I Went From Broke To $1B+ In just 3 years

- April 24, 2026 (about 12 hours ago) • 01:02:46

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Sam Parr	Zero to over $1,000,000,000 in 32 months. It's maniacal.
00:03	Chad Janis	"We're quite literally just getting started."
00:05	Shaan Puri	"Where do you think the gap is to really jump from average or good to great?"
00:09	Chad Janis	If you want to have the greatest odds of success, it's by creating a new format. New formats win.
00:14	Shaan Puri	"You obviously spotted one really great opportunity. I'm curious, what other opportunities do you spot?"
00:18	Chad Janis	I think there's an idea that no one else is going to be able to run it. There's a $10 billion business idea.
00:23	Sam Parr	"You should just say it now and we'll bleep it out."
00:25	Chad Janis	"We'll talk about that. I think that's the biggest opportunity for founders."
00:28	Sam Parr	"What are the inputs necessary to reach $100,000,000 in revenue for an e-commerce brand in three years?"
00:32	Chad Janis	Here. Here's what I'll say.
00:43	Shaan Puri	So, here's three things I'd love for you to deliver: 1. Origin story. I want to know the origin story — like, how the hell did you have the idea, and why did you have the confidence in the idea? We're gonna go there. 2. Marketing funnel. You sent us a thing about your marketing funnel, which is: what does world-class marketing look like in this scenario? 3. Brainstorm / next steps. The last part: I want to riff with you and brainstorm on "where to from here." You obviously spotted one really great opportunity — I'm curious what other opportunities you spot.
01:07	Chad Janis	Yeah, let's do it.
01:08	Shaan Puri	Okay, sweet, dude. I've been... I've been taking grooms [unclear] for, I don't know, six—six to twelve months now. It's basically like eating candy. It's like you open up a pack of gummy bears, you eat them, and then you're like, "I just had vegetables." Totally. I ate gummy bears, but I think I just had vegetables. Maybe. Totally. So, I want to know: where were you sitting when you were like, "You know what? What if we did this?"
01:32	Chad Janis	Yeah, so I like to describe myself as an entrepreneur who had short stints in private equity and investment banking. I've started three companies—this is my third—and I actually didn't want to start a company. I was leaving a private equity firm in Boston called Summit Partners to go get my MBA at Stanford. I told myself, "Look, I just want to have a normal MBA experience for two years. I'm not going to start anything. Maybe I'll do an internship in the summer." Two weeks before leaving for Stanford, I was at my parents' place in Utah, doing some work and drinking a greens powder in my dad's office. I remember looking up, super vividly, and thinking, "There's no way I'm keeping this habit past 30 days." I'll do it because I always finish what I started, but I'm not going to stick to this habit after 30 days. It wasn't just the taste for me; it was the weird frothy sediment at the bottom of the drink. The biggest thing—this is probably unique to me—is that I remember staring at the bottle sitting on the countertop, on the drying rack. I'm sort of an OCD person, and I thought, "If I commit to this habit, I've got to stare at that bottle on the countertop for the rest of my life." There's just no way that's going to happen. That got me thinking: how do I take comprehensive supplement nutrition and put it in some format—at the time I didn't know it would be a gummy—that gets people looking forward to it? So they go to bed thinking, "I can't wait to have that tomorrow." That's a complete pivot, I think, from how people usually think about supplementation.
03:14	Sam Parr	"Can we, like, roll it into a blunt now?"
03:16	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, yeah — exactly. Look, hey: we'll smoke your greens."
03:20	Chad Janis	We'll talk about that. I honestly think that's the biggest opportunity for founders. People just want to rip on the formats that work, but I think if you want the greatest odds of success, it's by creating a new format. So if it's a blunt — awesome. If it's these little "zen" pouches that people are doing now, and they're making those focused so they're non-nicotine — great. New formats win.
03:43	Sam Parr	Did you think that— I mean, it's maniacal. Thirty-two months to a $1 billion exit is maniacal. Did you call your shot? Were you like, "That's where we're gonna go," or were you like, "Who knows"? I mean, what—where was your mindset when you started it?
03:59	Chad Janis	This is a bit shocking to hear, but we've basically met the forecast that we put in place since the very beginning. You have to appreciate—I talked with thousands of entrepreneurs when I was at Summit Partners. I looked at the proprietary datasets; I don't have them anymore, obviously, but I have a very visual memory. So I know the LTVs and CACs of hundreds of brands. For me, it's weird. I could tell you—I won't—but I could tell you what every big brand's LTV, CAC, and margin looks like, all the brands that we know of today. Now, I didn't really forecast beyond $100 million of revenue because that would be pretty pointless, like I'm not...
04:38	Shaan Puri	A sociopath—yeah, there's a fine line between ambition and being just absolutely batshit. You're saying that now. I want to ask you something about the in-between: when you're like, "Oh, I don't really enjoy this form factor—what if there was another?" You said you didn't have gummies right away; it wasn't like you immediately had the fully baked idea. I'm curious: what were the companies or products you admired? I sort of have this thing where what you admire becomes a little bit of your destiny—your admiration becomes your destination. If you think about a great entrepreneur—Steve Jobs, famously—who did he admire? What products did he admire? You steal little elements of them and they sort of bleed out into your final products years later. Same thing with comedians and moviemakers. What were the products and companies you thought were kick-ass that you feel inspired some of the result of "grooens"? [term unclear—transcribed as "grooens"]
05:32	Chad Janis	Yeah, look — I sat on the board or observed the boards of great brands like Ruggable, Doctor Squatch, Brooklinen, Chubbies, Solo Stove, Thuma — twelve different businesses. I learned a lot from the unique problems and, frankly, the recipes that worked for each of them. I would say that the brand I think we most closely resemble in terms of execution is Doctor Squatch.
05:55	Sam Parr	"Is that deodorant?"
05:56	Chad Janis	It's the cold-process soaps—the bar soaps that are for men.
06:02	Shaan Puri	"I've seen the marketing, but I think I have the deodorant. I don't know what's so special about it. Is there something cool about it?"
06:08	Chad Janis	So what's cool about it is they just sold to Unilever last year for 1,500,000,000 [dollars]. In that business, what's cool is that cold-process soap is more natural. You're not getting all the chemicals and it's a very clean product. But because of the branding, the approach, and the partnerships they've done — like Harry Potter, Star Wars, SpongeBob — they've taken an approach where you, as a consumer, relate to the brand. Prior to Doctor Squatch, I don't even know what I was using. I was probably using whatever my wife was buying and stocking in the shower. They were the inspiration for us. What they've done within the personal care space — making it a joy for the consumer — is what we aspire to do within supplementation. I mean, we all spend time on social media. You get one ad and it's like: "Oh my goodness, Sean-san, I don't know how old you guys are, but you're blank years old and you've never heard of creatine? What the hell are you doing with your life? You're gonna die tomorrow." And then you get a colostrum ad: "What are you doing with your life? You need to be taking colostrum right now. It does a blank% increase in blank body metric." I just think the way we've approached this — taking inspiration from Doctor Squatch — is to make our supplementation a lifestyle: something that people look forward to, that resonates with who they are and how they live their lives.
