doing something for other people too i think what's fascinating about the origins of heights which i'd love to hear more about because i think for so many entrepreneurs i don't know where to begin but heights started off as a newsletter you built this community i think it was dawn was the was the name that's where i you know i discovered what you were doing next after you know life after gravel it's um i was really excited because you know so many brands talk about community and i don't always have the most authentic beginnings but heights really did you started to just put content out there at service to other people essentially because you were sharing your insights your journey let's talk about that how did that help you how did that get you out the gate faster what was the the natural evolution from having this community over email to having this product now with as you say tens of thousands of people using your product every day yeah i think one thing i would say to correct you is i've learned over time to be very very specific about um labels so i was trying to build a community but actually in truth it's intellectually dishonest because a newsletter is a one-way communication right so that's an audience and And, you know, a funnel technically looks like you build an audience, you get customers, and then the community is down here.

19:18Right. And that's where your super fans are. And that's really like many to many communication. So the reason I'm saying that to you is because for a couple of years, I was like, you know, we're a community, we're a community, we're a community. And then I was like, actually, by saying it, but then doing what I'm doing, it's actually intellectually dishonest and doesn't help me communicate what I'm trying to communicate well. so we built an audience first and I actually have no shame in that as much as you know I love community yeah I also know the difference between a community and audience better than most so um building a broad audience of people who care about the higher level topics which in this case were brain and gut health like focusing on the higher level topics enabled us to bring people into our world who were you know the people we look up to amazing entrepreneurs you know I mean as you know you know Stephen Fry like all these like intellectual people scientists like doctors nurses people who I revere in society but are nowhere in my category of the day-to-day people that I hang out with they're reading the newsletter and their reason they were reading the newsletter is I was saying I'm going to read science papers and so it's basically the proposition was very clear which I think is also part of it right which is every week I'm going to read a science paper about neuroscience psychology or nutrition and i'm going to condense it into three minutes because i think our tagline at the time was um uh something along the lines of science is hard and boring let me make that simple or something very like hooky like that right and so what it does is appeal to people who are like i believe in scientific principles i don't want to just hear about the latest juice diet fad from that influencer on Instagram in a bikini like I actually want to uh trust science but yeah fair enough I'm not going to read PubMed it's incredibly boring I don't want to read your citation so I'll do that part yeah and I'll write it in a fun millennial way and I'll include all the references and links but this should be an enjoyable bit of entertainment in your inbox every week but by reading it every week you'll learn a little bit more how to take care of your brain and gut and that proposition really struck a chord but it struck a chord with people at the top of the funnel um there's you know when you're building product it takes time and what you don't want to do if you're building a quality brand and you've got the space and time to do that and you're really clear about what you're trying to build don't want to rush it you're going to bring to market something crap um by doing the by building the audience we sort of gave ourselves almost like a credible narrative of space and time to not rush what we were doing because we weren't sort of like we got to get this to market by next month and compromise our values otherwise we're done we're like no no we're building an audience that hopefully will want to buy our product that we can pre-validate by the time we launch but the higher quality and larger the audience the higher quality product we get to make by giving ourselves time so those two things were so important to do in tandem i think it's so interesting because when you're building the audience that comes on the journey with you so they're brought in true it also starts gives you some signals as well to go wow people care about this space and you start to understand what could they be our first customers and how many customers and then when you think about even some of the technicalities of your you know minimum order quantities it probably started to inform some strategy you made around product development but I want to stand on the theme of education because you've educated a market around brain health you're now educating more of a market around gut health as well with the probiotic how do you think about education how do you think about education and continuing that theme of making it accessible, making it palatable for a millennial or Gen Z audience who don't have the time to read scientific papers.

