Success can break the business too ☕ Zain Peer

When Dragon's Den aired, we started to get orders like crazy. I remember even our website crashed. It was so busy. For 3 months afterwards, I still hadn't slept. I would wake up at some crazy early hour and I'd literally be on my laptop till 1 AM, 2 AM. We were the customer service. We were everything, right? We didn't have any employees. 3 months in, it feels like someone's just pulled down our pants and it was crazy. But at the same time, it wasn't like work. It was enjoyable. We were having the best time. We had investors We got an investment from 2 dragons, and I remember we accepted the offer, but then we were thinking it's too much of the business to give away. The amount of sales that we had in just the week of the show was multiple times the amount of cash they offered to give us.

This week's Millennial Master is Zane Peer of London Nootropics, an adaptogenic coffee brand he co-founded in 2020. His TV experience showed him what happens when demand grows faster than the business behind it, Especially when stock, cash, and fulfillment all have to catch up at once. In this episode, we talk about what breaks when orders arrive faster than you can handle, why Zane turned down the Dragon's Den investment, and what repeat customer changed about the business. Zane, welcome to Millennial Masters.

Thanks for having me.

Now, let's dive straight into it, Zane, because I know you didn't wake up wanting to build a wellness brand. You were actually trying to solve a problem for yourself. So I'm wondering, at what point did you realize you weren't actually selling coffee anymore?

We actually started by having coffee with other natural ingredients to give us 100% natural boost as a pre-workout before the gym to stay healthy. And a lot of people are like, hey, I'll buy this off you, you should start a business. And we teamed up with a nutritionist and she's like, what are you guys doing? You're adding guarana powder into coffee. This is caffeine on caffeine. Which is just a stimulant. And she introduced us to functional mushrooms and other adaptogens that synergize really well with coffee. And while we were still going down this pre-workout path, we started to have different adaptogens every day depending on what we needed in that day. And then one day we woke up and hey, we have a wellness brand. I didn't think it was ever a coffee. We even call ourselves an adaptogenic wellness brand from day one.

Which is a mouthful, but you would understand what it is about now that you break it down like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And we never ever say that we sell coffee on its own. We always say we sell adaptogenic.

How did you start? Because wellness is probably one of the hardest categories to build trust in. And a lot of products would say they improve focus, energy, sleep. How do you stop sounding like everyone else?

How we started was we were still doing the pre-workout coffee and we had a eureka moment one day when we had a development day. It didn't go very well. The taste was horrible. We were a little bit deflated. We were driving back to London and I was like, I really need some ashwagandha right now. I feel stressed. And that was the eureka moment. Why are we focusing on this pre-workout when actually in our everyday now we're having different adaptogens? One of the things that we discovered straight away with adaptogens is quality and the big differences in quality. So even the lion's mane mushroom, we ordered 20 different samples, more than that, from around the world. We couldn't find in the UK high enough quality extracts at the time. So once we started having what we call best-in-class adaptogen extracts, And we felt like the real impact in our day. Then we were like, hold on a sec. No one can have access to the Adaptogen extracts that we've got because we're importing them ourselves by the samples from around the world. And then how we started was, hey, we should just make these into sachets. It's way easier than trying to make a bottle of a pre-workout or a can, cuz it, we were thinking about this cold brew situation. Okay, so how do we do this? And it was a lot of Googling, figuring things out. We didn't have any advisors, anyone in this CBG Or food and beverage world helping us. We had a development day with a consultant that helped refine the flavors and test different coffees and adaptogens to try and just get an effective amount of adaptogens in a cup without it tasting like crap.

How many iterations did it take to reach the right taste?

Probably over 100, easily over 100. We had spreadsheets, iterations, even just tweaking The milligrams and how much coffee we put, how much adaptogens we put, and we wanted to maximize the amount of adaptogens. And because we use really expensive extracts, it was also looking at the cost per cup. And we were like, hey, listen, let's not worry about margins right now. When we scale up, we'll achieve cost efficiencies. One of the other key things was we spoke to a few manufacturers that said, hey man, we can make this for you, but you have to order a minimum of 50,000 or 100,000 sachets. And we're like, we don't have that. And then I came across a company who were like, we help, we work with a lot of startups. We have machines and we'll show you how to use them where you can literally fill a sachet, 3 grams, and then you can seal it yourself. And it was a couple hundred quid. We were like, why don't we just make it ourselves? So we made the website ourselves. Um, we got the machines and we just started filling our own sachets. And then one day we just turned on the website and We started to get a few orders and we just grew organically from there.

