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cover of episode How I Built a $72,000,000 Business In 5 Years - Julian Hearn Founder Of Huel

How I Built a $72,000,000 Business In 5 Years - Julian Hearn Founder Of Huel

2022/2/28
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Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

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Ali Abdaal: 本期节目采访了Huel创始人Julian Hearn,他37岁才开始创业,创立了价值数百万美元的Huel公司,这说明创业并非年轻人的专属,只要方法得当,并且享受过程,任何时候开始创业都有可能成功。 Julian Hearn: 我16岁辍学,做过各种工作,最终通过努力学习获得了市场营销学位。女友的鼓励促使我重返校园学习,最终获得市场营销学位。即使拥有市场营销学位,我仍然面临就业困难,这促使我最终选择创业。在早期互联网时代,我抓住机遇,说服公司投资建立网站,并迅速积累了互联网营销经验。由于个人原因需要在家工作,我决定自己创业。通过观察和学习联盟营销模式,我发现其盈利潜力巨大,并决定尝试自己进行联盟营销。我利用业余时间学习联盟营销,并逐步积累了经验和信心。我给自己设定了六个月的期限,如果无法达到目标收入,就重新找工作,这降低了我的创业风险。在创业前,我存了一年的钱,足以支付六个月的房贷和生活费用,这让我在创业初期更有安全感。在创业初期的一年时间里,我工作时间过长,之后就恢复了正常的工作时间。在创业初期,我努力工作的动力来自于摆脱枯燥的通勤生活和实现财务自由的梦想。创业初期的小小成功会激励我继续努力,并最终实现目标。我最初从事联盟营销,专注于SEO优化,并通过持续努力取得了成功。通过分析市场竞争对手,我找到了一个利基市场,并通过SEO优化获得了成功。我通过WordPress手动创建网页,并撰写内容进行SEO优化。我与一位来自塞尔维亚的程序员合作,通过Basecamp进行远程协作,我负责内容创作和SEO,对方负责技术方面的工作。我将外链指向具体的商品页面,而不是主页,从而提高了这些页面的排名。我通过分析竞争对手的网站,发现了关键词“promotional code”的搜索量很大,而竞争却很小,于是我的网站关键词定位于此。通过SEO优化,我将网站排名提升到搜索结果靠前的位置,从而获得了更多的流量和收入。我的第一个正式公司“Promotionalcodes.org”发展超出了预期,最终被一家美国公司收购。出售公司后,我感到非常不可思议,但我的消费习惯并没有发生太大改变。我出售公司的原因是考虑到SEO的风险性,并希望确保自己和家人的未来生活无忧。出售公司后,我没有挥霍金钱,而是谨慎地规划未来,并决定继续创业。我花了一些时间陪伴家人,并思考未来的发展方向。我认为工作与生活的平衡是双向的,过多的休闲时间也可能对身心健康不利。我创立“Body Hack”公司的初衷是建立一个能够长期持续发展的“生活方式型”企业,而非为了快速获利。我创立“Body Hack”公司是为了提供基于科学证据的健身计划,并对市面上虚假宣传的健身产品感到不满。我通过亲身实践验证了“Body Hack”公司的健身计划的有效性。“Body Hack”公司的健身计划虽然有效,但不够方便,这促使我开发Huel。我开发Huel的初衷是为了创造一种方便快捷、营养均衡的食品。我最初并不知道Soylent的存在,Huel的研发是基于我自身的需要和想法。虽然Huel与其他类似产品存在竞争,但我认为市场竞争是不可避免的,并专注于自身产品的研发和推广。我认为Huel在全球销量领先,这得益于其产品质量、品牌建设和销售服务等方面。 Ali Abdaal: 放弃工作创业的风险并没有人们想象的那么大,因为即使创业失败,也可以随时找到新的工作。在创业前进行充分的准备和实践非常重要,这能提升信心并降低风险。在开始全职创业之前,应该先利用业余时间进行尝试和积累经验,而不是盲目辞职。创业需要付出额外的努力和时间,但这只是暂时的,最终的成功会弥补这些付出。互联网的特性使得创业具有可扩展性,即使不是行业佼佼者,也能通过互联网平台获得成功。

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Julian Hearn discusses starting his multi-million dollar company Huel at age 37, challenging the notion that entrepreneurship is only for the young.

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Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive. This episode is a conversation with Julian Hearn, the founder of Huel. Huel is the multi-million dollar powdered food replacement company that I've actually been using since 2017. And Julian's story is particularly interesting because he started this company at the age of 37 and started off his career digging holes in a road and working night shifts at a petrol station.

These days we hear a lot of stories about entrepreneurships and founders who started companies and started doing cool things at the age of like 17 or 18 or 19. And if you're older than that, it can be easy to think that you're too late to get started if you want to do it yourself. Hopefully this interview will show you that that's not the case and that you can just kind of do this kind of stuff basically whenever you want and it can be successful if you apply it kind of the right way and you enjoy yourself along the way, which is what we're all about here. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this conversation between me and Julian Hearn. So I've been evangelizing Huel since about like 2017 when I first discovered it.

And I was using it a lot when I was in med school, going from placement here and there because I'd skip meals and skip breakfast. But just having the powder at the time and now the pre-made stuff is absolutely sick. But I still get weird looks from people who are like, Hugh, why did you do that? Doesn't it take the joy out of life to do? And I'm like, oh, no, it doesn't. It's just like a meal replacement for like, it's better than a sugary breakfast cereal. How do you guys think about the whole...

It feels unpalatable to be drinking your meals vibe. Well, we have products you don't have to drink if that's not what you want to do. But in terms of this joy element, it's quite interesting. I used to debate quite a lot on Facebook with people answering this. And I was explaining to people, you've got to separate happiness from pleasure. So really, when people are talking about joy...

They're really talking about pleasure. So you don't really sort of eat a sugary thing. It will stimulate your pleasure senses. It's not making you happier. So you know happiness is much harder to achieve, much more long-term, much more fundamental, whereas pleasure. But really, you know, drugs give you pleasure. Alcohol gives you pleasure. So actually pleasure is typically not a bad thing. It usually leads to bad habits. So going back to food, lots of people get pleasure from food.

but that pleasure is actually going to end up with them possibly overindulging, eating way too much. Cake might give you pleasure. It's probably not a very good food for you. You wouldn't have that for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So I think you have to be very careful and separate happiness. And I think joy is a word that probably sits somewhere in between, but really it's on the side really of the pleasure. But just think if you have too much pleasure from food, you're probably going to have health problems,

probably weight problems, probably going to be inefficient. So we try to separate that out. So we say that shawl is never going to replace a...

your Sunday dinner it's never going to replace your Saturday night takeaway it's never going to replace your your um a restaurant meal but what what it is really good at doing is giving you functional food which gives you the nutrition which your body needs in the most convenient format and ensures you get all of the nutrition and uh I use it for breakfast and lunch during the working week which are my most inconvenient meals and not social media typically you're on a rush

So I have it for roughly 10 meals a week, which is basically nearly half my meal. So instantly I get high quality nutrition very conveniently.

And they're plant-based. So I'm sort of 50% vegan without even trying. And so I think overall it gives me what I need. And then I can have a traditional family meal in the evenings without any sort of compromising my eyes. No problem at all. So there's a balance between the two. If people said, if you had a Sunday dinner every day for every meal, it's going to be super inconvenient, super expensive, super time consuming and not necessarily nutrition complete.

So I think people forget we sort of we've been trained that food is an art form, something you indulge in, something you spend a lot of time on. But really, your food is nutrition. There's a very specific list, pretty much identical across the whole world from all the doctors and scientists. They pretty much agree is pretty much identical what you actually do need to eat in terms of the specific macro micronutrients.

And we provide that, but you try and do that from natural food sources, super hard to do unless you've got a spreadsheet. So you sort of guess in most of the time in terms of even calories, let alone the 26 bits that you actually need. So we do that for you. You don't have to worry at all. And so you can relax the rest of the time and eat what you want the rest of the time. I was thinking in the shower this morning because...

Whenever we're here in studio, which is most days each week, we just order for some random takeaway from Deliveroo. And I was thinking our default at the moment is like chipotle chicken salad. But today I was like, oh, you know, we've been having chipotle chicken salad for the last couple. You know, let's get an unhealthy Chinese takeaway type thing. And I was thinking, you know, it would be cool if we had like a fridge that just had the pre-made heels just stocked like I do in

Because in my flat in King's Cross, we have a wine fridge, which has been replaced with the Huel fridge. So it's got the banana one is my favorite. And the salted caramel I've been having recently. So I've been thinking of incorporating that into the team. And I was just thinking, huh, I wonder how people would feel about that.

I'm sure we can bring a fridge along. I think we sorted somebody else with a huge fridge, a few places. Oh, have you guys got branded fridges? We've got some branded fridges, yeah. Oh, sick. Yeah, that'd be glorious if we have a branded fridge. Have you tried the hot and savory one as well? Because we were talking about drinking your food. I used to have those a lot during lockdown one. That was quite nice. The tomato... Tomato and herb. Tomato and herb one, yeah. We've got some new ones now. We've got a couple of pasta ones, which have gone extremely well. So we've got chicken and mushroom. We've got Cajun pasta. We've got mac and cheese, so vegan mac and cheese.

Yeah, we'll get you some of those. We said earlier, I'll give you a big box of stuff and get loads of stuff. I wanted to kind of take you back to when all of this stuff started because you're just about to turn 50. Is that right? Right. And you started, I was trying to work out what age you started various companies and it was like,

surprisingly later in life than people would initially think. People think founders like, you know, 17 to 19 year olds, Mark Zuckerberg, the Stripe guys. But you were like 30 something when you started? I would have been 36, 37. And yeah, I, yeah.

most of these sort of podcasts can focus around the sort of very younger guys. And yeah, you think about the Zuckerberg because the world is incredibly young. Well, I think he's done Ben Francis recently, incredibly young. So I think that it's, yeah, I think it's interesting that most people probably think when they get to 36, 37, they're sort of stuck in what they're doing. They can't retrain, they can't relearn. But yeah, I did. I just sort of,

sort of had a need, had a personal reason why I needed to start working from home and had to suss that out. And I did a lot of stuff you sort of do is listen to a lot of podcasts, tons of podcasts, read a lot online and try and work out and sort of bodge your way through to start off with. So it took me about a year before I got the confidence to jack my job in, but worked evenings and weekends,

Yeah, it must be 36, 37. Yeah. So I speak to a lot of people in their, like, so sometimes even late teens, but like early to mid 20s who say, oh, I don't know what I want to do. I haven't figured it out. It seems like all these other people are sort of like going ahead of me. What was your kind of experiences during school and sort of like late teens, early 20s? And how did we go from that to...

and then starting a business at age 36. So I left school at 16, pretty poor GCSEs. What did I get? Three C's maybe? D's? E's? Got two E's for English. I do remember that. I can't spell. I'm not really going to read it either, really. I got two E's for English, left at 16, worked at a shop for a year, then worked digging holes in the road for two years as a manual labourer.

Then I think my girlfriend at the time was about 90. She goes, what are you doing? Why are you digging holes in the road? You're too smart to do that. So I wasn't academically smart, but I was sort of quite smart at certain stuff. So I went back to college two years later.

And I thought I'd come out of there and get a job. Came out of college with two, I think it was a BTEC I had. Couldn't get a job off the back of that. So I had nothing else to do really apart from went to uni for. Now I'm committed. I've given up work. I might as well keep going. So then I got a placement at Bournemouth University, did a degree in marketing. Came out of that, thought I'd get a job straight away, no problem. Didn't. I remember I worked night shifts in a petrol station for six months.

and um and then luckily i think it was my stepmom she worked with somebody whose husband worked somewhere and luckily i got a job in marketing finally after all that so i'd had a degree market i had a 2-1 but couldn't get a job luckily i got one uh worked in a marketing team from about i think that must be 1999 something like that worked in marketing for mostly retailers so that was when you were like 25 ish yeah maybe a little bit older 25 26 like that and um

And then I started internet sort of came along. So this was still quite early because I think when I was at uni, I think I finished uni in 96 and the internet was really not really about, you know, I think at university you could go and use some of the computers there and you could access the internet, but nobody really had a home computer with internet in 96. And...

And then when I first got my job, I was just doing normal sort of marketing as a marketing assistant. And then the internet came along. So somebody said, can you have a look at this internet thing? Should we have an internet business? I was working for MFI, which is a furniture retailer at the time. And I sort of said to them, yeah, it looks like you should. B&Q, which is a bigger retailer at the time, had what they call a brochureware site. You couldn't buy, no e-commerce. I said, well, we could beat them. We could overtake them if you give me some money. So I sort of persuaded the team or the board to give us, I think it was £67,000 to start the first website. Got it.

got that built by an agency got that going and then of course I was almost a you know within one year I was almost a gray beard in terms of internet experience because nobody had it so then I moved on worked for some other retailers and then fast forward to um yeah 2000 and what were we 2008 I think it was um I needed to work from home because of a personal reason and um

For shit what I'm gonna do because I lived in the air which we shout and sort out in the countryside I was working in London and going an hour and a half each way So it's three hours of drive a day So I wanted to work from home no marketing jobs of any sort merit in in a wish me area So I needed to create my own business

and uh so started looking around and luckily at the time we were using some affiliates and affiliates are people basically who sit at home and create websites and make money from sitting in their pjs i suppose at home yeah this is something i can do maybe these guys met i met them i went to an affiliate event and uh these guys i thought they're making i knew how much someone someone making like 10 20 000 pounds a month i think holy shit there's loads of money and um

And I met them, I thought they were going to be, I don't know, I'm not saying they're going to be geniuses. But when I met them, I thought they're bright, but they're not like rocket scientists. I thought if they can do it, why can't I do it? So that was basically me then thought, right, I'm going to learn how to do this by myself, by listening to podcasts, by practicing, starting websites, learning, learning, learning. So I used to get home from work at say six o'clock on a workday, have my meal,

with my wife at a time and then go on the computer at seven o'clock. I basically had my computer desk set up in a lounge so I could sit in a lounge, watch TV, had a little mirror set up so I could watch the TV while I was working and work till say 11 o'clock.

