Project Hail Mary is an awe-inspiring masterpiece. I'm not an astronaut. Critics are in agreement. It's utterly spellbinding. So, I met an alien. Mesmerizing and profoundly moving. No, I never. Thumbs up, baby. Project Hail Mary. Amazing, amazing, amazing. In cinemas now. I mean, man, my life's been so wild. When I was 19 years old, I was going off a big jump, and I landed on my back, shattered my spine, and was paralyzed instantly. That was literally rock bottom. This is Ryan Chen, a guy who let no obstacle stand in his way. I worked in the organic chemistry lab, and I worked at Hulu, and then I think I found my true calling in just like being a builder, being an entrepreneur. So, he went all in. I cashed out my 401k to get like the first R&D samples, to pay for legal fees, to form the company. We're basically just living off of like credit card points, and then using the company funds for just meals, and just that was it. After four years of grit, the business finally worked. We were at Sky High off-sharp tank. The business was growing, and I was like, somebody's going to try to take this business away from us. Some ladies sued us. We would have won if we got to court, but getting us to court would have bankrupted us. This is the story of how Ryan Chen and his best friend Kent built a $100 million company by overcoming the odds. Welcome to Starter Story. Ryan grew up in an immigrant family of entrepreneurs. With a natural ambition to become more, he started his childhood playing sports at an extremely high level. National Kendo team, cross-country state champ, but when he went to college, his ambitions to become an athlete took a turn. When I was 19, I was at a friend's birthday party, and I was going off a big jump out in Big Bear, California, and I over-rotated on the jump, and I landed on my back, shattered my spine, and was paralyzed instantly. And literally my life changed in a split second, and I basically spent six months in the hospital, going through surgeries, going back to school part-time and also part-time rehab, and that was literally rock bottom. In my own head, I would go through scenarios where I'm just going to be a burden, I'm going to slow people down. Is this life worth living? You go down this spiral, right? And that was about a year, two years of really depression and figuring out what can I make of this situation. Ryan was really struggling to accept his new self, but luckily he had some true friends by his side. It took one of my best friends, Marcus, to convince me, like, hey, come on this trip with us. We're road-tripping from LA to Austin. We're filming this documentary called No Cameras Allowed. That was the first big trip I did with the Groover friends after my accident, and I think I was like, one, yes, I can travel. Two, I felt like I was closed off before. I only wanted to talk to people who knew me, versus now I'm like, this is who I am, this is what I represent. I think this fundamental mindset shift for me is, oh, I can do this. The reason why I'm alive and I'm well is because of the support system I've had, and I'm extremely grateful for having two parents that supported me, sister, all my friends and family that, without pushing me, they were just there. One of my best friends said that, hey man, you're still the same guy, but now you're just in the chair chilling. My perspective also is like, oh, I'm still the same person. I just get from point A to point B in a wheelchair, and sometimes I'm faster because wheels are pretty fast. One of Ryan's biggest supporters was his college best friend and eventual business partner, Kent. I met him my first day freshman year in college, so it was like one of those things, you meet somebody and you click, we bonded over, video games, super smash, and we just stayed friends. We would go out to eat, we'd go out to party, we'd bond over fitness. He was training, like, I think, six hours a day at the time. With both of them having a passion for fitness, the boys were constantly looking for ways to increase their performance during training. I was training for the Paralympic team at the time. Kent was training with the Olympic Judo team out in Japan, and we were both very focused on fitness at this point. We were taking pills during training for not just energy, but for focus especially, and the pills were made in Kent's dorm room, mixing powders, rastatans, parastatans for things like lucid dreaming, different types of creatine, and we've changed the formula so many times, right? We hope that could be the recipe that's that secret formula recipe that people want. Not thinking much about it, Kent and Ryan were experimenting with different pill formulas and getting different results. Then, one day, Ryan got an email that would end up sparking an idea. I got this group on email for, you know, 50% off on scuba diving, and I knew that Kent would be down, and we were both in between graduation and starting our first jobs, and I was like, hey, do you want to get scuba certified? And of course, he said yes. And so, we're on this boat. We meet all these really cool people getting scuba certified with us. We didn't have these energy pills, but even if we did, I think sharing it with people you just met would be like, oh, no, I'm okay. That was the aha moment of like, what if we can make supplementation more accessible and approachable by putting these great ingredients instead of pill form into gum and nits? And that was our idea. The seed was planted, but Ryan and Kent couldn't risk everything to