Now, I think it's oversimplifying a bit that you just switched on a website and got orders. There must have been something else at play there. Was it social media? Was it word of mouth? Did you spread it to customers from adjacent industry businesses to get your first orders?

So, um, we turned on Google Ads. Facebook ads and word of mouth. And we had our social media. So I think they were the main sources and it was just trying to get traffic to our website. In those early days, we didn't have any partnerships or collaborations or sponsorships. It was minimal amount of online marketing. And in those first couple of months, I remember we'll just get a random order from somewhere in the world and we'll be like, how did this person come across us? It was crazy. Where are these people finding us? But there was clearly, um, a market of people looking for our product, very niche market of people. In terms of launching in the space, it wasn't that much competition and people were looking for our product. Right now, if you started, it'd probably be a lot different because there's a lot of different beverages with mushrooms and adaptogens on the market. And there's a lot more awareness as well of the benefits of adaptogens. I think it's grown a lot over the years, but in the early days it was very much organic.

And in those early days of building the business and also marketing it, when not many others were competing in the same space, when did you first catch yourself writing copy that sounded better than you could actually stand behind?

As in, as in marketing copy and emails?

Yeah.

We always put thought into if we were being shown this, what would excite us? Right. And even that, that follows through to today. We write our own emails. All our comms is in-house. We do it ourselves. We keep everything very, very educational. Um, we've always been educational because I think that's the most important thing for what we do. I think there's 2 types of businesses. They're the ones that are brilliant at marketing. They've got big budgets. They've got investment. They'll get marketing agencies to write lovely copy and they'll sell the product. But their main aim is just, we just want to maximize profit. They will cut corners on the quality of ingredients, et cetera. Whereas because we came at that angle of we just want to help people, we helped ourselves. Our mission, and it's still the same to this day, was to help people incorporate best-in-class adaptions into their day. And we've always stuck by that kind of mission and to help that people need the education. They need to know, like, Okay. If coffee makes me jittery, which adaptogen do I need in my coffee? We made Zen for when we were having a stressful day. Like we're not sensitive to caffeine, but a few months in, we get people writing to us saying, hey, I haven't enjoyed coffee in years, but I've just tried your Zen coffee. And it's the first time I've had the lift of coffee in my day. And I feel so balanced. I feel great. And it kind of became the coffee for those sensitive to caffeine. by pure coincidence. Yeah.

I noticed, Zain, that you use language such as it has been shown to, or it's known that. Is there any language you simply refuse to use, even if it probably would sell more products?

Yeah, exactly. So we have to be really careful with our wording because in this space, if we're saying, hey, this thing is going to give you energy because cordyceps is like a mushroom. That's shown to boost ATP, our energy molecule, right? So cellular energy, our aerobic capacity, our oxygen flow. It's gonna give us true energy, whereas caffeine will block the adenosine receptors in our brain, which make us drowsy. A stimulant giving us a lift, but it's not true energy. Now we can't claim on our product and say this gives you energy because there's no official claim that you're allowed in the UK and EU for Cordyceps. To say that we can easily do it if we just add B vitamins to the product. But for us, it's like just keeping it real. So if you put B vitamins and you'll notice in so many products, hey, this has got B vitamins, it says it's energy. The energy source is something else and the B vitamins are helping because with B vitamins you can make that claim. So we were just really careful with our wording from day one in what we can and can't say. And hopefully the authorities in the UK and EU will one day catch up with the benefits of adaptogens. There's clinical studies on them now that they'll be added to a claims list. And there's quite a few adaptogens that are actually on like a, not the official claims list. I can't remember the exact name, but it's something like the pending claims list. Other companies have put them through to make claims on them. So that's why we have to be really careful with our wording. But if there's a clinical study that says it's been shown to do this in this study, and then there's also traditional use. So it can be traditionally used to do X, Y, and Z in these cultures. There's evidence for that.

Fair. Now, Zain, everyone talks about getting on Dragon's Den, but almost nobody talks about what happens the week and the months afterwards. And I'm curious to hear about your episode and what actually broke inside the business afterwards.