07:32	Shaan Puri	Alright, let's take a quick break. This podcast is called My First Million, and it's probably the question we get asked the most: How do I go from zero to making my first million? I did an episode a little while back where I broke down exactly the philosophy and frameworks I would use. Topics included finding your white belt business, identifying your "bear on the unicycle" advantage, the core way that your two skills could overlap, and why maybe starting a service business is better than starting a software business for your initial business to make that first million. The team at HubSpot has created a guide that took the stuff I said in that episode and laid it all out for you. You can get it for free in the description below — just click that link and it's all yours. Alright, back to the steps.
08:11	Sam Parr	"How much money did you raise to get to your first million in revenue, and how fast did it come?"
08:15	Chad Janis	Yeah. Month one we did about $30,000 in revenue, and month two was already about $230,000. So I guess, in month two — a month into the business — we had already crossed the $1,000,000 run rate, maybe $2.5–$3 million at that. I've never really looked at the business that way. Maybe you've heard me talk about LTV to CAC.
08:35	Sam Parr	Yeah.</FormattedResponse>
08:36	Chad Janis	I would say we probably burned through about $8,000,000,000 of capital until we reached profitability. That could have been less if we had slowed down growth a little bit. But, just the way it worked out is that we — I think we've earned through $8,000,000 of primary capital before we hit profitability. </FormattedResponse>
08:54	Shaan Puri	"You mentioned focusing on LTV to CAC. For you, what's good and what's great?"
09:00	Chad Janis	Yeah. I think table stakes for businesses that need to be acquired is that you need to be at least three. The best I saw—one obviously goes where we're at—but during the COVID era I would see brands in the four-to-five range. Those brands are probably two-and-a-half to three times right now.
09:17	Sam Parr	But when you say LTV, are you referring to—so LTV (lifetime value), for an e‑commerce brand: does "value" mean your contribution margin?
09:27	Chad Janis	Yeah, let me describe that. The way that I always look at it, I use a three-year period — so 36 months. LTV (lifetime value) is fully burdened gross profit, meaning: Sam orders our product. What are the total costs stripped out of that value to get it to Sam's door? So you've got product COGS, you've got discounts, returns, you've got fulfillment, shipping, merchant processing fees... you've got all of that that gets it to the door. That's your lifetime value over a three-year period. How much contribution (gross profit) are you getting from the consumer over three years? </FormattedResponse>
10:03	Sam Parr	"And you use three years not because that's how long someone subscribes to Groon's [unclear]. You just said three years — everyone should use three years."
10:08	Shaan Puri	Because you can't do a lifetime.</FormattedResponse>
10:10	Chad Janis	Yeah, I think it's a productive way of looking at it to optimize against. I mean, we obviously look at three months, six months, and twelve months, and try to make adjustments based on that. But yeah—we've got consumers who are... we're 32 months old, so we haven't hit that 36-month mark. There's very clearly going to be consumers who continue purchasing into, I guess, "perpetuity."
10:34	Shaan Puri	And you picked a name that—if you had told me, I would have said, "Hey, brother, do you wanna win? Or are you gonna put an umlaut over one of the letters and nobody knows how to say it?" And then you won. So I'm an idiot. What... what... what's the—what gives?
10:50	Chad Janis	So, what I always say here is—and Sam botched "Gruens" at the start. He said "Grooms," which is totally fine. What I tell people is: I do not care how you pronounce our name as long as you're buying. You can call it "Gruens" if you want. You can call it "Grooms." Which is correct? It's "Gruens."
11:07	Shaan Puri	But did you think it was a good name? Did you know something none of us do, or did you just not care about the name? And how the hell did you arrive at that name?
11:15	Chad Janis	Yeah. So the word "gruns" — with an s — I guess I can show you here — actually doesn't mean anything in the German language. The word "grun" means green in German, but once you throw an s on it, there's actually no meaning to it. So when I threw an s on it, it just seemed kind of fun and playful. You've got this natural smiley face. It felt like something that we could brand over time really well. It's simple. But you're right — at least in America, very uniquely in America — like [percentage unclear] of consumers don't know how to pronounce it.
11:48	Sam Parr	"That would be your argument to the team: 'No, guys — it makes a ton of sense now. It may not make sense in America, but... yeah.'"
11:54	Shaan Puri	It does.
11:54	Sam Parr	"Sean, we had — we had this guy, David, on who runs a company called Lexicon. His whole job is naming companies. He's named Swiffer, Febreze, Sonos, BlackBerry. Sean, what do you think David would say about that name?"
12:09	Shaan Puri	Well, it's hard to know, right? Because he's got this little AI computer brain where he's like "yes/no," and it's almost like a sommelier describing the taste of a wine. Then you just have to nod along like an idiot and be like, "Yeah—I sense the notes that you're talking about there." I thought notes are for music, but I definitely sense... So, you know, I think it's hard to know, but I would have guessed low, right? You're talking about something that doesn't make much sense in America, the market we're going after—but you did it anyways. What was the runner-up name? Or, you know, in the brainstorming process, sometimes you start with, "Here's what we're definitely not gonna call it," because it kind of guides you away from maybe some typical areas.
12:46	Chad Janis	Honestly, I hit it pretty quickly, so I guess I didn't mention this: I grew up Mormon, and I served a two-year mission in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. I'm fluent in German, and so, when I had the thought...
12:59	Sam Parr	I have a pretty sick assignment.
13:01	Chad Janis	Yeah, totally. It's literally called the "Alpine German-speaking Mission."
13:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, someone else could have been assigned to reading California... or...
13:09	Chad Janis	Yeah, totally. That wouldn't be too bad. That wouldn't be too bad — there's worse.
13:14	Shaan Puri	Alright, so you have the ideas. How long did it take you to go from an idea in your head to, "I know what the product is going to be, I have my first batch," and then to go for sale? Like, what?
13:25	Chad Janis	Was that timeline like... yeah. So coming up with the gummies took about a day. I grew up—you’re gonna think this is crazy—eating those big, single-serving Sour Patch Watermelon slices. I would eat one of those every day in college: a full 450 calories every day. I’ve always been a gummy fiend, and now I get to have a productive, health-focused gummy every single day. There’s a ton of varieties that we sell. I have a ton of ideas always circulating in my head and in this Notion doc [Notion document]. Typically I sit on those ideas for about a year. This one, I was like, “It’s so obvious—I gotta do this. I’m the right person to do it,” so I started working on it immediately and getting it to launch. Now, to answer your question: within a week of having the gummy connection, I said, “Okay, why hasn’t somebody done this in gummy form?” You’ve got a ton of gummies—why hasn’t somebody put comprehensive nutrition in a gummy? The big moment for me was realizing the entire gummy industry is built around these 60- or 30-count transparent bottles with a cap on the top. That is how a gummy exists. So I asked, “What would need to change? What would it need to look like to have a gummy be comprehensive nutrition?” That’s when I went down the path of thinking, “Okay, if it’s a pack—how big is the pack? How many gummies are in it? What’s the flavor of the gummy? What’s the total...”
14:55	Shaan Puri	"Sam, Sam, you've never taken the product."
14:57	Sam Parr	Right. No—I'm gonna buy it now, though.
14:59	Shaan Puri	So, the way it works is this: this is a good point you just brought up, which is — you don't like when we say "it's a gummy." You think, "It's a gummy? No — a single serving? You eat eight of these things." So it's literally like having a pack of Sour Patch Kids, which seems fine. But that's actually pretty non‑obvious. If I'm reading between the lines, or if I'm understanding what you're saying, you're saying one of the reasons nobody had done the comprehensive gummy was because the gummy would need to be, like, four inches large to contain everything. But what if we made it — what if we made it so it's not "a gummy a day," it's a pack of eight? We package them as little pouches of eight, and that's how we can do this when other people may not have tried to.