follow this dream. So, they had to go get real jobs. So, I started off as a financial analyst for Hulu. Kent worked as a music producer for Sony Music. We both just had this idea in the back of our heads, like we want to launch neurogum. This is such a great idea, but one, we didn't have the funding to do it. And two, no one taught us about how to start a company or how to build a business. So, we were both kind of just saving up some money and then putting that into the business of like starting some type of fund. And I cashed out my 401k, which I highly don't recommend people doing, but that was the risk that we were willing to take. It was just like a year of like R&D, trying to find a manufacturer that would even pick up our calls and take us seriously. Ryan and Kent knew they had to follow their dream. So, they went all in, spending all their savings on the initial research and development and a couple of samples. And finally, they got the product back. We had all these different formulas and I would sample them around to like all of my co-workers at Hulu. So, like my managers, other people in the finance team, my manager was like, yo, mother effer. He was like, I was up till 3 a.m. I couldn't sleep. And I was like, that's a me. I was like, so the product works. He was like, yeah, product works, but I couldn't sleep because there's like, you know, he was just like so wired and so I knew that we had something. Ryan and Kent finally had something great, but literally $0 to make another batch and market it to customers. With their backs against the wall, the boys had one last desperate shot to make their dream come true. Crowdfunding. We officially launched on Indiegogo. Kent, luckily, was a big redditor. So he got the Reddit and Utropics group to support. And I think we hit like our goal of 30k in like three or four days. Time Magazine wrote an article saying like, Captain Mayday to Gum is now a thing. And then we got invited to Dr. Oz. And all of a sudden we had a lot of people, moms, who watched Dr. Oz buying the gum and it worked. Ryan is proof that with a good idea and some attention, you can start moving products and make money. 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If you want to stop wasting tons of time and launch your brand website quickly, head to hostinger.com slash starter story and use the code starter story for 10% off. They're running a huge sale right now and you'll want to take advantage of it while you can. Now back to Ryan's story. After seeing some initial success and raising $30,000 from strangers on the internet, Ryan and Kent knew it was time to truly get their hands dirty. When we first launched, we were working at Hulu and Sony Music, respectively, for Kent for like a year and a half. The first 4,000 pounds of gum was sitting in Kent's apartment. We didn't have a warehouse. Kent's apartment in downtown LA was the warehouse and we'd ship 4,000 pounds of gum going to USPS every day. In those moments, we were like, okay, things are working. It's like a slow grind. And the first year, I think we did like a little over 100K and then year two was like 750K. And then we're like, oh, wait, this is like, this can be a real thing. Two years into the business, the boys realized that Nuro has outgrown Kent's apartment and they have a tough choice before them. Keep it as a side hustle or go all in. I think Kent and I both trusted each other. We knew that this product helped a lot of people and we had so much user feedback and we would see the number of repeat buyers and the percentage of repeat buyers as a percent of revenue. So we knew that we had some type of base and some type of adoption rate. So when we first left our jobs, it felt very real when we no longer had a stable paycheck, right? We had to like survive off of like what we were making and like eat what you kill kind of per se. Year three, year four, I don't think we took any salary. I think we're basically just living off of like credit card points and then using the company funds for just meals and just that was it. I was playing semi-professional poker to kind of make rent. We had so many inventory challenges. Couldn't get the products in time. We were sold out. We weren't uncertain about freight costs, raw ingredients. We've had products that get stuck on the border. That's like three, four, five, six weeks out of border and then you're just losing money. There's so many things that you go through in the business that are not glitz and glamour. It's like a grind and you're kind of in the trenches and at the end of the day, it's like, who do you want to go into battle with? And I'm like, I want to go into battle with my best friend because I trust him. Ryan and Kent are struggling to get neuro to the point of a stable, scalable business, not just a startup. They're desperately looking for a way to crack the code and then something crazy happens. 