What broke inside the business? Our backs broke. So, okay, so the whole Dragon's Den story. So we never applied to be on Dragon's Den. We just actually reached out from a BBC researcher and it wasn't something that we would think we would ever be chosen to do. So we were tapping away on email like, yeah, sure, we'll do this. We'll do this. And then we get this filming date. So we're speaking to the BBC and they're saying a lot of stuff. you'll probably have a lot of orders and stuff. So we did a big production round. The episode went brilliantly. I remember we were there for the whole day and the producers kept coming down to our green room and they would like poke their head in and they'd be like, these guys are fun. And our guy looking after us, I remember it was England versus Germany that day and he had a big England shirt on. He's like, guys, I got to leave. I've got the doctors. We're like, dude, you're just going to watch the England match. So we were left alone and we were there for the whole day. I remember at one point I ordered a pizza and I was watching the England versus Germany match in the green room while my, my business partner, Shaz, was just practicing walking up and down. And I'm like, it's so chill. So the whole experience for me was a little bit chill. They make it quite intimidating when you go in. They have all these cameras. They're like, you won't see any cameras. You see the biggest cameras ever. You're in there for a few hours speaking to the dragon.

And waiting and anticipating.

Yeah. There's this whole buildup to it. They make it like they want to capture these moments. And then afterwards we, you wait for months, right? They're like, you're going to be on TV at some point. We don't know if it's going to be a 2-minute segment in the episode or much longer. We were actually given the longest segment in the episode, like 15 minutes, which was brilliant. We had that date given to us. Like, I think it was a month or 2 before. So we've already got our production underway. Now, when the Dragon's Den aired, we started to get orders like crazy. I remember even our website crashed. It was so busy. I think it was 3 months afterwards, I still hadn't slept. Like we hardly got ourselves an office 2 months before it aired. Because we're like, we need a space to like store all this stuff. So we, so we, we got ourselves our first office. We had a lot of stock. And then I remember I would wake up at some crazy early hour and I'd literally be on my laptop till 1 AM, 2 AM. We had, we were the customer service. We were the, we were everything, right? We didn't have any employees. So it was, it was 3 months in, I think, Shaz called me, my business partner. He said, it feels like a bomb has gone off. It was crazy. We were having the best time. We had all these customers coming in. We had the loveliest messages. And then even afterwards, I know you mentioned a few months afterwards, we'd be at a different event, a show, a practitioner conference, and people would come up to us and they'd say, hey, I saw you guys on Dragon's Den. For months and months afterwards, which was really cool.

If you'd like to share if you had investment through the show or was it just a segment that showed people what you do and you came across really well?

So we had investment from 2 dragons and I remember my brother telling me, hey, if anyone offers you money, take it, you're on TV. So we were like, okay, cool. And then 2 of the dragons who had never partnered before. Deborah and Sarah, they were like, hey, we'll do this together. We love you guys. So we accepted the offer, but then afterwards we were reviewing it and we were thinking it's too much of the business to give away. And it wasn't clear to us the impact and what they would be doing in our business. So afterwards we declined, we declined to go forward with the actual investment.

That's one of the things that people don't realize, that it's agreeing on a preliminary deal in the show versus what happens afterwards. A lot of time the founders change their mind. Like you did, or sometimes the business itself falls through in the due diligence stage. So it's not just what happens on the TV show and you were bolstered by the amount of attention and orders you had as well, which grew your confidence, I'm assuming.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, the amount of sales that we had in just the week of the show was multiple times the amount of cash they offered to give us. So in terms of that, it was, it was brilliant. I highly advise anyone that gets the chance to go on one of these TV shows is just to do it. You live once and it's something to experience. You'd be like, fuck my monkey. Yeah. Yeah.

Now you mentioned that you already scaled up by the time you went onto Dragon's Den. So I'm hoping you can tell me that Romania packaging story because it sounds like one of those weeks Founders never forget.

There was this one time where we urgently, urgently needed packaging. And usually they send it in a lorry, but if it's urgent, it can be by a flight. But we needed the packaging yesterday. And we're like, how can we get this? We need it now. And then we were thinking, hold on, one of our, one of our team that are helping us out with quite a few events, helping us in the office. We could send someone. How much is a flight? Right. And in the end, she took a flight in the morning to Romania. There was 2 suitcases packed, took the flight back in the evening and all our labels, everything delivered to the office that evening. And there was, there was no quicker way to do it. And then sometimes you're like, hey man, this is actually way cheaper than posting it as well. So there's a lot of these stories where you get creative to source what you need to source.