22:56Yes. But also in an industry where, as you said, there's charlatans, there's a lot of quick hacks, there's a lot of fads. How do you cut through that noise and continue to really educate, but do so in a way that attracts people and pulls people in rather than not? so um i came across a quote from a friend of mine called matt learner um who basically said educating the market is the most expensive stupid strategy and i really agree with him like it's the worst you don't want to be in the place that we're in like you don't as a business of all the strategies you can take educating the market is the worst of all of it you don't have the money you're a startup educating the market is extent it's exponentially expensive and you need funnels of triggering different points people if you look at a funnel of marketing people you need to get people to the consideration stage right am i now considering that product you're so far away from that when people don't even know that they've got a problem or are interested you're so far you've just got to commit for ages i literally got a message um three days ago from someone saying uh it was a comment actually on the linkedin post i just did on our recent collaboration with matt Willis and he said this ad was so fucking great it finally converted me I've been thinking about getting your products for the last three and a half years that's everything you need to know about how long it takes to educate and convert a customer can you imagine how much money we've essentially spent marketing to that one customer to get him down the funnel so if you focus your business on needing to educate the market you're probably screwed and that's the truth you'll probably die before you actually have a meaningful revenue business so the thing that i would say is we got lucky so you mentioned both our products our first product which focuses on brain and focuses on brain care looking after your brain and all of these things it's niche niche is good um there are emotional triggers that's good um looking after yourself makes sense that's good all of these things are good but it still meant that we had like a technical limitation i guess and how you can really communicate this effectively to a broad enough audience.

25:02In the background, we were developing our probiotic and we were doing that for three years. The thing is, we got very lucky. We spent three years developing a product. And again, you need the time, the patience, the focus, the confidence in the long term of what you're building and good investors to give you the space to do that. Most investors are not going to say, yeah, have three years to bring out a second product as a startup. It's actually frankly absurd. but in this space our view has always been you can go broad or you can go deep and if you're going deep you can have way less products look at red bull look at the size of the market red bull has from going deep on a specific category specific niche even just those cans let alone their other flavors insane yeah so if you can be the very best at your super niche and mop up the market of people who are interested in that it's an enormous company yeah so that's always been our focus and three years when we three years back when we started developing that product probiotics were sort of a growing trend when we launched it in january 2023 that trend was ready to explode um the difference between the growth in our probiotic in terms that it's still not our best-selling product it's still vitals our first product but the trend of speed yeah right going from zero to that is exponentially greater and that's not because we're getting better at our marketing, all of the things.

26:21You could say it is those things, but it's actually because the consumers are at consideration stage when it comes to probiotics. They understand gut health is important. The education is being done by the media, by other influencers, by TV shows, by other brands. There is a groundswell of people talking about gut health and probiotics and why it's important. And if you can demonstrate that you're the best product in that niche, you'll mop up customers who are at the consideration stage. People are still not having that conversation about the brain i think they will and when they do we will fly right because actually we will be the people in the market the longest with the and so i'm waiting for that moment and i'm really excited for it but strategically to your question educating the market is actually a very bad strategy yeah yeah we talked about trust talked about authenticity um you mentioned matt willis you mentioned stephen fry talk to me about how you think about bringing talent and ambassadors closer to the brand, leveraging their reach, their distribution, but ultimately their trust with their fans.

27:21How do you think about that? How do you think about finding those right partners? How do you go about creating those partnerships and having those testimonials? I think that's so important because it gives the social proof that so many brands need, especially in your early days. Can you share with people about your own journey there? Yeah, well, it's been a journey. We're the only brand I know that buck the trend that everyone else in D2C tells you. And it is so frustrating because I actually love it to be the other way around the common narrative is big ambassadors don't work don't waste your money it's an absolute shit show and micro influences is where it's at and you get lots of creative from micro influencers and you make that work and you scale that and blah blah blah blah blah we've never been able to crack it we're just about now starting to crack that i have to say like we are and it feels very exciting because it feels like finally untapped territory in this world of d2c that somehow we're so unable to join this party that everyone else talks about but fortunately it's not like we're so bad at both sides so the ironic bit is that we've