Do this at the weekends as well. Did that nearly sort of full time for a year until I got to the stage where I started making about £1,000, maybe £1,500, £2,000 a month. And started thinking, I know how to do this. If I had more time, I could double the amount of work. I would double the amount of money I could earn. And so I remember saying to my wife at the time, I said, right, I'm going to have a crack at this. I'm going to jack my job in. Yeah.

I'm going to give myself six months. If I can't get the same amount of money I get for my salary, within six months, I'll go back and get that job again or get a similar type of job. And I think at that time, I had a good enough experience that I felt confident I could go back and get a job. So it felt like pretty low risk. And I thought as long as I could earn the same salary,

and I'm working from home, it's a win-win. I haven't got three hours a day, I'm not traveling. So that was the goal. Within three months, I was earning more than my salary and then it just kept on going after that. Lots of us go through life with a bit of a love-hate relationship with STEM subjects. In theory, the idea of learning how the world works in science and learning how to build websites with computer science is really awesome. But when you're plodding your way through formulas in a science class or trying to understand code, it can be a bit dry and boring. The way I like to learn more about this stuff in a fun and engaging way is with Brilliant, who are kindly sponsoring this episode.

Brilliant have a ton of courses that teach maths, science and computer science with visual examples and interactive challenges along the way so that you can learn by doing. One of my favorite courses in Brilliant is actually the computer science series, especially the introduction to algorithms and the fundamentals of programming with Python. I was actually considering applying for computer science rather than medicine at university, and I ended up going down the medicine route, which I don't regret, but

I never really understood computer science. And although I knew how to code, I didn't really understand the foundational algorithms and structures behind the field of computer science. So I really enjoyed checking out Brilliant's courses on that. And also their course on cryptocurrency is absolutely sick. And without that course, I really would not have understood how Bitcoin, for example, works. Anyway, if you want to improve your math science and computer science, then head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive. And the first 200 people to sign up via that link will get 20% off the annual subscription to Brilliant. So thank you very much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this video.

Yeah, I think that's when I think when when when people quit a job,

I feel like they often have this idea that, you know, I'm working a 30K job, therefore quilling the job is a 30K risk. But it's actually not because like next week you could probably get a 28K job if you really wanted to. And so really it's not a 30K risk, it's a 2K risk between the job that you currently have and the job that you could pretty easily get if you needed to. And even if you take a little bit of a pay cut, maybe you can't get a 35K job immediately, but at least a 25, 28K job is very reasonable in that context. Yeah.

And I don't know anyone who's kind of done that and regretted the decision because you're sort of like going all in on yourself and giving yourself that. You're like, yeah, I'm

I've got to make this work. And if I don't, then it's not the end of the world. I'll just get another job. If you talk about it and sort of practice at it forever, you're never going to do it. At some point, you do have to make that hard decision to do it. But I would never, I never would have done it before I'd been practicing and learning for a year. So evenings and weekends was vitally important. I think if you do that and really do it and start earning money, you build confidence. The more you do something, the more confidence you get. So I was pretty confident at the end of that year.

I said if I double the amount of time I can work on this or triple the amount of time as I probably could have tripled the amount of time I know I will do this yeah so I was pretty confident but yeah I put enough money to one side to pay the mortgage pay all the bills for six months which is not a lot if you just strip everything out of your life apart from the mortgage and the food bills you don't need that much so it wasn't a ton of cash but I put enough money in the bank that had that saved up over that previous year for the money I had earned from it put that to one side that was enough but yeah

It was three months and I was earning more. Yeah. So one, one thing I often hear from people is this idea of,

You know, I want to do this side hustle. Therefore, I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to make it happen. I was like, hang on, hang on. Like, don't don't quit your job until you've at least done it for a little while. Yeah. In in the weekends and weekends evenings. But I guess these days it's it's sort of become a bit unfashionable to talk about doing the stuff on the weekends and evenings and things. And everyone's like, oh, but like sustainability and like, you know, work life balance and mental health and all that kind of stuff. Rightly so.

But I think there is still that balance between like the people who sort of succeed are the ones who do add in that extra level of hustle, extra level of grind, if you want to use those words. Yeah, I think that you've all got to, you know, to make something work, there's going to have to be a period of time when you have to go outside your comfort zone. You're going to have to work harder than you probably healthfully should over a long period of time. But you're not doing that forever. So...

that was one year but I worked crazy crazy amount of hours I was doing a full time job with a three hour drive backwards and forwards to home an hour and a half each way and then working in the evening so there was crazy hours for a year big deal you know it felt like there was such an end goal at the end of it it was worth it and then when I started working at home when I jacked the job I wasn't doing all these evenings and weekends so there's only one year

That was pretty easy. In fact, I ended up starting working at two, finishing at two or three o'clock. Once the money started rolling in, I was even finishing early to make up for that previous year.

Then I suppose when I started, sure, that was tough. When that kicked off, there was two to three years of that when that was crazy, crazy hours. But now I'm 50 years old. I've given you an example of basically four years in total out of 50 while I've worked crazy hours. That feels doable in my eyes. It feels doable. So when you were making this money or attempting to make this money from the affiliate stuff, while you still had the job and you were commuting three hours, what was it that kept you going?

in those weekends and evenings while you're knackered from a day of work and driving back and forth and you get on the computer, you're like, what's going through your mind? - I suppose it's that dream of not being able to do that three hours when I'm sitting in that car, 'cause this was the day before, in the days before podcast, we basically was living to radio, radio with adverts in, driving backwards and forwards into London, it's pretty soul-destroying. And you think there's this dream of I met these guys, I remember going to this event, these guys were there, no brighter than me,

I think one of them had an Aston Martin, one of them might have had a Ferrari working from home. And you think there's, that's a dream. So you just think if I just knuckle down for that one year, I've keeps you going to do that. And I thought, and also, you know, there's progress in that year as well. So during that year, you will see times when nothing's happened and,

And then she might have a little win, little win, little win. So you get my little wins all the way through. And yeah, clearly if I don't know money through that whole time, it literally just knuckle down for a whole year. Nothing had happened. That probably would have been tougher than I thought. Yeah. But because there was wins and money's coming in at different times, it brings it back to the, yeah, if I keep going, I keep going, I keep going. I'll get there eventually. Yeah.

Yeah, I think in my life, it would have been around the same time, like 2008 to 2010 ish. I had like two distinct moments. One was when I first started doing freelance web design and made like a few dollars through a PayPal account where I lied about my age because I was like 14. I made like $10 through like editing some like MySQL code from some of the websites. I was like,

bloody hell, I can make money on the internet. And the second one was actually through affiliates. I made this like site that would get people to sign up for love film affiliates, which was like the pre-blockbuster, pre-Netflix era. And a friend of mine used his own family's credit cards to sign up for four free trials. And I remember getting a check in the mail for 50 quid, which was one of those like electronic checks where it's like tens of millions, zero, millions, zero, tens of thousands, zero, it's like tens, five. I was like,

Bloody hell, I made 50 quid. I didn't have to work for it directly. And it was just having those two experiences of a making money through selling my web design services and then making money through building this affiliate site that just gave me such confidence that this is a thing. You can make money on the internet. I can make money through a business.

and I think it was that sort of formative experiences that meant when I was at uni and started my first business that actually worked I had the conviction and the knowledge and the experience and having failed at a bunch of things before to be able to make that work yeah and I guess it kind of sounds similar it's a similar experience to what you had yeah I think that I'm I'm saying I've said it before I don't think I'm particularly I don't think I'm particularly brilliant at anything I'm very good at marketing now because I've done it for such a long period of time I think naturally at school I wasn't particularly brilliant at anything the beauty of like say working on

e-commerce or creating content or doing whatever it's if you put enough hours in you can sometimes beat somebody with more talent than you whereas like i don't know football you go to football pitch doesn't matter how much ever you put in if you're not really good you're not going to win right well it's something like this you it can be just through pure grind you can out you can beat other people and at the time most of the stuff that i was earning money through required on seo the beauty of seo is you can see rankings you can check rankings and you know if i just do that a little bit extra there i'll get a little bit of a bump up that i'll bump up

bump you can see yourself eventually move there'll be times when you get you go down as well so there can be disappointments but there's sometimes when you get those you just think more hours i can beat somebody who's they're not going to grind as much as i can i can do more i'll work more and eventually you can beat them so what sort of stuff were you affiliating back in the day this was vouch code websites so it's very competitive space yeah so i remember at the time i probably got in it

late-ish. There was other ones that already existed that were quite established. Are we talking like Hot UK deals and those sorts of websites? Well, it's more to do with voucher codes. Hot UK deals were deals as well. So they didn't really do that. It's mostly voucher codes. I think it was myvouchercodes.co.uk vouchercodes.co.uk They were the big guns at the time. And there was a few others. But there's always niches within every category. There's always a niche you can go after. So the niche for me at the time was

I'm pretty good at research, so I dug into it as much as I possibly can. At the time, the key advantage for me was this, that if you go to checkout pages, when you look at these codes, people use the term voucher codes, but a lot of them don't use the term voucher codes. It'll say enter coupon code or enter discount code or enter promotional code or enter promo code. So it's actually quite a few different words for the same thing.

Everybody chased after voucher codes because that was the sort of generic that people said but when I analyzed a lot of people checkouts pages I noticed quite a few people using promotional code. So I registered promotional codes to all UK. I think was the domain name that we had very snappy title and

but everybody's chasing after these keywords over here. So vouch codes and discount codes, and that was very saturated. But if you search for promotional code, so I don't know, time saves, Tesco promotional code, typically the top ranking one didn't even have promotional codes in the title tag, which is one of the key parts of a page for SEO. So nobody's even going after it, wouldn't even optimize him for that. So that was the opportunity I saw.

And so I used to, you know, work quite hard to get some rankings. And I just put all my, when you get links, you point them, most people point to the homepage. I point them to a specific product page

So the sort of deeper page, let's say you've got a site with 60,000 merchants and you can't point links to every single page too many. So I used to just start with a very small site that had say five pages, send links to each of those five pages with those optimized title tags. And that would help me get rankings for those. It was hard work, did it. And then that's why I knew that if I had more time, I could do more merchants and do them properly and just scale out that way. So were you creating the pages manually on like WordPress or something like that? Yeah, it's WordPress, yeah.

And so you find a website that maybe sells five products. You get the affiliate thing through like Trade Doubler or whatever platforms were up. Correct, yeah. And then you manually create the pages and try it. Well, was it a case of trying to write a blog post about the thing? Pretty much, yeah. You've got to put some content in there. Then you've got to go and spend time to get the links into that. And there was lots of tricks to trade away. So whether you did a link on a... You'd find a forum that had followable links on or...

you probably might have paid someone to do something, you know, at some point in time, there might be something going on there. So yeah, I worked with a guy, actually, interestingly, I worked with a guy who did the website. So I wrote the content and did the sort of the marketing or the SEO. He did the sort of tech side of stuff. And it was a guy, I found a guy, I think it was on a forum. And he was from Serbia.

Worked with him straight for three years. I never met him, never spoke to him, never Zoomed him, never Skyped him, never did anything. This was all done through pretty much through Basecam, which was like a task management tool back in the day. So we worked together full time on that project. But yeah, it's interesting. I've never met him, still haven't met him today.

Yeah, that's like remote work since before, like way before it was cool. Yeah, exactly. The whole freelancer thing. Well, I think it came out of the, around the same sort of time. It must've been the four hour work week came out around the same sort of time. So that's one of the primary things that I read at the time sort of motivated as well to think, right, yeah, outsource, outsource, outsource. Do the stuff you're good at and get rid of all the other stuff. So that was the sort of key learning I got out of that book. And that was influential.

Yeah, it's amazing how many people I speak to who've had 4-Hour Workweek as like an influential book in their life. Yeah, Tim Ferriss is very good. It's very well written and it makes you think differently about how to do this rather than the traditional way. So yeah, I'd highly recommend it. Yeah, I discovered it when I was 17. It completely blew my mind and just changed the trajectory of my life in the sense of like, hey, I'm doing this medical school thing, but I don't think I want to rely on being a doctor forever for my income. Therefore, let's figure out this passive income thing, mini retirement thing.

It was just like such a paradigm shift in the way I saw the world.

Well, most have been brought up to be you go to work, you do a job, you get paid a salary. But clearly that's not scalable. You know, once your hours, you can only work 40 hours a week or whatever, you get paid 40 hours. That's not scalable. But the internet is like, I'm not saying infinite, but it's pretty big. So if you can work something to sell a product or sell a service that's scalable, you don't even have to be the best in the business because there's billions of people out there on the internet now. You've only got to sell to a tiny, tiny percentage of those really, really niche projects. And you can have a really quite bigger business. Yeah.

So at this point, you're sort of mid-30s. You've worked in marketing for about 10 years at this point, if my math is correct. And you decided, I need to work from home. Therefore, let's figure out these ways of making money on the internet. Quit the job. Six months, three months later, you're making more money than you were in the job. And then I think you started your first, again,

I guess, official business in 2008, I was reading. 2008. Let me see. I'm just trying to think of it. That was, yeah, that was promotionalcodes.org. Oh, I see. That was that. Was that the one that you sold then? Yeah. Further down the line. Correct. What was that like? Like building it up and then selling the business in this sort of genre? It was nice in the sense of that business was solved the problem I had. It grew much bigger than I expected.

So in the final year, so after three years, I was making more than two million pounds per year.

Profit. Yeah, and you know that through affiliate deals correct? Yeah, manually making website pages and like yep just through that website really that one single website Yeah, yeah, there was big money to be earned that affiliate business was very big I think the affiliate bid has changed dramatically since then I think they do a lot of I think some of the the payments are much smaller now I think lots of people don't don't do it. They might ban voucher code websites. I think that those days are over and

But it was it was highly profitable. Obviously no product. Yeah, no customer service literally create a website get traffic to it redirect it through Clicks to the merchant you get paid a either a bounty or percentage of the sale Yeah, and how big was your team then when you were doing this sort of two million profit? I think right at the end there was four of us maybe five But really it was just me and the guy from Serbia for the majority of the time and

Okay, so what was that feeling like? You know, you've been kind of grinding hard at this job thing for the last 10 years and now you have this business which is making 2 million plus a year. Yeah. How did that feel at the time? Can you remember? It feels quite surreal. I watched your video yesterday where you were talking about the money that you've earned through some of the sites that you've done things and you just...

