Jan. 13, 2026
Navigating the Supplement Surge: John Smiddy's Blueprint for Success in a Competitive Market**
Send us a text In this dynamic episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we dive into the booming world of supplements with industry expert John Smiddy, founder of Nutra Marketers. With over 200 products launched across various platforms, John shares his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the critical factors that separate successful supplement brands from the rest. From his early beginnings selling rocks as a child to navigating the complexities of the supplement industry, he reveals th...
In this dynamic episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we dive into the booming world of supplements with industry expert John Smiddy, founder of Nutra Marketers. With over 200 products launched across various platforms, John shares his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the critical factors that separate successful supplement brands from the rest. From his early beginnings selling rocks as a child to navigating the complexities of the supplement industry, he reveals the importance of mindset, market research, and compliance in building a brand. John discusses innovative trends like nanotechnology and personalized supplementation that are reshaping the market, and how to monetize trust while maintaining credibility. He also provides invaluable insights into customer acquisition, retention strategies, and the common pitfalls new founders face. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or simply curious about the supplement landscape, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. Explore more about John's work and Nutra Marketers at nutramarketers.com
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. if you believe you can achieve.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today on Living the Dream, we will be diving into one of the most fastest growing and interesting online industries, supplements. Today's guest is John Smitty and John is the founder of Neutral Marketers and he is one of the smartest minds when it comes to supplement branding. John has introduced over 200 products to market across Amazon, DTC and retail. So we're going to be talking to him about his entrepreneur journey and everything that he's up to and gonna be up to. So John, thank you for joining me.
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> John Smitty>Hey Curtis, thanks for having me on.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>It's great to be here.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself.
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> John Smitty>Sure. So, as you stated, I'm John Smitty, I'm the CEO at Nutra Marketers, an agency with 100% focused on supplement brand building. So we work with, you know, companies, at all different levels. Whether you're looking to just start your first supplement brand, we have a launch program that's pretty well known in the industry and responsible for launching several well known brands, or if you're a mid sized business looking to scale up, that's an area that we work in a lot as well. So I started my journey as an entrepreneur probably when I was about 10 years old. I had a rock shop in my bedroom. So I lived in a neighborhood where I was kind of like an unsupervised kid. I could do kind of whatever I wanted. My parents were doing their own thing most of the time. And in my neighborhood most of the other kids could never leave the our block, our street. And there was a rock shop probably a mile and a half away from my house that all the kids wanted to go to and you know, buy rocks at this rock shop, but they never could. So I put it together that I could take some of the money, that I had made doing chores and different things around the house and get on my bike and ride down to this rock shop and buy rocks, bring them back, set them up in my bedroom on display and let all the neighborhood kids come in and purchase them for a marked up price. Right. So I that was my first introduction to entrepreneurship. And when I was in my twenties I pursued pretty heavily a music career. do you want me to just kind of go right into this or is there other things you want me to touch on before we jump?
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Oh, no, just, just keep on going the way you're going. Okay. Build it up and let people know, what you, what you were doing and how you got to where you are today.
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> John Smitty>Okay. It's a long story, but I'm going to try to keep it as high level as possible. in my 20s, I pursued a music career. So when I was in, you know, midd, I started to fall into music and singing. I played saxophone. when I got into my 20s, I decided that's what I wanted to do. I pursued a solo career that took me onto Vans Warp Tour. I had a sponsorship with a headphone company called Skull Candy at the time. I landed a management contract with a company called Galaxy Management that was owned by Jackie Callan, who is known as the first lady of boxing. She was the manager of a fighter named James Tony, pretty famous fighter. and through her I was introduced into the Hollywood scene. They did a movie about her called against the Rope starring Meg Ryan. I, was part of the music production for that film and ended up in that kind of Hollywood scene. And I got like a back backside view of what was going on there. And after I turned about 30 years old, I kind of had made a lot of friends in the industry, knew what it was all about, pretty much knew it wasn't for me. And, and my girlfriend at the time called me. I was on tour, on warped tour actually, and told me that she was pregnant. So at 30 years old, I took a real hard look at what I was doing in music and I decided I was going to hang it up, come home, and pursue a career in marketing.
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> John Smitty>Because the one thing that I really loved about music, other than the creative aspect of it, was the business side of it. And I never really liked the performing side of it. Although I had toured pretty extensively around the U.S. i just, it wasn't something that I, I could do it, but I didn't really love it. What I loved was getting new deals, getting our record into the hands of other record labels, getting us booked at clubs and getting gigs going. And I really love that side of it. So I came home, I formed a band that played, regionally. So we played I'm in Michigan.
