👀 A peak inside my $15M supplement co 👀

I talk a lot about car washes and side gigs in this newsletter but invariably people want to know about my main gig: my ~$15M supplement company.

Here’s the backstory and how we got here:

About 2006 or so I realized I was really sick. My digestion was a mess and my weight was out of control. My skin was terrible, I regularly had this gas that could make your eyes bleed. It was ugly.

I went to countless doctors who did countless tests. Nobody could really help me. They tried various drugs and diets, but nothing helped. Then I found a naturopath who helped me diagnose a gluten issue. Once we figured that out, a bunch of other stuff got better, and I was on the road to recovery.

But the lesson was shocking: western medicine as we know it was less than worthless on this issue - in fact it was harmful to me. Nobody from family doctors to GI docs could figure out my problem. This was a wake up call - I had to figure out my own health issues. This is in the very early days of Dr. Google and long before gluten was a well-known toxin.

Foods didn’t have the same label rules they have now, you could eat something and never know it had an allergen in it.

Anyway, this led me to go deep down the path of natural and holistic medicine. Before I regarded that stuff as hokum. I was wrong. So I started writing about it online. I had a solar and off-grid living blog, and I would mention things about natural medicine. Soon I noticed those posts attracted a lot of attention.

So in 2010 I started a company with a partner selling preparedness products, and the first one was a greens and proteins powder. I dug deep into the research to see what humans really need to survive and thrive. That product sold millions over the next 10 years.

This experience ignited a passion in me, to help people get off dangerous prescription drugs and heal themselves with food and supplements.

Today we do about $15M annually selling everything from CBD to blood sugar support. And our customers love us, we get testimonials every day from people who are avoiding surgery and walking without canes.

All of our products have double-blind placebo based studies behind them backing up our health claims. We don’t do woo-woo foo-foo sh*t here.

Now for the nitty gritty I know you want to know:

$15M revenue: we’ve kind of topped out here and it might be lower next year. Buying profitable traffic for supplements has become extremely difficult. We’re still trying to do it, but our best traffic source right now is email and we’ll continue to focus on that. We rent space in other people’s email lists and run affiliate promotions.

Staff: my partner and I are 50/50, we each spend about 30-40 hours a week on this business. We have two sales reps, a software developer in Pakistan who’s almost full time, an inventory manager, and 3 customer service reps in the Philippines.

The business is profitable but I’m not gonna lie our margins sucked this year. We still make a very nice living but we’re digging in to improve margins. Marketing, shipping, and mfr-ing costs are all going up and customer conversions are going down, making a tough climate for us at the moment.

But, having done this for 13 years or so, I know we’ll get through this and come out the other side with a better, more profitable business. I still love the business we have and can see us owning it for a long time. It’s deeply satisfying getting notes from people about how we’ve changed their lives.

You can see one of our stores at ProsperCBD.com

So, what questions do you have?

Kriss Berg, the CWG.