You can't quite believe it sometimes. And so I remember going down to the pub. It was only about a year in, I think it was. And they said, how's this going? And I remember I said to the guy, yeah, I earned 60 grand. He said, it's pretty good. But I thought you were saying you was earning really good money. I said, no, that's what I earned last month, just profit of 60 grand. He thought it was the year. So this was still quite early. But I mean, in the final years, it was like 250,000 pounds a month profit. So it feels pretty unreal. Yeah.

My spending habits didn't even change really great deal. So I didn't actually change. You just knew that there's a great deal of money there. And but SEO, being reliant on SEO can be quite risky. So I felt that it was it may not last. I'd rather take the chips off the table now if I can. So we ended up selling that business to an American company for basically a life changing multiple of that amount of money.

So I set myself up for life. So I was basically 40 years old, maybe just coming up to 41 and had this amount of money that was setting me and my family up for life. Yeah. So then at that point, what do you do when you're like, you've ticked the money box, you've completed the game in that sense. Yeah.

I was speaking to Oliver Cookson, founder of MyProtein, a few months ago. And he was saying that because he lives in Monaco. And he was talking about how there's a lot of people he meet who get sort of tens of millions in the bank. And then they're like, oh, you know that yacht? That's hundreds of millions. And end up doing this thing of chasing more and more money. But it doesn't sound like that's the direction that you went.

I did probably what a lot of people did. I took some time out to try and suss out what I wanted to do. I didn't, didn't, you know, certainly wasn't, it wasn't tens of millions. I'm not allowed to say the amount, but it was less than 10 million. And so I couldn't buy a yacht. I probably could have bought a yacht, but I couldn't really buy a yacht, anything like that. And I'm sort of the person who thinks, well, it's got to last you the rest of your life, right? I'm 40. I could live for another 40 years yet. So I'm only halfway there. So I can't spend it all.

So we stayed in the same house, took some time out. I had a young baby at the time, decided to spend some time doing that and trying to think

And I think I said you briefly earlier before, it's very tempting when you're working really hard to go, oh my God, that's the dream. I'd love to take some time off. I'd love to go and sit on the beach for six months. But I think when people talk about work-life balance, I think it works both ways. I think people typically mean work-life balance is you shouldn't be working all the time. You should have a balance with leisure time. I think the reverse is true, that if you have too much leisure time and no work, I think that can be detrimental to probably your health or your mental health.

So I decided I needed to do a bit of work. I didn't want to go back and do the extreme of work again. So I didn't want to do a full-time job. I wanted a, let's call it a lifestyle business. Three days a week would be optimum.

So I thought why what am I interested in? What do I want to do and and So the business that he'll eventually span out was the business that I started which is a company called body hack So I started that with the intention of being a lifestyle business that would keep me going forever I didn't want to start something it there was no there was no intention to flip it sell it or anything like that wanted to start something I was gonna be interested in so and keep me busy for a long time interesting

Interesting. I was speaking to another internet friend on a Zoom call a few days ago who's like 28, sold his startup for like 50 million or something like that. And he was also being like, yeah, you know, I took two months off. I realized...

I don't want to have time off. I want to actually do something. I don't think that's so interesting because I think people who have not, it's that classic thing of if you haven't hit that point, you think, oh, I'd want to chill on the beach forever. And kind of Tim Ferriss talks about this at the end of the four-hour work week that you get this void, this existential void of like, what the hell do I now do with the rest of my life? Yeah. And I think some people go back and,

do what they used to do in which may be full time start another business businesses can be really hard they can be really drained on you I didn't really intend to do something that was going to be as as demanding what you're I genuinely wanted to do three days a week I think if you've got three days work that you're really passionate about you really like doing yeah and you've got three or four days that you can spend doing other stuff I think that is got to be the best I think doing I don't know what Elon Musk does I

Surely he's going to look back one day and go, oh my God, I've never lived a life. I've just been working all the time. I don't think that's good for you. I don't think sitting on the beach is good for you. I think something between the two is good. Nice. So what was body hack? How did that happen? So body hack was, I think at the time, I had a bit of time on my hands. I thought I'd try and get myself a bit fitter. I know one of your goals this year was to do that. Get a bit more fit, yeah. And so I thought, right, I'm interested in this. Went online and it pissed me off a bit that there's so much...

Same fake news out there but so many people trying to sell something and giving you these massive promises about how if you did this is gonna work and I was just very Skeptical I just felt felt a bit grubby to me some of the stuff that was going on I thought I didn't like this I thought what I'm gonna do I'm gonna speak to some experts find out how to do this properly and then make a website where it's evidence-based So if you want to put muscle on we're gonna put people through different programs different eating plans

photographs, measurements, record it every week. So at the end of it, we would have these different programs where you would actually be able to see which ones work. And you go, right, I want those results. If I do exactly what he does, I know it's going to work because I can see it. If I want to lose weight, if I want to, they would be vegan, different, all those different things and goals and things you want to achieve. So I was a guinea pig for one of those. The PT, I saw him three times a week. So no more exercise than normal, three hours a week.

But the difference was he gave me a very strict meal plan, which I followed to the letter for three months. And it wasn't, I wasn't starving myself. I was eating three meals a day, three snacks a day, but I was cooking it all from scratch and weighing everything. I was like, well, calorie perfect. Hopefully I weighed everything very accurately. So within three months I went from, uh,

21% body fat down to 11% body fat. So I was 41 years old and it was the leanest I'd ever been. I was leanest I'd ever been. And, you know, like, you know, the sort of fat you can pinch off there, that was pretty much what was here. I put a bit more on recently because I've been trying to bulk out a little bit because I was like, I got down,

like very light. I'm a five foot 11 and I think I got down to about 11 stone, 10 and a half, which is probably too light for what I should have been. But it was just like, I just stripped this body fat off. I'd never done that before. I'd been going to the gym for the last 10 years and never got the same results. It's very, very clear. In that three months, I'd achieved more than I had in the previous 10 years in terms of body composition. And it's because I weighed all my food. So it just shows you are what you eat. So friends,

And I started that business. I got some traction. But the consistent feedback was that this is too hard to follow. I can't stop at 11 o'clock and cook an egg and some broccoli. I can't stop at one o'clock and cook this food. So it made me think this is there's something very special here.

But what the problem is, it's not convenient enough. How do I make this much more convenient, easy to follow? And a protein shake was the product I was using for afternoon snack. It was the most easy and convenient meal of the day, effectively. But you can't live off protein. Why can't you take all the essential nutrients, put it into a single product, have the same convenience of a protein shake, but you can live off it if you chose to, or it could replace the meals that you have a problem with. So that was the genesis of Huel.

Was Soylent, I think, back in the day.

So interestingly, how does that come onto the scene? Cause I remember that was a thing in like the Silicon Valley kind of people and loads of people taking the piss out of it. Yeah. So the interesting thing was I wasn't aware of swimming at this time. We eventually looked, so this must've been 2012. I think when I'm talking about body hacks, something like that, 2012, 2013, I don't, well, so somebody here can Google it and find out exactly when they launched. I'm not sure, but I wasn't aware of it. So this was, this was me trying to solve my specific problem at the time.

We launched in 2015, June. So by the time we'd launched or before we'd launched, I realized that Soylent existed. There was another brand in the Netherlands that was doing something similar. And it might have been a German one as well. So I was sort of...

a little bit annoyed that there was other things out there similar but competition happens in every market right so in some ways I wasn't that bothered and there was nobody directly selling in the UK at the time so we launched we did get a good good launch we got quite a lot of national PR because it's quite a novel type of product so

So yeah, fair play to everybody else. I didn't really mind. Interesting. Yeah, because I remember when I first started taking Huel, people were like, what the hell is this Huel thing? I was like, it's kind of the UK version of Soylent. And at the time, Soylent was in the news, so people knew what it was.

But I found myself like someone asked, why do you take oil? Like, what is Huel? I was like, oh, it's the UK version of Soylent. And they were like, what's Soylent? I was like, oh, interesting. I think Huel as a brand, at least in the UK, I don't know about internationally, is now so recognisable. And like no one really knows what, at least here, no one really knows what Soylent is. I don't know if that's kind of the vibe that you've gotten as well. Yeah, I think we're globally number one now in terms of volume of sales. I think that we, I think we've done a very good job in terms of execution, brand, sales.

service. I think our nutritionals are very strong. I think our products and ingredients are very strong. I think we do things really, really well. You know, I think they've had a few problems. I think, interestingly, the founding team are no longer there. And I think that it just shows that a founder-led business can be very strong and it can be very important. You know, you think of, we said Elon Musk, you think of Steve Jobs. I think sometimes having the founder at a company, even if they're just an advisor, I think is really key. Yeah.

But anyway, I don't know exactly what they did wrong, but yeah, they don't seem to have fulfilled their potential. Yeah, their founder, John, was actually a student on my YouTuber Academy a few months ago. So he's now got a YouTube channel where he's actually making really strong videos, analyzing businesses and stuff like that. But it seems like he's living the dream now, doing his thing. I think they were very young guys, going back to this thing about young guys starting businesses. Maybe they just got, I don't know, distracted. They wanted to do something else. They wanted to make videos. I don't know what it was. Yeah.

So, okay. So what was happening at Huel from like 2012 to 2015 when you sort of in that sort of pre-launch period? Okay. What does that look like? You have this idea. Yeah. Like,

Where do you even begin to learn from that? Okay, so body hack. I ended up burning some money in body hack, which is the money. And I think my ex-wife, she... I'm not saying she was a bit annoyed with me, but because I was sort of... It felt like I didn't need to work. Why do you need to work? Why would you do this? I think it's important for me to do it. So I think that...

I was quite cautious with yours. I didn't want to go and burn any more money. Is that me two in a row of me playing around just burning the family money? So I was very cautious with it. And I spent a lot of time. It's one of the, when you get certain ideas in your head, you can't get them out. They keep coming back no matter how much you try. So I ended up thinking about it a lot. I spent a ton of time on the first port of call was trying to find nutritionist to talk through the nutritionals of it. So I found James Collier who ended up being our co-founder and,

James Collier was actually Gordon's first personal trainer. Like 10 years ago or something. We were talking about him earlier. Body...

What was it about? Muscle talk. Muscle talk, that's it, yeah. He's going for a gross competition. Did he? Yeah. Interesting. So you found James Collier, the nutritionist. Found James Collier. So we did the nutrition. It was really quite quick. He did a report. I had to find him. I had to interview a few people. I spoke to a guy in Australia, so I had to go in the US, and then eventually spoke to James. So all these things take time, because I was trying to sort of get body hat going as well, you see. So I wasn't fully committed to Huel at this stage.

But the more I thought about it, the more I saw the benefits because the fact that it's in a powdered form means that there's no water. No water means no bacteria, no preservatives needed. You don't need a big packaging. The fact that we made it vegan means it's better for the planet. There's no waste because you shouldn't throw food away. Lots of food is thrown away. So it just solved so many problems. I couldn't get out of my head.

So I had to come up with a name. Names take a long time. Names are super, super important. Yeah. Where did Huel come from? So Huel is obviously human food put together. Human fuel, sorry. And things do take a long time. So I must have looked at all sorts of languages, looked at all sorts of different ways. But I think sometimes creating a unique word that's never been used before makes your life a lot easier. So I think...

I think it's been quite influential in terms of our success. I think it looks like a logo. It looks right. Yeah. And I think that it's distinctive. And I think the beauty of having a name that

Of course it does exist. I think there are some Shuls in the world, some people that call Shul, surname and first name. So it does exist, but there was a lot of competition in terms of, you know, Google, if you search for it, it doesn't mean anything in people's heads. You can give it meaning like it's an empty vessel. And so if you ever kind of come up with a name, I think trying to come up with a unique name is quite hard. So maybe just write down a list of the names that are associated with your product. Yeah.

And you can cut them up and then bash them together. And you might find a word appears in front of you. And that's sort of what I did with the tool. So it's fuel for humans. And you cut it up and you just bash it together and it creates a new word. So I think it's a wise thing. There's a book that I read or read many times, which is called...

I think it's 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. I've heard really good things about it. I haven't read it yet. It's very short. It's about 80 pages. The guy makes so much sense when you read it. It's quite an old book, so some of the references are out of date. But it's £7 on Amazon. Just buy it. If you want to start a business or get anything to do with marketing, I think it's just as valuable as my marketing degree, to be honest. I'm going to save three years of my life by just reading that. I think it's really, really good. And in there, he does talk about the value of names and how important they are.

You need a word that you can say, you can spell, you can repeat to other people.

If you can't, it's making your life a lot harder and you want something that visually looks right. So Huel was not a front runner at one point, but when the guy made the logo, it just looked right as well. So there's a visual sort of aesthetic of a name as well, how it looks on the page. So we were just talking about baby names a second ago. And that sort of thing can be important. And I think that name is the one thing that will probably stay with you forever. So if you think about logos do change, people change their logos. Your CEO is going to change.

Your staff are going to change. Your product's going to change. But the one thing that's going to remain constant forever, if you think about long-term, would be the name. So I'm not saying you spend years on it, but spend some valuable time on it. Make sure you get the best name you can possibly get. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the thing with the name, I've had so many ideas for things over the years, which have then been like, oh, wow.

once I think of a good name, then I'll make this happen. And I feel like there is a danger, especially when you're young and just starting out a first business or a second business where statistically it's pretty unlikely to succeed, like overthinking on the name front, overthinking, oh, we need a logo, we need a website, we need a business card. And then let's not worry about the product until further down the line. And then a lot of people, I think, get stuck in this cycle of procrastination. Correct. But remember, I didn't think much on the first one. So my first company is promotional code. That was thought of in a slightly different way. So I think there's two...