15:41	Chad Janis	Yeah, yeah. Our packs are about eight [gummies]. We go off gram weight, which is about 20 grams, and some grams are smaller or larger than others. Every gummy is identical in terms of nutrition. It's the total of the eight, in this case, that makes up the full dose.
15:58	Sam Parr	"I just think it's insane that I asked you a question I thought was going to be ridiculous — about you pointing, like Babe Ruth, and saying, 'You know, we're going to get to this,' and you're like, 'Yes, that was part of the plan.' I mean, it's pretty audacious to say, 'I'm going to get to 100 million in revenue in less than three years.' For the people listening: what are the inputs necessary to get to 100 million in revenue for an e‑commerce brand in three years?"
16:21	Chad Janis	So it doesn't have to be consumables. I think everybody points at consumables these days and they're like, "Ah—supplements," as if it's a better business. It's not necessarily a better business. If you're selling a hard good, like bedsheets or furniture, your margins are going to be worse and it's more difficult to ship. There are a lot of trade-offs. With a hard good, you theoretically make money on day one. With supplements, you don't—you have to make that money on retention. That's a new lever you have to pull to make the business work. So to answer it directly, Sam: first and foremost, you've got to have a good product. Good product doesn't mean making a better version of something like greens—that's not going to work for people. What's going to work is finding that product category, that white space. Good product = new white space. You've seen—I'm sure you guys have seen—things like nicotine pouches, the Whip and other players in that space. I would not encourage...
17:10	Sam Parr	An energy. It basically looks like a "zen," but it's not tobacco or nicotine—it's energy.
17:16	Chad Janis	Yeah, yeah. It's like caffeine and other things—like the nicotine pouches. Amazing. Not because I'm a believer in the product, but amazing because now you're taking a new format—a form factor that doesn't have competitors. So I think anybody looking at it and saying, "Oh, I'm gonna do it too," might find a little bit of success, but you're not gonna sell your business. You're not gonna be the winner here. Go find a new product format. Symbiotic—I came out with these little liposomals. Who else have I seen that's created new... Oh, you've got, like, do you know the product "Dose"? It's like the liver-health product. It's like these little shot glasses—it's a concentrated liquid. That's another one I wouldn't...
17:55	Sam Parr	"Even refer to them as a concentrated liquid of—what, liver?"
17:58	Chad Janis	Like, their supplement is a concentrated liquid for the liver. So look up dailydose.co — I think that's the website. That's another product that has a unique format. Another one for you: you guys know Mary Ruth Organics or R H O Nutrition?
18:15	Shaan Puri	Uh-huh, so...
18:16	Chad Janis	Those are—I'm not sure if they're liposomal, but they're liquid vitamins, right? Their approach was liquid vitamins, and I'm shocked there's not more competition doing that. These are big businesses; every single one I just mentioned is a big business doing really well.
18:31	Sam Parr	So, the framework of this is taking a thing that everyone knows—or many people know—and just slightly changing the form: the way you consume it. But everything that you've named so far has been a consumable.
18:42	Chad Janis	Correct — that's the space I'm most familiar with, and it's what people typically are looking at right now. But it would be the same thing. Do you know how big Cozy Earth is? Their whole thing was bamboo sheets, right? And I don't—if you ask me, I'm sure other businesses sell bamboo sheets, but that's their thing. They're a big business as well. I could give you examples across all sorts of categories. Obviously, supplementation is the easiest for people to visualize.
19:10	Shaan Puri	Wow. So step one — you're saying it's a good product. But, to be less generic: what you're saying is the right product. The right product is one in a category that's not already supersaturated. You either take an existing category and change the form factor to make it new, or you find a new pain — a new problem, new supplement, new whatever — and you're going to address it. You need some key differentiation: vitamins but liquid instead of pills; sheets but bamboo; greens but gummies. Find that key differentiation, which gives you a new category. Alright — that's step one.
19:43	Chad Janis	Exactly. And to be clear, a couple that I've just seen recently — and then I'll tell you step two: I've seen jelly beans as a form factor. I've seen lollipops. Right? Like, people are... Do I think those businesses are going to be huge? Probably not. It's a little bit niche, but they're probably going to be more successful than somebody making a gummy like us. </FormattedResponse>
20:02	Shaan Puri	Hey—stupid question: you started this by saying "Sour Patch Kids." How come none of the gummies are sour?
20:08	Chad Janis	This is... well, why doesn't...
20:10	Shaan Puri	Anybody be like, "It's sour vitamins."
20:11	Chad Janis	I would—TBD. We might, we might give you something like that, Sean. I'm a sour fiend as well. I'm going to hit that, don't worry.
20:19	Shaan Puri	Sometimes I want to start a business. Then sometimes I realize—oh, I know—I'm just hungry and I just want to eat that thing. I don't need to start. This might be the category where maybe I'm just hungry.
20:28	Sam Parr	Wait — you actually said something interesting. You said, "it's too niche." Is there a... what's your path to getting to $100,000,000 in revenue? Okay, so you said take the form factor, and then the second—or I don't know if it's the second name—but there is a TAM-related thing here [TAM = total addressable market]. Is there like a threshold where you're like, "this has legs"?
20:46	Chad Janis	Look, I'm a bit psycho, right? All I've seen around me is businesses getting to hundreds of millions in revenue quickly, so my gauge for success is in the business. The first business I started—I literally sunset it six months in. It was at $100,000 in revenue with 90% EBITDA margins, and I sunset it because I said, "This isn't big enough." That's how I'm wired. If somebody wanted to get to a $5,000,000 cash-flow business and run that, that's massive success. So I'm not gonna... deter people from
21:16	Sam Parr	But I want to know your threshold.
21:19	Chad Janis	Yeah—my threshold. Well, I mean, my sites are even bigger now, right? I'm still working on Grooms, Nutrobes, and Juiced, and these products you see behind me. We have more than just Gruens now. Happy to talk about that. But I mean, at this, I'm looking only at stuff that can be $110 billion outcomes—somewhere around there.
21:39	Shaan Puri	So let's keep going. In your formula, what's next? Do we do step two, or not?
21:43	Chad Janis	Number two — and this is the end of it — is LTV:CAC. So if your business has an LTV to CAC of three times or more, you are golden. Anytime people talk about profitability, anytime people talk about MER — I'm not sure if you're familiar with that — it's the Marketing Efficiency Ratio. The way you think about it is: if you spend 20% of your revenue on marketing, then the inverse of that is a 5x MER, right? So one divided by... [transcript cuts off]
22:14	Shaan Puri	All you're saying is: I want a machine where I can buy a customer for $1 and I know that in 36 months that customer will pay me back $3. I'm going to dump as many dollars as I can into the front of that funnel as long as that's possible. I'd say the key here is, most people — I don't know, maybe I'm just wrong — think lifetime revenue or lifetime value is just revenue. What you're saying, importantly, is it's the fully loaded gross profit. So to get to $3 you're probably actually doing about $6 of revenue on that customer — close to $5–$6 — to get $3 of gross profit off that customer.