cracked the other side that all other brands want which is how do you get really famous people who are like very very um i'd say have a brand of skepticism and you couldn't buy their authenticity they don't do lots of advertising essentially like how do you get those people that's the thing that people are interested in the part that no one can copy is product like it doesn't work if you don't have a great product you know someone just sent me I was mentoring someone just over whatsapp and he sent me his product that he's got to Marie Kondo and they're doing a partnership with that you know Marie Kondo is only going to do and it's a minimalist product and all this stuff she's only going to do it if they've got the great perfect product for her right so it starts with being sensible being living in reality if your products not amazing and the person is not a legitimate customer forget about it but if you think that that person would be a legitimate customer and it can help solve x y and z problem for them you might as well shoot your shot so the Stephen Fry thing was just sort of serendipity one of our investors who's the founder of WeTransfer they do lots of stuff with Stephen Fry was like I reckon Stephen would love this we sent him the supplements um and this is kind of the problem with with how we used to do it versus how we now do it if you send someone supplements you don't actually know what's going on you don't know if they're taking them you can't really follow up with them because it's highly intrusive it's their health so it's literally an awful like hit and hope like he's not going to do insta stories like it's just you don't know and this one time we did it with steven fry we did it in a pre-launch period and he went to buy our product casually the day before we launched and as a result he couldn't until he had to email damien to email me i want to buy the supplements they've been amazing for me how do i do it and i was like i can get you a code but you've got to give us a testimonial and like we want to be able to use your advocacy or mean everything to us he was like that seems like a fair exchange so he's been like our second longest serving customer after my mum i actually think he's got more orders than my mum um simply because you know she's had the odd uh you know i'm cancelling i'm going away for a month whatever oh you're going to lose your you know lose the race to steven fry now but hey um but anyway i um i would say that one thing was sheer luck and you do need luck on this journey gotta be in it to win it and you need the luck and that was huge for us and from that point as well you're able to say used by people like steven fry and and then the next person and then the next person and so it starts to compound just staying on that trend of future entrepreneurs watching this and thinking about how would they start a wellness brand how they start something in health today because it's become an industry that has so much as some that are great but as you know heights and why i've been an investor and a fan for so long is because it starts with a great product ultimately yeah what would be your advice for other entrepreneurs looking to get into this space yeah and it could just be don't because it's just so saturated it's not really it's not really don't because i actually always think that's kind of like a lame answer like great entrepreneur as in as if the last great wellness product is going to be heights there's gonna be many more so like at the end of the day the answer is um no one needs an average product yeah the world does not need a mediocre product in the world um one thing that entrepreneurs are amazing at is kidding themselves right and believing that if i just keep telling you my thing's amazing you'll believe it i'm afraid that's not true like if there's anything about your product that's even nudging towards mediocrity you're going to get found out and yet you can you can market your way out of that for but only for so long so you need something incredible and in the health space people are putting stuff inside their body so like even more so you need something that people can trust and is credible and that is going to take time so one of the other issues in this whole thing is you need space and time and money you know it's very uncommon to try and make this work without funding yeah and the reality for that is because the chances that you as a startup founder are going to bring out a great v1 all depend on how long you have to develop that product and the shorter your timeline on being able to develop that product the less likely it is because bigger companies have been trying with bigger teams and bigger people and bigger resources and all of the things that aren't your limitations so i think that's the main thing really is you need to buy yourself time and don't cut corners and compromise on the actual product but you can cut corners and compromise on other bits and pieces but the thing someone's putting in their body or on their body or whatever it is if you cut corners there you're never going to get a repeat customer they're going to try it if you're lucky there's you know what the whole early adopter categories for they'll try it but early adopters are also like the smartest type of consumer there is right they're the most open-minded they like cool new trends they're usually future thinking but they're also fucking highly discerning because they've already tried other things so if like if this is not the best experience or whatever and i just won't come back again and you can't build a business off a single customer you have to have repeat customers monthly i think it's fantastic advice yeah i think anyone who gets to know you knows you're very open dan very honest very authentic maybe unfiltered unfiltered but in particular with building heights in public this has become what you've been really known for I think it's hugely admirable because you don't have to do it.