For me, there's been two types of businesses. There's one that has a goal of making money. And yeah, you might optimize that in a slightly different way than say the way Huel has been optimized and what we've been trying to do here. So if I tried to start Huel in 2005,

when I started my first business, that would not have achieved the goal. I would have run out of money because it took me two and a half years to get to market. I would have run out of money and I never would have achieved that goal. So you need to write down what the goals are, what you're trying to do and how quick you need to do it. Because I needed to make money within six months. And so, sure, would have failed, right? We wouldn't be sat here today. So I think I need to understand what you're trying to do, do that. And there may be slightly different things I'm saying that will achieve that goal than achieve this goal over here.

How did you get a Huel.com? Surely it wasn't just available. This is like 2014 time for it. All these four letters were just gone. It wasn't available. And the guy's negotiation tactics are very clever. I think he sold domains for a living. I sort of, I think at the time, I think it was about $6,000. And I got Huel. I think I launched with Huel.me. That was free. There was a few that were free. So just like one that was free.

When he started getting a little bit of traction, I thought, no, I want the main domain. I think hule.co.uk wasn't available. I thought .com, I must go for .com because I want it to be a global business. So let's go after that one. I think it was 6,000. And I just got in touch and said, well, word doesn't mean anything. You haven't sold it. You've had it for 10 years. Surely I'll give you five for it or something like that. And he went, well, it's 6,000 and it's 6,000 for seven days. Seventh day passed. I went back to him and I said, yeah,

She still want to sell it goes well. It's seven thousand pounds now. What do you mean the price has gone up? Surely the price come down when negotiating here? We're not gonna put the price up. He goes well the seven thousands for seven days and

It's valid for seven days or something like that. And he did this several times until he got to over 10. And I left it for a few months because I thought I could get, I don't need it. I don't need it. And then, then Kewl started taking off a bit more. I do need this now. I went back to him and he said, it's 12 and a half thousand now and kept on putting the price up. I've never had this before. And I thought, I'm not, I never pay full price for anything. I'm not paying full price. So in the end, I said to him, look, this is my final offer.

you can't sell this to anybody else because nobody else wants it right it doesn't mean anything to anybody else you're never going to sell it you've had it so long this is my final final I'm telling you I'm not coming back ever again it's 10 or nothing and I think he took the 10

Let's get negotiations. Yeah, these domain squatters are so annoying. There's so many things that I wanted to do with domains and then the .com is not available because it's like owned by some squatter. Yeah. Someone even did a clever thing. So you know the .eth domains now? Oh, in the crypto world, they do like .eth domain. And someone has registered my name .eth. I'm like,

And I looked at his thing and he's, you know, it's his equivalent to who is...

And he's just gone through YouTube and podcasts. He's got like timferris.eth, he's got like Lewis Hose. He's got all of the big podcast names, the big YouTubers. He's just squatting on those domain names knowing that they might become valuable at some point. - But there's so many of these extensions now. You don't need that particular one. You could get one with your name on, I don't know, .agency or .whatever it is these days. - Yeah, I bought my .com around the time when I was 15. And I was like, at the time I was like, oh, this is a bit of a trap move. But now it's coming quite handy. - Yeah.

So you got Heal.com after a bunch of negotiating. You got James Collier, the nutritionist, coming together. How did it then sprout from you having a chat with James? Okay. So I obviously put the name together, got the logo. I started putting the website together, put it on Shopify, which we've been with ever since. They've been good to us. Yeah.

and started writing the copy, trying to get the brand positioning, the brand feel, look and feel, trying to get all those things together. So I could do all of that. So I did everything I possibly could. The one thing I couldn't do myself was make the product, even though I can make it in my kitchen in like...

Not that long. A blender. Yeah, you can make it. But to make it a commercial scale to food grade was a different kettle of fish. Okay, so how do you make it in your kitchen? If you wanted to just make it by yourself, do you buy carbohydrate? You can go on and buy individual component parts. Oh, okay. And you can put it together. The one thing you can't do very easily, but you can unless you've got really, really accurate scales, would be the vit blend. So most of the vitamins, I think the majority of vitamins in here will come from the natural sources. So the oats.

are very vitamin and mineral rich. The pea protein will have some in it, flaxseed will have some in it, but you will have to top up with certain vitamins to make the thing nutritionally complete. And I guess it's hard to like, can't you just buy a powder of vitamin A? Is that a thing? You can from certain places, but the weighing of it sometimes depends on the quantity, but you were talking about sometimes such small amounts, you need very, very accurate scales. You can do it in a kitchen in theory.

but commercial scale, the strange thing I found with the food business is in typically, uh, food manufacturers is quite a closed world. They don't even have websites. A lot of them are quite secretive because say you've got a, say you're making a really good, um, a drink or something. You might not want anybody to know where it's made because then people can go there and get it made and you don't want them to know how to make it. Cause then that's an extra competition in the market. So not many people talk about where it's made quite hard to find them. A lot of them don't even have their own websites. Um,

And also when you ring up and say, I'm starting a business, can I make a small order? No, because factories are set up to make things, make things very effectively and very efficiently.

at scale. So if you have to stop a line, change a line to do a small batch run, they're not really that interested. The feedback I got after a lot of work, after speaking to a lot of people making a lot of phone calls, was they don't want to speak to you because they've heard this so many times, a startup's going to come along, they're going to place an order for a few thousand pounds, they're going to cause them a load of time and effort to do that few thousand pounds, and they won't be able to sell it and they'll never come back, so they've just wasted their time. So they're not really interested, they'd rather deal with bigger players. So it's really, really hard to get it live.

and I got let down a lot of times. And the most frustrating one was I actually finally got a big multinational company to agree to do this. So I knew they could do it. The guy said he was UK sales manager at the time. He said he was going to do it. And they basically strung me along for about four months. And I'd already been a year, 18 months in at this stage. I was scared of burning money. Like I said, I'd burnt money before. And, um,

And I was getting frustrated. When are we getting, when I'm getting the product, when I'm getting the product. And finally on the fourth month after he said he was going to do it, he's going to do it, he's going to do it all the way through. He just sent me an email cold, no phone call, no nothing. He said, we've decided we're not going to do it. And at that point I'd, I think I had enough. I said, right, that's it. I'm done. And yeah,

Then I had a few beers that night, woke up in the morning, went, no, I'm not going to let him spoil this whole thing. I have put a lot of time and effort into this. So I went back on the phone the following day and ended up speaking to the guys we still work with today. They were a small business down in Devon and they've grown with us. So six years later, six and a half years later, we're still working with them today. They've grown really big off the back of us and we've grown big as well.

How did you know this was going to work? Did you have like, did you make the stuff in your own kitchen to test the concept first? Yeah. So I think my very simple logic was this. I don't think I'm completely weird and I was using it and I found there was value in the product. It was saving me time. I knew I was getting very good quality nutrition and I was using this. My very basic logic was this.

The internet's a big place. Surely I can find a thousand people. This thousand true fan concept that Kevin Kelly came up with. I'm sure I can find a thousand people, slight different. He said a thousand people a year. I want a thousand people a month. Surely I can find a thousand people a month that will pay 45 pounds for this product. That's 45,000 pounds a month, 600 K a year, whatever. Um, make some profit out of that. And I've got a nice lifestyle business to keep me happy, not to overwhelm me with work, but to keep you to do something that I would be proud of. The good quality product that will,

make some people's lives better. So I thought, surely I can do that. Surely I can find enough people that would understand the same thing. I thought, yeah, of course I could do that. And that was it. That was the original sort of principle and goals. So you'd kind of done the proof of concept in your own kitchen and be like, yep, this is actually quite tasty. It's nutritionally complete. This works for me. Now let's scale. And you eventually found this company in Devon. Yeah, correct.

How did you find them? Like, what was that? Google. I think Google. If we start any business, Google is definitely your friend. What do you Google? Like food manufacturer? Correct. Every keyword you can think of. Food, powder, even some of the ingredients you might look for. Then you might speak to one person. You might land on a few people. Then you speak to them. They say, no, we can't do this. They say, do you know anybody who can? They might point you in a direction. You go, that is a dead end. Keep going back. Yeah.

So lots of good glue. Okay. So you found these guys in Devon, small business. Were they like taking a big risk and working with you initially? Or what was that relationship? I think the answer originally was no from them. Yeah. They said, no, not interested. I said, come on, could you, you know, I'm just gonna, you know, I don't know how I'll convince them, but I think I convinced them and said, look, I think originally, I think I wanted to order two and a half thousand pounds worth. And I think they said, no, it's not worth our time. I said, okay, so yeah,

That was in the phone call we sort of put out. And I thought about it. I thought, no, I think maybe the tone of his voice was it wasn't an immediate no. There may be a little pause. I thought, right, we're nearly there. So I went back and I said, what about if I doubled the order and order £5,000 worth? And I think at that point he said yes. Okay.

So now you have £5,000 worth of powder. Is it like in your kitchen, in your bedroom at this point? Garage. Yeah, so it all launched out of my garage. I can remember the early days I sort of had pallet loads of this stuff, boxes, and I got a couple of those like, I don't know what they're called, carpenter's horses, you know, like sort of the table things like that. Pallet on top. And I can remember I packed all the early boxes. Website was live. We went live in June 17th, 2015. I packed all the early orders online.

And again, I would advise people if you ever start a business, try and do as much as you possibly can yourself. I don't mean forever, but going back to the Tim Ferriss concept, you should outsource stuff. But I think the best thing to do is do it yourself first. So then you know how it should be done. So when you outsource it to somebody, you can tell them exactly how you want it done. So when I sort of packed the boxes or sort of looked at it, it felt a little bit... What's the word?

looks a bit average so i i then got a um one of those rubber stamps made so instead of getting loads of printed boxes i just made the rubber stamps and impressed it on the tops so that you know you get that sort of like slightly rusty logo it looks nice yeah hand stamped so it shows a little bit of care and attention it's something you know do things that can't scale um uh i printed these sort of big sort of thank you cards it was sort of some sort of inspirational quotes on hand signed them and numbered every single one

I put a t-shirt in there which we still have out today and packed them all nicely and sent a load off to the press, sent a load off to obviously the initial customers but I hand packed them with sort of you know care and attention so when we scaled up I could then pass on something so I want it done exactly like this. So what happened then? So this was June 2015 you launched. Was there sort of fanfare out of the gates? What was this like?

Not quite a fanfare. But it was sort of quite exciting. I think we got two orders before the day we actually launched was interesting. I'd mentioned it on a forum, sorry, on a Facebook group. And a couple of guys came in and just bought it. So I thought, well, something interesting. I haven't even gone live. This was a test site and they'd bought something. So got orders immediately. And this is something that's really hard to know when you're starting a company. There's definitely been companies that have been flatlined for a very long time and then hockey stick up.

but I've had three companies now effectively. The first one just went straight like that and pretty much forever. The body hack company went like this. It got some attraction. We got, I think I got on Hacker News on day one. Do you remember Hacker News? Yeah, that's the other thing.

So I got on, you know, Y Combinator's Hacker News. So of course we've got 75,000 visits in a first day or something. So I got those visits and got quite a few orders on day one. But that spike didn't last, obviously, and went back down again. And then the feedback from the initial customers, well, they all pretty much, it was a subscription business, sort of unsubscribed fairly quickly after the first month. So I thought this has gone like that and it was hard. Whereas first business went like that and Shure sort of went like that. So I'm not saying you should give up

But there is an argument at some stage you've got to decide when you're going to give on something or do you keep sort of just trucking ahead for years and years and years? Real tricky one. But we did get initial traction straight away. Initial orders, national press. I paid an agency because back in the day when I was doing voucher codes, I was jealous of one of the competitors who kept on getting quite good national press. So I remember looking who was their PR agency and I remembered it. So when I launched my business...

three years later, I thought, I'm going to go to that agency. So I found, found that agency, that PR agency and said, right, I want a three month contract, 5k a month for the first three months. That's all I want. So I want some press logos because when you're buying a food product, you've never tasted it.

It is not traditional food in the way you'd expect it to look and you've got to give me £45 upfront. I thought it's quite a hard ask. So I thought if I've got some press logos, it will become more trustworthy. You know, you're gonna put this thing inside your body if it's been seen on all the national newspapers. So I said, goal is first three months, I want national news and I want quotes out of all of these national press, you know, Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail, et cetera, et cetera. And they did that and orders came in.

And then a few months later started turning on performance ads and the performance ads, then you can just scale that raise. You just turn the dial up each month to get that nice growth curve. And connected to an American Express account. So you get like loads of emails. Well, we did do that at one stage. Yeah. They're not as easy to use as you think. Oh, really? Yeah. How did you arrive at the 45 quid price point? Interestingly, I did the maths on it. And because it's quite a heavy product, um,

You know, this has always been something we've, I'm not saying had a problem with, but because we force you to buy two pouches at once, people go, well, I can't just buy one. Well, if you buy one, the price is going to shoot up in terms of cost per meal because the delivery charge is spread over two. Yes. And cost per meal is the number I always look at and be like, huh. Yeah. And, you know, £2.83, that's actually pretty cheap. Yeah.

It is, yeah. So it felt like the optimum way for me to... Yeah, it is quite a big ask, but I do remember... I can't remember who it was. I think it was one of our non-execs who I'd started working with, the guy who helped me sell my first business. He did say, it's much easier to bring your price down than it is to put your price up. So go in at a price which is as fair as you can. If there's a...

I think the tempting thing for entrepreneurs or people starting businesses is if I sell it cheap, I'll get more customers. Yeah, you might do, but it might make your business much harder. You've got to sell a lot more to make profit. So, you know, if you don't ask, you don't get. So maybe just start a little bit higher than what you might because there might be loads of costs you're not aware of, which is very true. I mean, over Hewell's life, I think we've been profitable four years out of six.

