This week on Wayne Liew Dot Com Entrepreneur Interviews, I have with me, Anthony Adams, the founder of Apollo Nutrition LLC and the proud creator of The Hangover Cure.
Anthony just caught my attention with his one of its own product when he sent in his pitch for this interview. He is also a super nice guy who is willing to share tons of tips throughout the interview.
Now, if you have always been wondering how the dietary supplements industry works, this is an interview that you MUST read as Anthony reveals the secrets of the industry that are unknown to most outsiders.
Introduction of Anthony Adams and THC
Wayne: Today, I am delighted to have Anthony Adams, the creator of The Hangover Cure (THC). Hey Anthony, welcome to Wayne Liew Dot Com Entrepreneur Interviews. It’s always nice to chat with entrepreneurs about themselves and their ventures. Anthony, thank you for coming on and share your story with my blog readers today.
Anthony: Hi Wayne, thanks for having me.
Wayne: Anthony, before we get into the gist of our discussion today, can you talk a little bit about your background, what is your current main project and what role do you play in Apollo Nutrition LLC, which from my understanding, is the company behind THC?
Anthony: Yes, that’s correct. I founded Apollo Nutrition LLC and we market The Hangover Cure (THC) though it. I graduated from Texas Tech University in 2006, spent the next 2 years working for IBM in sales and was laid off in early 2009.
Anthony: I decided to start my own business in February 2009, which eventually became The Hangover Cure. I handle all marketing and sales for Apollo on a worldwide basis.
Anthony: I have several main projects that I am working on, from some potentially huge distribution accounts to an eBook regarding online business creation, and a few other supplement ideas I am just beginning to develop.
How Did the THC Idea Came About?
Wayne: For me personally, I have never came across any products that is close or similar to THC. All I knew was that there are some natural or home remedies out there that can reduce the effects of a hangover. How did you come up with the idea?
Anthony: Thanks, I appreciate it. Well, believe it or not, when I was in college, I was drinking a lot. I always suffered from horrible hangovers and, like you said, I didn’t really know of anything on the market that helped, so I spent years developing my own formula with a lot of trial and error along the way. I always believed that a product that actually did help with hangovers and was marketed to the right audience (college students, young professionals) would find an customer base.
Production Model of The Hangover Cure
Wayne: It sure has a market. I am in college right now and there are definitely students that are not able to attend classes the next day because of hangovers. I can safely assume that most of my blog readers don’t know much about the dietary product industry. How did you go about developing THC? Maybe you could share with us some aspects that are key to the process such as finding the right ingredients, which I think is not easy.
Anthony: I was lucky in that sense. My mom is a nutritionist and probably the healthiest person I know. She has a remedy for everything and hangovers are no exception. She got me started on the right path by putting together a cocktail of hangover fighting ingredients such as vitamin C, B, l-cysteine, l-glutamine, milk thistle extract, etc. But it was up to me from there to tweak the formula into what it is today.
Anthony: I chose to create it in powder drink mix form for shipping purposes as I didn’t want to have to deal with shipping a liquid starting out, like an energy drink.
Anthony: Anyone looking to get started with professional supplements, and this applies to most any food product from what I can tell, should simply Google ‘dietary supplement contract manufacturer’ to find a lab capable of producing most of anything you need. This was huge for me as the last thing I wanted to do was have to set up a factory to get my own product made.
Anthony: These labs are capable of making virtually anything you need, so if I were to call them up and say I need a 8.4oz RTD (Ready To Drink canned beverage) with (whatever vitamins, minerals, etc.) and a fruit punch flavor, they can do it. So, as an example, if we were looking to get a canned beverage made to aid with digestion and bone/joint function, we would simply call up a lab, lay out what we need, and let them get back to us with a quote, it’s really that simple.
Anthony: They also have marketing teams in house (which I did not use) if you need a product name/brand created, it’s a full service.
Wayne: Wow, that’s something I didn’t know about and I guess most of the people outside the industry don’t know about it too!
Anthony: Well it’s funny, I remember in college having to create sample products for marketing classes, and it was just implied that you have to take out a huge loan to get a factory up and running to produce whatever your product is going to be, and that’s simply not the case at all. It was very eye opening to say the least. And that’s not just in the supplement industry, Nike doesn’t own the factories that make its products. They are essentially a marketing company.
