Founder Playbook · Starter Story
10 tactics from Ryan Chen
The Underdog: From Life Changing Accident to $100M/Year
Watch the full episode“we didn't have the energy pills but even if we did I think sharing it with people you had just met would be like oh no I'm okay that was the aha moment of like what if we can make supplementation more accessible and approachable by putting these great ingredients instead of pill form into gum and mints”
Repackage The Pill Into Gum When Strangers Would Never Accept It
While getting scuba certified with strangers, Ryan realized nobody would accept a random pill from someone they had just met. That insight reframed the product: take the dorm-room nootropic formulas and put them into gum and mints so supplementation felt approachable and social.
“I would sample them around to like all of my co-workers at Hulu so like my managers other people in the finance team my manager was like yo mother eer he was like I was up till 3:00 a.m. I couldn't sleep and I was like that's me I was like so the product works”
Validate The Formula By Handing Samples To Your Coworkers
Ryan validated his energy gum formula by handing samples to coworkers at Hulu, including his manager. When his manager reported being wired until 3am, Ryan knew the product actually worked before they ever invested in scaling.
“we officially launched on Indiegogo Kent Luckley was a big redditor so he got the Reddit new ICS group to support and I think we hit like our goal like of 30k in like 3 or 4 days Time Magazine wrote an article saying like half native gum is now a thing and then we got invited to Dr Oz”
Launch On Indiegogo With A Pre-Existing Niche Reddit Community Behind You
Ryan and Kent launched on Indiegogo and tapped Kent's Reddit nootropics community to drive backers. They hit their $30K goal in three or four days, which triggered Time Magazine coverage and a Dr. Oz appearance that drove their first wave of buyers.
“Time Magazine wrote an article saying like half native gum is now a thing and then we got invited to Dr Oz and all of a sudden we had a lot of people moms who watch Dr Oz buying the gum and it worked”
Earned Media Reveals The Audience You Didn't Engineer For — In Their Case, Moms
After the Indiegogo launch, earned media on Time and Dr Oz delivered a buyer segment Ryan hadn't engineered for: moms. The lesson is that press placements don't just drive traffic, they reveal which audience actually converts.
“when we first launched we were working at Hulu and Sony Music respectively for Kent for like a year and a half the first 4,000 lb of gum was sitting in Kent's apartment we didn't have a warehouse like Kent's apartment in downtown La was the warehouse and we'd ship 4,000 lb of gum going to USPS every day”
Run Fulfillment From Your Apartment Until You Outgrow It
For the first year and a half, Ryan and Kent kept their day jobs and ran shipping out of Kent's downtown LA apartment. Four thousand pounds of gum lived in the apartment-turned-warehouse and went out to USPS every day.
“we knew that this product helped a lot of people and we had so much user feedback and we would see the number of repeat buyers and the percentage of repeat buyers as a percent of Revenue so we knew that we had some type of base and some type of adoption rate”
Track Repeat-Buyer Share Of Revenue Before You Quit Your Day Job
Before quitting their jobs, Ryan and Kent tracked the percentage of repeat buyers as a share of revenue. That metric, plus user feedback, gave them the conviction that a real customer base existed and the business could survive without their paychecks.
“Year three year four I don't think we took any salary. I think we're basically just living off of like credit card points and then using the company funds for just meals and just that was it. I was playing semi-professional poker to kind of make rent.”
Years 3-4: No Salary, Credit Card Points, And Poker Tables For Rent
After leaving Hulu and Sony Music, Ryan and Kent paid themselves nothing for years three and four of Neuro. They survived on credit card points, expensed only meals through the company, and Ryan played semi-professional poker on the side to cover rent while inventory and freight issues compounded.
“we got two offers that were like below what we were asking for and Kent and I just had this floor we're like we're just not going to go below this and we stuck to our guns”
Set A Valuation Floor And Walk Away From Bad Shark Tank Offers
Going into Shark Tank, Ryan and Kent set a hard valuation floor and refused to drop below it, even with two live offers on the table. They walked away with no cash but kept their cap table intact, and the exposure plus the relationship with Daniel Lubetzky later saved the business from a trademark lawsuit.
“we've had a lot of major celebrities kind of talk about our product organically Ashley Graham a lot of professional baseball players Steve Aoki is actually a huge neuro user Joe Rogan big fan of neuro he talks about it organically none of that's paid Andrew Schultz a lot of people just have been picking up nuro”
Compound Unpaid Celebrity Mentions Into A Top-10 TikTok Shop Brand
Ryan attributes Neuro's scale to unpaid, organic mentions from celebrities like Joe Rogan, Steve Aoki, and Ashley Graham. His team then repurposes those clips into TikTok content, compounding the initial mention into a top-10 TikTok Shop brand.
“I asked my dad one time I was like Hey like how do you define success and this was years after my injury. My dad said that success is defined by how high you bounce back from Rock Bottom and that that really stuck with me cuz he was like you know you hit rock bottom and you fucking bounce back higher than anybody could have imagined.”
Define Success As How High You Bounce Back From Rock Bottom
Years after being paralyzed at 19, Ryan asked his dad how he defined success. The answer reframed his entire approach: success isn't avoiding the bottom, it's the height of the bounce back, a mindset Ryan carried through four years of near-bankruptcy into building a $100M business.