609: From $0 to $20M in 3 Years Selling Suppliments | Damien Fitzpatrick

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Welcome back to the founder podcast. So what if three back-to-back career-ending knee injuries became the catalyst for building a multi-million dollar supplement brand that's now sold in over 50 different countries worldwide, all within just under five years. Well, today's guest, Damien Fitzpatrick, former professional rugby player and founder of the supplement brand Pillar Performance, has done exactly that. After spending years as a citizen scientist, desperately searching for products that could keep him on the field, Damien realized the gap he was facing and it wasn't just his problem, It was an entire category waiting to be reinvented.

1:25So in this conversation, you're going to discover how to navigate the world of complex supplement manufacturing, global regulations as a first-time founder, why starting with retail and pivoting based on where customers actually want to buy your product can unlock insane exponential growth, and the counterintuitive strategy of cost-neutral marketing that built this multi-million dollar brand. This is a crazy story about turning adversity into expertise and building a global performance health brand by solving a problem nobody wanted to tackle. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship.

2:05Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

2:11Damien, welcome to the Founder Podcast. Nathan, thank you for having me. So first question I want to ask you is after a 13-year successful rugby career, what made you leave and fully go into starting a crazy supplement brand that is growing super fast? You know, you only started, what, five years ago, on track to do over$20 million in annual revenue, super fast growth, super competitive space as well. Why did you leave? Talk us through. Thank you, yeah. 13 years, successful, I would say. Look, there were moments. I mean, I wish, I think part of my journey within that 13 years is exactly the reason that I made the jump basically straight from the field into the life of an entrepreneur, which to your audience, we obviously, a lot of people realise how big that jump is to some people.

3:11You roll out of a sport and you start your own business, that's great. um it is it is quite a leap but the reason for that was because unfortunately across that 13 years i would love to be really really well known um for my time on the field i would say um and you know i'm happy to laugh about it now but there i'm probably more well known for the times i spent off the field um middle of my career uh it's really well documented i i suffered um three knee like acl reconstructions back to back to back so like literally 24 i was kind of came out of high school signed directly with professional rugby um as an 18 year old 19 made my professional debut you know did all the steps played that season you know probably fast tracked was on track to you know play for australia really early do all the things and it was kind of like everything was going nicely hit kind of 23 in the first big injury happened it was you know i was coming off the back of probably my best pre-season um and i did an acl which is not uncommon it happens it's contact sport um and everyone said you know you can come back from this you can be stronger etc which i did put my mind to it just got to work did the rehab only unfortunate thing then step back on the field day one of pre-season after returning same knee goes again fast forward okay pick yourself back up go again you're 24 and a half now you've done nearly 12 you know 18 months out of the game still on contract so we still obviously had enough legacy in my ability that teams wanted me to stay decided to make a move personally went over to france um signed with a professional team in leon over there um and unfortunately same knee went again within 10 games um and at that stage that was the kind of the moment where i was like wow this is this is not normal we went through a huge amount of intervention in the time um had to find a surgeon that would detect what was the problem which was a kind of a genetic i suppose angle it was a misalignment in my tibia so we had to go through a full procedure to um realign that tibia and i was able to get back on the field i was famously now the first rugby player to do a tibial osteotomy is the surgery um uh very thankful that we found a surgeon in europe that was able to do it got me back on the field i was able to continue my career for another five to six years but what it did do was it really did limit my physical ability i suppose to reach my maximum potential um and it was what led me into during those five years of being on the field and being really grateful for the journey um but supplements and interventions and anything i could do to make the journey as easy and as pain-free as possible i was doing um so when the time came that my knee was getting to the point where it was no longer enjoyable to keep playing um i'd done significant amounts of tertiary education and i kind of knew that what i was looking at was there was a space there that needed probably my full time and attention and energy and at that moment in time and there was a number of things going on in the world at that time COVID being one of them, that I knew that my time and energy would be best spent diving into solving this problem.

6:30And that is where we are now. And kind of got to work straight out of one and into the other. And there's a lot of journey in between here five years later. Okay. So jump straight in. What did that look like, right? So COVID obviously was a great reset for many people with their career, right? I found that we lost a lot of great people because they're like, okay, I'm going to start my own business now. I mean, you're like, oh, I'm going to move to another company. Like, there was a great reset. So, obviously, this forced you as well to kind of rethink things. Did you know straight away you wanted to do something in the supplement space?

7:10I did, yeah. I was looking at this space and I knew there was a gap there from the last two years of my career. I was finishing my MBA and I was always – in MBAs, I'm sure you've interviewed a lot of people that have done them. There's always two schools of cohorts. Half of them are going to go off and change the world through their own means and ideas. And the other half are going to stay in the corporate world with that qualification and progress up the ladder. I was always – and I was this strange professional athlete in the middle of this cohort. So I wasn't really bringing anything to the group work besides I can do team culture and team building and I could do the work, but I wasn't bringing real knowledge.

7:53I was like, yeah, I could throw a ball pretty straight. But I was always drawn to these people. So when I was coming out of these classes, going back to training and looking at the gaps that I was seeing, and particularly on the supplement side, there was just this huge gap in what I actually needed from my knee, from, I suppose, a prevention perspective in terms of how much pain I was going through. And right then and there, it actually wasn't the sports supplement products that we were taking. It was the micronutrition or the pharmaceutical products. So things like high-strength curcumins, omegas, anything that could remove my need and reliance on anti-inflammatory products, anything that was natural was what I was really needing to stay on the field.

