For our latest edition of ‘start-up stories’ I had the pleasure of talking to Calloway Cook, founder of Illuminate Labs about their story, brand, and some major takeaways from their journey thus far. Here’s a look our chat:
“4 out of 5 herbal supplements don't contain their active ingredients.”
What’s your origin story?
I became interested in supplements around 2018, I had never taken any dietary supplements prior, but I began building a stack, I became interested in nootropics, the science behind gingko and ginseng, and some of these compounds that can improve cognition and focus, etc. I was living in New York at the time, when a landmark study from the Attorney General came out, stating four out of five off the shelf herbal supplements don't contain the active ingredients. That's gotten slightly better since but it obviously concerned me as someone who was taking multiple a day. So, I reached out to the manufacturers of every supplement I was taking and none of them would send me the test results. One of them even said our legal team won't allow us to send it to you. And I was like, that’s a weird thing to say to a customer. At that point, I was already looking to start a company, so the timeline aligned, and what made this business model viable was the fact that the testing doesn't cost much compared to the manufacturing, once I saw that, I was like, we really have a business here!
What’s one word to describe your brand?
“we publish third party test results on the product pages…accessible for anyone to see.”
What are you looking to disrupt?
We're the most transparent herbal supplement company in the US. What that means is we publish third party test results on the product pages, so you don't have to ask for them, they're just available and accessible for anyone to see. Not only do we publish the raw data we have a concise document that visually summarizes it, which to my knowledge, there's still no other companies who are transparently publishing this info to prove the supplements you're taking are accurately labeled, low in contaminants, and as potent as advertised.
How are you making a positive impact in the world?
On the product side, reducing the contaminant intake for the average consumer could hopefully shift the industry in this direction, it could incentivize suppliers to have cleaner products and lead to a better supply chain, ultimately resulting in more products being pure and clean.
“we’re helping shift purchase decisions to healthier ones.”
On the content side, we’ve published a blog called Illuminate Health, which is very popular and drives most of the traffic to our site. The blog alone gets over half a million page views a month. It's all organic, no paid ads at all. The content we publish on the blog is a research-based analysis of health products and health trends. For example: maybe there's a health trend popular on TikTok, we're going to investigate the formulation of the product, give our opinion on whether it's likely to be effective based on clinical research. That reaches more people than the products themselves, and for all those people, we’re helping them shift their purchase decisions to healthier ones.
Who can benefit the most from your solution?
Our target audience tends to be well educated, they’re PhD’s, nurse practitioners, and others with advanced degrees who’ve already done their own research to recognize this problem. That's who our early adopters are… but of course, we want to break into the mainstream because unfortunately, the average American consumer doesn't really know what’s in that bottle when they go to GNC and buy a supplement off the shelf. On our team we have a staff of doctors, medical experts, and registered dieticians, which resonates with our audience. For those early adaptors who go to our site and see other medical experts associated with what we're doing… that creates trust and assurance, it feels good for them to know for example - this supplement isn't going to have a ton of lead in it, which is a legitimate concern especially with herbal supplements that are grown outdoors.
What’s the experience you’re looking to create?
We prioritize ease of use, and UI. We do a lot of testing on the product pages, even on the blog, just to make sure there's no UX issues. The experience we want to facilitate is seamless, so there's no frustration at all, no matter what device you're on or the country you're logging in from. It’s obviously a continual process, I'm happy with the way the site is now we've made a huge amount of progress, but we have a lot of plans to make it significantly better as well.
Are you building a group of loyal followers?
Absolutely, most of our customers are repeat customers. When someone signs up, we have two payment options a one-time purchase and a subscription plan. Around 90% of customers get at least one additional product which is a good sign of our product quality and brand.
As far as the content side, we also get a large amount of repeat traffic, even though we drive much of our traffic through search, we're getting over 50,000 people a month directly coming to our site, not even from email or social that's just people going into the URL. They probably have us bookmarked and are coming to see the new content we published since we're adding something new almost every day. On top of that, I personally get a lot of emails where someone may have read our other reviews and now, they're looking to us for advice on another category.
Life as an entrepreneur…
What frustrates you?
The time it takes to find great, communicative service partners. Every startup has a need for service partners in different categories including technical, accounting, legal. It can take a long time and a lot of bad experiences before you end up with a great team of service partners you trust.
what scares you?
Nothing, I think every entrepreneur obviously is scared that their company will fail but that's just a part of the process.
what encourages you?
We’re building a strong brand, we have so many people coming to us directly now and we are becoming more of a known name in the health space.
Tell Me a time you took a risk, what did you learn?
When we first launched, we had to take a lot of risks to see what worked. We tried a lot of things on the paid ads side, we tried a lot of different ways to scale the business and pretty much all of them failed. We tried, everything from Amazon ads to Reddit ads to Facebook ads, I don't know anything about paid ads, and it just went horribly. We didn't spend much money because we were on a limited budget, so you test all these things small scale, we didn't have much money in the bank, but it was still risky for us to even go through $8k to $10k. It took me longer than it probably should have because the one thing that I do know about and I'm an expert in is content marketing, SEO. So, if I could have reversed the order, I would have done SEO before doing paid ads.
What are some resources that You’d recommend?
I would recommend that anyone publishing content, start by looking at Google's resources. Don't look at a summary on some site that's monetizing it, it's never going to be more accurate than Google's resources. I see a lot of sites doing it wrong, it's a little bit more tedious because it's more thorough, but if you're going to write 100’s of articles, you should take a weekend, drink a lot of coffee, and extensively read through it all so you don't end up doing something that's going to just get your site penalized.
What advice would you Give to other startups?
“ test things in small scale before having to raise money.”
The more you can structure your business to test things in small scale before having to raise money the better. I see this on Reddit all the time where people will say I have $500 to start a company… and I’m like, you can't start a business, I'm sorry, you're going to end up either wasting your own time or giving up 95% of your company. My advice for those people is to work a job, save up a little bit money, take it to an MVP version because then you have some leverage and then maybe you find a way to scale the business before you ever need to raise significant money. If we had raised VC money, we might be scaling in a way that's not actually good for the business or for our customers.
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