How Huel Went From a Garage to a $1.15 Billion Exit: Case Study

In August of 2026, there was a big acquisition in the e-commerce space. Huel was acquired by the French conglomerate Danone for $1.15 billion, and most of the internet totally missed it. Now, in the last year, there has been a flurry of big acquisitions in the e-commerce and physical product space, especially with consumables and food-type brands. For example, Groon sold for $1.2 billion. Dr. Squatch sold for $1 billion. Now Huell, this powder, is sold for $1.5 billion to the French conglomerate Danone. Now here's what's different about this case study. It's totally copyable. If you look at a lot of the acquisitions that have happened in the last year, they were run by big experienced MBA graduates and they were built on private equity spreadsheets. But this one was started by a washed-up entrepreneur with a couple of failures that didn't start Huel until his mid-40s. And the thing is, he documented the whole thing for the last 10 years so that entrepreneurs like you and me can just go back and watch how the company grew. So today I'm going to cover how Huel went from a little side project that wasn't supposed to go anywhere and compounded into a $1.5 billion exit. Okay, so first let's talk about Julian Hearn. He was not a first-time founder when he started Huel. He had one success and he had one failure. The success was an affiliate website that he built and then sold, but we're not exactly sure how much he sold it for or how much he kept. But after that, he started a fitness website that ultimately was a failure. He lost several hundred thousand dollars. In fact, the reports that I found suggested that most of what he made from his previous successes got sunk into this project that ultimately didn't go anywhere. He lost a decent amount of money on this website called Bodyhack. And Bodyhack was a website that ranked different diets and workout programs. It ultimately failed. But as a result of running this experiment, he basically was able to see why people did not follow specific diets and why they didn't get the results that they wanted. And what he concluded from this was that following a diet and workout regimen was just too complicated, and he wanted to do something that was a little bit simpler. Enter his next idea, which was Huel. Now, as an aside, this reminds me of this brand right here, Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon was founded by 2 entrepreneurs who were coming off of failure. Before they started Magic Spoon, they had this company that was called ExoProtein. ExoProtein sold cricket flour, ground up crickets turned into protein. No one wanted it, but they learned a lot about getting into the protein space, and they used that experience to start something that was a little bit easier to sell than What did they learn from this? They learned, hey, people like protein, they don't wanna change their habits. So they started Magic Spoon where they said, how can we make eating protein fun? Let's turn it into cereal. Now, I had the founder of Magic Spoon on my podcast and he said it was the first time in his life that he really understood product market fit because he had a product that people already wanted and he made it accessible to them. Enter Magic Spoon. Now, With that aside out of the way, how does this impact Huel? Huel was the exact same story. It was an idea that didn't work out, but the founder used what didn't work out as the data to suggest what would work. And in this case, he made a complete all-in-one meal replacement, healthy shake that would make people have an easier time following a diet. And that's what he made. That was the beginning of this brand. So the takeaway here is that his failure gave him the idea for the thing that ultimately turned him into a centimillionaire. That's over $100 million. He cleared $500 million from this exit. Can you believe that? So our failures on our resume often lead us to the breakthrough that takes us to the promised land. All right, with that out of the way, let's break this down of how Huel became a 7-figure brand. Forget how it became a billion-dollar brand. I'm interested in how this got off the ground and became a multi-7-figure brand. And what you're going to see is that this is the part that you can totally copy. There were basically 3 elements that made this business successful out of the gate. The first was he knew that this product solved How did he know that? Because of his previous failure. So he built this all-in-one meal replacement in order to make it easier for people to follow a diet. He had product down. Took him like 18 months to formulate this. So if it's taken you a while to figure out what your first product is gonna be, don't worry. Takes a lot of founders a long time to figure out what a good product to bring to market is. The second thing that Julian Hearn did was he built his entire go-to-market strategy on the idea of having 1,000 true fans. It basically argues that if you have 1,000 people who really love what you're trying to do, it's hard to go broke. And Julian Hearn took that to heart.

In fact, he says, quote, my very basic logic was the internet's a big place. Surely I can find 1,000 people, this 1,000 true fan concept that Kevin Kelly came up with, that'll pay £45 for this product. That's £45,000 a month, £600K a year, whatever. Make some profit out of that. And I've got a nice lifestyle business to keep me happy.