8:40Obviously, we have there a protein and not only a macronutrient and the traditional sports supplement sides. That existed in sport. But what I was looking at as I desperately needed it with our medical team, with the dieticians in our codes, was a strength and class of product that would actually match the amount of information that I was needing to be removing out of my system. And we just couldn't find it. And by this stage, professional sport had moved away from even over the counter, like in front of the counter brands, we say, to the practitioner category in pharmacy. and even then there was a gap in terms of the level of potency of the product we needed and what was available and that really bugged me and I was always a bit of a citizen scientist I was I was testing products bringing them in from different places the team had a budget so I was allowed to go shopping in different parts of the world bring products in there was it was really difficult to get products that were athlete safe so that was the space where I was like well this is and I was listening at that stage I was I was also being able to kind of confide in our dieticians who was talking to dieticians across the AFL and the NRL that were facing the same problems with some of their aging players that I knew I was like okay there is there's an interesting space here and if there was the opportunity it'd be interesting to devote a little bit more time into this fast forward those two years COVID hits middle of the season I knew I was ending the end like twilight of my career and the competition just kind of drastically stopped and it gave me a four-month window sitting at home to just put my energy and time and thinking into into something and that's kind of where i got to work on this space um and it was during those four months that i knew that this is what i was going to go and do that this is actually where my passion and energy lied um so i needed to inform the team that i won't be coming back once the competition restarted and i actually did i retired i didn't actually come back after the competition just kind of re-sprung after covid um and i got into building and raising and and everything on that journey but it was during those four months where i got to really build the business case understood the problem that we were going to solve work out the layers that we're going to solve them with um and then get to work but it was going to require my full-time attention it couldn't have been a side hustle yeah 100 so talk me through what did the first product for pillar look like you said you raised some money how much did you raise how did you find a manufacturer like talk me through those details because even like one of my best mates you know he still probably has some supplements that he was trying to just sell on ebay like like it's there's a lot of people want to start supplement brands yeah i um i was pretty i'm still very ambitious in terms of um and we are as a company we're very ambitious in terms of um where we can go horizontally with the amount of gaps that we can solve in what is our category of performance health now.

11:42Pillar, we call ourselves a performance supplement company. We call our category performance health. We think that terminology definitely aligns more now to where the consumer between health and performance are going to exist. Five years from now, we were talking about it off air, people who are wearing wearables, looking into personalization of health. This new consumer that is going to adapt a performance and health lifestyle will be starting to look for products that traditionally would have sat in sports nutrition retailers but look very, very different. And we're trying to make that navigation a lot easier.

12:18So where we wanted to start was really difficult. The gap that I saw was that essentially the pharmaceutical or practitioner-only category within pharmaceuticals. So in Australia, we call it category vitamins and minerals. And that was one of the first things that really bothered me because that category that isn't macronutrients is not just defined by vitamins and minerals but in our retail channels here in australia in the uk the same us they're called supplements if you go into a pharmacy but we call it vitamins and minerals except when you when you actually look at the category like that it's that it literally only defines maybe one to maybe 30 percent of the products that actually sit in there there's nothing in there from a hormone perspective like it's a hugely vast area of preventative health that was the area i wanted to solve the first products from a need state perspective i wanted to solve for inflammation so i said no there needs to be a solution that can come be able to get people like me that have severe arthritic pain severe inflammation pain so from what i wanted to solve for i said okay i want to solve for inflammation and injury first that was my greatest passion was um then i was like okay if we're going to be known for that recovery is clearly one of these spaces that we want to solve for top of the hierarchy of recovery is sleep how do we how do we actually start to think about recovery okay during sleep what happens during sleep okay physiologically we want to actually get people to be recovered from a muscular perspective it's deep sleep a soul from there so when we asked what the first product was it was a product actually i formulated and when i realized when i looked into this pharmaceutical category it was one thing wanting to try and disrupt some of the biggest companies in the country and you know a space of a retail channel be it practitioner pharmacy that is almost untouchable for an entrepreneur it's like how do you get in there it's like decades of science and and i went up to you know and i would just walk into pharmacists and that's asked them i say how if i was like you know if a brand was to go there and in this part of the pharmacy and i wanted to go here how would they do that they'd be like oh well you need to do x and i said okay we'll go and work out okay how do we how do we go and solve that um but that was the space that i wanted to do was to actually go and try and create a new opportunity a new space where consumers that had the lifestyle or problems that i was facing could actually find them in that practitioner channel um and what we learned was that to go and do that we had to firstly be tga listed we had to use manufacturers that were tga manual like tga certified the pharmaceutical and the um the practitioner category was it a completely different spectrum to just over-the-counter supplements um and when we found manufacturers that firstly okay when i spoke to manufacturers that weren't any of those things they said no no we can't do that so like okay problem first and then the second problem obviously once we found them realizing that the minimum water quantities of what we had to do was huge so like um like four or five thousand units for a single skew um but it costs like per unit oh you know it can range anywhere and this was the other thing because we were we weren't trying to compromise on like you know when we'll come into the space we had to you know what we were going to do was to create a greater product than a highly more highly formulated product than what was existing so i was actually thankful being a rugby player i was i did my research i was actually able to go and get on linkedin like every entrepreneur should um linkedin is an amazing network of of meetings and information um but went and reached out to a number of the formulation teams from these bigger companies in in the big pharma space and just said hi i'm from i'm damien i play x could we meet for coffee and i want to chat about the products and went and just listed a bunch you know a bunch of questions and i said hey why why does your amiga stop here why haven't you informed sport certified the product so us as athletes can take it and one by one these formula like the formulation teams basically gave me the you know they gave me the blueprint they said oh well we can't take the products too high because we're you know we're owned by x company and explain the whole corporate structure i said i understand how that works you know um but i said okay so you guys are actually margin driven which is why you won't take your formulas higher because you need to reach a margin ceiling based on you know x y board has told you so um and that was the you know as an entrepreneur you go okay how do i get around how do i get around this you know okay come up with a come up with a strategy that potentially doesn't have to compromise on the margin pick channels that won't be affected at a lower scale on that margin which is what essentially we ended up doing so we had to formulate the first you know run of product was going to probably cost 800 ,000 like a lot of money so I raised yeah so I raised I raised a million a half um uh from friends and family in our first now first round and still to those days There's many of those people still on the cap table.