22:48	Chad Janis	Whatever your margin is. But yeah—that's correct. You've gotta do it. If you hit that three times — i.e., if fully burdened gross profit LTV [lifetime value] divided by your CAC [customer acquisition cost] ≥ 3 — you've got a business.
23:01	Sam Parr	How did you know that Grooens was going to be 1 to 3?
23:05	Chad Janis	I didn't — I'd seen enough to know how it might play out. But we came out with a CAC, and everybody in our company, since day one, knew what our CAC ceiling was — that ceiling would result in a 3× or greater LTV-to-CAC. [ CAC = customer acquisition cost; LTV = lifetime value ]
23:19	Sam Parr	"Can you say what that number is, or no?"
23:21	Chad Janis	When I first started, I can't really tell you, but what I'll tell you is: it's two times higher today than it was on day one of launching the business. Why? It's not because we magically got better LTV [lifetime value]. It's because I set the CAC [customer acquisition cost] so low to ensure that we'd be able to hit it.
23:36	Sam Parr	So what does that mean, then? Your ads need to be extra catchy. In order to make extra-catchy ads, you need a super good offer, a super good story, or a super... like, it's...
23:46	Chad Janis	It's kind of all of it. That's where this gets so difficult. Sometimes I see the "shadow figures" that are running these dropshipping companies, and they're like, "Gruen's ads are bad — they're not even good; they're so non-creative." That's because we're a reputable company that doesn't say we can cure cancer or do the kinds of things some of these shadow figures do. That's not creative — that's actually bad to do as a human. To answer your question: it's not just about creating good ads. You have to have the good offer, the good retention, and a good product. You have to have a product that people actually want to take on. Our Amazon LTV to CAC is phenomenal. And that's on a platform where we don't advertise the way you do on Meta. We don't structure our subscription portal in that certain way — it's a one-click cancel button — and that's leagues beyond what I've seen with other brands in terms of Amazon economics.
24:39	Shaan Puri	D2C is one of these funny spaces. I think I DM'd you.
24:44	Chad Janis	I read our DM, Sean. It was from a couple years ago — it would have been around 2023, about three months into the business. You're asking about the landing page. </FormattedResponse>
24:52	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So, three months into the business, I think I just sent you a compliment. I was like, "I think your landing page is really great." I guess the interesting thing is—you were really quiet, right? There's this weird paradox, and I would call it the "drop shipper's paradox," which is: the louder somebody tends to be about their ecommerce success, the more I proportionally increase my skepticism. I feel like you were very quiet and you built a killer business. And now, once you've kind of, you know, reached a big exit and... [unclear phrase], you can talk a little bit more about it. You're doing a bit more [unclear]. What do you think about that? What do you see when you look out at the landscape of people who are quite vocal—quite loud—on D2C Twitter and other places?
25:34	Chad Janis	You know, I want to have sympathy for how others run their businesses. What I'll say is: I've had chats with some of these people who are louder, who are running these little shadow businesses — you don't know what their business is, but it's doing $100 million in revenue or whatever. What I've come to realize is some of these people just don't know yet that what they're doing is inappropriate. The ads they're running are inappropriate; they don't really understand the consequences. They're fist-bumping their friends about the Lamborghini they just bought. So, I think it's less about how loud people are and more about the natural evolution we all go through as we learn what it means to be a reputable businessperson running a clean business. That comes with time. I had to learn most of it through amazing brands with great executive teams who were mentors and friends. I think for some of these people, they're learning — and it's going to take a little bit of time.
26:32	Sam Parr	So, from the outside I look at you and I think, "Well, you seem really... I've only known you for 30 minutes, but you seem very calm. You seem very well balanced. You seem like a lovely person. The success has been off the charts, and I think, 'Well, everything's perfect—this guy has just had it all.'" But, of course, that's not the reality. So, what has—what has sucked about this journey?
26:51	Chad Janis	You know, it's funny. The team— we have this joke internally that I'm the "chillest guy" we know, and it's sort of, kind of true. I am actually a pretty calm person. I think mistakes are all part of the learning process. No business is perfect. A perfect business is one that learns quickly from the mistakes it makes, and people aren't to blame for that. What I'll say is, I could give you an example of a really rough day we had on January 29, 2024, and I can tell you a little bit about that. But I would say the hardest thing about building a business like this—something folks just don't appreciate—is how difficult it is to build a team of all-stars. More difficult than that is unleashing them: giving them the space to play, run, and execute according to their abilities. That's really been our unlock: one, getting amazing individuals. If you look at our executive team, if you look at our entire team—the 130+ people of this company—I think people would say, "That is a stacked team." They're not going anywhere. We're having a good time. We've got a lot ahead of us that we want to do, and the culture here allows for them to [take sell — unclear] in a way that they wouldn't be able to do elsewhere.
28:01	Sam Parr	Can you dive deeper on that? People always say, "hire the best people," and I say that too. But I hate when I give that advice—or when I receive it—because I'm not trying to hire the worst people. I am trying. So what does "the best people" actually mean? What do you look for? What attributes?
28:18	Chad Janis	Yeah. You know what's so funny about this, Sam? I've heard people say, "Oh, somebody could be the best for your role." And I'm like, "No, no, no—there are legit people who are the best." You're probably just not able to hire them if you're saying, "Well, we got the best for this narrowly carved-out role." So when I say the "best" is what we're looking for, I mean people who have the confidence to make decisions. Right? Everyone has the ability to be essentially a CEO. Frankly, I would not be surprised if, five years from now, a lot of the folks here at Gruens have started companies that are really successful because they've had that skill set — that repetition of making decisions as if they're the CEO. I would say it comes down to reps, experience, training, and whatever function you have — if you're a marketing person, a retention person, or a product person. And then the hardest part — again, this is where I think people listening who might be founders or CEOs have to check themselves — is: how do you unblock these people? How do you get out of the way to ensure that everybody together is building something massive?
29:25	Shaan Puri	"I want to ask you about your marketing, because I think you did world-class marketing. Like we said years ago, I think the nicest thing I ever said to you was, 'Yo — nice landing page,' right? That's the highest form of respect I give you. I want to actually open up here — let me screen share. I want to show you your Facebook Ad Library, and I just want you to talk us through a sort of ten-minute master class on marketing. So I want you to tell me what you see, because the average person will look at this and not really know what to take. I want you to point out what's interesting here. Let me see if I can zoom this a little bit. What's interesting here? What should people notice? What can they learn from this that would apply to other businesses? How did you guys think about marketing? Yeah, I mean..."
30:06	Chad Janis	The first thing I see when you go back up is: what does it say—"poop more"? What other supplement brand do you know that's being a little bit sassy with commentary like that? You see it a little bit more now from these brands that are just talking about their clinicals all the time. Nothing against clinicals—we do clinicals too, and we test our product selectively well beyond what's required—but we just don't talk about it because that's not fun. What I would say here is that these are fun ads. Somebody sees that and they're probably laughing a little bit. If you scroll down, you'll see brands spending some time on GLP-1 as an angle. I'm really proud of the day we decided to do this, because everyone around us—and I don't spend enough time on Instagram to know— is like, "Nature is Ozempic."
30:49	Sam Parr	Or.
30:50	Chad Janis	They'll say something like that, which is objectively wrong. Like, "you're not supposed to say that." We've never taken that approach. We are, what we would say, the best friend to Ozempic, tirzepatide, Zepbound—whatever the sort of [GLP‑1] ones are.