And, you know, we're a big business now and our profit is still, you know, relatively small as an EBITDA percentage. Mm-hmm.

because we're still in a growth phase when you're growing there's lots of things you've got to spend money on you may not think about so don't just work out on just your basic margin as it is yeah what you're you could sell out like don't cut yourself too short so that's how i came up with that price oh interesting yeah that's something i i hear from like new entrepreneurs a lot where they're like i've got this idea i'm like okay cool what else is in the market and how are you going to be better than them oh we're going to undercut them like oh yeah okay this is it's gonna be it's gonna be tricky yeah um i remember when when i when i got into med school

Basically, the standard business that anyone getting into med school who has an entrepreneurial spirit to them is, let me make courses teaching other people how to get into med school. And so every year, there is always five to 10 new businesses that start up or undercut the competition. And every year, there's five or 10 businesses that fold

because they realize that actually selling courses for 30 quid for a whole day is actually unsustainable when you have all these other costs that add up. And it's the companies that tend to actually go in at a more reasonable or higher price point for a few hundred pounds for the day with scholarships for people from whatever backgrounds. Those are the ones that seem to survive longer. And the strategy of undercutting the competitors, I think, is very hard to make it work unless you're like Amazon scale, I guess.

Yeah, pricing is super hard to get right. There's definitely an argument sometimes that, you know, if I was going to make a judgment call on, say you've got two courses, one's £10 and one's £200, which one's better? Obviously the £200. People are going to think that. LVMH is one of the richest companies in the world, Selenia, I think.

luxury brands at crazy, crazy prices with huge, huge margins on them. And then sometimes that makes them more desirable. You know, if you're trying to sell a watch, even, you know, most people can't judge whether a watch is good quality or not. But if you charge £50,000 for it, you think that must be really good. It's really desirable, right? So the pricing is hard to get right. It can't be just done purely on margin. Can't be just done purely on how much money you need to take in to make the profit you particularly want.

You can't just judge it against competitors. So I remember when Starbucks first launched in the UK, I think Starbucks was like, I don't know, two or three quid of coffee. And the default was 50p or whatever for a cup of coffee. And you know, then styrofoam cups are real horrible ones. So sometimes if you've got a premium product, you're in a better position. It sounds crazy. We talked about Red Bull earlier. They're £1.50 or whatever it is. Whereas, you know, you can buy alternatives much, much, much cheaper. So pricing is quite hard. It's definitely an art as well as a science.

So did you get pushback on the pricing? Was it like, oh, this is kind of bordering on expensive when you had that 45 quid? We get it all the time for it's expensive. But as you say, I think a meal is £1.50.

Right one pound 51. I think he's a powder meal So for 400 calories if you want to go and buy a sandwich from certain sandwich shops is London It could be really expensive five six pounds or suppose. Yeah, so it it depends and you know We want it to be affordable, but we don't want to sell something, you know cheap and nasty once a high quality premium product And when you think about all the stuff that comes with it, you know, you get free delivery You get free t-shirts worth 20 pounds. You get a free shake, which is worth 10 pounds and

You know, it's a well packaged premium ingredients compared to some. The nutritionals are very strong. You get a very good customer service. You know, everything, the whole thing together, I think is in really good value for money. And even on a cost per meal basis. Yes, you do have to buy in sort of a bulk, but still it's relatively affordable. So it's just very, it's very difficult to please everybody all the time. You can't.

What was the rationale behind the t-shirt? T-shirt. And the continuing to include the t-shirt. The original rationale, I probably can't even remember that so long ago. I think I just felt like there was something I wanted to give, I think

I think there's a book on the principles of persuasion. Yeah, I think it's seven principles. And one of those is you give something to somebody. So I think the classic example they give is, you know, when you go to a restaurant, when they want the bill at the end, they give you some sweets or some chocolates. I think McDonald's have a happy meal where they give kids the free toy. I think if you give something, there's been loads of science done on this. If you give something, they feel obliged to give something back. So it's part of the art of persuasion. And I think I remember reading that book. I remember that. And I thought,

Okay, I'm trying to persuade people to do something that put their hand in their pocket. Never tried this product. It's a food product. They can't eat. They can't sample it before. We can't really send you a sample. It's difficult to do. Therefore, it's an added value. I'd much rather add added value rather than give a discount. So the price I could buy the t-shirt for will be more than the discount I could possibly give you.

and it helps spread the brand name right this is one of the key things when you're launching something new how do you get your your brand awareness up yeah you can spend money on it but the beauty of a t-shirt is you could wear it for years you could wear it hundreds of times and thousands of people could see that brand name it's quite well fitting as well it like hugs the biceps nightly it's not too much like it it kind of makes me feel a bit more hench when i wear it yeah so i've i uh

you know, I've done this product, you know, the whole show to be something I want to be proud of. So I, I very conscious about the products that I choose and, um,

The early t-shirt was an off-the-shelf one, but then about two years in, we went to a full custom one. We spent nearly a year developing that t-shirt, believe it or not. And the attention to detail on it, I think, is very good. So, yeah, we do spend a lot of time to make sure. And, you know, I could probably argue, I could probably justify, I could have an argument with somebody and say this is probably one of our lowest CPA advertising techniques ever.

Difficult to prove. Almost impossible to prove, but I could argue that would be the case. I've seen loads of people wearing the T-shirt and I've been in the market. I keep on trying different brand T-shirts.

t-shirts to wear and the issue with like for example the Uniqlo ones is that they shrink after two washes but I still have my heel black one from like 2018 because it's just a great t-shirt to wear like I probably wouldn't wear it in public much but like to wear around the house to wear to the gym it's just a nice fitting t-shirt that doesn't shrink and I guess that comes from the attention to detail that you guys correct you got into it

So in the first year, I read somewhere that you did about a million in sales. Okay, so I think we've changed our year ends a little bit. So it's hard for me to remember. But if I remember the original ones in the first six months, I do remember this very clearly. We launched in June. So by Christmas that year, I think we'd done about £750,000 worth of sales. And then the following calendar year, I think we did about...

Five million, I think it was. And then it was 14 million the following calendar year. That's in calendar years, not the official numbers. Okay. What was the team like at the time? Like, how did things grow team-wise? Okay, team was very scrappy to start with. Yeah. The interesting thing is, okay, when you start in a business, in the corporate world, most people have got very, you know, small jobs. Yeah.

Sorry. Very defined. Yeah. Narrowly defined. Correct. Yeah. When you're starting a business, half time you don't even know what you do need. So what you want is very open minded people who are willing to muck in and wear many hats. So what I did originally was, again, keeping costs really low. I got...

I think most of our early employees, first few, were basically straight grads. These are people who came out of university, had never done a job before, and I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to have a different culture, and I wanted to not do it the standard corporate way. So I wanted people that were easier to mold, and people who had no preconceptions about what they should be doing or any arrogance about this is beneath me, because you would have to sweep the floor sometimes. You'd have to...

do pack boxes you'd have to do quite menial jobs sometimes and then then you got switched straight away to dealing with buying product or dealing with the finance problem or something like that you had to change and shop and change real quick so that was the the initial initial team of sort of people straight out of university and most of them are still there today so now you have like 200 and something people over 200 people now yeah what was that like or how how do your head count change over time can you can you remember what

The rough? I can't remember really. I think very crudely, very, very crudely, you could probably argue around the same sort of number of people per million, one person per million. So in the first year, say one person. Following year, we're doing five million. Might have been five or six people. Following year, it's 14. Might have been up to 14 to 20 people, something like that. That's still like very small considered. Scrappy. We were very scrappy, yeah. Very scrappy to start with. Okay.

Because you don't know. It's very hard. Like I said, going back to this fear of burning money. I wanted to do things really as best as I could, but I didn't want to go and scale up with loads of, you know, C-suite people in the early days when you don't know because an early stage business is like, you know,

We're talking about babies early because my partner's pregnant. But early companies are like babies. They could die at any stage, right? They need a lot of care and attention. So it's high risk to go and take a load of people from very senior jobs, try and attract them into your business. And you think, oh, my God, imagine if the business went under. They've lost their job and they can't pay their mortgage. So it was very scrappy in the first couple of years. I think it was about the...

second and a half, maybe third year. We moved from real temporary service office, you know, the sort of ones with the blue carpet tiles and the sort of like white walls in between, real unbranded office. We actually bought an office across the car park and we fully branded it up. And that was the sort of moment when you went from a,

a flaky business that felt like it could go under at any stage to a real business. And at that stage, that's when we started scaling up the people a lot faster. Oh, interesting. Can you remember what the main challenges were when you had like 15 to 20 people? This is the position that I'm in at the moment, 15 to 20 people. We were talking about recruitment earlier. So I think recruitment is always a problem in every business at every stage. You know, when you're really young, you don't want to take really good experienced people in.

as you get bigger you want to do that but then you need to attract people in but because you're not so early stage

Some people might think is not as exciting as your sort of later stage. There's always a reason why it's hard to do and getting the right people to move to your offices that may not be in the same area they are because talent is sort of equally distributed in my eyes. So to get talent, you might have to persuade people. We've had people move from Scotland. We've had people move from overseas to come and join us. So to get the right talent can be really hard. I think it's always hard whether you're 15 or 200 people. I think it's always hard. And what are the challenges like? How

How did the challenges change over time as you go sort of from 20 to 50 to 100? Like, I'm just trying to get a feeling of what that experience is like having never done it before, really. I'm not sure how much it changes because while you're in it, it always feels the same sort of level of challenge, if that makes sense. So I know in the podcast you was talking to Ben about...

I think he was saying that even people who are running big multi-billion pound business are sort of winging it to a certain extent. I totally agree. I think there is your company, my company never existed before. You could read a book, but that's based on how to run another company. So this is a different situation you're in. So every company I think is unique. Every time is unique. We've never lived in this time before. We've never just come out of COVID.

this has never happened ever before, quite like this. Therefore, every time, every moment, every company is unique at that moment in time. So you are always winging it because you've always got a different challenge that's never quite existed before. My general manager, Angus, he asked the other day as we were driving back from Gymshark, be like, hey, you know, Gymshark's a pretty big brand. Like, you know, have you thought about

you know, we're at 17 people right now, we're at like 4 million revenue, whatever. Have you thought about kind of beyond 10 million, 20 million, 50 million? Like, could we actually impact like millions more people than we're thinking? Are our ambitions too small? And in my mind I was thinking, yeah, but I feel like every time we add more people, the stress level goes up a little bit. Has that been true in your experience or is there a point at which you're like, actually adding an extra 30 people doesn't significantly change your personal stress levels?

Personal stress is partly dependent on what you choose to do. Okay. So for me, I gave up the CEO role 2017. I think it was two years in. Yeah. So for me, I can argue my stress levels are lower now. So for me, the stress of being a CEO was greater than I feel my role now, even though we're a much bigger company. Hmm.

I think stress is a strange one. I think stress is obviously essential in life. However, it depends on how you define what you actually mean. For me, the stress of being CEO was I didn't like doing that role. It was not pleasurable for me because I was doing stuff I hated doing. So I've got much bigger responsibilities now, but I much prefer doing what I do because I'm CMO. I focus on what I think I'm good at and I enjoy doing that.

So if I was CEO now, I would have broken a long time ago. It's just not the right job for me. You spread yourself over lots of stuff. So maybe instead of thinking about it's going to get a lot worse or it's going to get when it gets bigger. Maybe if you're feeling a lot of stress and you're worried about the future, maybe look at what you're doing and try and get rid of some of it. Maybe you're doing stuff that's not right for you, doesn't fit you.

outsource it, recruit somebody else to do it. Because typically the stuff that really gets on you, like I had to do, I'm not very good at writing. I had to write something personal the other day for a project we're working on. I can't really say anything about, but I had to write it and it took me, I kept on, people chased me, chased me, chased me. Because, you know, you sort of put off doing something you don't like doing or you're not very good at.

And the stuff you do like doing, you can't stop thinking about it. You can't stop doing. So maybe just review what you're doing because I don't think it does. I'm not sure for me, the bigger the company, the more stress you've got because you've got more people to help out. You can easily argue. It's easier now. I think in the early days when I was doing, you know, on day one of Fuel, there was only me, nobody else. I did every single job. Yeah.

Well, surely that's harder than doing, having five, 10, 50 people working for you. Interesting. How did you decide that you wanted to not be CEO and become CMO instead? It was pretty easy for me because I think there was one month in particular where I think I spent the whole month doing zero marketing, zero brand, zero product. And it just felt like super ineffective use of my time. The stuff that I'm good at, I'm not doing. The stuff that I'm not good at, I am doing. Mm-hmm.

didn't make any sense to me yeah so it was very easy to say look this is I'm wasting my time doing um stuff I'm not enjoying so why not find somebody who's really good at doing that yeah and then I can focus on what I am good at how did you find the ceo uh linkedin in one hour no way yeah it was it was pretty easy what I did is I actually um I've got the recruiter tool and you just go in there and I think I listed out a load of sort of

Well, I wanted somebody with food experience and I wanted brands which were not the massive corporates, because I think sometimes massive corporates, you can be, what's the right word? Sometimes just too far away from the cold face to actually be doing work. So I wanted somebody who'd been in a CEO role, MD role, operation director role, those sorts of, so just put those job titles in.

And I selected about 20 or 30 brands, which were in the food business that I thought were small enough to actually have the person doing day-to-day really important work. And it pumped out 20 people or something like that. I scanned through them. James was one of the ones I saw and looked at his CV or LinkedIn profile, looked good. And then passed it on to a recruiter we were working with to sort of line up the first interviews. And that was it.

Pretty straightforward, yeah. Okay. Did you not want to recruit from within, like promote from within? Oh, we were too... There was nobody at that sort of level at the time. It was very early. And because I was doing that role, I think the most senior person below me at the time, I'm not sure, but I think we had a finance and operation manager who effectively was...

the only person in that team, maybe a couple of people underneath them, that was it. So very, very early, they were on, you know, they were at manager level.

Because I guess for some people, at least in tech, when the founder doesn't become the CEO, it's often like a big ego type thing. Like, this is my company, though. I want to be CEO of it. It sounds like that wasn't really a thing for you. You'd kind of gone beyond that. You were like, you know what? I want to do stuff I'm interested in. Focus on the marketing. That's what I'm good at. Let's leave the executiveness to the other. Yeah. I don't think I've got a very big ego. And I didn't enjoy doing it. And it's a hard job.