Notice here that this was a lifestyle business concept. Anyone can start a business, with the goal of having 1,000 people paying $50 a month. Often we overemphasize product and we underemphasize how important building a raving fan base is, which is why audience is one of the core pillars of my scalable, sellable model. You need a product that sells itself, an audience of raving fans, and then the third piece, which is a sales channel that compounds. And in the case of Huel, that was a basic Shopify website. In fact, Julian Hearn programmed the website himself, didn't hire a developer, didn't go get some fancy people to make a complicated website. He simply made it himself. And this is back in 2016 before you had all of these ways that you could code up a website and use AI to build something in like 19 seconds. So we don't have a whole lot of excuses. Those were the 3 pillars. He had a product that he knew solved a problem. A goal of 1,000 true fans, and a very basic sales channel— just an old-school Shopify website. That was the beginning of Huel. And here's where it gets really fun and interesting— how they brought this product to market and got their first few customers. June 17th, 2015, Julian Hearn launches Huel. Guess where he launches this? Does he run a bunch of ads? Nope. Does he sponsor a lot of influencers? Nope. He talks about his new product on a Facebook group called London Startups, and because he's talking about it, a couple people went and looked it up and bought the product. And when I say a couple people, I mean a couple people. He made two sales.

That and actually two of the guys went on to buy from the test site. I hadn't even sent live.

Wow! I hope this feels like good news. That a billion-dollar company comes out of the gate with 2 customers? And how did he do it? By posting on a Facebook group. These first 2 sales were fulfilled from Julian Hearn's garage. He's doing the marketing, he's doing the shipping, he's doing the selling himself. He even said that he drove the orders to the post office himself. This is the early, humble beginnings of entrepreneurship that very few people see Or care to talk about. We care to talk about the headlines. We care to talk about how fast things scale, but we miss the early grindy days where you're doing everything yourself and you're working long hours just trying to make something happen. I find it kind of refreshing that there was a guy who was just trying to make something happen on the fresh heels of a failure. Fulfilling 2 orders from his garage, driving them to the post office. And from that, he was able to grow a business that ultimately had a billion-dollar acquisition because they started talking about the product on a very small group of people, and they turned those 2 people into raving fans. In fact, Julian Hearn talked about how he reached out to those 2 customers and simply asked the question, Why did you buy? And their answers became the beginning of how he targeted customers from then forward. And he didn't try to scale into 9 figures off of 2 customers. He then tried to reverse engineer those 2 relationships and do it at scale. Huell began to get regular orders on direct interactions with people on forums and small groups. The first big raving fan base that came to buy Huel came from the Soylent Reddit group. It's just a competitor of Huel, and a group of people decided to rally behind this product, and the founders got involved in those relationships because they were committed to creating 1,000 true fans. They reached out to those customers and built relationships with those early buyers. In fact, they created a group of them. He called them the Hueligans. And he created a forum on the Huel website where he could engage with the early buyers of this product. Now, I teach a lot of entrepreneurs. I run a portfolio of brands myself, and then I help founders get to 7 figures and then prepare for an 8-figure exit. And one of our core tenets is something called the traffic triangle. It's how you build an audience of raving fans. Part of that strategy is to build what we call the hopper. The hopper is where we keep our raving fans and engage with them directly. There's a, a bunch of different ways that you can do this. You can do this in Facebook groups. You can do this with an email list, but Huul built their own forum and this was inspired by how they were getting their traffic. So notice where the first few customers came from. They came from Facebook groups and they came from Reddit groups. So Huul said, let's double down on that. Let's build our early buyer base into a raving fan group and let's control that on our own forum. You can still go see this forum today over at discuss. It's just an open forum where they're building relationships with their buyers. Do you notice how the beginning stages of this business were on building deep relationships with the early customers? This is a hurdle that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle to overcome, which is I'm not getting the sales that I want. How do I grow this thing into my first 1,000 customers? And what I tell them is you do that by celebrating and bonding with the customers you do have. And you turn those 9 people who care into raving fans. We don't try to scale what isn't working. We try to create connections with the people who are paying attention and then scale that. Practically, what this looks like is when you get a good review, you post that on social media and celebrate