As the Co-Founder & CEO of Graymatter Labs, Jim Phillips is currently creating plant based alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs. Prior to Graymatter, he spent his career in early stage growth in both B2B & B2C SaaS platforms focused on digitizing commerce.
Jim helped build Charm.io to acquisition in 2022. He was a Former Leadership Team at Ritual responsible for the Midwest Region of the US market 0->$40M revenue. He also served a tenure at Ritual including launching the US market with Chicago as the company's first expansion city in 2016.
Prior to Ritual, Jim co-founded Fooda ($34M raised) & was on the founding team at HighGround (acq. July 18').
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- [00:40] Intro
- [01:19] Discovering a revolutionary product
- [02:44] How D2C insights sparked a new venture
- [04:14] Finding the right supplier for your product
- [06:03] The black box of contract manufacturing
- [07:16] Learning Meta ads to drive initial sales
- [08:04] Launching subscriptions for wider reach
- [09:09] Episode sponsors: StoreTester and Intelligems
- [12:22] The power of networking at industry events
- [12:55] Overcoming a life-threatening health challenge
- [14:42] Deciding to go all-in after a life-altering event
- [15:54] Discovering your true customers through feedback
- [17:28] Using data over ego to make better decisions
- [18:32] How customer interactions shape your brand
- [19:31] How to stay resilient through business challenges
- [20:22] Solving growth challenges with the right strategy
- [21:12] Graymatter for better focus and productivity
Resources:
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You really just have to use the data over your ego, right, and go with what is working. Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host Chase Clymer, and I believe running a direct consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results. I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business. Let's get on with the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming the show Jim Phillips. Jim is the co-founder and CEO of Grey Matter, the makers of BrightMind, the first drinkable ADHD supplement, Jim. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to get into it. All right. BrightMind, talk to me about this product quickly before we go back in time. What is it so people understand the product and what we're going to end up talking about? Yeah. It's a drinkable ADHD supplement. It's a combination of 27 active ingredients, so tropics, adaptogens, and it really helps you focus and people take it in place of prescription stimulants or to take less prescription stimulants. Absolutely. Well, take me back in time. Where do the idea for this product come from? So I was an entrepreneur at a really young age and 26 and I was in over my head. I didn't know what I was doing and like many people, I started taking prescription stimulants, started drinking too much coffee and thinking that that was going to help me get ahead and ultimately it led to lots of anxiety, lots of burnout, and not a lot of success. And so I started to think there's got to be a better way for this and I started studying how to have better periods, longer periods of productivity naturally and I did two things. I started meditating, learned how to meditate, those are very, very impactful for me. And then I learned that no tropics and adaptogens in a plant-based substances can actually help your cognition in a very functional manner. So I read up a lot about that and used it for myself and it was really successful. This was maybe 15 years ago, 10 years ago. And when I would talk about it, it was just really obvious that people had no idea what I was talking about. They didn't know what a nootropic was and it kind of looked at me crazy. So I knew from that point there's an opportunity to help spread the awareness of this. But to take you back to how I actually started doing this as a brand, prior to Grey Matter, I was a co-founder on the founding team at a company called Charm.io. Charm tracks every direct-to-consumer brand in the world. It's basically a database of Shopify brands and other platforms. And now the reason that's interesting is because they're actually kind of hard to detect for the incumbents' data warehouses. Like the Zoom infos of the world have trouble identifying Shopify stores. So the founder of that company built the technology to detect it. I helped build the go-to-market plan for Charm, did all the customer-facing activity with a really small team but we grew it up to seven figures in revenue and then actually sold it to a e-commerce aggregator in New York, a commerce SaaS aggregator in New York called Swiftline and then I stayed on to to run Charm before that company. So spending all my time analyzing direct-to-consumer brands and it just made me really want to start one on my own. And so I've always had this idea that the awareness of client-based supplementation could really work for focus if people just had more access to it and knew more about it. And so I teamed up with a PhD molecular biologist and we started formulating the combination of ingredients that ultimately came bright-minded around 2021 and we launched in 2022. Talk to me about that timeline a little bit more though. So when you decided to go all in on building your own business and taking the concept that eventually became bright-minded as the product, how long did it take you to go from like this? All right, I'm going to do this to I have a sample. Yeah, it was really hard to find the right supplier. There's a ton of co-manufactures out there, there's companies that advertise themselves trying to have it look like it's a get rich thing, make a supplement and come this, you're going to make millions of dollars and it was cognizant of that and I wanted to make sure we found the right partner and it took a while and you know it's going pretty well. But that I think was the longest period to get to the sample was finding the right partner. That maybe took a few months and also just working on what exactly we wanted to put in it. It was really important to us that we made something that you could feel and feel quickly. There's other supplements out there that have similar claims to ours but you know I'm biased obviously