31:04	Shaan Puri	So, you were able to kind of surf that wave. You were able to hijack some of the momentum of that product and position yourself not as a replacement but as a companion. Wait?
31:15	Sam Parr	"Why do—why do you have an Olipop? Okay."
31:17	Chad Janis	Well, the GLP one's new crush ad had an Olipop image on it, and we're running a limited-time offer right now with Olipop, so this... </FormattedResponse>
31:27	Sam Parr	"Is—oh, it's like a flavor. It's an Olipop flavor."
31:29	Chad Janis	Got this is Groon's, which I guess you can see right here — I'm pointing to it in the video. [pointing to it in the video] Maybe people are on audio, but we've got Groon's sort of original. Every month or two months we do these limited-time offer drops. In this case, it's Olipop strawberry vanilla flavor. The first one we did was like a Granny Smith apple–flavored. We did a Grinch sour "Grinch Punch" last year in November. So we do these. Again, back to the whole idea: how do we make this fun? You tell me one other brand that's doing drops and making it actually fun to take the product each day.
32:04	Shaan Puri	So, it looks like you've got different angles. You’ve got—yep. Hey, we’re… you know, Ozempic's best friend. You’ve got "poop more" [unclear transcription]. You’ve got nurse — you know, the nurse here who’s...
32:15	Chad Janis	Probably talking about nutrient gaps.
32:17	Shaan Puri	Nurse Jackie talking about nutrients. You have these angles, and I'm guessing that these each lead to a landing page that aligns with that message, correct? So it's like... </FormattedResponse>
32:24	Chad Janis	Yeah.
32:25	Shaan Puri	"Five or six different angles, each to a tailored landing page that continues that message. Are you doing that just to experiment to find one winner? Or are you like, 'No — we're going to keep running five or six of these,' because there are different markets and different customers with different mindsets, and we're going to try to reach all of them?"
32:40	Chad Janis	Yeah. To make this super applicable for people, you should test ads in high volume. Find new angles, test all over the place, and find what sticks — with an eye towards being a good human. Don't say that you're going to make somebody's sex life better if your product doesn't actually do that. Actually do the science validation if your product can help with certain things. Once you've identified an angle that seems to be running, build the entire funnel around it. You've got static ads that talk to that angle. You've got UGC — sort of the "hold-the-camera" angle — ads that run at that. You've got more cinematic-type shoots that run at that angle. Everything: you're plowing all sorts of ad concepts, or sorry, ad structures, toward that angle. From there, where people land is really important. What people receive as a pop-up is really important. What people receive as email and SMS is really important. Everything is tailored to that message. So if you came in on a gut-health ad, we want everything tailored to: "Hey, Sam just expressed interest in the gut-health ad. Great — Sam's probably interested in gut health." Let's give a pop-up that helps them understand what about gut health they're interested in. That pop-up informs what messages we send on email and SMS toward Sam's expressed concern. That page is dialed for Sam's intent. On the back end, once people have purchased — this is something we're trying to put into process now — how do we talk to Sam long-term? He may have started on gut health, but how do we get Sam to understand that there's so much more to this product than just gut health? Do that over time, building on the foundation of why this product was important.
34:20	Sam Parr	Most everything you're saying is sort of like when I read "How to Win Friends and Influence People." I'm like, "Oh yeah — this is obvious. Makes sense." But the hard part is execution. Totally. And it seems like you're ruthlessly, in a kind way, executing. So I'm going to ask a bunch of questions that I think you can answer in one go: - How many ads and landing pages per month are you putting out? - I think you only said you had a 30-person team — that seems like a lot of output for a relatively small team. Can you talk about who's doing the work?
34:51	Chad Janis	Yeah— we're probably putting out hundreds of ads a month, cycling them in and out, just trying to find that next unlock. We try to create new concepts pretty consistently. So it's not just about ad volume; it's actually structured around how much of that is business-as-usual ads or concepts and themes we already know work, and how much of that is trying to find new frontiers of applicability. When Sean reached out to me in December 2023 saying, "Hey, nice landing page," that was me — I was the guy who built that landing page. We didn't use an agency. I even said that in the message because you asked: that was me from the beginning. You can see our buy box [the place where you do the Add to Cart], and we've seen people rip that over the last three years, copying that buy box. If they only knew that random dude named Chad — who's not an e-commerce expert — built it. Broadly across D2C I know quite a bit, but I'm not an e-commerce guy who builds these sites. The whole industry is mimicking this format. Since then we've found new formats that work. Talking about the team: we've got people across functions. - Retention: about three folks who do emails and SMS, and set up all the flows that allow consumers to have a good experience. They're focused on the post-order journey — from order one through order hundreds. - Paid/Creative: a large team creating ads and the actual creatives. We have probably four, maybe five or six creative strategists who actually create the ad concepts. Then we have people who design and do the video edits. - Ad management: there are probably four or five people who actually manage the ad accounts — looking at analytics, evaluating, and passing feedback back to the creative strategists: "here's what's working, iterate on that." - E-commerce: an e-comm team that's absolutely dialed — producing landing-page designs, iterations on cart and checkout, post-purchase optimizations, and all that good stuff. We're constantly iterating. It used to be me throwing up a quick website against an ad angle, and now we've built a full infrastructure around it. It's really fun to see.
37:08	Sam Parr	Still, that's crazy. That just doesn't seem like a lot. It doesn't seem like a big operation for creating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of ads.
37:16	Chad Janis	It doesn't require a lot, and I would tell people that they can do it themselves. You create a template. Shout out to Replo — it's the platform I used. I think you can do hundreds of millions in revenue on Replo. The website is replo.app, and it's a Shopify plugin. It's such a good platform. You can just create a template. The only thing you need to swap out is the headline — whether it says "gut health" or it uses another ad theme. Substitute the little blocks on the page with the new ad copy. It's not that hard. In a day, you can create a completely new ad funnel that will have incremental performance against the general landing page.
37:54	Sam Parr	"That guy's gotta clip that clip and make that mad. Get ready to see your face on a Replomat."
37:59	Chad Janis	"Look — I have no problem. They don't charge... I mean, I've told them before: they don't charge enough. It's stupid how much value you can get out of that. And I would say this about a lot of our platforms: they're just giving a shout-out because it's relevant here. What do you...? "
38:13	Shaan Puri	See, when you look at average marketing versus world-class marketing, what do you think? If I'm somebody who has a brand or a company and I have a landing page, I got ads—I’m doing all the things. He said, "test creative"—I'm testing creative. He said, "test landing"—I, I think I'm doing that. What are the most typical things missing? When you either advise a founder or you go look at somebody else's brand and you're like, "Oh man, they're just not doing this one thing, these two things, well enough"—what are those?
38:36	Chad Janis	Yeah.
38:36	Shaan Puri	To really jump from average or good to great. </FormattedResponse>
38:39	Chad Janis	It typically comes down to having a better product, which is so unhelpful because it's "you've got to cut your losses." But a lot of the people trying to find these hacks are doing it with a mailed-in product. They didn't — we took a year to develop our product; it's custom blends.
38:58	Sam Parr	Well, how did you know that it worked? A lot of times, when I take vitamins, I don't necessarily know if they're working. Did you get your blood tested a bunch?
39:05	Chad Janis	This is the beauty of this industry: if you go to PubMed—are you familiar with PubMed?