the heck out of that. And if that gets a little bit of traction, then you might run some ads to something like that. Or if you get a, a great endorsement from somebody that is a raving fan, run ads to that. Those are the things that can be manufactured via relationships. In 2015, Huel did a whopping $800,000 in revenue. Not bad, especially not bad for a product that was started with just a community. Now think about this. 10 years later, a brand that does $800,000 in sales sells for $1.5 billion. It is totally copyable to get a business to about $1 million in sales within a 12-month period. There's a good book about it called 12 Months to $1 Million. Great playbook for getting a business to 7 figures. Then fast forward 10 years and this business sells for over a billion dollars. That's super interesting. So let's cover how they grew from a 6-figure company to a high 7 and ultimately a billion-dollar exit. This is why I love the internet, because you can go back into the archives and look at Julian Hearn talking about him building the company in these early phases. He was on a podcast called Shopify Masters and You can see the title of the podcast is basically how he accomplished a $2 million run rate. $2 million. Beautiful. I, I love looking at stuff like this. We often love to fantasize how businesses grew to a billion-dollar exit. I like to look at what they were doing scrappy in the early stages. And one of the things that Julian Hearn says in this interview is that they worked with a PR agency in order to find some of their talking points and open up additional relationships. Now, Remember, this company was already doing the hard work of building relationships with their customers when they had hardly any of them. They were doing the hard work of turning those early customers into raving fans. And at this point, they were already getting the hooligans to talk about the product publicly and even turn into their ambassadors. Then they could turn on the marketing machine a little bit more aggressively. And in this case, they hired a PR firm to try and get them some earned media, free distribution. Now, this is 10 years ago. This is when getting onto publications meant something. Today, this would look a lot more like influencer marketing, but the strategy was very similar. It was knocking on doors and having a way to enter into the conversation and maybe giving away free product in order to get the attention of people who could bring you some attention. That is a playbook that a lot of people we work with still run today, but they do it not with big media outlets. They do it with TikTok creators and Instagram creators and some bloggers, some owners of Facebook groups, people who have small communities. If you can work your way into the attention of people who have a little bit of distribution, you can leverage that to get a lot of media attention. That is the playbook that Huel used. They created raving fans from a small group of customers. And then they started to make inroads with a little bit of distribution that took them to about $5 million after about 2 years in business. The asset behind all of this was the audience that Huel cultivated. If you go back and look at their history, you will find that this brand had a lot of failed products, but it was still hugely successful. Why were they able to be so successful despite the fact that they had failed products or failed marketing campaigns? It was because they built such deep relationships with every person that cared about them. And at one point they were getting about 20% of their customers from referrals, meaning that they were incentivizing their customers to operate as affiliates and promoters of the business. One of the things that I like to remind students and clients is that if you have 10 customers and you build deep relationships with all 10 of them, 8 of them are gonna say, thanks for the product, it's great. And once in a while, you, you make a relationship with a customer that really loves you and starts to spread the word. One of those people for Huel was Steven Bartlett. If you don't know that name, he is the creator and the host of one of the biggest podcasts in the world called Diary of a CEO. And in 2019, Steven brought Julian Hearn onto the show to talk about the growth of the business and his journey as an entrepreneur. Turns out at the time, that was only the 35th episode in the Diary of a CEO's Life Cycle. And as it turns out, that podcast kind of became big. This is before they did clickbait headlines and talked about everything under the sun. They mostly talked about business at the time, and that was one of the big breaks that Huel's CEO got, and it introduced them to a whole new group of customers. Not only that, it introduced Huel to a whole new set of investors and business people. In fact, 2 years after featuring Huel on the podcast, Stephen Bartlett became an investor in Huel. And when you're an investor in a company and you've got millions of followers, you're incentivized to talk about the product in front of your followers. And this opened up Huel to a whole new set of buyers. So again, as a result of creating deep relationships with customers, once in a while they created a relationship with Somebody who became an affiliate, someone who left a great review, someone who became an investor, somebody who had a podcast. Was it every customer? No. Was it every 10th customer? No. But once in a while, they caught a big break as a result of building