Making Something From Nothing: Michael Brandt Of HVMN On How To Go From Idea To Launch
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Delegate. A good founder should be able to do a lot of different things, but you’ll quickly need to hire other people, simply because there are not enough hours in the day. Just because you can design your own logo or file your own taxes doesn’t mean you should. Look for opportunities to identify tasks, or roles, and delegate them to other people who will save you time and ultimately help the business achieve its goals sooner.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Brandt.
Everything Michael Brandt does is fast and intense. Aside from cruising through marathons at a cool 6-minute mile pace, he and fellow Stanford alumni co-founder, Geoffrey Woo, have scaled H.V.M.N. in a few short years. Most recently, they introduced the second iteration of their flagship ketone drink, Ketone-IQ™. H.V.M.N. invented Ketone-IQ™ because they believe people should spend more time with elevated ketone levels for better health and performance. Through Michael’s steadfast leadership, H.V.M.N not only launched the world’s first drinkable ketone, but is tracking to redefine the limits of human performance, metabolism, and longevity to combat the global metabolic health crisis.
Alongside his co-founder, the duo secured a $6 million dollar contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command to continue research into the benefits of ketones. The pair gained early interest from pro-athletes including Former Olymian Speed Skater Apolo Ohno, Professional Racing cyclist Vittoria Bussi and Ultrarunner Jeff Browning and notable early investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, and Joe Montana (Hall of Fame NFL Quarterback).
As a father of a newborn, Michael has increasingly limited free time but remains an avid triathlete and marathoner with a 2:42 personal record.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I went to public school in Chicago. I was accepted into Stanford for undergrad, where I studied computer science and design. I have always been interested in the intersection between new technologies and culture, where new products and user experiences emerge. Over my lifetime I’ve seen the shift from the internet and smartphones as the most exciting platforms for innovation, to the present and future where the human body is the most exciting platform for innovation.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Alan Watts has a quote, “Even the best informed person ultimately comes to a leap of intuition before making a decision.” It’s important to know how your intuitive mind and rational mind interact. We should trust our intuition because it can be incredibly powerful, especially when guided by decades of insight and experience. At the same time, being able to rationally inspect your own decision-making is an important part of how we hone our intuition.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
As a 2:42 marathon runner, one of my favorite books of all time is Born To Run by Christopher McDougall. Besides being a beautiful anthropology of running culture, there’s an excerpt that sticks with me — great runners think about being easy, light, and smooth. They don’t worry about being fast, because if they can run easy, light, and smooth, then they’ll be fast. It’s a great mantra for life.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
Taking a good idea into an actual business requires 1,000 different steps that need to be executed well. No one step is impossible, but in aggregate the effort requires discipline. It also requires insight in knowing what exactly needs to be done next and how you’re going to attack it, either directly with your own skills and hard work or indirectly by leveraging other people.
One of the most valuable things you can do when you have a big idea but haven’t made any progress on it, is force yourself to identify one small step you can take towards your goal today, and take that step without hesitation.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
Uniqueness doesn’t matter as much as people think. Google was something like the 12th search engine. Of course you should do some research in an area before launching into it headlong — if you’re launching a new app, look around the app store; if you’re launching a new CPG look around Amazon and Target; etc — but if you truly see a better vision than anything that exists on the market, don’t be afraid to go after it just because someone’s doing something similar.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
Source a good manufacturer. To source a good manufacturer, you need to have a good understanding of what it is that you want to make and how to make it. This can be a chicken-or-egg problem because you may not know exactly how you want your product to be manufactured until you speak with manufacturers. That is okay. Start building your product specification outline by writing down everything you know. Then start talking to manufacturers — search the internet, ask for recommendations, and start emailing, calling, and visiting various manufacturers to get a sense of what’s possible. As you speak with more manufacturers, hear what questions they have for you. Form opinions on where you want to trade-off on quality vs. speed vs. cost. Eventually you’ll have a short list of manufacturers that you feel are trustworthy to work with, and can achieve what you need, and then press go!