39:10	Sam Parr	It's public — it's where studies are, right?
39:12	Chad Janis	Yeah, all the studies are published there. I mean, you put vitamin C in your product and there are thousands of studies about what vitamin C does. Sure, maybe I don't know the precise outcomes of a hundred, 20% blind-sample, placebo-controlled trial, but I can pretty much guess what the outcomes are going to be based on the thousands of other published studies on vitamin C. So, to answer your question, Sam: no—I didn't. Prior to launching, I hadn't done those tests. But I looked through thousands of articles to land on what I believed the right formulation would be for our product. That's also when I tested with consumers pre-launch: "What's your perception of this label? What's your perception of this many gummies, the size of the gummy, this flavor of gummy?" All of that stuff.
40:00	Shaan Puri	"What's on your ideas list that you're not actually going to do? You can riff with us here — brainstorm other brands or ideas that you think are interesting. They may or may not work, but they're interesting."
40:12	Sam Parr	Yeah, and also, you mentioned that you have a Notion doc—if you're comfortable...
40:15	Shaan Puri	If you want to pull up your bank balance, we can also just do that.</FormattedResponse>
40:19	Chad Janis	I'll tell you wiring instructions too. Here's what I'll say: One thing I disagree with is people saying "ideas aren't worth anything." Oh man, do I disagree. I think ideas are worth so much in the right hands — and in my hands, they're in the right hands, I believe. Every founder should believe that about themselves. There are certain ideas I can't share because I'm like, "Guys, I legitimately have an idea that, years from now..." I've still got a lot I want to do with Groons. Actually, there's a lot I want to do with this business. I'm not done here. But years from now, I think there's an idea that no one else is going to be able to run at. There's a $10 billion business idea.
41:00	Sam Parr	"And I'm... you should just say it now. We'll bleep it out and we can react."
41:03	Shaan Puri	"Totally give us, like, a code word or something, so we can — we can at least give you credit for it years later. Hey, like, we're..."
41:09	Sam Parr	We're the wrong heads.</FormattedResponse>
41:11	Chad Janis	When you see it, you'll know. You'll say, "Oh yeah — this is a bill. This is a big business idea." So I don't think anybody's going to do that in the meantime while I'm finishing my chapter here at Grooens and doing what I set out to do.
41:25	Sam Parr	Okay, well—what are some other ideas that, if in the right hands, are great but aren't in your hands?
41:32	Chad Janis	I had this idea one time. It has nothing to do with consumer [products] and I actually almost ran with it around the time I was starting Grooens, and I still think it's a good idea — but I'm not going to be the one to do it. I'm happy to share it now. There is no way to direct the money that you have coming in from direct deposit. That direct deposit hits your checking account, and then we all have to have the willpower to decide, “Oh, put 10% in savings, put this against your bills, do this over here,” etc. What if you become essentially the distribution layer of ACH transfers [ACH = Automated Clearing House]? So the deposit hits this distribution layer before the person has to use willpower to decide what they're going to do with it. This is helpful for so many people. It can wire out their rent, their car payment, something over here, something over there, into their investments, and so on. What actually hits the account they spend from would be, say, $500 for groceries or whatever it is. The technology exists to do this — it just hasn't been structured. I can't remember what platform allows for it, but there's a platform that can facilitate what I just described. So this idea could be done tomorrow.
42:40	Shaan Puri	That's a great idea—whether it's for consumers or for businesses. Have you ever read the book Profit First? Somebody recommended it on the podcast. There was a time when my girlfriend bought me the book The Game before I went to college. We were going to break up and I was like, "You need to learn how to talk to girls." I was like, "Oh, thank you." It was a gift, but it was also a message. My friend told me about this book, Profit First. I think it was a gift and a message: "Hey, you're running this business, you've been doing it for years, but you're not pulling out any profits and you don't know where all the money's going. It's profitable on paper, but you're not getting money out of this." That's a very common business-owner problem. There's this book called Profit First, which has a philosophy that basically says you preset the budget. What most people do is say, "I have this much revenue," then they pay all their expenses and whatever's left over is their profit—like a surprise. You're usually quite disappointed with that surprise. The better way this guy advocates is to set a budget for your P&L. You might say, "I'm going to spend 25% on opex (operating expenses). I need to reserve 20% for taxes so I'm not stressed out every tax season." Then you literally create four separate accounts: a tax account, a checking account, an opex account, and a profit account. > As every dollar comes in, you preallocate it. For example, 20% automatically goes into the tax account and sits in a money-market account until tax season. Your opex account gets its share, and the profit account gets its share. > So each dollar is sliced: 15¢ (15%) to profit, 25¢ (25%) to opex, etc. It’s actually kind of a life-changing idea. It forces discipline. You think you're running pretty lean until you actually have a hard cap on expenses, and then you realize, "Oh—there was way more fat I could trim." I could have been this profitable yesterday; I just let profit be an output rather than an input. But unfortunately, there's not an easy way to do this. You have to set up multiple accounts with your bank and then tell your accountant to keep doing these sweeps every two weeks.
44:45	Sam Parr	Have you guys heard of Simp? Do you guys remember Simpul? I loved Simpul—it was really cool. I don't... I think it's gone. It got... it was one of the very first Silicon Valley banking...
44:56	Shaan Puri	Neobanks
44:57	Sam Parr	Yeah, neo-banks, and it was... I don't know if "neo bank" was a description.
45:00	Chad Janis	Like the envelope system, where you digitally put money into different envelopes, yeah?
45:05	Sam Parr	I didn't make a lot of money at the time, and I wanted to fly home to St. Louis to see my family. It was going to take me four months. When money came into my bank account, I visualized it as if it were still one account. I thought, "This is how much is left." I had $350 in my spending account but another $400 in my vacation account, so I told myself, "Don't touch that money." It was pretty cool. </FormattedResponse>
45:29	Chad Janis	So, Sam — here's what I love about this idea. And Sean, you're actually bringing up why I think this is even potentially more compelling for businesses: if you're changing the way that the P&L works, I mean, venture capital firms want that, because now there's more discipline around the money that they're giving.
45:44	Sam Parr	Totally.
45:44	Chad Janis	The small founders who are making 5 million a year, who want to pull 500,000 out — they want it because now it's like, "I'm forcing myself into that discipline to pull 500,000 out every year." That's a huge use case that I wasn't thinking of in terms of personal. The problem with budgeting today is it's done. I grew up in a family where, at the age of six, I was in Quicken. I had to take every receipt, scan it, and type it in... [inaudible].
46:09	Sam Parr	"Your mom and dad made you do that."
46:10	Chad Janis	My dad taught me budgeting. Yeah, and that's awesome. And like, we were still against debt and everything else. But I had— it was so... it was awesome until there was an imbalance at the end of the month, and I had to go search for the 20¢ that was off.
46:22	Sam Parr	Is that, like, a Mormon thing? Because I think I've got a bunch of Mormon buddies who are very disciplined with their monthly budgeting. </FormattedResponse>
46:29	Chad Janis	Yeah, it might be. Honestly, it might be something that's— I mean, there's a lot of financial discipline in general. But to put the headline on it: what I love about this idea is it solves what I think sucked about the granularity of wasting hours a week or a month typing in all my stuff, right? It also solves the other end. People get to the end of the month and think, "That was actually a hassle to do. Did I change any of my behaviors based on it? I don't know." Then, on the other end, it's like "Mint" back before that got acquired, or whatever. And I think the other one today is "Monarch," which I like—love Monarch. Yeah, more money. It's helpful to see, but Monarch's not really a proactive platform. It's like, "Oh, I'm just getting information."
