Hello FLF,
I have been meaning to write this post for a while now but just have not gotten around to it until now. About 4-5 months ago, I read all of the @MJ DeMarco books, starting with Rat Race and then MFL and Unscripted . These books solidified my decision to pursue a life of Entrepreneurship. I have always been an avid reader and read a lot of books about business and entrepreneurship but MJ's books definitely compelled me to want to take action more than anything else I had read.
A little background on who I am and where I come from. I am actually a professional baseball player in the US (not affiliated with MLB...yet). I play in an independent league called the Pioneer League which is made up of teams that used to be minor league affiliates of MLB clubs but are no longer due to Covid, which cut MiLB basically in half. I am 25 years old and began my "professional" career last year after graduating from college last summer. I am a 2x 1st team All-American and was Conference POTY last year. My main goal in my life has always been to play for MLB and will continue to pursue that goal until I cannot pursue it any longer. Anybody in here a scout or front-office member of a MLB club? lol
One of the reasons that I have decided to pursue the entrepreneur life is to provide a life for my amazing wife and our future children. My wife and I have been married for about a year and a half now (been together for almost 6 years). She has actually been one of the main driving forces in eliminating the excuse that since I am playing baseball there is no way for me to make money or have a career since I am devoting so much time to the game. Which leads into what our latest venture is into.
My wife and I both live a very holistic, clean lifestyle, trying to limit the number of toxic things we take in through this world, which is nearly impossible. She was always raised this way by her family and then I was introduced and fell in love with the lifestyle when we met. With the series of events over the past handful of years it appears that this way of living is starting to become quite popular and more people are becoming aware of their health and their environments.
When I was in college, I came up with an idea for a natural sports drink. Since most of my childhood was fueled by Gatorade, I can understand how bad something like Gatorade and other competing brands of sports drinks are. These drinks and all the variations that are still coming out today with different names made me think that there isn't really something completely natural with just whole-food ingredients out there. After a few months of messing around with recipes, I came up with a recipe that I was very confident in that also hydrates well beyond any drink available while being completely natural and healthy. I ended up getting a lot of my teammates and coaches to try it and everybody loved it. Many people even said they would prefer it more than any sports drink they have ever tried. I probably had close to 50 people try it and at worst someone would be indifferent by it and at best say they would order cases of it. So this coinciding with Rat Race Escape landing in my lap(universe really forcing my hand here) really forced me to look into creating something out of it.
My wife's uncle is actually a co-packer who packages drinks in cans so this was a great connection for us to have right out of the gate. So we got together with him and he said he would help us get this going as much as he could. He got us in contact with some can manufacturers who were able to get the design that we had made onto some cans and that's currently where we are today. We have had some bumps along the way, most recently being the compatibility test needed for our drink to be housed in cans. In order for our drink to be canned it has to pass a compatibility test to ensure the beverage is able to be held for 12 months in a can. Our drink is just 4 ingredients that are whole food items so our drink ended up being a little too acidic, so we had to send out a couple more refined batches to get retested. We are confident that these results should be better after speaking with the chemists for the can manufacturer.
This is where I am looking for a little bit of advice from people who have successfully launched a product such as this before. The first batch we are having made is 200 gallons which comes out to about 2100 cans. For online, we are selling 12-packs and 6-packs. We plan on getting in contact with some local small businesses such as health food stores and gyms that might want to test our product in their business. We are about 2 weeks away, barring any setbacks with the test, from having our cans finished and printed. Then after the cans are completed and shipped to our co-packer, we are about 3 weeks away from having finished drink in cans. So for a total of about 5-6 weeks away from having finished product. We have a completed website that is up and running (not yet announced to our followers). I am curious to know what the recommended timeline/preparation needed to announce both the launch of the website and then announce the drink itself. We have been up on social media for a little over a month and have been posting every day on Facebook and Instagram (Instagram has been our main platform thus far). We have not linked the website in any of our bios yet and have not yet announced the drink, would love any advice people would be able to lend.
Look forward to hearing back and updating this post as we go along, Thank you.