33:36And I think so many brands are teased. They want to do it, but don't really go the full way in which you do, where you expose your revenue numbers. You talk about good months, bad months. You talk about dips and sales, growth metrics. You share everything. Letting people go. You're really letting people go, which I know is a big topic for last year. Like so many companies had to go through that, but you shared openly and honestly your experience. Talk about why you do that and why you think so many others should do that also. yeah I think why I do it is it feels like therapy to me um but I think there's also like as a founder the first time I the first time I when I did gravel basically um I started interviewing great people uh because I started secret leaders in 2017 right so it was around the same time and I was always talking to founders who on reflection of their journey looking back were able to create great narratives and steve job said you know you can always connect the dots looking back everything makes sense backwards so you get these great narratives and you get these great stories and there'll be lots of failure and humility and all that kind of stuff that wasn't really the issue the problem is in the moment you wouldn't find founders who are willing to talk about how it's going now right now because that's actually very uncomfortable and it's also uncertain and the more uncertain something is the less you can do damage limitation on the narrative but you know every single entrepreneur running a business right now is running the business now so actually the only thing that really matters is like the current narrative now and how to basically play out my day by day not the moment after the fact and not the moment you overcame that thing and everything did work out or didn't work out and you've got time to lick the wounds and so I thought it'd be super super interesting as an experiment to just document the journey as we go month by month and do it on LinkedIn and Twitter and share you know obviously now it's revenue numbers but it started off with newsletter subscribers right like if I go back all the way on Twitter I'll probably find you know newsletter subscribers on week one three you know and so stuff like that for a year it was this is how many newsletter subscribers is how many unsubscribers these are the things that we're doing behind the scenes we're looking forward to bringing out our new product and then as it grows it's this is the revenue this is the learnings these are things we're doing and then last year it's you know we've had to let 40 of our team go i've even had we had an employee leave the company for first time and you know obviously i checked with her in advance you know do you mind if i do a building in public post about this i'm always going to and i've had also colleagues leave who said no i don't want to i'm not comfortable with that but because we have a culture internally of a everyone who joins knows i'd do this right b we have a really good like i'd say not quite radical candor but we have very strong feedback culture where everything is very direct and open and honest and we talk about stuff and it's all very visible yeah and so culturally people know that we're not ones to like hide behind narrative we're real and raw and that's a cultural thing so when i asked my colleague emma at the time who went to oddbox you know do you mind if I talk about this you leaving and our failings therefore as a business to not be able to keep you which was the first time something like that had happened because you know usually the other way around yeah you know she was like yeah absolutely and I let her read the post first and stuff because obviously I knew what would happen which is in the comments everyone being like what a prick yeah and then her actually coming to my defense me like he obviously checked that I was okay with this first but it's those things you don't see you don't see what it's like for a founder to have to fire someone amazing you don't see what it's like for a founder to lose someone amazing you don't see and you know this is it's interesting for employees and it's interesting for other founders because at the end of the day you're a human i'm a human and employees are human you're all going through different sides of the same human journey but this part of it is very hidden yeah and it's like the messy middle right it's the bit where you don't know how it's going to go so I just thought that was a far more interesting process um you can only imagine how uncomfortable Joel was with it but give him full credit I was basically like you know this is how I want to do it and he was like okay fine I think he's very much like you want to look right out of sight out of mind on a lot of it but you know for someone who's so uncomfortable with this kind of stuff full credit for like letting me do it because as you know it's like and he's also filtered and sensible yeah and i'm really not as you know i'm really unfiltered so it's very deeply uncomfortable for him to be like god you're gonna everything i talk about obviously implicates him yeah right so it's hugely uncomfortable but it's a good opportunity for both of us to do something different in the space and i think you've inspired so many other founders to do it also yeah i've seen that a lot which i like you know i get tagged in a lot of these as well and the thing is everyone stops doing it and i totally get that yeah everyone stops because it's very easy to do we grew x last month we grew y last month as soon as you're like i've got to talk about stuff that my employees are going to read yeah and my investors are going to read yeah how do i feel about that and then that only works if you're pretty honest with your investors and you're pretty honest with your team if you feel like there's misalignment between what you're going to publicly say on linkedin or twitter and how you present yourself to your employees or your investors that misalignment is going to cause that to stop and that's the issue like most people like all habits start well get into like a really good rhythm and then stop and then starting again is really hard the most common building in public post is i haven't posted for nine months but you know things are good again and it's like i totally get it because i really get the fear i've overcome that fear often but unless it's like you're willing to share all the bad stuff it's not really doing it right yeah i think it's great great insights thank you endurance resilience you talked a little about you know especially in those bad months or those