17:09Amazing. My brother, who was an instrumental part in filling the early rounds, he's not from the health or wellness or consumer CPG background. He was from banking, but he himself personally kind of kick-started the round. He said, Damien, I believe in you and the space and what we're doing. I think I've got some mates who will also be the same. So a lot of our angel investors came through networks of just our friends and family, mothers-in-law, all the lists. And it's very common as to how people usually get their pre-seed or seed done. But a majority of that money went to stock. And if I had my time again, probably would have, we launched, I wanted to essentially disrupt an entire shelf.

17:56so we had to have a ready pretty uh dominant range of product um for my time again probably would have made it half kept some further money for acquisition you know every everything and all the mistakes and and we did like early doors you know you um you go hard i think some advice is you know you kind of have to go hard or go home a little bit in this space if you want to make a dent in a short period of time and that's what i wanted to do and there were some stressful times with cash flow um but yeah so how did you find a manufacturer effectively to create something that didn't exist and because i i get it now around kind of the pharmaceutical grade yeah so how did and then even the approval side that like like how long did that take and how did you find someone that could help you there um yeah huge amounts of time huge amount just hours and hours in the beginning you have to do it so like you can use consultants but they they are very expensive and that's not where i wanted to put the best use of capital i said well you know if my time and my wife's time was was was money that's where we have to we have to work out the regs we have to go and work out how to discuss with the suppliers so that was kind of what i took on personally my wife really did a lot of the background and homework on the regulation front um all the labeling everything like that she was from a product design background as well so but from the supplier perspective it's it's one thing to get through the regs learn the regs know how to do that but then to be able to convince some of these like and in australia we have an amazing um history of contract manufacturing but we have very minimal choice so it's really dominated by three to four major players in terms of manufacturing you go to the us there's one on corner of every street and you have to be very careful but here in australia basically every product that you can find in health wellness in the major retailers are manufactured by pretty much four players because of that they don't they don't really need new brands to come in and so i learned that and realistically what you have to do and what i was thankfully able to do was to to tell them what the vision was to show them that there is a new movement happening and this is the customer we're going after and to take a chance on us like and we had to they were you You know, originally it was 5 ,000 units.

20:11I think I got them down to two and a half. Scratching and clawing and begging and then, you know, hope that they believe in the vision to give you a shot because, you know, without, I suppose, new brands as well, you know, they can't keep filling the pipeline. But that's what you have to do. You have to just do what you can to, you know, you firstly have to almost, before you sell a retail, before you sell a customer at a DTC, you actually have to sell your supplier to give you a chance to make the damn product and it's not going to, you know, sink the ship before it happens. Yeah, yeah. Look, the amount of times I've heard that story, it is so common where if this supplier didn't take a chance on us, we wouldn't exist.