Find a retailer. Finding a retailer is relatively easy once you already have sales traction. This can be another chicken-or-egg problem (Notice a pattern here? A meta-skill for founders is being able to break out of chicken-or-egg problems). One of the great things about the internet is that you don’t need permission to start selling. You can start selling on your own website with tools like Shopify, and you can start selling on Amazon pretty quickly as well. Having sales traction will help make your case once you’re speaking with buyers at retail stores. If you go this route, you’re not beholden to any one buyer because you’re also able to sell directly to your customer, which is a good position to be in.
File a patent. I advise founders against spending time thinking about patents early on. A patent doesn’t make a business. In most cases it’s a better use of time for a founder to focus on building their business, making products, generating revenues, and making their customers happy, rather than filing patents. That said, if you feel strongly that patenting certain novel intellectual property is the correct business strategy, the first thing you should do is interview a few lawyers and find one that you feel comfortable guiding you through the process. I would not recommend doing it alone, it will take a lot of time and is a very nuanced area of law.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
- Delegate. A good founder should be able to do a lot of different things, but you’ll quickly need to hire other people, simply because there are not enough hours in the day. Just because you can design your own logo or file your own taxes doesn’t mean you should. Look for opportunities to identify tasks, or roles, and delegate them to other people who will save you time and ultimately help the business achieve its goals sooner.
- Think Hard About Branding. It’s worth obsessing over getting your brand name right. I heard the founder of Expedia, who also founded Zillow, speak about this in an interview. I really enjoyed his philosophy around creating new words, so you can completely own the meaning around them. There are other ways to name your company, but the point is, it’s important to get right because it’s the first impression that everyone is going to have with your brand. Make it count.
- Consolidate Your Feedback. You probably have ideas and feedback for different people and projects around your company, but you’ll drive yourself — and everyone else — crazy if you deliver feedback at all hours. Keep organized notes, and deliver feedback in the right venues like scheduled 1:1s or project check-ins.
- Build A Following. It’s always better for your company when the founders have an audience of people who like them. Cultivate that audience along the way by creating content about what you’re building and letting your community into the process.
- Differentiate Between ‘Type 1’ and ‘Type 2 Decisions’. ‘Type 1 Decisions’ are irreversible or very expensive to change, like what you name your company. These decisions should be deliberated and taken very seriously. However, most decisions in business are ‘Type 2 Decisions’, which are relatively easy to change if you get wrong. For example, the pricing on your product or the copy on your landing page. For Type 2 Decisions you should move much more quickly, and be comfortable making updates along the way based on what’s working or not.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Start selling it. Put up a website where people can buy your product. It can be your own website, or something like Kickstarter. You don’t need to actually manufacture the product yet, but you do need to communicate what your product is (and what it looks like, how much it costs, etc.) and get that in front of people. Figure out what’s on the gating path between where you are now and getting your first 100 customers. Then once you have market validation from your first 100 customers, you’ll feel much better about pressing go on manufacturing.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
The right expert consultants can massively accelerate a project. Make sure you have a good agreement on what the deliverables are. You may want to break the project into checkpoints along the way, so that you can have honest, objective conversations about whether or not the project and relationship are on the right track.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
If you want to make a lot of money and have a large impact, you should raise money from investors. Venture capital is the best way to scale a business quickly and get a much bigger outcome for yourself and everybody involved. Not all founders want to build a massive business, and that’s okay too. But if you want to build a big business that goes public and makes a large impact, you should fundraise.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I’ve chosen to focus my talents on solving the metabolic health crises. Our flagship product, Ketone-IQ™, is based on years of research into metabolic health and performance. It helps people boost their metabolism so they can have more energy, reduced appetite, and better physical and mental performance. My goal is to continue bringing down the cost of ketones as a nutritional primitive so that everyone can have access to it.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Do something active everyday. It’s a simple rule, and if a movement could build behind that, I think the world would be in a much better place, physically and mentally.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Justin Bieber. I think he’s one of the best entertainers of our generation, and I respect how he’s evolved over the years. I also think he’s made some smart business plays, and am excited to see what he does next. It would be great to collaborate.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Michael Brandt Of HVMN. On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