47:11	Shaan Puri	"What it's about is like: 'I'll tell you how bad you're doing at it' versus 'Hey, let me just fix it for you.'" "Totally. But you wanted to fix it for me — solution?" I really wonder whether, with agents — or given the popularity of Mercury and other popular neo-banks that are pretty product-first and more programmable — somebody could build this on top of one of those banks, or whether they'll end up releasing something like this themselves.
47:37	Chad Janis	I think you get acquired. If you run this business, you're going to be acquired for $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 (about $500 million to $1 billion) in two years if you execute this right. Somebody out there listening right now, feel free to send me a DM when you do it. This idea—the infrastructure exists to be able to do this. If you execute it correctly, you are, one, making a massive impact in millions of people's lives; and two, you will have a financial outcome.
48:01	Sam Parr	"Yeah — what would be cool is if, in 12 months, we can say, 'Hey everyone, we did this podcast with Chad. Here's what he said,' and then play the clip that you just said. Then we're like, 'Here's the update.' Because this is... this is fantastic. This is really cool. We do this segment all the time. This is a top-tier idea."
48:17	Shaan Puri	You have a couple of quotes that you sent us, or kind of philosophies. We always ask people: what are the philosophies you live by that you think are not something everybody does, or that not everybody believes in? You said one of them that I like is "access is everything." You explained how you didn't have a ton of access early on, but through Summit and Stanford you explained your "access is everything" philosophy.
48:40	Chad Janis	Yeah, I think access — and the privilege of having access in the world — is something that, when you don't have it, you should surround yourself with people who do. Do good work for them, and you will get access every time. Then, when you do have it — like the privilege I now have — I see it as your obligation, my obligation, to give that back to others.
48:59	Shaan Puri	So, explain what you mean by "access." What's the personal story? Where—where—where does this kind of [thing] resonate? </FormattedResponse>
49:04	Chad Janis	Yeah. You know, I'm a dude named Chad. I worked in private equity. What you see today would not have existed without people leaning in and giving me incremental access—and me doing good work for them. If you go back, I was always curious about this because you get asked on those questionnaires whether you're middle income, high income, or low income. I was aware of sort of wealth, but if I looked at the income my parents had—and there are seven of us kids (six siblings and me)—I think I was at the bottom end of the class as it was defined. I'm not saying that from a standpoint of shame. I'm grateful to have lived in that area and seen those people, because I think you can solve a lot by just giving awareness to kids about what's possible. It's like the grasshopper moment: once they know, they can go get it. I was recruiting for the big three consulting firms—McKinsey, BCG, Bain—through a contact who put me in touch. I didn't get in, but through another mentor I landed this gig at Lazard. I did really good work; Lazard's an investment bank in New York City—one of the premier firms—working on mergers and acquisitions. That mentor (I'm still close to him; I went in and visited him) gave me access, and that access then landed me at Summit Partners. At Summit Partners I did phenomenal work. I literally invested about 30% of that fund—a $5 billion fund. I sourced the deals that made them money. I did really good work. There's this moment when I got into Stanford where I wondered, "Should I feel bad?" I mean, I've had a ton of accomplishments: I got a 3.95 GPA, I've worked at great places, I even got this white dude named Chad... should I feel bad that I got into Stanford? What I came to appreciate is: no, I shouldn't feel bad knowing the reason I got in is because two people who are very close to the Stanford folks sent a text and a nice letter of recommendation for me. They weren't doing that for nothing—they were doing it because I did good work for them. I made their lives easier. I earned their trust. Maybe I wasn't born into the kind of access where my dad could text Stanford and say, "Let my son in," but you can earn that access by doing good work for the people who do have it. They're often eager to help you achieve that sort of accomplishment. So that's how I think about access. It's part of—when I got asked recently, "What's your legacy..."—that...
51:33	Shaan Puri	"You wanna leave on the world?"
51:34	Chad Janis	And I'm like, you know, it's about 33 years old. But the way I think about it is I want to give that access—access that I've either been granted or earned over the last many years. I want to ensure that more people who spend their lives working with me and putting in good work have access to that.
51:52	Sam Parr	"Dude, you're—you're awesome. You are so cool. I think that when I was younger I met this really successful guy named Scott Belsky, who was the Chief Product Officer of Adobe and an amazing entrepreneur—maybe a billionaire. He used this word with me that I'd never heard before. He said, "I'm gonna invest in you and you need to be a steward of my capital." I was like, "I don't know—what is that word, 'steward'?" I'd never heard it. It's just this idea that you need to be the vehicle that protects and passes on a little bit of greatness. That's kind of how I interpreted it, and you are that person. So, my friend Austin Reif—do you know Austin Reif?"
52:31	Chad Janis	He's one of the Morning Brew founders.</FormattedResponse>
52:35	Sam Parr	He started a company and sold the company for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was 30 years old. He was texting me about a new idea he was working on—brainstorming. I was like, "Do you think it's going to be successful?" He said, "It can be successful if I want it to be." I love that, because what you and he both said was very similar. You have this similar mindset, and I find myself being around him and people like you, and it's contagious.
52:59	Chad Janis	Yeah. You know what — I've thought about whether I should be... I've tried to figure out whether my impact on the world is more narrowly focused on the people who spend hours, thousands of hours, with me working inside of grooves, or if I should have more of an impact publicly, trying to relay some of this message. It's hard, though, to relay all of these experiences that I've had in a public forum that allows millions to learn. But you're totally right, Sam. At the end of the day, why was I able to build what I built? It's because I knew it was possible. I saw it done many, many times by others, and if I ever had a question I could go ping those people. So: network, experiences, awareness of what's possible.
53:41	Shaan Puri	I think there's a different way to say what you just said. The way you put it was kind of like, "I was pretty fortunate that these things happened and I did my part, but they did their part." This happens a lot with entrepreneurs — we sort of stumble and fumble our way to success, then afterwards we can look back and realize it wasn't complete random. In fact, you can recreate the conditions of success more reliably knowing what I know now. Two or three words you just said. The first one is exposure. You really can't imagine what you've never seen. Your brain won't go anywhere if you don't have any exposure to things. I was talking about this with Ben, my business partner, about my kids. I said, "My kids have never been exposed to so much in the world." We literally keep going to the same resorts. They've never seen a third-world country; they've never seen a lot of things. I started bringing them to just do adult stuff with me because I used to only do kids' stuff with my kids. Now what I realized is: let me just bring them along for life. Kids actually love it — they like doing laundry, they like cooking, they work out with me now in the gym every day. They like going with me to meetings. They actually kind of enjoy that because they're getting exposed to new stimuli they've never really seen before. Even if they're five years old and they can't fully grok it, there's some part of it that breaks the fence they had around what the world is. It starts to poke holes and lets new things in. Growing up, I didn't know any entrepreneurs. I didn't know anyone in my entire family. My mom has nine siblings; my dad has four. Out of all of them there were zero entrepreneurs — every single one of them was an engineer. Like a typical Indian family, the highest calling was: get a good job. What's a good job? A six-figure job that has health insurance. That was all I was exposed to. Then my senior year of college I took a class called "Getting Rich" [class title as remembered]. In the very first class the teacher brought in a speaker — a girl who started a T‑shirt company. The next class she brought in a guy who started his own hedge fund. I just looked at them and said, "Why are these guys having all the fun? This sounds awesome — maybe I could do that instead." I was finally exposed to the thing when I was 21, and it changed the trajectory of my life. Had I not had that exposure, it literally would have just not happened. So the first is exposure: how do you get yourself in a position to see new things or help other people see new things? The second is access. The way I would put it for you is earned access, because you said something very casually like, "I did good work for them." I bet if we peeled that back there was a lot there. I bet you over-delivered. I bet you didn't get paid proportionally to what you did, and you didn't whine about it. These are my guesses — tell me if that's true or not. But access is earned through showing that you're somebody who deserves greater opportunities and greater access. You sort of delay the payoff of those actions and have faith that you're going to "kill it" right now, and that the ball will bounce your way over time. You don't need to immediately measure tit-for-tat what you're getting versus what you're putting in.