bad days how do you keep your motivations high down you know how do you um how do you keep yourself motivated but how do you how do you build that resilience over time through when you've had those periods of setbacks or failure or you feel like things aren't going you're going as well as you want them to be how do you manage through that well i will say that i got feedback for the first time ever ever which was actually spot on and i was embarrassed by that like what's happened to your like inspiring motivational angle every time something goes wrong at heights i'm like this is good because you know i've been an entrepreneur for 10 years now so like i know that it goes like this so i'm like wow we're here i know what's coming it's here but we'd spent like four months from november to february not great and we tried lots of things and none of them were working and so none of the things that we were trying were working and it wasn't through like a lack of you know it was a bit of a lack of ideas and jadedness and all these things but four months is ages for a startup not to grow and you know we're quite brutal in the heights about language and stuff you know we're like if we're not growing we're default dead so like actually it's that it's that important to be growing even if it's one percent it's really really everything um and it's not like toxic growth it's actually just coming back to you know what sounds great on linkedin to be like oh toxic work cultures and and actually the reality but no no we've got a bank balance guys and we've got to pay for product and customers and do you like your jobs and the opposite you know these things cost money so we have to so this is kind of like the hard realities behind it we're like it's really stressful and for the first time ever I was just like huh I'm like losing confidence that we're like able to figure that out and the thing that I was worried about the most was I didn't want to have to let go of anyone I found it very traumatic to let go of 40 % of our team last year it went well but you know we basically had to fire like say almost half the team and we got to profitability and the team that we had helped us get there and everyone grew a lot and it was kind of a cathartically amazing experience but I really like the people I let go no one was doing a bad job I still talk to them regularly it was my birthday yesterday like loads of them messaged me like we're mates and I like working with people that I like it sucked to have to let them go yeah um it is it depends on who you are and all this stuff but most founders would say you know there is a traumatic element to that because you really like these people but you cannot afford to pay those people to do the jobs if collectively the thing's not working.

42:03And so I was seeing the writing on the wall. It's November, it's December, it's January, which is supposed to be the best month in wellness, nothing, February. Are we going to have to let a bunch of people go? Like I really don't want to do it. And so it was really like causing fear and like lacking motivation. But equally, Joel and I did something drastic about it. We basically were a fully remote company and we decided to fly everyone in for two weeks, co-working, IRL, every single day, like emergency vibe. and anyone who works in England had to come to the office Monday Tuesday and just doing that which obviously everyone was kind of like oh yeah and I was sort of like not in so many words but it's a bit like we've got two options we change the people or we change the system and I don't really want to change the people do you guys want me to change the people you know like I've only got two options here and so everyone's like well I'd like to keep my job and I'm like exactly so fucking come to London let's change the system let's do something about it and you've literally just had a like incredible march and then april was so good that we had like our two best sales days ever in the last this week like sunday was our best and then tuesday was our even better best and so things are flying again now and there's correlation causation to this stuff right but actually i don't think so i think causation i think we identified a problem flew everyone in got us all together regalvanized the team the spirits the energy and look at the results immediately the month after that's very rare as well by the way so we made a lot of changes um and we did them quickly and we took action and so you know to your question like resilience you know there's a lot of that sort of um open-mindedness to try new things and also understanding that yeah you want resilience to deal with when things aren't working and that the writing might be on the wall all of a sudden and it's going to be a real challenge like in this environment the amount of money you can borrow to grow you know we had like a one and a half million pound debt facility it went down to 150k like that because of four months of bad experience um you can't pay for stock with that and suddenly you're like shit we might not have a business unless we fire everyone two good months later and it's back up one and a half the swing and this is very important for founders to listen to because you'll do anything at some point to stop raising money if you can and borrow money and you can do that when you've got a certain amount of money and you've got revenue and you've got growth if the growth dies you don't get the money so again growth is like it's all connected right and so the sort of resilience i think is one side to it but it's also the adaptability right it's knowing that um if you get a group of smart people together even when things aren't working if you're truly collaborative and actually making a lot of effort and impact together you probably will get through it but the trick is not to die yeah from a personal perspective and i ask this question also raising a young family how do you handle that dan you know you you have a wife, you have a young kid.

44:48How do you think about the emotional stress it takes on you as an entrepreneur, but also your family as well and those around you? And how do you, even in those moments where you're going through the pivots or the changes at work, you're making the changes to other products or the processes, system, the people. But from a personal perspective, what are you doing to keep that, to build that resilience over time and that endurance? Yeah, I mean, I'm really good with my daily habits and each to their own. But I go for a walk every single morning. I do something called morning pages, which is basically just journaling.