And let's talk then about retail, because Harrods and Selfridges sound glamorous, but operationally, what changes when you're sitting on the shelves of such major retailers versus just doing it on your own website?

So, um, there's a funny story with Harrods actually, because they reached out to us and they said a few customers had requested adaptogenic coffee and what you guys do, like you specifically, could we get a box? And at this point we didn't have a label for retail. We didn't have a barcode on a box. They were just plain boxes and all the information was inside, right? We were selling it online. So we sent the box over and then we're like to the buyer, so what do you think? And he's like, it tastes delicious. I really enjoy them. Thanks for the sample. What about your retail box? And we were like, what does he mean? What do you mean? And then Shaz came up with an idea that's actually, we can put a sleeve with all the information you need for a retail box and just slide it onto our box. And we sent it back to him and they ordered. So operationally it's like changing packaging to make it ready for retail. Now the big one actually came after Harrods and Selfridges. So we were speaking to a few other places.

Ocado, right?

Ocado, Holland and Barrett, and a few others. And they were, they all said the same thing to us. It's like, do you know what? Love that you're in Harrods and Selfridges. It's a good credibility, but they're department stores. They've got a lot of shelf space. And our boxes are like flat, wide boxes. I wish I had one that you basically send in the post. Right. And they would, they would display them very nicely.

To fit through the letterbox. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And they would fit on a whole shelf and we can't stock your SKUs how they are now. You're taking up this, this much space for one SKU. You need it this way and for it to be a box that can stack. Um, we were so busy for like, I think it was 18 months and then we made the boxes and we launched straight away in Holland and Barrett, um, 2 years ago. So it took us a while to create a retail box and that was probably the biggest change operationally. And I remember the Holland and Barrett buyer walking around our office and saying like, is everything going to be shipped from here? And at this point we didn't have like a 3PL. We were literally going to pack the pallet, wrap it up and send it to them. And we were like, oh no, no, no. We, you know, we've got a big warehouse. It's going to be fine. And then within 2 months we had to sort that out, get the warehouse, get the stuff. But the first order, we just wrapped the pallet and got it picked up ourselves.

What about producing so much stock in advance and putting it on the shelves and obviously spending the money to do that?

That is probably one of the biggest hurdles, especially without investment. So we're still fully bootstrapped. And as we grow, every round needs to be slightly bigger than the previous one, but you need cash for that round. There's many creative ways and companies that can help you with that. There's companies that will say like, okay, we know you need to produce this. We will pay for your supplier invoices and give you 20 days to pay us after you sell them. But we want to have 1 or 2%. So there's, there's ways around it. It's all, it's all to do with cash flow, right? But even now we are careful not to produce too much. To have all this, all the cash tied up in stock and we can't use it for marketing and growing. So it's a careful balance.

Yeah. And what would you say then is the balance between your own sales via website versus the sales you have in retail in Harrods, Selfridges, Ocado, Holland Barrett, et cetera?

Ooh, I would say that about 80, 85% Um, it's through our website. We have a subscription program that we set up and that was the game changer.

That's an interesting ratio. And that also brings me to the question I had on retention for you, Zain.

Yeah.

Because I think a lot of founders obsess over getting the next customer and the next customer, but you said there was a game changer when you enabled the subscription. So you haven't done it from the beginning. What was the thinking behind that? Now everybody tries to do some sort of subscription, but when you've done it, it wasn't the thing that everybody was trying to copy.

Yeah, we didn't have subscriptions for the first 2 years, 2 and a half years of our business. We had a few, we had a few requests from, from customers. I would love to subscribe. But for us, we just didn't know how to do it. We were trying to figure out so much and we're like, subscriptions would be great. We didn't realize the impact it would have. It's insane. Customers don't need to worry about ordering. They get a little discount. We give them free delivery in the UK. And that is the biggest piece for retention, I think, is the subscriptions. Um, yeah, it's just a game changer. And we didn't have a Shopify website when we moved to Shopify. Subscriptions were easier to handle, to grow, et cetera. But it's just the perfect experience that we even have. rewards program where at certain intervals in your subscription, we'll send you some merch and other gifts. We always think, what would we want? Yeah, I'd love to have the coffee delivered every month and not worry about it, the adaptogenic coffee, and get all the perks for being a loyal customer as well.

