First Day - How First Day Built a $100M Brand Without the VC Treadmill

I love that distinction because culture, if you think about it, doesn't really show up in mission statements.

It shows up in the decisions that you make and the choices you make when customers will never know how you made them.

And that's usually where trust is built.

One of my favorite topics.

So let's stay with decisions.

There are a lot of consumer categories you could have built a company, lots of them.

You chose one where consumers already had reasons to be skeptical.

And we've already talked about how crowded the space is.

That's not an easy path.

There are a lot of commodities.

So walk me through that decision.

What did you see that convinced you that this wasn't simply another vitamin company waiting to happen, but a category that genuinely deserved to be a rebuild? Was there a specific moment, a conversation, something you discovered where you stopped thinking, this is frustrating and started thinking, this is actually broken and I want to solve that?

Completely.

I think I always knew I wanted to do something with health.

And when I was talking to parents in particular about how they made those daily decisions in their life, a lot of them were already taking a supplement or a multivitamin or giving it to their families, right? Usage rates of this category are 90% plus in the US, which is incredible.

Yeah, really unusual.

And when I talked to them, it was frankly shocking to me because when I actually asked them, okay, you know, you're taking this product, you're bringing it home to your kids, to yourself, how did you pick it, right? And how do you know that it works? And nearly all of them were telling me that actually they didn't know if it worked.

And in fact, they weren't sure.

And that they were just going into the grocery store, they were going to the vitamin aisle, everything looked exactly the same.

They knew that it was supposed to be healthy for them and they were really interested in what it could do.

And they figured it It might not be harming them, which actually isn't necessarily true if you look at the science.

But they were just picking something off the shelf and hoping that something good happens.

And what I found was there wasn't any real understanding of what the category was doing, if it actually worked.

And when you go back into the history of how supplements started, it's literally where the term snake oil came from.

And so there's such a huge gap in consumer trust and something that initially became this huge obstacle.