And I think I've said to a couple of founders asked me about this. I said, look, you're always gonna be the founder. CEOs change, the founder can't change, right? You're on Wikipedia, the founder of Nike is gonna be the same person forever, right? That cannot change. You don't worry about that. You're not gonna get forgotten.

So, you know, the way I see it, she was my baby. He wanted to fulfill its potential. And if that's the best route, then do it. I think sometimes people hold on to this because they don't want to, I don't know what it is, they don't want to get forgotten or whatever it is. They hold on to a role for far too long. And I don't think it wasn't fun for me.

So over time, you know, you started off with a powder and then it seems you've expanded out into the kind of the hot meals, the premades, the protein bars. I've got a friend who I was having dinner with yesterday. I think they worked with Huel at some point. They've got a spreadsheet literally rating every single Huel product in terms of its taste and blind taste testing and all this super on the whole optimization of life kind of vibe. How did...

How did you sort of evolve the product line over time from powder into into these other things? One of our values is sort of product and customer obsession I think if you focus on what customers want Yeah, pretty good place to be rather than something. Sometimes people look at competitors and copy competitors I think you listen to your customers because your customers will be a different group of people So if you copy somebody else's product and give it to your customers that might not like it if you can't give customers what they want and

you're in a much better place we we're d2c so we listen to our customers thousands of times a day you can't give them all what they want you can't please them all with separate products and you have to avoid um i think they always talk about tech businesses you can't give them all the features they want otherwise it become too cluttered so sometimes you need to declutter

So we try and keep our range pretty small. We've only got seven products, but we do listen to what they want. And if you hear it enough times, I don't believe in surveys. I don't believe going out asking people. I think it needs to be given to you without them, you asking them. So I look at rejectors of fuel. So on Facebook, you know, on our ads, you'll get people say, I'll never buy this product because I would look at that. If that pops up enough times that, well, if I do give you that, would you buy it?

And same for customers. They'll say, I really love your product, but this, and that needs to come through, I'm saying organic sources. I think if you ask people, they typically will try and give you what they think you're asking for or what might make them sound good at the time. So it needs to be natural. We've got a forum as well where we hear a lot of feedback from people. So reading between the lines, people for a long time said, I want more protein.

I want less carbs and I want a natural sweetener. So we created Black Edition, which became our number one product. Yeah, that's the one I use. There you go. In the powder form. So we gave people what they want. So that's typically how we do it. Same for hot and savoury. Same sort of principle I've been asking for. I want something hot and savoury. I want something that's got more whole foods in it. I want something I can chew more. I want something more like an additional meal. So we created the hot and savoury product. Nice. So what's next for Heal? Ah.

Next I can't really tell you how the product all I can say is that MPD team are really good. They were sorry what what MPD so new product development. Oh, okay. Yeah, so they report in to me and we work and we've got a really exciting product pipeline and We're working on anything like up to 30 projects a time And what I do is we work on stuff and sometimes you have to go down a path before realize before you use a dead end So we experiment try stuff speak to people

mock stuff up because sometimes it gets rejected because it ends up being too expensive or it's just not possible to make or actually people don't like it for some reason or another. So there's lots of reasons why it ends up we killing a project, but you got started before you find out the answer. You can't just think of idea and reject it straight. I want to try it first. So we work on lots of stuff and, um,

Yeah, there's some interesting things coming. So I think people quite often sort of position this as this sort of powdery weird product. But in theory, you can make anything nutrition complete, any food category you could go into making nutrition complete. So we could go to some quite interesting categories and have a USP over other people because they don't typically optimize for nutrition. They're optimizing for taste and texture, which is not essential in life. Primary purpose of food clearly is nutrition. That's what you actually need. So we're optimizing for the right stuff. So if we can go into any category and produce something really interesting,

And even some other stuff that's interesting as well. We could be working on that. Hmm if you Had your time again are there any things any sort of make big big mistakes? You'd say you've made or things that you regret that you would that you would have wanted to do differently I'm a strong believer in that no regrets if you go back in time and change something Would you be where you are today? You could be further back so

Probably not, because I think where we got to is really much further than I ever expected. And would I do anything differently if I really could and end up today in the same place? A couple of times we've recruited and made mistakes. Really hard to recruit. We were talking about this briefly earlier. It is really hard to recruit the right person for the right job. We spend a lot of time. I think we've got better at it now. So if I went back, I probably would apply some of the recruitment principles today to those early people.

So I'll give you a quick overview of what we do now. So we've got internal recruiters now. I think the beauty of internal recruiters are is they know your brand inside out. They really know what you want so they can pick better people. So that's a benefit. Cost saving too probably if you look at it. Recruiting can be quite expensive. So internal recruiters, I would have probably bought some of those on board earlier.

The recruitment process now is quite extensive. We probably you could have up to six rounds. So not all on separate days, not like it's going to take six days. I insist now on some sort of test and it should be a, you know, not like an IQ exam or something like that. It should be something very specific to your role. So you might give somebody a case study, do a case study, present it back to us.

The reason is because I think that interview processes or interviews can be quite artificial environments. And I've experienced people who've been very good at interviewing, terrible at the job and vice versa. One of my best employees, he was terrible at the interviews, very nervous.

But I saw something in him and gave him a chance. This was very early. He's ended up being one of our best employees, right? So I think that you can't judge just purely an interview process. It's a very fake environment. You're never going to go for an interview process at work. You're going to do work. So why not do a test, which is closer to work? We always have a culture fit interview as well that a person can veto. So say you're the hiring manager and you're looking for a graphic designer. You find this graphic designer is really, really good.

But he has to fit in with the rest of the team. So we make sure two people have got nothing to do with your department interviewing from a culture point of view. If he doesn't fit with the rest of the team, we don't want that person in the business because that can end up causing conflicts or problems somewhere else in the business. And that's why people leave. And I don't want anybody leaving this joint. That team can veto that person, even if they're the best graphic designer in the world. It can still say I don't want them. I do a culture fit interview. Still do it now. I can veto. On the culture fit interview in interviews. Yeah.

Are you like, are you trying to ask a question of, is this someone I want to have a beer with? Are you doing like, I get a good vibe? Do you have like specific questions that they need answers to? What's the person here? I personally do have a range of questions that I ask same each time. So questions could be simple as like, tell me which culture you've worked in, which has fitted you best.

Oh, nice. Yeah. There's no clear right answer to that. Correct. Yeah. So just because it might just not fit you as an individual. And obviously I was asking the same question, which culture have you worked within that you've not, that's not fitted you at all that's used. And clearly if that doesn't sound like our culture, then there wouldn't be the right person. Right. So it could be questions along those lines. Yes. I typically, I think in the back of my head, could I spend a lot of time with this person? Because you're going to be at work for 40 hours a week. That's a long time.

And so if you think that person is going to be, you know, difficult to work with, going to be a bit rude or arrogant, it's sort of people we don't want to work with. Right. So one of our key values is don't be a dick. Right. So, you know, we want people that you're going to want to spend time with because you've got to sit next to them. They've got to interact with other people and they've got to speak to people outside the business and represent the brand as well. So there is lots of sort of nuance to that. But really, fundamentally, are they a nice person? Do you want to spend time with them? OK, so you've got the test. You've got the culture for interviews. Yeah.

What else do you have in the recruitment pipeline that? So you would probably see your immediate manager. You might see the senior person in that particular team as well. You might see some juniors in that particular team. Culture fit, me, culture fit. And then obviously the recruiter will spend time with you and they do the first stage really fundamentally to get past. And then one of those stages you do a test in. So you might see up to six different stages to that. Wow.

That's quite a lot. I think our churn rate has been incredibly low. So over the years, we've lost very few people. Like I said, we had 240 people of people I really wanted to keep.

Three four people really low we have had people leave but sometimes that's fine That does happen people might leave because they want to move countries They wanna my first employee that always sort of regret she left, but she'd done Spanish at Cambridge I'm sorry Russian at Cambridge and she wanted to speak Russian on a regular basis We don't sell Russia so she couldn't but so nothing we do about that That's that's so be it But in terms of people that actually wanted to go and work for another company very very rarely that happened for

let's say someone's listening to this and they're sort of, you know, just coming out of university, they're applying for jobs and want a job at one of the green brands. As someone who's been on the other side of kind of recruiting a bunch of people, what are some things that potential candidates do that helps them stand out in a good way? This is so easy. I can't believe this still happens, right? I reckon less than 5% of people actually write a covering letter.

So because it's so easy now to sort of spam people with CVs, you go to Indeed or wherever it is and you just drop your CV and just send it. In the early days, I was being really ruthless because I was doing all the recruitment. The first 10 or 15 people, I did all the recruitment myself. Because I was trying to run a business, be the CEO, do all the work, I didn't have time to do this. So my easiest filtering technique was if you didn't write me a covering letter to say why you wanted to work for Huel, I feel like you don't care. If you don't care, I don't care about you.

So if you did that and you delete all the ones that have got no attachments apart from the CV, you'll have 5% left. So it's a very quick filter mechanism. Out of those five, there will be probably half of them, maybe more, will be standard covering letters. I want to work for your company. Insert company name. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's very rare that anybody goes beyond that.

What the best, I think if you want to stand out, there's two things I would say is write a company, you know, choose the companies you want to work for and then find out why you want to work for them and say that.

mention some things about yourself or why you can add value to that company. So I could add value to Huel because of these things and make it specific to Huel, right? So I don't know, say you're looking at graphic design, say I've looked at these two pages or I've looked at something on your website and I saw there was a mistake here and I could have made it better there. That shows you put some real time and effort into it. And then the final thing is if you want to go really far and go and really stand out, I think in the whole time I've had a few people do stuff like this where they were actually interested

create something physical and send it in so i think i said to you earlier there was one of our employees she and i think it was a dad actually helped her she wanted to stand out there was no job for her at the time so she just she she'd seen she all used your she wanted to work for the brand so she loved the packaging so much on our sort of label on the back she took the same template and um

turned her CV into one of our labels. So instead of saying best before date, it would say born on day, that was her date of birth. And instead of like ingredients, it will be her attributes and skills or whatever. And nutritional profile would be her employment history. She changed around to that. So that really makes you stand out and then send it to the hiring team leader sort of thing. So I think she wanted a marketing job. So she sent it directly to me at the time. So, so that, and when you, when you get one of those, it really does stand out. Yeah.

Yeah, we did a big bunch of recruitment a few months ago, recruiting for like eight positions at the same time. And one of the positions we were recruiting for was a videographer. And we had like 100, 200 people apply, something like that. And there was one guy who actually made a video and was the only person who made a video to be like,

Whatever. And sort of, we ended up not going with him in the end because they just didn't have the right level of experience that we needed. But that was an instant hack to just get to the top. We need to bring this guy in for an interview. Whereas everyone else was like, okay, let's send them the asynchronous interview. Let's look through their CV. Let's make sure this guy was immediately by just standing out with a bit of effort, you know, a day's worth of putting, putting something together. Um, just,

immediately got to the top of the pile. Correct. I mean, clearly, if you want to be CEO of Nike or something like that, just sending, doing this one label or something like that's not going to get the job. You need to obviously have it backed up with being the right person for that job. But if you're the right person for that job and you strongly believe it is,

An hour of your time, half an hour of your time. It's not going to take very long to do, but you could land your dream job just by doing that little bit of extra work. You'll see if you already exist, there's no work. So a covering letter, which you can attach when you're doing to an Indeed or most things, it should be a covering letter thing. You could attach that half an hour, an hour of your time, really spend a bit of, you know, not a lot of time, but spend something on it and you will stand out. I cannot believe, I reckon it's less than 5%. Can I ask a little bit about firing people? Yeah. That's like often people who start companies say that's the hardest part of the job.

I have had to do it once and it wasn't a nice experience. Do you have like a philosophy or a mental model when it comes to kind of if like recognizing someone's not right for the role and then what you do about it? Yeah. Yeah, it's horrible. I think if they are not performing, then obviously in some cases you can move them, right? There could be a better job for them within the same organization. It depends. If they're not performing because they just are not

Lazy or whatever then that's much easier to do So we've had people where I don't know in customer service is very easy to see performance because there's there's tickets So there's a number of tickets per day one person's tickets were 15 10 times smaller nearly everybody else's they just weren't working as hard as anybody else That's quite easy because you just pull them up for it explain to them that you every else is doing this number You're doing this number You're not working as hard and can't you can't be

So those ones are fairly easy. The ones which are tougher is the ones where it's a little bit more difficult to put your finger on exactly why they're not fitting in or they're not performing. And we've had a couple which have been quite emotional when people have been told. Clearly you want to give people a chance to improve. So the first stage is to go through a process of explaining to them where they've gone wrong and what you think or what is expected of them.

A recent example of somebody where we did this and we gave multiple opportunities to up their game and they didn't. They just didn't respond. They just didn't show willing. And it was quite interesting because the person had come on board and had sort of bait and switched us really. They had put a load of effort in to get the job, got it. And then once they got it, got a feet under the table, they just sort of chilled out. And then they got told it wasn't good enough.

didn't respond, got told they weren't good enough, didn't respond, got told they weren't good enough. So eventually then it was fairly easy because we're given multiple opportunities. So all I'm saying is I think you need to speak to the individuals, explain to them what's wrong, how they can improve, what is expected, and then give them an opportunity to improve.

I've never really experienced anybody where there isn't, there is a valid reason why that's happened. If they're obviously experiencing problems, you need to sometimes ask the question, is there something else we don't know about? You're not telling us. I haven't really had an example of where that's actually happened, but, um,

You know, it's important to find that out. Usually if there's something really bad going on at home or in their personal life, that comes to surface quicker. And actually the ones where that's happened, it's usually us saying to them, we can see you're not happy, but their work was still good. They were still grafting. Have you found that in instances where you do give feedback and say, hey, this thing needs improving? Has it improved more often than it's not improved? No. No.