I have been meaning to write this post for a while now but just have not gotten around to it until now. About 4-5 months ago, I read all of the @MJ DeMarco books, starting with Rat Race and then MFL and Unscripted . These books solidified my decision to pursue a life of Entrepreneurship. I have always been an avid reader and read a lot of books about business and entrepreneurship but MJ's books definitely compelled me to want to take action more than anything else I had read.
A little background on who I am and where I come from. I am actually a professional baseball player in the US (not affiliated with MLB...yet). I play in an independent league called the Pioneer League which is made up of teams that used to be minor league affiliates of MLB clubs but are no longer due to Covid, which cut MiLB basically in half. I am 25 years old and began my "professional" career last year after graduating from college last summer. I am a 2x 1st team All-American and was Conference POTY last year. My main goal in my life has always been to play for MLB and will continue to pursue that goal until I cannot pursue it any longer. Anybody in here a scout or front-office member of a MLB club? lol
One of the reasons that I have decided to pursue the entrepreneur life is to provide a life for my amazing wife and our future children. My wife and I have been married for about a year and a half now (been together for almost 6 years). She has actually been one of the main driving forces in eliminating the excuse that since I am playing baseball there is no way for me to make money or have a career since I am devoting so much time to the game. Which leads into what our latest venture is into.
My wife and I both live a very holistic, clean lifestyle, trying to limit the number of toxic things we take in through this world, which is nearly impossible. She was always raised this way by her family and then I was introduced and fell in love with the lifestyle when we met. With the series of events over the past handful of years it appears that this way of living is starting to become quite popular and more people are becoming aware of their health and their environments.
When I was in college, I came up with an idea for a natural sports drink. Since most of my childhood was fueled by Gatorade, I can understand how bad something like Gatorade and other competing brands of sports drinks are. These drinks and all the variations that are still coming out today with different names made me think that there isn't really something completely natural with just whole-food ingredients out there. After a few months of messing around with recipes, I came up with a recipe that I was very confident in that also hydrates well beyond any drink available while being completely natural and healthy. I ended up getting a lot of my teammates and coaches to try it and everybody loved it. Many people even said they would prefer it more than any sports drink they have ever tried. I probably had close to 50 people try it and at worst someone would be indifferent by it and at best say they would order cases of it. So this coinciding with Rat Race Escape landing in my lap(universe really forcing my hand here) really forced me to look into creating something out of it.
My wife's uncle is actually a co-packer who packages drinks in cans so this was a great connection for us to have right out of the gate. So we got together with him and he said he would help us get this going as much as he could. He got us in contact with some can manufacturers who were able to get the design that we had made onto some cans and that's currently where we are today. We have had some bumps along the way, most recently being the compatibility test needed for our drink to be housed in cans. In order for our drink to be canned it has to pass a compatibility test to ensure the beverage is able to be held for 12 months in a can. Our drink is just 4 ingredients that are whole food items so our drink ended up being a little too acidic, so we had to send out a couple more refined batches to get retested. We are confident that these results should be better after speaking with the chemists for the can manufacturer.
This is where I am looking for a little bit of advice from people who have successfully launched a product such as this before. The first batch we are having made is 200 gallons which comes out to about 2100 cans. For online, we are selling 12-packs and 6-packs. We plan on getting in contact with some local small businesses such as health food stores and gyms that might want to test our product in their business. We are about 2 weeks away, barring any setbacks with the test, from having our cans finished and printed. Then after the cans are completed and shipped to our co-packer, we are about 3 weeks away from having finished drink in cans. So for a total of about 5-6 weeks away from having finished product. We have a completed website that is up and running (not yet announced to our followers). I am curious to know what the recommended timeline/preparation needed to announce both the launch of the website and then announce the drink itself. We have been up on social media for a little over a month and have been posting every day on Facebook and Instagram (Instagram has been our main platform thus far). We have not linked the website in any of our bios yet and have not yet announced the drink, would love any advice people would be able to lend.
Look forward to hearing back and updating this post as we go along, Thank you.
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