I’ve been building companies for eleven years. Ocean is the one I’m proudest of. It’s also the one I almost didn’t build.
My last supplement company worked. I know it worked because customers told me, in emails I still have. Then it was taken apart. I shut it down, cancelled thousands of subscriptions, and let my staff go. The whole thing was gone in days. Why it was taken apart is a longer story than belongs on this page. I tell all of it in the full letter.
I ended up on the floor of my office in Eugene, Oregon, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. That’s when I learned the thing this industry doesn’t say out loud. Doing it right doesn’t protect you. Nobody is coming to check whether your product works. So most companies stopped trying.
For almost two years I built nothing. What finally pulled me back wasn’t a business plan. It was the research. The forms the body actually uses. The minerals most of us are short on. They were right there in the studies and not on the shelf, or buried under fillers and a big number on the front. The holes were everywhere.