20:49And that's something that's really interesting, right? Like, what does it look like from a negotiation standpoint? point difficult it's um i always look and i i think there aren't that many things of being a professional athlete that are really that translatable in i get asked this question i used to you know we do a lot of speaking like what is translatable from professional sport into business from a skill set perspective almost nothing like literally almost nothing but from like a soft skill perspective um the ability to be able to speak you know and have confidence in kind of your opinion particularly if you're that way inclined like you get used to being able once you really believe in something people can hear it in your voice because you've had to kind of have a voice in those in those kind of really tense environments um and i would say one of the best things about i suppose also being an athlete is the fact that you've got you're an athlete so it was able to get me into a room which maybe I wasn't able to do if I was just coming out of you know MBA school as someone else because at the end of the day a lot of people love sport and they find athletes interesting and they love the athlete's mindset they love the I suppose point of view coming from somewhere very let's say raw almost coming out of an athletic environment into a business environment it is very raw so I think people are quite interested to see the mindset of that um which i used to my advantage i will be honest i you know lever leveraged the fact that there was you know people in these companies that really they want to believe in athletes they want to support they you know they love probably what you did on the field and felt some sort of aspirational tie to it use it to your advantage yeah 100 i respect that so i'm curious what products did you launch with how did the launch go you said you probably would have had half the amount of stock and varied skews i assume and how did it go and how did you get did you get shelf space off the gate how did you do that like talk me through great question um original plan was and with a lot we i've always envisioned this brand and and our space and our community where it is it's it's got to be built in equal parts d2c and and online and in retail so we are very very much an omnichannel brand if not almost more of a retail brand now where the where in retail it sits today looks very different to where i thought it was going to sit before launch so as i said i i wanted to disrupt the practitioner and pillar is right as it stands today is is sits and regulated in as a pharmaceutical category but we are a sports supplement brand we just happen to have a line of micronutrition that can compete anywhere with any practitioner brand in the world if not stronger so it's a unique place to be where i where we where you often need to to be able to create shelf space you actually do need to fill a shelf and so what i wanted to do was to solve this problem for performance health from micronutrition first that was the space where i felt was desperately needed to be innovated needed to be innovated from a formula but also a brand like a brand you know you look at the pillar brand everything about it was deliberate the glass jar the black packaging black without being colorful like we wanted to be clinical not clinical in white where the traditional pharmaceutical category sat and not black and gold and bright where sports supplements we needed to be somewhere in the middle that was aspirational for male female but was uniquely different um and we what we wanted to do was come in with micronutrition that covered let's say the big the big rocks of of the category bones joints sleep so magnesium we had a product called motion armor which was a mix of curcumin and eggshell membrane very high strength uh calcium product in there we had the vitamin b complex family we had vitamin c we had zinc we split a number of the products out now when we and so i actually pre before we launched i had actually pre-sold the range into three out of the four major pharmacy groups so i won't mention names but they bought into what the vision was i said guys we're going to come in there is a space here and the head officers they they they agreed they said you are right we can we know it's going to happen there is going to be a brand that will come there's this performance health customer that's going to come in loves running marathons much more serious about their products that will identify with this brand um that's so yeah so i was actually very um in that instance was able to almost but then because i was able to sell it off a pitch deck where the product wasn't even available so like the brand that i was pitching didn't even look like the logo was different to what we ended up going with but again it's it's how it's it's not so much what it's how and who you're selling it to that the retailers are really interested in yes um but So we got accepted and we had a deadline to hit.

25:51And this is where things became really difficult. And this is where COVID made – this was probably the most stressful part. And the launch of anything is stressful. So we had one group that was 130 pharmacies, ranged the product across 90 of them, so about 70 % odd of the range, had to deliver on a certain date. And what happens in the pharmacy channel is you actually do the deal with head office. It goes into a DC and then it gets sent out to all pharmacies. So we actually did the deal. We were able to get the money, which was able to conserve our cash flow. So we actually got paid from the retailer, which was able, we were then able to pay our manufacturer.

26:33But what happened was the product then just sat in the DC because at the same time COVID hit and everyone got locked down. so okay yeah i was able to solve the problem here because i had a little i had a you know pool of money that i was able to pay the manufacturer of great the product wasn't sell i knew it was just sitting there and i would look into these going to these pharmacies and be like the product's meant to be there it's not there they're like well sorry you know we're busy putting covet injections in people's arms and i was sitting there going we're going to have a major problem here because yes we've paid for the first lot but the product's now sitting there with a shelf life just eating away at shelf life and we have no we're not selling in our major channels that we're meant to sell in so yes we had a short like short-term win and early revenue look great and we covered the cost of the manufacturing but we were getting no data we weren't being able to build the brand we weren't being able to like there was really stunted i suppose the launch of the product which made us pivot and that's where we really then okay if this is going to happen we need to start to educate online and start to rethink the channel strategy.