And on the tech side, you mentioned how, how you use Shopify. So it's a big platform. Yes, they take a cut out of your sales and you also pay a monthly fee. But is that still cheaper than trying to develop all these features for your own website? I think that's also where a lot of founders are torn when they try to build their website and their systems.

Yeah, Shopify is expensive, but it's worth it. That's the summary. It's like we originally built on WooCommerce and it was so easy. They had a subscription plugin, pay once. I don't know if that is like £300 for the year or something. And that's it. You can negotiate the cheapest payment gateway to take payments. It's like, it's great from that perspective, but you have to keep it updated. You need to always constantly be working on it. But with the Shopify website, everything is so smooth. It's just like the smoothest experience. So it's expensive, but it's worth it. That's the, that's the, just the summary is like, if you're going to build a website, build it on Shopify. It's obviously cheaper to do your own website and stuff. The tech stack that comes with Shopify and everything involved with it, it's just, it's just a better customer experience as well that I find. There are other options out there, but I think there's a reason why Shopify is the biggest and the number one e-commerce website platform. Because they're the best.

One question while we're at retailers, because I had a very interesting chat with an American founder who has a soap shampoo bars. She refused to sell her products on Amazon and did it only through her own channel and a range of other independent retailers. Do you have your products on Amazon? And if not, why?

So we have our products on Amazon. We didn't have our products on Amazon for a long time because I had it in my, I had it in my head that our products are so good. It's a little bit of ego. Our products are so good that they'll go viral on Amazon and then Amazon will be like, oh my God, we need to make this. And then—

Which is what they have been shown and seen to do relatively often in various categories.

So I'm like, then they'll just copy us and then we won't be very good on Amazon. But I think after maybe 2 years ago, we launched on Amazon. We realized that actually there's a whole marketplace of people that are searching for our product. And we had requests from customers, et cetera. If you do, if you use Fulfillment by Amazon, they have Amazon Prime, which is brilliant for some customers. And it also takes some of the orders and stress off our team and fulfillment side to be like, hey man, some orders are handled by Amazon. I think the fees are quite expensive, but it's a, it's a, it's a, it's another marketplace.

Is it up to 30% from what I've heard?

It is after you've got the Amazon fees, the FBA fees, et cetera. It's even a little bit more than 30% in some cases. And there's a lot of hassle as well with the listings, with things being blocked, with, they ask for some certifications randomly. Apparently it's happened to loads of brands in the past 2 weeks. They implemented some AI thing that went a bit rogue. And they're like, until you send us this, you're, we can't accept deliveries. And we're like, well, actually we've sent it to you all already. You have it all. So we resent everything, all our certifications, and then it's just a waiting game now. So if you have the inventory and you want to grow, it's another place where a lot of consumers shop on. They find it easy, convenient. You're going on holiday the next day, you can rely on Amazon to deliver.

So is Amazon also included in your 20% overall sales from other retailers? Besides your website, or is that a separate thing?

We count it as direct-to-consumer. It's not a huge percentage of our sales.

And what do you make about Amazon in a way imposing the minimum price, or the cheapest price being with them?

So this is a little bit annoying at times. So one of our SKUs on Amazon, they stopped showing the buy box because Amazon are like, this isn't the cheapest. We couldn't find it cheaper anywhere. We hardly ever do sales on our products. So our Amazon agency was saying, hey, we need to drop the price to £10 a box. I'm like, we've never ever sold £10 a box. It's crazy. It's cheaper than subscription. We can't do it. Just stick with the price and keep writing to Amazon. And it took about 2, 3 weeks for Amazon to reinstate the buy box for one of our most popular SKUs. Now, Every couple months there'll be some little issue somewhere on Amazon, but if you can handle it yourselves or you have an agency, overall it's worth it, but you need to have the resource and capacity to deal with it because Amazon's a beast and it's not like a retailer where you can jump on a call, sort anything out quickly, and you're dealing with some remote support people that usually just send you automated answers, which is quite frustrating. But if you've got the patience to deal with Amazon, it's a great channel.

And if the channel doesn't represent a significant chunk of your revenue and sales, then you can also afford to wait 2, 3 weeks until that issue is sorted.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So overall, what's something you've learned about repeat customers that, say, completely surprised you that you weren't expecting at all?