but there is an objective difference. We have 3x more ingredients than the next closest competitor. So it was important to us that it really worked and we worked with the PhD to formulate it, finally got our manufacturer on board that we partnered with and from there the samples actually you know came pretty quickly. So we tested you know with ourselves and also you know with focus groups for over a period of probably three, four months and then ultimately landed on the formula that we have to. How many conversations did you have with different manufacturers before you kind of found the right one? Man probably eight and looked at a bunch of others. I think that there's a business in like the yelp of a contract manufacturer right? Because there's no feedback on whether or not the customers like them or you know how organized they are or what their turnaround times are or what their prices are compared to other people. You have to go and figure it out yourself and make a spreadsheet and you know track what you like and don't like about them. I don't know if that exists if it does somebody could send it to me but you know it's kind of a black box when it comes to finding your manufacturing partners. Yeah it comes up quite often on this show and definitely heck even on Reddit I'll see people getting burned by their manufacturer and the first question was like how many did you look at? They're like I went with the first one. It's like no you never do that. Oh you can do this great alright I'm in. Yeah it's not the best way to do it. Alright so you've got a great partner you've got a great product you believe that you've kind of iterated on and you've tested so walk me through the go to market in the launch strategy how did you you know how did you put this thing out into the world. Yeah so we tried to launch it with friends and family and social media and get kind of UGC style shares and you know it didn't really work it's been a slow roll right when we started. We ultimately after a few months of that in getting the product out we ultimately started working on meta and generating sales off of meta ads I had zero experience with it. We did end up getting some help just from people that I knew in the industry that had worked on meta but that's how we made our first sales. Ultimately we ended up launching subscription which was a big help for us in terms of generating consistent revenue we launched subscription in probably summer of 2022 and you know from there it definitely started to increase and you know we got it to people that are outside of our bubble right our friends and family bubble and we started getting really really good feedback you know people telling us that the product was changing their life and just really saying astonishing things things that to me I didn't expect but I was obviously happy to hear and then the retention on our subscribers was very good you know into our third and fourth month we were maintaining 60 to 65 percent of the monthly cohorts. So that to me was was a really big indicator that we probably have something here because people were were speaking with their dollars and continue to buy the product and also telling us things that you know we're very very positive. 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So it's a bit of a unique story but I started getting sick in August of last year and I had at a fever every day I had night sweats that were crazy I had you know muscle aches I was just super fatigued and it ultimately went on for 72 days straight towards the end of that I was seeing cancer specialists I there was numerous doctors that I went to no one could figure out what was wrong with me everyone kept telling me that I had a virus and that I just had to wait it out and I'm sitting there thinking it's been too much how much much longer do you want me to wait but I literally thought I was going to die towards the end of this because no one had any answers and I ended up getting a behind spot in my right eye and I went to an eye doctor or written a specialist and ultimately he identified that there was bacteria in my and through that I guess it's a very good indicator of something called endocarditis which is an infection in your heart and so I somehow had an infection in my heart I still actually don't know how I got it but you know once I finally figured out what was wrong with me it was ecstatic I was really happy but by the time I got to the hospital they did some tests on me and determined that I needed to have open heart surgery to save my life like quickly the endocarditis was essentially destroying my aortic valve and I needed to have surgery to to fix it and do it fast so that was um around the same time last year that that gray matter and our product pipeline really started taking off and we we seven x star subscribers in q4 of last year we started getting um you know just very very very positive feedback and so I'm sitting in the house we're recovering from this you know very existential moment and uh you know getting the feedback that our product is changing other people's lives and it just made a lot of sense to me that I should go all in on this like this is how I should use my second chance at life um it didn't make sense for me just to go back to you know things how they were as normal when you know their had this opportunity to help a lot more people based on some of the the feedback we were getting at the time so I ended up deciding to go all in after our fully recovered so that was in February of this year and we've been doing it ever since that's amazing and you know it definitely puts things into perspective you know do you want to sit on zoom calls all day long or do you want to build something and and impact some lives yeah this is exactly what I was thinking it's like did I just go through all that just to get back on the same zoom calls it just didn't seem right talk to me a bit about uh these customers that are having such a great response to the product and and uh you kind of thought it would be gamers at one point but talk to me what it actually ended up being yeah so you know I've been through a lot of startup companies and either as a founder or early team and you know just kind of this um the rule is that you have to have a very niche market when you start right