27:35And that was really the moment where people probably thought Pillar started as a DTC brand. It actually didn't. It was actually ranged. And the vision of the brand was we wanted to, and still do, the brand competes against the big pharma companies. But because of COVID, we had to get very clever at how we started to talk to our customers and educate them as to what we were doing that was different. And that's when we turned to DTC, really to start to do that. so when did you launch launched in may like i was looking at this with the head of finance the other day so first invoice got that we always say like let's say launch june 2021 yeah june 2021 so i had half a year and then basically from june 2021 so we had revenue coming in like if you look at that half a year it actually looks half decent yeah but didn't mean the product actually went anywhere just kind of sat sat there yeah um and then we kind of really like we always put 2022 as our kind of first year um going for it yeah and so talk me through the d2c side right so you raise that money you said you wish you probably put some more money aside for acquisition so obviously paid advertising all of that kind of stuff has been a component a key component of your brand but talk me through like how did you get your first customer online what happened what was the channel that worked like we have because it's a very competitive space there are a lot of stuff yeah very competitive space we were um two things we did before launch as well that was helpful but if we go back to that story with the um with the retailers the products so over that six months products did start to find their way onto shelf um now one of the prime you kind of said what product did we launch with the product that i i took the risk on all the bet that i knew if we would so if we could solve it and i knew that if we were going to get this right and we were able to get it into people's mouths that there was going to be a need that was going to be filled really quickly and that was to be able to solve for sleep with a powder magnesium that didn't taste foul really simple concept like but way harder to execute when you dive into it so it's like well why didn't another brand sort this out well the big reason is it is very very difficult at a clinical level so plus 300 milligrams of glycinate magnesium which is probably the most sour form of magnesium like sour in like raw taste if you were to put it without any flavoring or anything you it would be unpalatable so which is why any other brand had not never done it always kept it in tablet form so i saw from my own teammates that tablets were just it was just at the time pill fatigue was really really prominent five years ago i think it has changed um people are far more function focused over form but back five years ago even 10 years ago it was all about it was all about form so like um you know people wanted powders over tablets so what we what i saw was that my own teammates just wouldn't take tablets dieticians were giving them products they knew were going to help them perform they just wouldn't do that because they were in tablet form i said okay well if we can solve for that and we really really spent a lot of r &d trying to find the the silver bullet to power to magnesium thankfully we did we found a way to block that neutral that really sour taste of magnesium which meant when we went onto the market we actually provided the strongest magnesium at a glycinate level which can affect deep sleep which can then solve for the biggest thing that everyone was trying to solve for which was sleep in recovery but the question was how did we get that product and so we knew the flavor was right once it hit there we're like and so all the manufacturer when we got ranged it was actually that product that i went sold the vision of the brand to the retailers but when that was our only powdered product the rest of the nine were tablets then when the retailers tasted that product they said this that that is a game changer that's the one we're going to lead with and yep you can bring the rest of these nine in but that was the product they wanted so we knew that that was the product there that somehow if we were going to start to make name for the brand and start to get real viral traction we needed to get that product in people's mouths um it was very difficult in the early stages because the first six months everyone was on lockdown so what we had to do was start to just educate deep sleep so we went online we really did try we were creating a new category a sports performance brand and skin but in a pharmaceutical through a pharmaceutical lens and a clinical lens um and we had to do it the hard way start to show people okay like it's that law of familiarity i really worked hard on it was this idea of magnesium is not new a lot and thanks to many brands in australia we have had like quite a large history of vitamins minerals being educated i knew okay most of the population is aware that what magnesium does and has probably had a bad experience because magnesium actually doesn't when you put a different form in your body that's not what you're trying to solve for say sleep and if you go put another form of magnesium in there that wouldn't do that you don't get the result you want so you stop taking the product and you have a bad experience you tell other people that it's expensive we but the biggest difference about actual micronutrition when you get the formula and the timing right is it will work so we actually just had to be really deliberate about, okay, you guys all know what magnesium is.

32:58Now let me just take you the rest of the way on this journey. Now you just need to learn exactly what form of magnesium you need for that particular problem. And what we are solving is for sleep and recovery, putting you to sleep because when you're in deep sleep, your muscles recover. Simple. And we just went all in on that message. And we got lucky. I must admit, we got the first customers D2C doing the traditional paid media, built some hype with professional teams because we were able to get professional teams immediately onto the brand, which also really helped because we were the only ones doing what we were doing.

33:31Yes. That was my network. We partnered with the Roosters from Launch, which is a huge team in the country, did the same thing with the Giants, did a number of AFL teams, which gets a little bit of credibility. It doesn't build million-dollar brands just launching a logo, but it gets you a little bit of the way. Yes. can we just before you go into that like what did that look like what did that partnership look like like talk me through yeah what can you share um well it was the biggest gap like that was part of the way i knew that there was if we were to fill this space of all these products we would be unopposed and we still today we are the only brand the first brand that's ever been 100 informed sport certified so that's the certification that allows an athlete to be confident that the products have zero like no water band substances in there so we knew that if we solved for that there's and we had teams before this like because i had the dieticians all on board with the idea before i had investors and anything like that i said guys okay i'm going to go and do this i'm going to keep you guys informed and when i do it i need you to come and get me into the room with the teams and they said absolutely because i was solving a problem for the dieticians technically yes they were my biggest advocates they said damien can let's together to try and solve this.

34:45And my early dietician in the company, she was a dietician for the Brisbane Lions. So we had like pro sport has been, it's in the fabric of the business. Everyone who works in the business has come from some form of professional sport. And so that there, we use those logos to build credibility, probably helped with the early attribution on ads, early creative. We really lent into that team credibility side because it's the only thing that we had that was different to pharmaceutical brand A. um and then what happened was the magnesium definitely was it was clearly the product that people wanted it was the people product people started buying and then the reviews started to come back and the real moment for us was when and again sometimes you just get lucky in business and when it does you got to run with it and you're wearing the double watch just like I do usually when people started to write their reviews in on the product it was just one after the other people weren't just writing their reviews they were taking the photo of their hrv scores of their deep sleep scores on their watch so it didn't matter whether they're wearing a whoop like you and i or they're wearing an aura ring or they had a garmin they all instead of writing a review would be like this product works look at my deep sleep and so from there we went okay and then i think if anyone's seen a pillar ad now you'll see we we ran with that and everything is around of measurability don't believe us for it measure it and you'll see the difference and because the product started to work and it does work because from there you can run with it in so many directions um so that was the actual viral moment that we realized this product here is to this day it's one of the stickiest products it's out the gateway into the brand everybody wants to solve for sleep whether you're a seasoned marathoner you're someone who's just looking to be the best version yourself for business or kids sleep is the undeniable top of the hierarchy for health and wellness um and we're lucky that the product that we're you know that everyone globally now is using for pillow it's a product that's in i think we've got it in over 50 countries now we have 18 different regional licensee distributors these are the triple magnesium not all the products around the world but that particular product is um and then kind of long story okay go full we had the silver bullet meaning be it measurable so in supplements it's been very difficult to have anything attachable to measurability it's one of the things that i think the supplement industry in general really suffers from you can't do before and after with protein because you either feel sore or you don't feel sore you know you have a carb gel you either run well or you kind of run crap and who knows what it was because a bunch of things could go wrong um with magnesium like when people are using the product you can almost get a result 24 hours later and the beautiful thing about the rise of you know Virgil was saying thank you to people like Will Ahmed from Whoop people were actually then able to measure whether the product worked so then we went on this sample like from that when we could get out into the community we just went on a sampling overdrive yeah got you it was just yeah so a big part of your DTC play now is you off samples and from that moment the minute we were able to get back out to the community i said okay guys we're going to be this brand we're not going to hide behind a website we we've we've got an education but we always wear our d2c and website as a and we're very like research led so we run our own internal phd program now so we have phd students doing research for the company we want to be there's definitely a level where we believe pillar wants to get to and can get to for customers that is different to anything else that's happening in in the performance supplement space that's why we call ourselves a performance health brand but what we wanted to do was to say, okay, how do we get in front of our customer?