45:17um i exercise five times a week i you know i basically i make sure that i prioritize these things yeah and i really try super hard not to compromise around them yeah and know thyself you know what works for me isn't necessarily what works for someone else but i know of all of the things unless i take well obviously wake up take my supplements i know that if i don't i can be groggy as well i know that if i don't go for my daily walk i'm screwed and those two things alone like the rest could fall away i could not journal i could not exercise or whatever but if i didn't go for my walk i know that i'd be screwed so you kind of have to know the things and learn your own body you know that's not the same for joel for example he doesn't have like i need to go for a daily walk thing so i mean i think he does probably need to but hey who am i to tell him um but it is really important for you to figure out what are the things that put you in you know in your parasympathetic nervous system what are the things that like bring you calm again you know some people do ice baths some people do saunas some people you know play with animals whatever the thing is you've got to find a way to like relax your nervous system as well in between because if you're operating on adrenaline spikes the whole time you're going to have complete burnout and i've had burnout and it's really horrific i was basically in bed for a month um you don't want to be fucking with your adrenal system by doing that and there's a lot of highs every day with work and there's a lot of lows so you are going to anyway do that with your with your system you can't help it your nervous system um but what you can do is control the things outside of work yeah and so i've also made a really great daily habit of i do bedtime and bath time every single night with my daughter you know yesterday was my birthday like what i do for my birthday i finished work early picked her up early from nursery we played together for a couple of hours in a soft play i then did dinner and bedtime with her then got a babysitter and then went out to cinema and dinner with my wife after all of that because that's what I want to do on my birthday yeah but also that time as you well know playing with a toddler is incredibly fun and obviously I can't speak about the older they get I'm sure it's a lot worse but the point being like whilst it's fun or whilst you're in service of someone else for like a two-hour period not really thinking about work and I'm out of it and I tell myself obviously and I'm relatively good at it stopping work at six yeah and I'm doing that stuff I do stop work at six because I do all of those things but sometimes I finish work after that period and even if I do that I don't feel so bad about working late or doing that because I've spent the time suddenly focusing on my daughter and I think that's a surprising life hack you know I feel like my ability to handle all the things has improved since having a child not decreased yeah and I don't think people would imagine that to be true at all but actually it makes you more efficient in the time that you have and also puts you in a more balanced mindset to make good decisions making bad decisions when you're stressed you know will create more problems but we all do it i couldn't agree more i think your your point around prioritizing those things that spark energy spark joy is now what i'm prioritizing in my life but previously what i didn't do you know for me it was always work work work once you felt like you had the results and then i could exercise yeah then i could go on holiday then i could do these things yeah and if you invert that you enjoy the journey and actually the results start to speak for themselves and i think you know since having children as you say makes you a better delegator it allows you to um really understand what you're doing your work for and why i think is it adds to a huge sense of purpose i heard a really nice analogy yesterday which was um a book i'm reading which is really good called uh winning not fighting yeah um by the founder of leon and he said uh i love i love i love the sea i love the ocean and I was with someone who also loved the sea and I love ocean but I'm peaceful I believe in you know not fighting I believe in calm and this person was like you know no you've got to win at all costs the art of war like all this stuff so we're very different philosophies but we both love the ocean and I was like you know let's go and do something together I wanted to go on a sailboat he wants to go on a speedboat it's like this is the perfect analogy because actually the speedboat would get him from A to B faster yeah however you want to go around the world that speedboat is running out of petrol in the middle of the ocean and only one of us is making it around the world yeah so i was like it's actually a really brilliant analogy isn't it because actually it's true that only one of them will make it on the journey to the end and it will take longer but literally one of them will fail yeah and i was like it's spot on really hit me i was like this perfect analogy final question dan yes if you weren't building heights if you weren't building secret leaders if you weren't running founders what would you be doing otherwise it's a really good question i think i've become more interested ironically more interested in in personal brand one i've got two answers like the personal brand side is because um i've never deliberately built a personal brand up until january the 1st 2023 that was the day i said it was my sort of commitment to myself i'm going to post every day on linkedin and twitter and i'm going to do it around building my personal brand and as part of building personal brand um my other businesses fall into that but I think about it like a funnel I'm building audience in my ideas and who I am as a person and then my business is that what I do and stuff falls into the funnel of the content and I've really enjoyed learning about how to build a personal brand that is in itself an extraordinarily fascinating meta concept like everyone I'm really bad at thinking about me and I'm good at product businesses I'm good at thinking about this is a product i can