a relationship with a customer. That is what is totally copyable in any business. You can absolutely build a business on the back of caring more about your customers than everybody else. I have a client right now. Her name is Amy, and Amy launched her business a year and a half ago and is already pacing like $3 million in her business. First-time founder, she's done an awesome job. And a big part of her strategy has been the fact that she reaches out to her customers and is in the DMs with them and sending voice memos to them and building real relationships with her customers. I have other clients that have built half-million-dollar businesses or low 7-figure businesses in a year to 2 years. And The base of their strategy is cultivating a group of 300 to 500 people who become raving fans. That small group of people does more than buy your products. It becomes the people who say really nice things about you, who leave you a great review, that become content, that become ads, that become the thing that acquires more customers that become raving fans. We start with what we have and we create as much engagement with that small group of people as possible. In around 2017 and '18, the strategy for Huel began to change. This is when the founder brought in a CEO to help professionalize the business and prepare for the next chapter of growth. This is when they started raising capital, bringing on investors, and pursuing other forms of distribution. But they never got away from the core strategy, which was building a raving fan base that talked about them everywhere they went. They doubled down on the hooligans idea. That was the nucleus of everything they did from this point forward, and it allowed them to pursue other product ideas and other distribution channels, even though they didn't always work out. Now, it was under the new CEO that they crossed 9 figures, raised capital, and ultimately got the deal from Danone for $1.5 billion. But here's what's interesting about the deal to acquire Huel. In January of 2026, Danone attempted to launch a competitor To this brand, it was called El Pro Meal To Go. I don't know what that means either. They ultimately shuttered the project and decided to just buy Huel instead. They couldn't recreate the fan base that Huel had cultivated over the previous ten years. They could recreate the product. They could recreate the packaging. They could recreate the marketing campaign. They could reverse engineer the ads. They could look up the upsell flow. They could even bully their way into retail stores because Danone has. as billions of dollars, but they could not manufacture the same raving fan base that Huel had. Ultimately, they said, let's not try to compete with these guys, let's just buy them out. And Danone wrote them a check for $1.5 billion. Yes, it was a good product. Yes, they had good marketing. But the crux of everything was the deep relationships that they built with their raving fans. So let's zoom out. Julian Hearn, the founder of Huel, did not do anything that you cannot do. First, he looked at his failures as a tuition. He lost a large amount of money in a previous business venture that didn't work out, but as a result of that, he was able to figure out what people actually wanted, and he developed a product that solved that problem. Second, he built a responsive group of buyers before he tried to scale. I think community is the most underrated asset in most Of the early days of entrepreneurship, you can absolutely build a mid-seven-figure business just by cultivating amazing community. And number three, they treated community like it was the asset. In fact, there's one thing that I didn't mention in this video. There was a year that they took a loss in their business. It was the year that there was inflationary pressures and tariffs and costs were going through the roof post-COVID. And Huel decided not to raise their prices even though they were going to take a loss because they had this group of subscribers that had been loyal to them, and they decided to. be loyal back to them. That's treating the audience like the asset. And because of that, they were able to weather the storm and ultimately get to a point where they could be acquired for over $1 billion. And it was that spirit, those values that they protected throughout the entire scaling process. And that became the asset that allowed them to become a billion-dollar business. Whether your goal is have a billion-dollar exit or just have a 7-figure company that you can sell or scale for a life-changing amount of money, The strategy starts with having a product that people really want, an audience that loves to buy from you, and a sales channel that compounds. Huel did that, but they prioritized the community first. And that's the lesson that we all can use in our businesses. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. I help entrepreneurs build 7-figure businesses and have life-changing exits. And if you want to see the framework for how we build these brands, go over to capitalism.com/model. M-O-D-E-L. It'll show you the 3 pillars that we use to build brands. Their product, audience, and sales channels. Huel did all three well, but they prioritized the one that I think most entrepreneurs underemphasize, and it's audience. And they did it by building a community of raving fans, and it took them all the way to a billion-dollar acquisition. Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys on the next episode. Take care.