No, typically it doesn't change. It doesn't improve a great deal. I think it's because they're just either out of their depth or they just don't have the desire or the oomph to change. That's just the way they are. And sometimes...

It usually happens quite quickly within somebody joining a company. I've seen, it's very rare you have somebody, you know, working for two years really good and then their performance drops. It usually they join and it's never been great. It's always been a bit bad. Typically, my experience has been typically,

they're nice i mean they can be really nice people and you give them i think in the early days we were probably worse at this and so sometimes you'd have people for six months for a year and you just think oh if we do this we could get them to do that give them a bit of extra training give them a bit it typically never changes so i think once you see it work on it but in the early days i probably should have pulled the plug on people a bit quicker on some of them because if it's not right for us it's probably not right for them either it probably would be better off somewhere else yeah so i guess philosophically speaking you're um you want

You want to give them a chance, but you're thinking in the back of your mind that like last 90% of times I did this, it didn't work out, but hey, we'll give you a chance anyway. Of course, yeah. You've got to give people a chance. I can't even think of an example. Actually, I can. There is a person I'm thinking of now where they have improved, yeah. There has been one more example of somebody that has improved. They've definitely upped their game. They're still...

got some fundamental traits which probably aren't quite right for that particular role. So I think we probably will have to replace them eventually, but they've definitely upped their game and that will probably extend that period where they'll be able to work for the company for another year or two, I think. But eventually they're going to hit the ceiling. How do you think about things like culture? Culture is one of these big words that everyone talks about. What's the sort of culture that you're trying to make it heal? And I guess how do you mold it in that direction? So I think culture is, yeah, I think it's

super, super important and super important to give it due care and attention. It will happen naturally, but I think the hardest culture will probably be a company that's been existing for a very long time. I've worked at places and once you've got a culture, it's very hard to change that culture. Luckily with Huel, because I started with a blank sheet of paper and I was a founder and I was there, I think it's been fairly easy to do in some ways because

I didn't start this company just to make money. I wanted something I was going to be proud of. I wanted a company where I was going to work there as well. So it's very easy to sort of say, I want to work somewhere where there's no dicks. I want to work a place where people are nice. And I want to perform. I want to get good results. To create a culture where...

we are market leader, we achieve great things, but we don't burn people out and people don't want to leave every two years because it's such a soul-destroying place to work. There's no fights, there's no crying in the office, we don't want any of that. So we want to really look after people, but we want to have that energy and that

that sort of passion to achieve great things and so have higher targets. So I tried to merge those two together. So sort of stuff that we do is we do recruit well. I think that we do have ambitious targets, but not so ambitious you're never going to achieve any of them. We do look after people. We have a people team. That people team look after the team and make sure there's anybody with any problems. We do provide a lot of perks. Huel's got share options, quite generous share options as well.

And so, again, we're all hopefully more on the level playing field together and rowing in the same direction. And then we do lots of additional perks. We've got a gym at work. We bring in a PT. We have, you know, free fuel around the office. I went to a posh office the other day, a very rich company. They're charging one pound 80 for coffee. Don't have to pay. You know, even stuff like that, I think, makes a difference. We've really tried to think about doing the right thing at all times. Nice.

That's really cool. Yeah, I think that's one thing we're starting to think about a lot harder now that the team has sort of accidentally become 17 people where we're like, all right, now we need to really think hard about this culture thing. Have you written anything down?

We've got core values and stuff, but they're all very rough first drafty, but no we haven't really really written down any culture principles Yeah, I'll start it. Yeah, just think about what he is and words that you may use phrases You may use just write it down. I mean I could not probably could send you my first deck that I did It's pretty crude and pretty rough. We've refined it immediate better. Yeah, but there's there's a very famous culture decks out there I think that Netflix one is one that's often used

very long now, it's probably a bit too long, maybe a bit too specific. If you looked at the Netflix one, did a crude version of that, a quick crude version, talk about, you know, principles, some stuff, stuff you don't want to do, the stuff you do want to do.

But yeah, so we have two sets. We have, in terms of values, we have Huel's DNA, so that's as a company. So nutrition first, taste of clothes second. And then we have how to be a Hueligan, which is what we sort of call all of our customers and all of our employees will be Hueligans. And there'll be stuff in there like, you know, number one is make customers happy. Number two is don't be a dick, stuff like that. Any tips? Oh, sorry, just one other thing on that is...

I still induct everybody comes into the business. And I think that it's very easy for a culture deck to become dusty, put in a drawer, nobody sees it. So what we've done is that when everybody joins, I do it. So I would induct everybody who joins and give them my thoughts on culture from my perspective.

So don't be a dick. It's like, you know, don't gossip around the office. You know, that's not allowed. I don't accept that. If I hear that, you'd be in big trouble. We print out those two sets of values on just a little sticker. Everybody's laptop in the business should have it on. Stick it on there when they first join. So at least it sort of tries to keep it top of mind. And then...

you know, then you've got to live it. You have to live those. So you don't want to wear right sort of flaky stuff. That's a bit aloof, never going to happen. So just try and remember and try and quote those things back to somebody. If they're doing something wrong and try and make sure you try and yeah, bring them to life. And so, yeah,

It's very easy. I think it healed to a certain extent. We don't have a floor, which is just from management, you know, like James and our CEO and myself, we all sit, you know, open plan office, all sit together and try and sort of live those values together. Awesome. Yeah. I think when I first started out the business, I came across things like culture and like values and missions. I was like, oh, what is this bullshit? But now I'm like, oh crap. I really wish I had paid more attention to this. Yeah. One thing that,

I think it's harder now is the working from home. I think that has made culture harder. So I think when you're all in the office together and you have beers on a Friday afternoon, it's very easy or much easier to build that together. It's a little bit like a football team or something much easier. I imagine a football team, if you never got together, the team can't be together. So I think you've got a lot of remote workers, I'm assuming, correct? We do, yeah. I do find that challenging.

it's so much nicer when people are in the office. But also it's like, I can't insist on people being in the office because COVID and stuff. So it's like, how do we keep the people who are not coming to the office fairly regularly as involved?

as the people who are in here and just hanging out daily and lunch and coffees and things like that. Do you do, we have a Christmas party is quite big. Oh yeah. It's put quite a lot of time and effort into the Christmas party. Again, it has to be everybody together. No teams allowed to go and have their own Christmas parties. It's one team or no teams. And then we have a birthday party on the anniversary of our birth anniversary.

each year as well, but that's another big party. So we had a big one. We spent a lot of time and effort. It takes months of organizing to have those two big ones. We have two big ones. People will, the American team don't fly over, but the London team, the Tring team and the Birmingham team all have those parties together.

So those can be events where you get sort of home workers together. Yeah, that's a cool shout. Yeah, we had sort of a mini Christmas party, but then again, COVID, because we had this whole plan and we were like, all right, let's really pare it down. But I do want to do things like twice a year, kind of either a ski trip or like an adventure holiday where everyone goes off to somewhere and we fly in the remote workers as well and do that as like a thing. We did do, yeah, during COVID, we did do one that was quite good. I think they set out these kits, these cocktail kits, which was all on a remote.

party where we had to sit and make cocktails at home by yourself and then we broke up into little groups like little groups of 10 or something where you had like you'd have a chat together and sort of drinking together that was is the best that you could do remote yeah um any tips for juggling uh family life relationships that kind of stuff while building a business and being quite like

entrepreneur vibes? I don't think there's many things you can do in terms of juggling at certain times. So I think hopefully you'd want your partner or your husband, your wife, whatever, to really understand there's going to be a time when you have to knuckle down and you might get a bit manic. You might get so, you know, long hours. You might look a little bit unhealthy. You might have been doing crazy hours and you might get, you know, a bit of pressure to sort of relax. But sometimes if you know this is the right thing to do,

As long as you know that they know and you know, this is not going to go on for, well, it might go on for years, but it might not go on for 10 years. It might go on for a year or two. Then I think if you're both aware there's an end goal there.

then I think that's the best thing you do. I think it's the best thing you can do. Clearly, you can't do that seven days a week for years on end. So there will be times when you can go out. But obviously, sometimes the day when you're not working is a day you don't really want to go out because that's the day you want to chill out and relax. So that doesn't work either. I think it can be... What I'm trying to say, I think it will cause conflict sometimes. I'm not sure I've got much advice on that. I think sometimes you have to just do it. Yeah.

Yeah, do you do you do things like you know having having a hard stop in the evenings and you then you're not gonna check email or is it all kind of integrated with I'm not a massive regimented planner. I think that is When there's something to be done, I typically try and do it And I don't like saying right Sundays are clear as much if you had a massive panic or massive problem on a Sunday I wouldn't like to say that Sunday's always clear or I'm always finishing after 7 o'clock at night. I

I'm not very good at doing that. No. Sorry? When we're on holiday, we relax. His brain just goes mental. We'll be on a sunbed. And he's like, I've got to do this. It's a little bit like shower in the morning. You know, you're supposed to think very clearly in the shower. I think sometimes when you do go on holiday and you're supposed to be or you're having a meal out with somebody, that's when you're not at work. And sometimes your brain is still thinking about work. And so stuff comes into your head and you think, oh my God, I've got to tell somebody about that now. Yeah.

I think if you're dating, I think maybe it's the other way around, rather than the entrepreneur changing, I think it could be the other person. Could you tell them to be more understanding sometimes? I think it is tough, but I think if you're dating somebody who's just got a nine to five job, then...

That's a different experience from dating somebody who does this. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's something I find if I'm on holiday or if I'm on a weekend, I'm not working. That's when I have the best ideas. And suddenly I'll open up Slack and be like, and everyone's like, whoa, what the hell's going on? And I'll be like, oh, crap.

I need to refrain from just spamming the Slack channels with various ideas. I'm like, oh, we could do this, we could do that. I'll either schedule it for a Monday morning or I'll save it. But you are in a manic world. I think sometimes that was the most exciting times is the early days for me when you are making everything up from scratch. And sometimes those odd ideas that spring into your mind at the odd times sometimes can be really important.

Nice. This has been great. Can we end with some social media questions? Yeah, sure. Sick. Ah, fantastic. Okay, so we posted on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. So we have a bunch of questions. Excellent. So we'll just pick some good ones. We've got Cameron who asks, what's been your biggest mistake and what have you learned from it? I get asked this one a lot. Yeah. It's a very hard one to answer because I think we sort of asked this a little bit earlier. Biggest mistake...

Probably the biggest mistake you've ever made, I probably can't tell you about. And I think there's nothing to learn from that, really. It's just mistakes happen, right? Some things happen and sometimes you're unavoidable. You're going to make, I'm just trying to talk this to somebody, over your career, you're going to make tens of thousands of decisions. You can't be right all the time, even though I think I am generally right all the time. I'm not sure what the really biggest mistake really would be in terms of value back to this person. I'm not sure. No.

Um, Trevor says, how do you power through the part of starting a business when you're not making money? Okay. That is a good one. I think we sort of talked about this a little bit. I think you have to have this vision, this goal of where you want to be. And, um,

If you want to be up here, then I think sometimes it's the exciting times when you know you haven't got there. I think quite often, Steve talked about this, where some people have already got to the top. Sometimes that's the worst time. So sometimes it's exciting when you know you're going up a hill. When you're not making money,

Okay. So in the affiliate world, it was quite easy because quite quickly you can make some money. Whereas for Huel, it was two years before I made a penny, right? That must, that was hard. Like I said, I nearly gave up. So if it's something you can, if you buy, if you can generate some money, so say you're starting a restaurant, so you have to build a restaurant and you have to start that from scratch. It could take a lot of time, but could you do, I don't know, a,

dinner party event or something to at least get some money in the door doing something around a similar type of subject. Can you do a mini version, a pop-up or something like that? If it's something that's like building some tech that's going to take years, that would be really hard to push through. But I think you have to just remind yourself there's some motivating goal, not that I just want a bit of money, that my life's going to be better, my family's life's going to be better. Something a bit more motivating that should keep you going. Sick. Zach says, what's the hardest part of being a business owner? Um...

I like it. I'm not sure there is for me. It doesn't feel hard as such. I think trying to please, trying to keep, you've got a lot of sort of, I'm not saying stakeholders is the right phrase, but you've got, you know, you've got your team, you've got your customers, you're trying to keep a lot of people happy and you can never keep everybody happy. Impossible. So there's gonna be some times, but I've got a bit of that.

thick skin now and I'm sort of in marathon mode now that I feel that in the early days you're sprinting later on you're in a marathon mode and therefore you know you can only do so much so before I used to be really sort of quite sort of um hectic overnight I wouldn't go to bed until stuff was done I'm gonna go now I'm a bit more chilled and I can let those sort of things I can deal with them a lot more easily now I think you have to just relax a little bit sometimes yeah nice

Ash says, what's your advice for teenage entrepreneurs? Teenage entrepreneurs. Well, you were a teenage entrepreneur, correct? Yeah, I guess so. I didn't make any money while I was a teenage entrepreneur. I think the key thing for, you know, entrepreneurs

is to probably learn. I think podcasts are excellent way to do that. I've seen you've got loads of books here. I'm a terrible reader. I don't like reading at all, but reading books would be good as well. But for podcasts, for me, hearing someone's voice, I've listened to that. It's much more like storyteller. I can hear it. I can hear the inflection in someone's voice. I can get it. So I'd say, I would say listen and learn, but also do you can read and learn for your life and never do a single thing. You have to start at some point.

So start something which is not going to cost you a lot of money. Start something and just get some experience under your belt. And then obviously you should be able to apply some of the things you've heard in the podcast. And if you're not making progress, then something's wrong. So course correct and do something different.

But I would say start something. The chances are the first business you start or the first website you start is going to go nowhere. Right. The fifth one might go nowhere. So start, get something and maybe drop it quite quick and move on to something else. But then the 10th one you start might be better. So I was sort of...

you know, the business I started that year, I probably did five or 10 websites in that first year. And then I sort of started getting some traction with one of them. And that's the one that went on. But don't worry about it. Don't commit. Don't like spend six years planning something and then realize it's going nowhere. I would sort of start something, but there's so many little sort of things you could do. You could sell on Etsy now. You could sell,

You can start a website. You could do a course on Skillshare. You can do lots of things quite quick and easily now. And if they start getting a bit of traction and double down on, if they don't get any traction and move on to something else.