and that's what people think and um ultimately we thought that could be gamers and we designed the packaging kind of the messaging for it and it didn't really end up resonating with them it was kind of too sophisticated for them they already had some of their own products that they used to this right they're drinking Mountain Dues and like other shit um and so we just uh naturally through people buying it and looking at customer feedback found that that people with ADHD are really resonating with the product um and you know it's helping them have an alternative and you know ultimately the premise of the company is really become to make plant-based alternatives to over prescribed pharmaceutical drugs um you know things like Adderall and Vivance and you know we're not against that in any way but we just feel like there should be an alternative and you know we could see in the future making something that is an alternative for um anxiety like Xanax or for sleep ambient um so you know there's multiple ways that we can take this but ultimately just through our customer feedback found that is really helpful for ADHD. Absolutely and it's always you know listening to your customers and pivoting to where they want you to be I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to hear that and learn that because what you think is the reason people like your product may not be it and coming to terms with you know not necessarily being right but still finding some success like I've seen some folks double down on the wrong ICP because they that's what they thought it should be and it's like at the end of the day just let the market decide. Totally and it has more to do than than just that right um with ads with with anything that you put out there that has an opportunity to collect feedback from your audience you really just have to use the data over your ego right and and go with what is working. There's been ads that we've created just statics that I thought were terrible and they've ended up being the best ad that we've we've ever had you know so I think there's a lot of examples of that where you really got to look at the data if you want to make the best decision. Oh yeah that's that's perfect uh especially I guess while you guys are finding success by no means are you a household name and you know I think a lot of young entrepreneurs get caught up in the idea of like things being off brand and then therefore not taking that swing in like marketing or advertising um everything you don't have a brand it's kind of like what I want to say it's like yeah a 10 million dollar your business doesn't have a brand in my opinion like they're you don't have a brand until people know who you are and like the zeitgeist. Yeah and the interactions of customers and word of mouth you know speaking about your brand is gently you know generally what creates the brand you can kind of give them the seeds of what you think it should be um but ultimately other people make your brand uh you know when it comes to how you appear in the market um I think that's maybe controversial to say but I think that's what you're getting at. We've talked a lot about kind of the growth that you've seen over the last year or so um any lessons learned in 2024 as and you know anything on the horizon as we're looking into 2025 and obviously we're recording this right before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Yeah you know I view this as just a series of problem solving you know once you get past kind of the getting up and running zero to one um then you got you got new sets of problems and it's just maintaining the the right attitude every day getting through you know the difficulties that you know you're trying to overcome in that moment you know there's very specific things that I'm working on fixing right now um but but ultimately there's going to be new ones after that and so I think it's just having the right mindset that this is going to be a journey and kind of enjoying it as you go um we we do have a potential partnership with limited supply where they're going to document us going from kind of where we're at now to multi seven figures in revenue and partnering with um an agency called Rover to do so um so we've been getting some help with our media buying some of our other stuff and really just the premise is you know how do you grow any commerce business from one that's kind of bubbling like where we're at with a decent amount of revenue but really take it to to an actual brand like we've been talking about and and multiple seven figures in revenue and documenting what happens and those kind of problems you have to solve along the way so look out for that um and also more flavors more products um you know these next couple months I think are going to be really really fun for us and I'm just excited to have more people try the product. Absolutely speaking of trying the products if I'm listening to this show you're obviously you put a lot of work into it you're very passionate about it if I want to check it out or should I go which I do? Yeah go to try gray matter.com t-r-y-g-r-a-m-a-t-t-e-r this is what it looks like and um you just mix it up in water and drink it and uh people drink it in the morning people drink it in the afternoon you can kind of find when um you know you like your best but uh yeah it should give you just some some clarity in a decent amount of productivity time to do what you got to do. Awesome Jim thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own businesses. You can find all the links of the show notes. You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestlycomers.co to get each episode delivered right into your inbox. If you're enjoying this content consider leaving a review on iTunes that really helps us out. Lastly if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help you get your Shopify store to the next level reach out to to electriceye at electriceye.io/connect. Until next time.
On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Jim Phillips. Jim is the Co-Founder & CEO of Graymatter, the makers of Bright Mind - the first drinkable ADHD supplement.
We talk about using data over ego to make better decisions, how customer interactions shape your brand, finding the right supplier for your product, and so much more!
