#30 - Reinventing the Energy Drink

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Aaron Hinde** (0:34)
We were at a party, and I'm handing out 5-HTP, milk thistle, B vitamins, because we're up for basically two and a half days dancing, probably a good time. My business partner now, Orion and I, started talking the day after taking all the supplements. He's like, hey, we thought we should package these supplements up. Instead of having to buy full bottles of each, we thought, well, let's put all these in a beverage. Can we actually pull this off?
So we go super thin because we burn through all our savings starting the company. And I mean, we're eating like mac and cheese and tuna every night. I got two kids at the time living in a 400 square foot trailer. We were doing like eight cases a month there. So we're like, shit, there's something here.
We used to ring the bell in the office, you know, when we get a new gym. And it was like, oh, the first month we got like 12 gyms. We were so stoked. The next month we got 30

**SPEAKER_4** (1:22)
Then we got 50

**Aaron Hinde** (1:23)
Then we were hitting like 200 a month.
Right? So it starts adding up quick. It went from 700 grand to 4 million in one year.

**Shaan Puri** (1:31)
So where do you think this goes? How big does this get?

**Aaron Hinde** (1:33)
Over a billion.

**Shaan Puri** (1:38)
Five million is not enough.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:39)
Ten million.

**Shaan Puri** (1:40)
Fifteen million. Twenty million dollars.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:41)
Hundred million dollars. Half a billion.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:42)
Eight hundred and fifty million dollars.

**Shaan Puri** (1:44)
One or two people in a bedroom actually put threats to these like giant multi-million dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:53)
Add another zero to that price, buddy. Add two more zeros.

**Shaan Puri** (2:00)
Every week, we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast. I started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that we find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the bank?
I asked them, how did you spend your money now that you're rich? And what would you do if you were starting over from scratch again today? If you're like me and you want to own your own business instead of living a nine to five job, this is the podcast for you. The hustle presents My First Million.
So I just took a sip of LifeAid's new CBD drink. So I'm here with founder of LifeAid, Aaron Hinde. LifeAid is a new sort of energy drink company. Do you like being called an energy drink?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:54)
Functional beverage.

**Shaan Puri** (2:55)
That's less catchy.

**Aaron Hinde** (2:56)
It's less catchy, but there's a lot of negativity associated with energy.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:59)
That's why I paused.

**Shaan Puri** (3:00)
I was like, I don't want to call it that. But basically, if you're like me...

**Aaron Hinde** (3:03)
Clean energy would be a better description.

**Shaan Puri** (3:06)
I don't want to drink Red Bulls and Monsters myself. I'm not going to put that in my body. And so LifeAid is like an alternative. So founder, you're based out of Santa Cruz. You came up for the day. You got a party to go to tonight.
I appreciate you stopping by. Exciting company. You guys are doing $35 million in revenue, I think, this year, right about.
So that's got to be a $100 million company. Not many people have done that in the sort of beverage space. And so we're going to learn...

**Aaron Hinde** (3:30)
99% failure rate.

**Shaan Puri** (3:31)
Right. We're going to learn how you did it, a little bit about you and what it takes to get something like this off the ground. Because I think I get a couple of different types of guests, right? You get like the high tech entrepreneur. And if you're not a programmer, you're not into software, those are sort of, it's just a different beast altogether.