38:34So we literally went every marathon, every gym, every place that we can get to. And the brand has been built from there, really on probably the growth of endurance out of COVID. Naturally, it wasn't my background, but it was just that customer that was so aligned to what we were doing. Anyone that was endurance-focused also had this Nexus crossover of health. so we that's that's where we went to we would show up at every ironman every triathlon every cycling event every marathon and the product just through word of mouth and virality just took off to the point where we had customers in germany central europe uk mainly endurance athletes just wanting to get their hands on the on the magnesium product and our big strategy was just magnesium in mouths that's what we needed and it was just every time someone would try the product the more and more people would take photos of their watch, take photos of their watch, to the point where it got Whoop.

39:31They contacted us and said, why do people keep tagging Whoop? And it got me an invitation to go and meet the team in Boston, which was an amazing experience. They're like, why do people keep tagging Whoop on your posts? And it was one of these things where sometimes you get lucky, but at the same time, the product has to work. 100%, right? I think oftentimes people are attracted to perhaps starting a business for what it does mainly for them. But the people that are always sitting across from me on the microphone, they've done incredible things. But first and foremost, they're focused on creating an exceptional product that truly works and solves a big problem.

40:12And usually, more often than not, it's something that doesn't exist. It's not just copying something else. You've made it better. You've made it different in some way, unique shape or form. So one thing that a lot of people get caught up on, and I have to ask you this, is selling globally, getting the licensing, all the T's and C's. How did you work through that with a pharmaceutical grade product? Yeah, great question. And it was a big strategic moment because we did jump a few steps. so we've got the product that we know we can scale there was market fit in a small segment of the you know of the endurance market be it australia let's probably just say even east coast australia at the same time that was happening the brand had we decided you know what we actually learned very quickly that actually pharmacy is not the place for pillar pillar customers are aspirational people want to buy pillar where they associate with the activity that they're taking it for not where people who potentially are sick or looking for prevention are shopping because what we actually found when we rolled out of code but this was an amazing learning painful lesson but it was good we could not once the triple magnesium took off in the market we could not keep it in stock it was and to the point where our sound that sounds great no no that was actually got to the point where it was painful because we knew we were leaving revenue on the table we couldn't pay bill like it was becoming a problem but when it went into pharmacy eventually you wouldn't like it just it just didn't move like it would when it was going on d2c or when it was in a sports supplement store and it was this immediate like people were literally scratching themselves to find triple magnesium people were buying multiples online but yet they wouldn't walk into their local pharmacy to buy it that was the moment for me where we knew and that was where we completely pivoted and that was after 12 months i kind of said to our investors said you know the vision i had and one day you know it'll go back there and i and i still see the the brand will will have its place in in pharmacy and and preventive health and the brand will service a lot of people but i said guys we can clearly see here where people that the shift of what people want to do and where they want to buy the product needs to match how they feel about it and so we went on a complete channel shift and that's why you'll see pillar products now in your local running store your local cycling store in downtown berlin it'll be in a high-end map store um and it's so unique that and it could be in a in a probably let's say a traditional bodybuilding store because the product there sits aligned to where people want to and and are thinking about why they're taking the product what they're actually getting their recovery for not sickness and health and so like My point being there is it's as much about how do you scale it.

43:05So then I decided with our investors, I said, we have two choices here. Keep dipping into the pool that we've got to right now or because we're getting all this inbound international demand. And it is, I think every founder has this moment. What do we do? Do you chase the shiny things overseas or do you double down on your market? we decided that making the product the brand we always i always visioned the brand to be to be a global brand um and i just decided that early on and it was not agreed with by all investors but i said guys the strategy for us is going to be if endurance is going to be where we're going to build the brand because that customer understands the product they were just willing to read more science which is was our point of difference i said we have to go and find them in where they and that's around the world.

43:55But the unique thing about that customer is you don't have to change your strategy in terms of your marketing. Because by this stage, we've had global athletes using the brand and a global athlete in running is still the best runner in the world, whether he's sitting in Africa, whether he's sitting in Germany, whether he's sitting in France or the US. You can still use the same athlete's image. So it wasn't like we were doing large-scale product launches. We just had to make the distribution available. So we did the painful decision to go, and you asked about regs. We had to go and we decided we had to regulate the product in Europe first.