Yeah, I think that's something that we did really well in the early days of this business when it was just me or just like a few of us. But as the team's grown in size, I found that we're just taking a lot longer to do things. And I guess this just happens naturally. But I keep trying to think, oh, could we maybe be a little bit more scrappy like we used to be back in the day while at the same time? Yeah. How do you think about that tradeoff between like kind of like team getting bigger and just stuff getting slower?

Well, that is absolute classic, isn't it? We use the example of Halo Top, which is an ice cream. Do you know Halo Top? Halo Top is an ice cream. I think it came from North America. You can buy it in this country now. So they start with two people, I think less than seven years ago, maybe about seven years ago.

And then they sell hundreds of millions of pounds worth of ice cream per year. And they were two people and they got to market with a low calorie ice cream. So all they did is notice people like ice cream, took out the sugar, put some stevia in and put a little bit of whey protein in. Pretty simple. They made a product which tastes less good, arguably, than Ben and Jerry's or something like that. But because it's lower calories, it sells loads. And they start with two people.

Unilever that owns Ben and Jerry's. They took years to get that to market, sort of similar type of product. So you can move a lot faster. It's a lot of classic sort of innovators dilemma. The bigger you are, the slower you're going to move, right? I think Coke Life, which was one with Steven, took five years to get to market or something crazy. You can make that in the kitchen in five minutes. So I think the beauty of being young is that you've got less commitments. You can do anything you like. So just do something. Do it scrappy. Scrappy is good. I think scrappy is excellent. Get stuff done because...

If you take a long time to plan until it's perfect, it's probably too late. You know, you want to launch something, read a book on minimal viable product. That is a good, good concept.

But as you get bigger, you don't want to do minimal viable product anymore because you're saying this is too crap. I can't launch this. So yeah, we do experience that for sure. And you have to fight against that. And there's a sort of balancing act. So yeah, our products we launched now, we can't be as scrappy as we first were. So the beauty of being young is that you, or you're early and you haven't got a business, you haven't got a brand, is that you could do a really scrappy, crappy version. But give it to your friends, sell it to your friends and get some feedback and learn more.

learn, improve, learn, improve. Nice. Yeah. One thing we've been thinking since the discussion with Steve from Gymshark is that can we reorganize our sort of team of 15, 20 people into sort of these three people squads for each different project? Because I

Because I find that three or four is like a good number. Because it starts to get to like six, seven, eight for a single project. It starts to feel like everything is slow for no reason. So now we're, as of Monday, we're going to experiment with what it's like to do three man squads for a bunch of our different things, see what that's like. And how are those squads organized? Do you have, they've got a project lead or how's it done? Yeah, so what we're thinking is when it comes to YouTube videos, it would be like the host, a writer and a producer. And that would be it.

at the moment what we have is like a team of four writers and a team of like four hosts and everyone's sort of trying to do a bit of everything. And it's, uh, whereas this would be host writer producer working in like three weeks sprints to just come up with an idea, write it, film it the following week, edit it the following week, release, repeat that process. You scope it out before you do it.

Do you actually sort of research the market, come up with a concept, think it through or you just do work? We do a bit of that. So we spend about a week doing the whole figuring out what's going on, competitor analysis, market research, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I spend, I try to do a lot of that because I think you can think a lot faster than you can do. So think, spend a lot of time thinking. And I think one thing people make a mistake of is that they might think, I want this as the solution. This is the right solution. I'm going to take six months to get to that solution.

Well, but that's maybe only thinking one level ahead. You know, we talk about when a good chess player will think, I don't know, six, seven, eight, nine moves ahead. So you've got to think about the, not the next move, you've got to think about the next six, seven moves. And I think it's far easier, like a chess player probably would, they would go through those and what's the competitor or what's going to happen, what's going to come back, what's going to be the problems, how that's going to work, da-da-da.

So if you think for all the permutations of all the things you could do, what the directions you do, you can think that through a lot faster than doing it. And you might realize that is good now, but actually has boxed me in for the future. So come back, go down a different path. And then that's still not right. Go down a different path. And then you hopefully will get to the right path. And then you commit to that path. Nice.

Yeah, like a really solid whiteboard stage. Just like getting ideas on the page. I don't even use whiteboards. I do sort of research the markets a lot. And sometimes you might... Say you've got an idea. Chances are you can find somebody who's done something similar. And if you see that idea never took off...

then I'm not saying you kill that one, but it's sort of a bit of a signal, a bit of a tell that that probably there was something fundamentally not appealing in that idea or that execution. So it might be that you can iterate on it and make it better, but it might be that, oh, no, I've seen that. I've seen that done a few times. That's not going to work, right? So that might help you.

rule out the options you've got because when you've got a whiteboard you've got unlimited options there's so many things you could do which one are you going to do which one are you going to commit to yeah okay so we've got uh lepo who says with so much information overload and so many quick ways to make money on the internet how do you find the one thing to get into or yeah how do you how do you how do you get started with i guess picking picking your option when there's all these options related to what we just talked about

If somebody's trying to sell you a course on how to make money, that is really tricky because that might not be the right one. It is really tricky to know. I think I would always think niche is better than the big win.

especially if you're very early, try and pick something very, very small. And that can be incredibly valuable because the competition will be less and it's much easier to do something very bespoke. And you know where you're going to reach that person. Try to solve one of the world's great problems is going to be bloody hard to do. Right. So start simple, do a very simple thing and just do it and do it scrappy. Get it going, get a little bit of money because when you've got money, you can invest money in other things. So trying to pick the idea, um,

You are going to guess. You're going to guess. But I think it's always easier to be, you know, what's the word? Scratch your own itch. So Huel was scratching my own itch. My first business pretty much chose that particular idea because there were some big mouths saying how much money they were earning in that category. So Voucher Codes, I remember there was an affiliate forum. Yeah.

Forum is a good place for doing research. And there were some people in there sort of saying how, not saying how easy it was, but just saying there's so much money, da, da, da, it's crazy, da, da, da. And I thought that was definitely made me dig into it deeper. I did my due diligence, my research, looked into it and then found the opportunity to do a niche, which is just a keyword variant of what they were doing that nobody was competing with. So that gave me an easy little niche to go after. I didn't even want massive money. These guys were talking about big, big money. I didn't even need that or want that. I just wanted enough to be able to make myself self-sufficient.

so i think niche down on something that maybe already exists um and if it's quick and easy test it i think going back to tim france i think he's quite keen on testing those sorts of ideas you know there's that little example he said if you want to test something you put uh

What do you say? You do an ad. Yeah, like a few dollars of AdWords behind it. Yeah, you can test it quite quick or even, you know, there's different ways you can run tests, but that was one of the easier ones. You set up a website. You don't have to put credit cards. You can send people to it. You can see what the traffic is. You can work out what the conversion rate is. You can do some number crunching on it as well. Definitely. And the final question from the Q&A, Mora says, what resources would you recommend to students who want to start a business, podcasts, books, et cetera? What resources? Yeah. 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is obviously number one.

In terms of podcasts, you mean actual life things that you're going to learn from? Yeah. Back in the day, I used to listen to This Week in Startups. It's become more of a news program now, so you don't learn so much, I don't think. It's newsy. But I think the early podcasts, they were really good at talking about how you pitch a business, how you position a business. There's lots of that. So that was really useful. I think

I think there's a whole series of podcasts which have been done by Y Combinator. Oh, yeah. Startup School. They've got a whole thing as well. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but there's about 20 videos they did and they're really good lectures. They are the lectures, the really early ones. I think there's a guy called Sam, which is one of the founders, did. It might be Startup School. I'm not quite sure, but you can probably put it in the show notes. We'll find it. Yeah.

That is really good stuff. Some of the first two or three podcasts they did on there, really, really good. And, you know, there's been some pretty serious businesses come out of Y Combinator, so they must know what they're talking about. So they were really, really influential. I think if you Google my name, Julian Hearn, bio, I think there's a list at the bottom there. There's some podcast links there. And

And there's some really good, there is some really good places where I've learned. There's no way I would be where I am today without listening to podcasts. - Yeah, same, to be honest. Okay, final few rapid fire questions that we ask everyone. Who's had the biggest influence on your career? - Well, I would probably argue that one book, that 22 Immutable Laws, the guy's called a guy called Jack Rees. I would say without that, I wouldn't be here today. - Okay, I'm gonna get that book today, thank you. What's one tip for someone looking for success?

I think the biggest thing for tip for success is you've got to find some dis-motivating thing. If you can try and find something that's going to motivate you through the thick and thin, and it can't be just money, I don't think. If you can find something, then that is the thing that will drive you further and faster. Nice. What does the first and last hour of your day look like? I'm pretty simple. Yeah.

First thing I was just get, just get up. Uh, I don't really have any routines. I'm literally get up fast as I can shower, get to work. That's what I typically do. Um,

Anything interested in them? Not really. You come home to a nice cup of tea. The last hour. Last hour, I do try and... My sleep has never been particularly fantastic. I don't think anybody's is really. I do have one of these aura rings. I try to monitor it, try and improve it. So I know that it's not particularly good. If I get 80, that's really good. I've got often 60 or 70s.

So I do try and be a little bit semi-strict with myself towards the end of the night. Don't eat anything late at night. Don't go on your phone too much late at night. So the last hour is pretty much probably chill time, watching TV, not too much, and try and get some decent sleep. Nice.

What material item under around about a hundred pounds has added large amounts of value to your life? - Under a hundred, I think this is 250, I think. - Yeah, the ring. Do you find it's useful? 'Cause I've got one, but like I don't really act on the data. It's like, oh, 80. - There's two things I've wanted to run this. There's only two that I'm interested in. One, I try to hit, this does a calorie count in terms of the exercise you've done. It's not great for like weight lift or anything like that. It's purely just to encourage me to do steps, I suppose. So they do a calorie counting on there. I try to aim for a thousand burn per day.

just an arbitrary number, good. And then sleep score, I try to aim for sort of 70 plus. So it just keeps me a little bit aligned because I don't know without this, whether I'm getting really bad sleep or really good. So at least it keeps me, I know that if I go out and I eat late at night, it will be low. If I drink, it's gonna be even lower. So I think this has been useful. It's over a hundred, but I think it has been helpful. - I guess the next question is what book would you recommend to anyone? - That's probably pretty easy. I think my whole life I've read about five books.

But we haven't mentioned briefly that for our work with work week that was probably super influential in the early career. Nice. So let's say Huel gets acquired or dies for whatever reason and you've now you're now back to square one. You've got

You know, you're financially set, but and you've got all the skills, but you want to start a new thing. How would you go about building that up? OK, so I'm a slightly different. I'd have slightly different objectives than probably most of your listeners. So in terms of me, I have sort of put a little bit of time into this because obviously I know that I'm 50 now. So I'm assuming I've got a certain number of years left to get towards it. So what would I do?

At the moment, I'm still a thousand percent committed to Huel. This is the sort of once in a lifetime company for me. So I haven't really thought what I would do post, but you do think if Huel died, which it won't, I've got no idea what I would do. If Huel was very successful and it gives me, you know, a huge life changing amount, that's the one that's obviously more interesting. What would you do? Would you do something which I think would be...

majorly interesting but very um world changing we do something really really serious money would certainly not be the driving factor it wasn't the driving factor for you so it won't be in the future you'd want to do something that's going to be ticks a massive box for you so obviously you know elon did electric cars and he did like going to mars i know space doesn't really particularly interest me but i'd probably focus on something that would make a huge difference which would be really

got a few little things i'm sort of interested in but at the moment it's thousand percent your way my brain works is if i um like people have asked me to do like um uh you know board roles or something like that i know that if i start thinking about something it's very hard when you're in the shower i don't want to be thinking about any other company apart from fuel so at the moment it's just that nice um what quote or mantra do you live by i don't really have one my friend said one years and years ago which is a bit odd but it sort of does sort of work for me and um

It's basically, I think it's sort of along the lines of just grit your teeth and get stuck in. Right. But he sort of said something like, if it doesn't fit, force it. Right. And the concept behind that is that some things just naturally work, but sometimes it doesn't. And you have to get...

you have to make it work sometimes. And making it work means like forcing it to work. But it should fit naturally. So you should hopefully find something that just works. And that is the optimum. But there's occasionally when sometimes it won't work, but you need it to work. It has to work. And that is the time when you go above and beyond. And sometimes it doesn't need that much more effort. So going back to body hack earlier, I'd gone to the gym for 10 years.

and hadn't seen great improvements. But just by changing one thing, which is basically weighing all of my foods, my calories were bang on. In three months, I've made more progress than in 10 years. So I forced it to work, forced it to happen. I changed it and did something different. So I think that sort of logic and the same for starting any business, you're going to, if you just do your normal nine to five, I don't think you're going to make a success of it. I was on a panel once and somebody said, what do you think of four hour, four day weeks? I sort of smirked and laughed and I said, look,

Yeah, once you're a big corporate business, you can do that. But if you're in a startup mode or you're trying to start a business, I don't think you're ever going to get it done in four days, right? Because somebody else is going to work seven days and they're going to beat you. So you are in a very, very intense zone where this thing you're creating can die at any second. You have to go above and beyond. You have to force it through. And there will be a time when it could last a year or two when you're gritting your teeth and going above and beyond. Final question, journey or destination? Well...

got to be a journey right so yeah the destination is death really that's the end so um that's where we're all going eventually so i think journey definitely is the um uh you know i look back i remember the early days of huel when you're in it it's flipping hard but you look back and you go that's definitely the the the fun is the most exciting time so definitely journey

Love it. Julian, thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. I feel like I've gotten such a masterclass in entrepreneurship from someone who's been through the trenches at all levels of success. And yeah, just want to say thank you so much for being so gracious with your time. Thank you very much. And for making amazing products, which I use on the daily. Okay, I'll bring the fridge in and we'll get a load of products sent to you. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

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