Patents
Wayne: Yeah… Do you have a patent for THC? And why? Because most inventors of products will choose the path of patenting their brainchild.
Anthony: It’s tricky with supplements because you cannot patent a natural ingredient like vitamin C. It will also be easily circumvented, even with a patent. Let me give you an example: Say my product contains a host of vitamins, including 100% of your daily value of zinc. A competitor could come along with a virtually identical formula, but with 125% of your daily value of zinc and suddenly they have a different product.
Anthony: So to answer your question, our formula is protected by an NDA with our manufacturer, but I firmly believe it’s all about branding and marketing your product better than your competitors because of the ease of formula circumvention. Just go to any health food store and look at the 100 different kinds of multi-vitamins on a shelf, it’s the same concept.
Anthony: What I mean by an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) is that our lab is the only manufacturer on Earth that knows exactly how our product is produced, but the ingredients themselves are not. The ingredients themselves are not protected as they are not drugs and therefore not patentable.
Regulations in the Dietary Supplement Industry
Wayne: Got it. Another barrier that I see why entrepreneurs are not that into the dietary niche is because they think it will involve a lot of form filling and product testing due to compliance issues. Do you face all these with THC? Any tips to share with us?
Anthony: Supplements are not regulated by the FDA, meaning that while I can make a claim, such as ‘Immunity Booster’ for a product that contains vitamin C, I have to have a disclaimer saying something to the effect of: ‘This product has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not intended to treat, prevent or cure any disease.’
Anthony: I didn’t encounter any issues with forms, the manufacturer actually takes care of this as they are the ones providing the product liability insurance, which is another reason I recommend using a contract manufacturer and sticking solely to the marketing of a product. They are on the hook for anything that goes wrong with your product.
Anthony: As far as product testing, like I mentioned earlier, I spent years perfecting this formula through a lot of trial and error. It’s all natural and contains ingredients proven to help with hangovers in clinical studies. Dietary supplements don’t undergo the scrutiny of pharmacy drugs though.
Anthony: So, to answer your question, there really isn’t a lot of red tape preventing anyone from getting into the industry. Now, if your product actually helps people is a completely different story. It obviously needs to work for customers or you won’t have any staying power.
Business Tips from Anthony
Wayne: Very true. What will be the number 1 advice that you will give to someone planning to start out in this direction? Of course, you have mentioned using a contract manufacturer. Any other important tips?
Anthony: Wow, let me think. It’s tough to narrow it down to one piece of advice. I would say don’t be afraid of failure. No business starts out perfect. No business is perfect, actually. School, theories, studying and internships are great, but real world experience blows them all out of the water. Failure is the best form of learning on the planet, so as long as you have the drive to stick with something, just understand that nothing comes easy and learning from your mistakes is a tremendous teacher.
Anthony: In starting a new business, you are essentially going into a venture with a 90% probability of failure in your first year anyway. So by default, the odds are stacked against you. Failure is just part of the process. And that goes along with one of my favorite quotes, which is ‘Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ by Samuel Beckett.
Marketing and Sales of THC
Wayne: Let’s talk about the marketing and sales of THC. I know that you’re good at Internet marketing and since you take care of all the sales and marketing for your company, you must be good at promoting THC. Is promoting THC or a dietary product different than products from other niches?
Anthony: I feel like our product is completely different from any other supplement on the market. Supplements, by default, are marketed to the health-conscious and sold in places like Whole Foods and GNC. Which is fine, it makes sense. But there is a reason why you probably haven’t heard of any other hangover prevention products on the market. They simply are not marketed to people who actually need them. If you are health-conscious, you are probably aren’t going out and drinking ten Jack n Cokes in a night. Our product sells in liquor stores, it’s a natural fit.
Anthony: My goal is to do what vitamin water did for the bottled water industry, but for the vitamin/nutrition industry. There is nothing ’sexy’ out there. Before vitamin water, every bottled water product on the market had some variation of a mountain stream or a waterfall on the label. And then glacéau (vitamin water) completely reinvented the market. That’s what we want to do with vitamins.
Anthony: And again, this is easily confirmed by simply going to a GNC and looking at the rows and rows of bland, boring products. Water, by default, is a boring product, but look at what vitamin water did. That’s my goal. Get people who don’t care about supplements using our product because it works.
Anthony: So whether that is through a clever name, a unique marketing strategy, cool packaging, whatever, I just think there is a huge opportunity in supplements to stand out because everything is so vanilla right now.