So we had a 12-sachet box, right, to start with. A box is all 12 sachets. Then we're like, we're going to make a 60 sachet box because if someone wants it for like a big family or for an office, then maybe they can get 60 sachets and it'll be a little bit cheaper. Right. We call it—

why 12 and not 7 or 14?

That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. I think we were looking at everything available and we were like, 12 is a good number because we have 3 blends and we can have a box with 4 sachets of each. Um, and it kind of just landed. It's a great question actually. I actually don't know. It was 12 and then, so 60 was like, okay, this is perfect for 2 sachets a day for a month.

That's why I asked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's 2 sachets a day for a month if you want to have a subscription, but it's great for like a business or a big family. So we did that and then everyone started to buy the big box and we're like, hold on, let's make it even bigger box. So we made something we call the hamper box. with 240 sachets. What surprised me is that repeat customers will buy the 240 sachet box for £200. That was made for businesses and stuff, but it's way cheaper unit cost. And there's people that even subscribe to it, maybe not every month, but they'll have it every other month. They'll get the huge hamper box. And that was probably a big surprise that we wasn't expecting.

So more of the product at slightly bigger discounts when they buy more made sense and people liked that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I know some people are like, hey man, I just want to stock up. I just want this to come every other month, or I just want to buy a big hamper box. I think the discount you get at that quantity is pretty decent as well. Yeah.

It also can be a marketing trick and you can make the smaller one cheaper versus the bigger one, which a lot of Producers do when, when it comes to that. I'm just going to give the example of a small Coca-Cola where a can can be £1.50 and it's £2.20 for a 2-liter bottle, for example.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it is, there's less packaging involved. There's, you know, versus the product. So there's a lot of savings along the way. Like a slightly, a different example would be like bottles of wine because it's known on shelves. The, in supermarkets, they'll put a really expensive bottle. So if there's like a $10 bottle of wine and a $20 bottle of wine, and you walk in and you're like, hmm, which one do I buy? It could be 50/50. But suddenly if there's a $50 bottle of wine and you walk in, you're going to a dinner party, you're like, I don't want to buy the cheapest one. The $50 is a bit expensive. So let me buy the $20 one.

The middle one that pushes you in the middle one. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So Zane, if somebody tried to copy every ingredient and product you have to try and replicate your business, what couldn't they actually copy?

So our recipes, so our recipes, people have tried, but the, they can't get our mushroom extracts. So we work exclusively with a company called Heifastaterra for their own mushroom bioscience company, the only company that has ever worked with them ever. Um, and they've been going 25 years and they have really, really high quality mushroom extracts. They even have an oncology range of supplements with studies on cancer. They're mycologists.

Mm-hmm.

And the quality of their mushrooms, which is like the active compounds, is insane. Which I think this is why we've grown so much in the practitioner community and with doctors and functional medicine nutritionists, et cetera, because they know the quality. So I think from that aspect, it would be difficult. And the credibility that we've built over the years, I feel like it stands for something. So we have a very loyal customer base. I think we'll always see some products that are quite similar, but yeah, that's the world we live in. I think that the pie is big enough for everyone.

Fair. Now, when you look back, would you say that there was a crucial moment and something that maybe nearly killed the business first, or was the hardest thing to get right? Was it getting the ingredients right or people to actually enjoy the taste and drink it every morning?

Ooh. Okay. So I think the recipe was everything because for us, we were coffee connoisseurs. This has to taste nice. You have to enjoy the experience. You want to be looking forward to your next London Nootropics adaptogenic coffee. That was, I think that's probably the key. Some products we come across, not necessarily in our field, but just in general, you can see they're trying to do good. They're trying to put good quality ingredients and stuff, but the experience doesn't quite match that. And I think both are equally important, the impact on your day and the taste and experience. And I think that's what we got right in our business that helped a lot with retention.

And lots of people are trying to build the next consumer brand, or they're dubbing themselves as that. And as you said, even in your space, you're starting to see here and there popping up people making similar claims or similar products. But I'm guessing they realize very soon that there's something much harder than it looks from the outside. And I'm wondering if you can share from your point of view what that is.

Yeah. So I think it's building that community and building that loyal customer base from scratch and having the patience to do that and having the quality product. We even looked into, can we trademark this recipe? You can't do that. That's why Coca-Cola has their recipe in a vault somewhere. 2 people or something in the world know the actual recipe, right?

Yeah.

It's the thing that you need to protect.

And do you have your recipes in a vault?

