#95 with Craig Clemens of Golden Hippo - The 9-Figure Business You've Never Heard Of

**Sam** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. Sales super teams aren't built overnight. They require unicorn-level talent, endless training, huge budgets, and lots of luck.
Or you could just use Sales Hub from HubSpot. It's an all-in-one platform built with all the tools for your success. Smarter prospecting, check. Faster revenue, yup. Scales with your team, sure does. But in Sam's speak, I'm gonna put it way simpler. Just go to hubspot.com/sales, and it will make selling easier, faster, and more efficient.
hubspot.com/sales. So today we have, Craig, what's your title actually? Are you CEO or founder? What are you, what's your title?

**Craig Clemens** (0:45)
I just use co-founder because I do too many different things, yeah.

**Sam** (0:48)
Okay, so co-founder Golden Hippo. I don't know how you describe you guys, but Craig, I think I met you originally at a conference, and we became friends. And you just tweeted something the other day that got thousands of interactions, and it caught my eye.
And we chat just as friends. But you tweeted this thing. What did you tweet the other day?

**Craig Clemens** (1:13)
It was the 10 things we learned at Golden Hippo after spending a billion dollars of our own money on media.

**Sam** (1:19)
And our own money. So what is your company?

**Craig Clemens** (1:23)
Company is called Golden Hippo. We build brands, direct to consumer, and we are self-funded. So that's where the own money comes from.

**Sam** (1:31)
How, so like, what's a brand?
Can you give an example? Or can you say what you guys sell?

**Craig Clemens** (1:37)
Yeah, I can give an example. So we partner some of the world's top doctors, people of influence, people of expertise, and we help them bring their ideas out to the world.
So probably the brand we're most well known for is a brand with a doctor named Stephen Gundry, who is a world famous heart surgeon. He's an inventor of a device that is used in 90% of all heart surgeries. And we partnered with him to bring nutritional supplements into the world based around his ideas and philosophies.

**Sam** (2:09)
Okay, and so what are examples of products that you guys are selling with Dr. Gundry?

**Craig Clemens** (2:15)
So Dr. Gundry's philosophy is that we humans are a condominium for bugs, AKA bacteria. And he calls it hollow bionics. And what that means is if you take care of the bacteria that lives in us, the 25 trillion bacteria in our gut, you guys are all familiar with microbiome and on our skin, that they will take care of their home, which is your body.
So that's something all the products have in common, is that they're designed to nourish the bacteria that call you home.

**Sam** (2:47)
So Dr. Gundry has how many skews? Is it just one or two products that you're selling to his audience? Or do you have a whole store with dozens of different things?

**Craig Clemens** (2:56)
Yeah, yeah, it's like, I don't know, 50, something like that. We have everything from specific digestive health supplements to coconut bars to coffee creamer, the whole game.

**Sam** (3:11)
And is it all physical stuff or is it any information?

**Craig Clemens** (3:16)
The information is available on GundryMD when you subscribe to our newsletter. We send out a high quality email newsletter, we do a podcast, we do a YouTube channel, but the information is all free.
The products are what people go to.

**Sam** (3:31)
And roughly how many brands like him do you guys have? Like dozens or hundreds or like six?

**Craig Clemens** (3:37)
Yeah, more like in the 10 to 20 range. I actually don't know exactly because we're always launching new brands and shutting down brands that don't work.

**Sam** (3:47)
Got it.

**Shaan** (3:49)
And at the beginning you said self-funded.
You said, well, the tweets that went viral that caught my attention, and many others is here's what we learned spending a billion dollars of our own money on paid media. And it was about marketing and it was about how to spend money. Well, self-funded, is that because you had a big win before this or is that because you bootstrapped this kind of slowly, but over time accumulated a big cashflow in business? So give us kind of the brief history.

**Craig Clemens** (4:14)
Yeah, great question. So self-funded because we bootstrapped. Though this is not my first company and I was really fortunate in my younger days to have an amazing mentor who taught me all this shit. You know, I was one of those kids who fairly graduated high school, I had a 1.7 GPA.
I went into the lucrative field of-