44:31So we did what a lot of Australian brands don't do. We actually did Central Europe after Australia. We have a German entity, a team over in Germany, because a lot of our ingredients are coming in from Germany. Very, very high-quality raw ingredients come out of Central Europe and Germany. So we said, okay, we're going to base our European team there. but what it meant was we had to actually regulate the product in nine different regions so when you go to europe and you pick up a pillar product off a shelf there's six different languages on it there's nine different regulations i have an amazing head of operations she's been with me from day one she single-handedly has worked this out um and went through some we went through some really painful days to the point where we like we we have purposely not flown out to you know say a 50 million revenue run rate because it's we wanted to get this infrastructure right had to find manufacturing over there and then had to do the same thing in the us so we actually have three different layers of manufacturing so australia manufacturers for australia and our apac customers europe is the same us is the same so three different manufacturing plants which enables three different levels of regulation because while triple magnesium might be the product each region only allows a certain amount of product you know a certain amount of formulation in there and it was just easy to set it up with manufacturing that way so no other way around it is just it's painful and but it was an investment we wanted to make um which i yeah which i still think to this day i don't think i'd do differently yeah look i think it's smart you you you want to build a business that through the power of the internet can reach as many people as possible.

46:08It's a great way of saying it. If you're only selling to Australia, it's a very, very small island in the pond. The States, Europe, there's massive amounts of people that you want to be able to get leverage for the work that you're doing. If you make creative, whether it's organic or paid, you want to be able to share that in to as many people as possible and not be limited so i think it's a really smart play i think it's that's such a good point i actually haven't heard anyone put it like that because it that is what happened we were getting so much earned like just so many positive earned touch points because of the you know the measurability it goes back to every person that was doing an endurance sport had a garmin on at least a garmin or at least it may be let's say the very entry level of wearable was apple watch and we could kind of see the level of like how like i suppose how into their endurance journey they were based on the wearable they were you know so it left someone with maybe ended like the most experienced maybe had the double watch had the had the whoop and the garmin but apple watch was the beginning and there was just so much we just felt that there was such an opportunity that if we made the product available in these markets that that work that we were doing from the measurability and the virality of who who was posting what what blogs it was showing up on we went really aggressive on podcast strategy it's probably one of the biggest spends that we've done because we felt that it was actually one of the best our product is more technical yes so we find that still creative is actually quite difficult it's great you know for brand touch points and we use still still creative really just in brand campaigns yes highlight great athletes um highlight product launches highlight just the key parts of the brand but really difficult for us to convert because the product is when you see just a still creative it's just it's just a product on a page what really works for us is have it and that's why sampling and getting to events works because our sales team were able to actually spend two three minutes with a person and explain the difference podcast you don't get three but you might get 60 seconds which is enough um and we always try and you know you always try and break it even if you have a code at the end of it um But then again, say the podcaster has 10 ,000 listeners, you might get 300 sales, but you're still getting 9 ,700 ears on your brand that might come later when they see the team at another marathon or they then might see it on a retail shelf somewhere.

48:40We find it as a really effective way for a technical product to educate. You said something interesting. You're happy to break even on the first sale. no we were happy to break even on the podcast okay so we would always look at the cost of a as best as possible and they're not always even and we think about events like this as well because we have a consumer product we have a tangible product that when someone goes to a trade show or an event we can actually sell a product i always give the team like we try and we call cost neutral marketing so say a podcaster cost a hundred dollars we would like to it as close as possible get$100 worth of sales.

49:20It doesn't always happen, obviously, and sometimes they will exceed that. Same thing with events as well. But that is how we've scaled it manageably. We've raised$4 million in our lifetime, which in our space is considerably small compared to some of the other brands in the US raise a lot more money. And we've been able to do it by being quite strategic about where we invest, I suppose, our attribution and acquisition marketing, which has always been around events and podcasting. Got you. And when you say podcasting, that's going on shows or sponsoring shows? Sponsoring shows. Interesting. Yeah.

49:57And it's far too obvious when you're also like on, you know, like if I go on a podcast or out my head of research goes on a podcast, they're often the ones that we don't. We'll sponsor it six months later because it's just too inauthentic. Yes. Yeah, okay. guest is on there and now there's an ad there it's like no like so if we get invited onto a show it's actually like we tell the show look and and often we'll get invited on there after we've been doing the ad so we try and never put them in the same yes because otherwise you just you just you lose credibility very quickly audiences are very smart yeah 100 we don't like you're not here because totally exactly right like we we want to hear about your journey so okay well look this is crazy man super impressive growth you know 2025 on track multiple eight figures brand is going super fast um you know this is your first business tell me kind of what hasn't gone right because you've got this product it's a superior product in the marketplace there's some things that are really working well on the acquisition side, the global expansion side?

51:06What has been some of your biggest challenges? What has not, like, even just cash flow? Yeah, cash, I mean, I don't enjoy fundraising. Some people love it. Some people might look at me and think, oh, he's very good at fundraising. I don't naturally enjoy that. So those times, and I've had to do it now three times, times um or i always find it very distracting and stressful and that's not i know that's no that's not new news to some people but i also felt that like i was rather critical in in terms of the operations the business is a little bit different today i've got a fantastic building a fantastic team but back when i was raising the capital it was just so stressful because it was like there was a couple of it was probably the middle capital raise where i've brought in you You know, our strongest partner to this day that will be with us on the journey.