56:39	Chad Janis	Yeah, I think it's true. Frankly, I'm young — I'm 33 years old — and I think about the impact I want to have on this world. I think it's that first one: exposure. How can I facilitate exposure to everyone, right? Young kids — how do they get exposure? Honestly, I think that's where my wife and I want to make an impact: making it possible, through some effort in the next chapter of my life, to ensure that the random kid who's six or ten years old in a place that would never get exposure to this at least knows what's possible. Because if they know it's possible, maybe they'll go after it themselves every time.
57:16	Sam Parr	"Hey — can I ask you a question that you might not feel comfortable answering... When you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, what do you decide to do with it? Where do you invest the money? And that includes: did you decide to give any away?"
57:28	Chad Janis	Yeah — TBD on it. One of the hardest things I have is I've thought about my impact. It's the same as... I don't even know if I'll invest in other companies. It's not because I don't believe; it's "what's the next best use of a dollar?" It's going to take a lot to convince me that it's something other than what I can go after and do myself. That doesn't mean it's always business-profit centered. I don't always have to make money. Like, can I — Sam — go out and make an impact on the world by taking my own funds and building something special out of it? Something that has an impact, whether it's mentorship, exposure, or whatever it is. So, TBD. I mean, as you know, when you receive money you spend a lot of time thinking about deploying it. You don't want to rush into anything. But I would expect that the more meaningful deployment of my capital is going to come through some personal effort in my life that I do to make an impact.
58:27	Sam Parr	So, well—first of all, can I ask a boring question? Where did you invest the current money? Where'd you invest it—are they just boring index funds, or...? </FormattedResponse>
58:33	Chad Janis	You know, there's a difference between signing and closing. You have to go through regulatory approvals, so we've signed, but the closing happens as soon as it's been approved by the government.
58:45	Sam Parr	So you don't have [it] yet?
58:45	Chad Janis	The money's not been wired yet by the... [speaker trails off]
58:47	Sam Parr	Deal? I don't know what that is. I've not had a deal. There's a threshold.
58:51	Shaan Puri	Yeah. My first acquisition—they just Venmo'd me.</FormattedResponse>
58:57	Sam Parr	Yeah — we haven't... I've not dealt with the Department of Justice yet, so that's pretty cool.
59:02	Chad Janis	That's funny.
59:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah, there's a crazy—there's a crazy story, you know, about the company AppLovin.
59:07	Chad Janis	Yeah, yeah.
59:07	Shaan Puri	My co-founder was the co-founder of AppLovin at the time, so he’s sitting next to me at the office and they signed this deal. I’m like, “Oh my God, you just sold— they sold the company for, I think, $1.2 billion or $2 billion. I forgot which the number was, but $1 or $2 billion,” and I was like, “Wow dude, you did it. You sold a company for a billion dollars— $2 billion, that’s amazing. Should we go? Dinner’s on you.” He’s like, “Dude, we haven’t got the money. It’s gonna be months.” He said, “If it’s over— I forgot what the number is— $750 million, $1 billion, whatever it is— it’s literally like the government.” The way he put it was, “It’s gonna sit on Trump’s desk until he stamps it.” The crazy thing was they sold to a Chinese company, so there was actually a lot of risk. He didn’t know this at the time; he thought it was over. Well, nine months go by, a year almost goes by, and the deal is still not approved. But they’d been running the company—they doubled revenue in that year. So instead of waiting for the approval, what they did was they went and renegotiated. They were like, “Hey, here’s what the $2 billion gets you instead,” and now it gets you 25% of the company instead of whatever— 85, 100%. They renegotiated the deal because the business had grown. It was the best thing that ever happened. They took a minority investment, got some liquidity, and it kept growing. The thing— it’s now, it was like a $100 billion company in the last... </FormattedResponse>
01:00:19	Chad Janis	Yeah.
01:00:19	Shaan Puri	It's last year, right? So it went 100× since then.
01:00:22	Sam Parr	A quick Google — I haven't had time to read all this. I believe the threshold is $130,000,000, where the DOJ [Department of Justice] has to...
01:00:29	Chad Janis	Interesting
01:00:30	Shaan Puri	1:30
01:00:30	Sam Parr	You have to notify the DOJ [Department of Justice] and the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] about anything north of $133,900,000.
01:00:37	Shaan Puri	Dear DOJ, I'm rich. Do you do what you notify?
01:00:41	Chad Janis	There's an official form, and then they're just reviewing it, as they should, to make sure that it's not bad for the consumer.
01:00:48	Shaan Puri	Dude, that's cool — that's awesome. Thanks for coming on, man, and congrats again on building something pretty epic. I remember when I saw the product; it just seemed like, "Oh, that's it." The best products are actually simple like that: the proposition is easy for the customer to understand. It makes sense in the world. It was almost like hidden in plain sight, I feel, in a way. To your credit, you ran with that, you acted on it, and you built something pretty incredible.
01:01:16	Chad Janis	Of course — thank you for having me on. My hope is that three years from now we're talking and you guys are like, "Jeez, dude, we didn't realize there was that much ahead of you." We've got so much. This team wants to do so much and is eager to show the consumers what we've got for them: new products, new innovations, new fun, limited-time offers.
01:01:34	Shaan Puri	"What's the best thing on that shelf I should buy?"
01:01:36	Chad Janis	So, have you tried the HollyPop? We've got some products here that are launching soon. But have you tried our HollyPop... that's...
01:01:41	Shaan Puri	Actually, I've only ever had the original. I know — I didn't even try anything else; I just got the original subscription.
01:01:46	Chad Janis	That's it. So, yeah—you may know this, but we've got gruens, which is the comprehensive nutrition: greens, multivitamin, and fiber. We've got nutrobes, which is a nootropics product. We've got immune, which is almost like an immunity shot—like the 2-ounce bottles but in gummy form. And then we've got juiced, which is this one right here: a "pre-anything" energy product. So, I mean, we've got about 12 innovations in the pipeline. That's what I'm saying—it's so exciting. We've done something so big, but we're maybe five miles into a marathon.
01:02:17	Sam Parr	Good man — thank you so much for coming on. You have an open invite whenever you want. You're a wonderful guy. We're so happy for your success, and it makes us feel good to promote you. So, thank you for coming on. That's it — that's the pod.

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I Went From Broke To $1B+ In just 3 years

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