2019, a group of investors were just like, hey guys, you guys have such a great story. You should tell the story. I think Shark Tank would be a great way for you guys to tell the story. They convinced us. I didn't want to do it to be completely honest. Kent was like, we should do it. Like they're right. It's great for marketing, but it's really great to get an investment. We got two offers that were like below what we were asking for and Kent and I just had this floor. We're like, we're just not going to go below this and we stuck to our guns. The boys walked away from the sharks with no money in their pockets, but little did they know the exposure and connections they just got would change their lives forever. It's been like a step change, right? It's not just like linear or just hockey stick. It's like you grow and then it's the best and then there's another big milestone that you hit. I think we had a big step change with Shark Tank. The business was growing and I was like, somebody's going to try to take this business away from us. Some ladies sued us for a trademark. We would have won if we got to court, but getting us to court would have been grossed out of us. And I reached out to investors, friends and no one really was that helpful. Four years and thousands of hours of work poured into this business. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. But then Ryan remembered a guy named Daniel Lubetsky, one of the sharks from Shark Tank. Hail Mary. I DM'd Daniel Lubetsky on Instagram and I said, hey Daniel, I don't know if you remember me, but me and Kent were on Shark Tank. You were our guest judge. We loved you. You mentioned that if I'd ever needed some advice I could reach out to you, I'd really need your help on something. And he messaged me back and I told him about this trademark lawsuit about this lady who was suing us. He hopped on a phone call with us right away for 18 months, consulted us, defended us. He was talking to his lawyers, our lawyers, their lawyers, her. He was like, hey listen, at the end of the day, if this goes to court, you know Ryan and Kent are going to win based on merit. And it's going to cost you a lot of money and it's going to cost me a lot of money because I'm going to back all their legal fees. And Kent's like, oh, like, you know, she's worth like $300 million and Daniel Lubetsky's like, I'm worth $3 billion. Turns out not making a deal on Shark Tank didn't matter. They made a friend that would save their business. And with all the legal stuff cleared, Nero went on a well-deserved growth hot streak. You know, we've been really fortunate with organic earned media. So like I said, Shark Tank was huge for us. We've had a lot of major celebrities kind of talk about our product organically. Ashley Graham, a lot of professional baseball players. Steve Aoki is actually a huge newer user. Joe Rogan, big fan of Nero. He talks about it organically. None of that's paid. Andrew Schultz. A lot of people just have been picking up Nero and just kind of talking about it. So I think we're a top 10 tick-tock shop brand. We're continuing to go viral on different videos that people are repurposing from Joe Rogan mentioning us or Shark Tank or different videos that our teams are doing. But it's just all kind of compounds and ads. I think, like I said, it's like years one through five is like the hardest part to get to that kind of inflection point. It was until like year seven where we're really taking like a very good salary and things started to click. We are now doing almost $10 million a month. One of the things that we're really proud of is like we had employee satisfaction survey and I think we had like 96% satisfaction rate. That's like my most proud stat this year. Despite the revenue like has been amazing. It's just like to see the team engage and to see the organizations that we can help impact and donate to like good causes like it's been awesome. I mean, man, my life's been so wild. You know, it's like obviously like no one expects to go through an accident that I've gone through. But then to be able to pick yourself up from rock bottom through the support of others. It's surreal. You know, it's really wild. And I asked my dad one time, I was like, hey, like how do you define success? And this was years after my injury. My dad said that success is defined by how high you bounce. Hey, Saints Breeze, we get through so many snacks. Have you got anything to help me save? Well, we're always matching and lowering prices. So hundreds of Saints Breeze fresh fruit, veg and everyday products are price matched to Aldi. And every week with Nectar, you can save money on thousands of the products your family loves. So you can snack away knowing you're saving money. Saints Breeze, good food for all of us. Selected products, Aldi price match not in an eye. Nectar prices require Nectar account. Terms at saintsbees.co.uk slash aldiprismatch and netto.com slash prices terms. It's back from rock bottom. And that really stuck with me because he was like, you know, you hit rock bottom and you fucking bounce back higher than anybody could have imagined. And so, yeah, I feel like I'm happier now than I was as an angsty teenager when I was like 18, 19. And I think there's whenever there's like a door that closes, I think there's like two more that open. And I think it's just like about you just going through that door. Ryan is proof that entrepreneurship is for everyone. Doesn't matter your current situation or your current skills or your current income. The truth is nothing will ever be perfect. So you just have to start. If you don't start, then all the dreams you have in your head will have a 0% chance of coming to life. I hope you guys are all inspired after watching Ryan's story. And I hope it's enough for you to just take that one step of action today. And if you're ready to take that first step today, then you should definitely download our free deep dive of 50 AI business ideas that you can start right now. I put a link at the bottom of the description. So just head over there if you want me to send those over to you. All right, I'll see you in the next one. Peace.