52:02This is when we did a VC round. But that journey there was like we're actually really requiring the money because, as I said, when we launched, we had such a large range. Product didn't move out of the DC. And we were edging to that point of, you know, there was a cliff time there. But in that VC round, you know, it was new to me. I had never done a VC round. Very different, you know, friends and family. that they really just believed in me as a person. Legal docs were much simpler. And then you bring a VC in who just wants to make sure everything is, you know, cleaned up and I suppose enable the business to then scale forward.

52:41And it was marrying up those two times, which was very, very stressful. And I don't, yeah, I think still to this day, like we've been through this, like we've been through acquisition offers already, which is way earlier than we would have ever thought, but a great learning experience. that is when you really need a great group of people who have been there, done that before, I must admit. It was a really, really, really big learning curve for myself and my wife who's obviously been in the business from day one as well. And as a founder, like, you know, you can get an offer and, you know, the money can be life-changing.

53:17But it's not always as glossy as it seems and it sometimes just really does tear the vision for what you want to do. And I'm glad that we got those early. so we've been through that now and we've got i've got a lot of kevlar i feel from these first five years i feel i've lived 10 in them um we had challenges like we we had um the biggest product challenge we've had we had two major product challenges we had we had a container of product this is how we knew that we weren't going to be shipping product around the world in this category we had a container of product ceased and almost destroyed um over in europe so tick the wrong very simply tick the wrong box on a on an animal product import we're importing fish oil sending them so essentially manufacturing in australia sending it over to europe got the regulatory i got the regulatory wrong on that one have that product turn around basically and in that process ran out of shelf life basically dead that was um that was a painful re-forecasting of a lot nearly you know could have had we not been in a stronger financial position you would have been enough to sync the brand how much we talking hundreds okay yeah to read and then we had to move those around yeah yeah i can't remember the exact amount but it would have been yeah over a hundred yeah um that was that was an expensive mistake um and then at the beginning right at the beginning i remember the probably the most still to and the the cool thing about going through these things because you become just so immune to problems and that's the thing like it's just what are like athletes have as well i think we just get used to setbacks as an athlete you know have more lows than highs everyone always said in professional sport and you know in business it's the same um but right before we're about to launch the brand manufacturer calls um and i remember them showing me this photo they said damien we're really sorry you have this beautiful glass packaging i know you love it but the label will just not go on this packaging because it came the packaging had a slight concur like concave in the glass every glass jar is not flushed straight and so the ones we must tested were flush straight but then the real the large batch came and the label was just pooling and it just was not and so basically we had to pull off and the manufacturer was like look we're huge get these jars out of here we had a delivery date in 10 days they're like we won't be able to get you back on the line for three months i'm meant to be delivering this product to get paid by the retail role saying so we literally had to drive out to the manufacturer pick these glass jars up find a co-packing agent that was able to put the label on the jar to send back to the manufacturer because then you're tga the manufacturer has to be the one that puts the the product in the jar and the lid on and so that there was probably that that was the i remember that was the moment i felt sick there was that day where i just felt like if i don't deliver this product the whole dream is dead before it even starts and all of those very close friends and family at the beginning who entrusted their money with me yeah i would have let them down before we even got to see if the brand would work um that was probably the sickest i ever felt right at the beginning it's a lot of pressure at times though massive yeah yeah yeah massive do you think uh what you've done previously in your career through sports has enabled you to be able to handle a high amount of pressure i think so definitely um definitely i think in like in anything in life it's i and i try i try and tell a lot of people this my wife and I talk about it a lot.

56:48And she's in a very unfortunate position that we have to live together and live and breathe the business together. But we've set up the structure of her and I within the team that we try not to cross over too much. She works in the product team and very deep in product design and regs. And I'm obviously out there more running the sales, marketing, and obviously company structure. And that works well for us. but when we leave the office court, so to speak, I kind of have my moment where things get very stressful that like you have a rant and we always have this thing that we try and warn each other.

57:29Just by the way, you can't solve this problem for you. I'm going to give you a 10-minute rant here. Can you please just listen? And it's not really even a rant. It's just 10 minutes of feeling sorry for yourself about a problem that you know you're the only one that can fix. So just stop. At the end of it, once we always go, you're finished? Yeah, we're finished. Okay. I'll solve that problem tomorrow. But it's like give yourself that moment to just feel sorry for you. You know, like, yeah, you've got a problem. It's not the greatest problem in the world, but only, by the way, no one's going to, like, by you whinging to me, you're still going to have to solve it yourself.

58:00But once it's out of your system, go and solve it. And I always find it quite helpful. It's like a process where you go through, feel sorry for yourself for 20 minutes, go have a walk, come back, do what you've got to do and solve the problem because it is on you to solve. Yeah, 100%. And oftentimes it's not as bad as your mind. Totally. Like your mind goes to like if this happens, then this happens, and you spiral and it's just like, oh, my God, you know what I mean? But oftentimes when you look back, it's never as bad as you think it would be. That's emotion, isn't it, though? Yeah. We're emotional beings.

58:29It's what also makes probably the best entrepreneurs great. I think early stage when you're in the trenches with your team, if you are too neutral in your emotion which you know they say the best ceos in the world should be you know neutral at all times i'm actually not sure if that is if that's the best place to be for early stage business because your team needs to feel the emotion they need to see that you care up and down the you know the spectrum of wins and losses if you lose they need to see it really stings and if you win everyone needs to celebrate um but it goes against kind of everything that you're here later as businesses evolve into larger businesses that you need to be very stable, very forecast, very planned.