Wayne: Right. Sometimes, a competitive niche can be pretty dull and it’s all down to the price. If you don’t mind, Anthony, can you share with us your top 3 marketing strategies, either online or offline, for the promotion of THC?
Anthony: Number one would be Google AdWords. We have had a tremendous amount of success recently due to the improvements our SEO for key terms like ‘hangover cure’ but starting out, to compete on Google, which is the only search engine you should worry about for the immediate future, you are going to need to throw some money at AdWords.
Anthony: The ROI is huge if you can write effective ad copy and tailor it to your niche. What I mean is, don’t trick anyone into going to your site, it wastes their time and your money. I target very specific niche terms like ‘Buy Hangover Cure’ and ‘Hangover Cure Drink’ because of how specific they are to my product.
Anthony: Number two for me would be Twitter, which I don’t think most people have really figured out how to use for business. Shamelessly plugging your product all day will not win you any more followers. I use Twitter Search to look up people tweeting about being hungover. People on Twitter are essentially telling the world they are hungover or looking for a good hangover cure so this is essentially the same concept as using AdWords and tailoring a paid ad to people actively searching for a phrase, like ‘hangover cure’.
Anthony: The upside to using Twitter Search is that it’s free and you are instantly in touch with potential customers. The downside is, it’s time consuming. I strike up conversations with these potential customers and eventually talk up my product as a logical solution. It’s not spammy, it’s not annoying, and it puts you in touch with your target market. That is how I use Twitter for business.
Anthony: And finally, I like using blogs. Twitter helps with this as some of those people talking about how hungover they are will list a blog as their personal site on their Twitter page. From there, I might strike up a conversation by saying something like "Hey, would you be interested in reviewing a free sample on your blog? Sounds like you could use it." Again, this isn’t spammy, and who doesn’t want a free product? So they get a free sample, and we get a link back to our homepage, which improves SEO. That’s what I spend a lot of time doing these days, incoming links from blogs.
Wayne: I can see how THC fits into the Twitter context because really, a lot of people tweet about what they are doing or feeling so if they have a hangover, they will tell others about it on Twitter.
Anthony: Yeah, I really lucked out with my product choice, it helps with such a specific ailment that people aren’t afraid to tweet about. I wish I could say that was intentional, but when I started THC, I didn’t even have a Twitter account.
Anthony: I mean, I could be wrong. If I was selling a supplement to help with arthritis, I cannot imagine a lot of people tweeting about joint pain on Twitter 
Upcoming Projects by Anthony
Wayne: Haha… That’s true. So Anthony, what’s coming down the pipeline for you personally and Apollo Nutrition? Any upcoming products or campaigns that you would like to talk about?
Anthony: I am looking forward to 2010. We do have some new product ideas and some big campaigns planned that I unfortunately am not at liberty to talk about right now. But yes, we do plan to extend our product line at some point next year. I am also writing an eBook on online business and that should be available in early 2010.
Wayne: What will be the core idea of the eBook?
Anthony: Well, when I started out, I was very frustrated by the lack of good content regarding online business creation. You can go to a book store and find a host of books that teach theory but there really isn’t anything out there that I know of that says ‘This is what works, this is why it works, this is what doesn’t work, this is why it doesn’t work, this is why, etc.’ I just get annoyed when a business book goes ‘Once you have a website up, just sit back and let the money flow in.’ while getting a website live is like 5% of the online sales game.
Anthony: Basically, I am writing the book that I wish I had when I started out, because we went through a ton of financial trial and error and I don’t wish that to happen on anyone.
Conclusion
Wayne: I see. That would be pretty exciting. Anthony, there will be readers out there who want to learn more about The Hangover Cure or to connect with you to learn more about business. What will be the best way to get in touch with you?
Anthony: I can be reached directly at anthony [at] drinkTHC.com, or simply fill out our contact form at www.drinkthc.com and it should get to me.
Wayne: Nice. Thanks again for taking out some time for this interview. I really appreciate it and I’m sure my blog readers will too.
Anthony: Hey Wayne, I cannot thank you enough for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today.
Any Feedback or Questions from You?
Are you an entrepreneur in the dietary supplement niche too? If so, do you have any more tips other than the above for entrepreneurs looking to enter the market?
If you have any questions for Anthony, just leave them in the comments section below.
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