communicate that what are the benefits what's messaging when you are the product it's a very weird meta thing to do and also you get trapped inside your ego your own insecurities how will people think of me am i a dickhead am i showing off all of the things right and it's even harder when you've got business partners who hate that stuff right because now they think that you have gone ego mad whereas actually i'm exploring it really from like a philosophically interested point of view so i just got 100 000 followers on both linkedin and twitter over the last couple of weeks and you know you learn in interestingly you know what audience what content residents with what audience and how to bring them in and how to convert them and what even the point of that stuff is right where do you want to direct them down the funnel to like which one of your businesses one of your products the thing that I've really enjoyed about it is like trying to think about yourself as a product instead of like an actual physical product but beyond that the reason I decided to do any of this is the meta trend that everyone talks about AI in a world where skills are commoditized and AI can do a lot of things I actually think like one of the last bastions of really great value is your personal authenticity and your personality and your reputation coming through on social it doesn't have to be the biggest thing but I actually reckon it's an enormous cheat code like life is kind of about building blocks um of uh opportunity and making things easier over time you don't want to start from scratch every single time on every single day with every single opportunity so having the uh ability to build an audience means that you kind of build this uh you know automatic cheat code for how people view you yeah weirdly people are nicer to you weirdly people think you're more important or interesting than you actually are and those things aren't always correlated right like most some of the most successful people in the world the smartest people in the world will have the smallest followings on social however there will be many many times when they wish that they had the access for an audience yeah so that is one answer to the question the other is if i was to do a product business there is one product that i'm obsessed with one brand i'm obsessed with and that's who gives a crap um so the direct consumer toilet paper the reason is because they managed to pick a category big enough that everyone uses everyone wipes their ass and it's they've connected meaningful purpose to it yeah so they now know everyone wipes their ass but westerners have great toilets and africans and lots of places in the world that are poor don't have good access to toilets we give away 50 of our products to help build toilets in africa and actually help people with sanitation obviously female sanitation like the stuff is sorry female hygiene like this stuff is massively purposeful and impactful and i think it's awesome and i i've interviewed simon griffiths but i've been a customer of of um who gives a crap for probably 10 years and i would never and it's not as good a product as andrex right it's not as soft on your ass or any of these things of course it's not it's environmentally friendly but like you don't care about those things because actually i'm like amazed that there aren't more businesses yeah that have found categories of product that everyone uses and needs but attached a real attached a real core purpose an underlying purpose because that's the best way to hire the best people yeah and the company with the best people wins yeah so the best people will be attracted to two things the most amount of money right which is why you have fucking idiots in politics sadly there was tons of money in politics the smartest people would go there you'd actually solve a lot more of the world problems but it's inverted and that's not what happens so they go into business instead which is why business actually ends up being quite a good force for good because smart people try and solve big problems in the private sector that they'd probably love to try and solve in the public sector and then the second side of it is purpose having an unbelievable mission about helping people in a meaningful way like that is an incredible way to attract the best people to your to your company and so um those like those are sort of my two areas where i like intellectually i find super fascinating and i don't know what that category is because i i often look around household things and think this is the toilet paper where can i find it would you argue you're doing this with heights already you're already in service of so many others not yet and so the reason for that is because in our space um it's not possible to get the the price down yeah with the quality up so extracting nutrients extracting quality nutrients out of those vitamins and minerals and actually making it the quality level that we need it's not possible to fulfill a broader mission.

55:34It just isn't. And so that's nothing to do with us. That's actually to do with the extraction methods and stuff. So if there's a big breakthrough in an innovation and you can actually sell high quality vitamins and nutrients and bacteria and all the scientifically studied stuff for half the price, 100%. But I'm also like a practical realist. I don't like to pretend I'm on God's mission when you're charging a certain amount of money that actually only the middle class and above can afford whereas who gives a crap is actually cheap toilet paper yeah right it's affordable it's worse quality than the expensive stuff yeah but it's meaningful yeah i didn't think we'd be ending this conversation talking about toilet roll people talk to me about exactly don't worry about it right back up you're an inspiration dan you are energizing your sector within health and wellness you have taken it upon yourself to interview some of the most successful people on your podcast and the last few years in order to share learnings So I'm delighted that you'd be there to join us today and share some of your learnings and for people to hear from you a little more than they often get to do.

56:35So thank you so much, sir. Thank you, mate. Pleasure.