Yeah. In our heads. It's like, yeah, yeah. It's in the, it's in the cloud in a vault somewhere.

We also have a couple of closing questions, Zain, on your journey in business, because I'm wondering what's become much more important than you realized when you first started in business, but also what's become less important.

Less important is easy. So less important was at the beginning, you want to perfect everything. It's your baby. This has to be perfect. And then you realize after a while, even with launching, it took us 2 years to get the right recipes, et cetera. The packaging was not yet perfect. And we were like, it has to be perfect. We could have delayed another year just trying to get the packaging right and this right and that right. But the moment we launch, it's like, Okay, amazing. Now we just keep improving and we're going to get feedback from customers. So as long as it's good enough, if you can spend years perfecting something, I'll just launch it. Take that step. That's the thing that we let go of pretty early and—

Perfectionism.

Perfectionism. So even now, say we were launching a test on our website and we're like, okay, we want it to look like this, this, and this. And it was not perfect, but Do you know what? This is good enough to get the data. And if it works, we can improve it from there. Well, let's move quickly. So that is the thing that we've kind of let go of and something that we've gained, probably perspective in terms of what we're doing is really impacting people's lives. And we have people write to us and it gives you that motivation every day where You're like, holy crap, like built this business because we wanted people to have adaptogens. And then someone wrote to us a letter saying how we saved their marriage. You're like, that's crazy. And explained everything. He said, man, I was so stressed in my day. I was coming home. I wasn't paying attention to my wife. And then someone bought me this adaptogenic coffee. I was so reluctant, but then I started trying it and everything changed in my day. And I started paying attention to things and you're always talking about Listen to your internal cues. And I knew when I was stressed, I knew when I was reacting. And now I'm so balanced. I see everything and I start paying attention to my wife. And I genuinely believe that your coffee saved my marriage. And you're like, how can some small ritual— we preach like you should do X, Y, and Z. This is just part of what you should be doing. And then that, that perspective changes how you go about what you're doing. Who we want to work with, is that aligned with us? Is that aligned with that mission of impacting people. Yeah, that's something that's changed for sure.

It gives you wings and a motivation and a bit of oomph to continue through some of the things which are not always as fun.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What is the end goal here? It definitely does.

So finally then, Zey, what's something you believed about building a business 5 years ago that you've completely changed your mind on in your journey at London Neutral?

But the aspect of community that we built and the network that we built is probably everything. We've always brought good vibes and met really cool people along the way. And everyone wants to help everyone. And that's just what we've attracted. We've got loads of people willing to help us. They believe in our journey, our mission and everything. So we've got our team and then we've got also this network of just friends and talented people, people with connections that are just like, hey man, I'll help you. And they don't want anything in return. It's unconditional. But if anyone else needs anything, we'll do the same for them. And I think that's really beautiful about something that I think a lot of people don't realize. The people think it's like the world in them.

Yeah.

That, yeah, there's a lot of people willing to help and just give free advice. Just give free help. Hey, I know someone that will really help you with this thing. Like, contact them.

That was my question. For any new founder starting up a business right now or this year, and they will hear you talking about community, where would they start to build their own community?

Do in-person, in-person meetings, events. People are so digital. People are on social media, on the laptops. Community is so important. There's proven health benefits to it, right? We try and have a meetup every few months. And just do something fun and we'll coincide it with going to do something with a client. Um, so we have like clients that are longevity clinics, or we went to a members club in Richmond and they just hosted us and we had a whole morning with our ambassadors. I think that in-person things are very powerful, even though they're small scale. I think they're important and powerful.

Well, that is a Very good ending note for this episode of Millennial Master Zane. Going out there and meeting people, not just posting or advertising on social media in order to gain new customers. The real-life connections are possibly the ones that will take you the furthest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And genuine connection as well, because I think there's a lot of people that are like, hey man, I just need to network. And they'll go to a thing like a conference, and I literally saw it. A girl kept saying, hi, what's your name? What do you do? And what's your role? And it's like, you haven't even said hello to this person. You're asking them what they do. You don't genuinely want to have a connection with this person. You just— is there something for me here? So it's connections, but genuine friends. It's not just a business transaction. This is a personal I think that's an important distinction to make.

Just going around and asking people what you do, that's not going to build your community and the genuine connections.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Great note to end on.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Zain.

Thanks for having me, Daniel.

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