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> John Smitty>So we played all over Michigan, all the way down Chicago. And that was kind of my, my job at the time. And then I had this thought that, man, if I could start doing this type of marketing for other businesses, I think that's What I'd really like to do. And this was right when we were kind of, my space was phasing out and we were moving over into like the world of Facebook and social media. And so I picked up a couple deals with some other businesses around town, did some posting and social media management for them. And then, I had a job offer with a local magazine. And this is where I jump now from kind of that social media area into advertising. And I would guess it was probably about 2013, I took a job with this magazine, NM 3 magazine, and I started selling print ads for them. And I learned really quickly that if I was going to retain these customers, these businesses that I was selling ads to, meaning if I was going to keep them as clients paying me every single month to run their ads in our magazine, those ads had to be effective. And in order for those ads to be effective, we need to have really great copywriting. So I started focusing on copywriting and then I started focusing on creating great offers. Because a lot of the times the businesses weren't giving me great offers to advertise. They were just here, advertise our, you know, I had one shop that was like a head shop. They sold like hookahs and smoke pipes and stuff. And they're like, yeah, just advertise our name and our address. I'm like, that's not enough to like draw somebody in off of this ad. We need an actual offer and we need to know what we're going to do when they take action on it. What's the next step? And then what's the next step? Like, how do we get them into the store then how do we get them to buy and take advantage of that offer then how do we upsell them? So I started consulting clients like that. And I did that for about three years. And in 20. Oh, no, I did that for about a year. And then I took a job with a local TV station doing the same thing, only we were doing television ads. So this was a local cbs, and Fox affiliated station. I worked there for about four years, and did the same thing with commercials. So very quickly I knew I need to retain my clients. I need to make sure that we are creating, scripts for these commercials that are going to drive revenue for them. I need to make sure we have a great offer. and so I started consulting those clients. And after about four years of doing that, I had done really well there.
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> John Smitty>I was actually the number one rep, ah, in the region for that station. As far as New Local business. I actually, national sales position opened up and I applied for that position and I was denied. So it was a really an eye opener to me that I probably had hit a ceiling at this particular station. They knew where I was valuable to them and that was on the street selling ads.
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> John Smitty>And so I decided I was going to take a handful of the clients that I was consulting and start my own agency. And the interesting thing was at the time I could take that client roster and continue to place my TV buys with the station. So although I took those clients, they were still clients of the station. And there was a weird period of time where the station didn't really like me because I had left and went on my own. But I was still bringing them large television buys. So the agency started out as a local digital marketing agency.
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> John Smitty>We do, you know, website design, SEO, we do some TV buying, we'll do some digital advertising and things like that for local service businesses. And then one day I had, and by this time I had, I had guessed probably a team of about six people. I had an office suite downtown. We had been in business for a couple years and things were going okay, you know, and, and I had a guy walk into my office in Michigan, who lived in my town in the, in the summertime, but in the wintertime he lived in Los Angeles and he worked for a very large software company out there. And he had just purchased a supplement brand. And he said to me, hey, I just bought this supplement brand, it was pretty well known brand in, in this category that he's in. And I, need somebody that can do national and international marketing for me, mainly SEO at the time. And I said, whoa, there's no way we're ready for this.
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> John Smitty>We're a small local agency. And his response was pretty good. He was, he was kind of shocked. He said, I'm surprised that you're that honest with me. Most people, most agencies would just my money and do what they could do for me. And if they fail, they fail, but they still get paid. and because you were honest, why don't we give it a year, I'll come back in a year. You know, let's see where you're at then and if you're comfortable enough. So in that year span of time I had some other companies come to me, on an E commerce level and we had started doing some national search engine optimization and some other like, digital advertising for those national brands. So he came back a year later and I said, we're ready let's do it. So we took over all of his marketing. We scaled that brand up, we helped him launch a second brand that did really well. Through that, I met other people in the supplement industry who were hearing the good things that our agency was doing. And, before I knew it, I just had supplement brands coming at me like crazy. And some of those brands are very big now. I worked with brands like Vade Nutrition, at the very beginning of their venture venture before they had the shark tank investment that they received. I worked with, brands like Rise, who went on to be sponsored by Conor McGregor, pretty famous UFC fighter, worked with a lot of really large influencers, Mike Macro influencers like Ashton hall, who's pretty well established influencer, most a lot of people would recognize. and so this whole thing just kind of snowballed. And back in February of last year, we had about 95% of our clients were supplement brands. We were known as a supplement marketing agency. We had a known launch system for launching supplements. You know, when you're doing supplements, there's things like compliance that are, really essential to marketing. There's things that you can and cannot say. And if you say something wrong and you get that, that brand flagged by the fda, it really can be devastating to a brand. so we became just monsters at knowing what could be said and what couldn't be said and making sure our clients were protected. And because of that, we had, you know, like I said, About 95% of our client roster was supplement brands. So we decided to rebrand as Nutra Marketers, which we did last February. and we've just continued to go on, and win awards along the way and work with more and more brands, bigger brands. and we're pretty excited about 2026. So I would say, like, that's the high level of what happened. But if we're talking about an entrepreneurial journey, there's a lot of things that happened along the way. Setbacks that happened, losses, failures that happened, you know, that I had to find a way through. And you know, one of those times was when I launched this agency, I had to go to my wife, we had a new baby, we had a house, we had health insurance. With my job at the station, I mean, I had a pretty cush job, pretty well paying. We were, we were taken care of. And, I went to my wife one day, sat her down at the table and said, hey, I'm going to quit this job, drop our insurance cash in my 401k and everything we've been saving and start my own agency. And it was a very scary time. And I can tell you as an entrepreneur that her buy in was a hundred percent, essential to what I'm doing today and where I'm at today. Because had she said, I can't get behind this, I don't support it, and fought me every step of the way, it really would have been a bust. There were times, you know, one of the things that she said to me when I brought this to her was, I'll give it, I'll give you five years. She said, how long do you think it'll take to establish the company? I said, well, it takes on average five to 10 years to establish a company. She said, okay, I'll do it under the condition that we give it five years no matter what. We don't back out, no matter what. We're committed, we're all in. So I said, okay. we shook on it. We made a deal as a husband and wife.
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> John Smitty>That's what it was. Five years or bust. And there were some times when it got really hard. You know, I had, I was trying to grow a team. I was trying to keep an office downtown that was pretty expensive. You know, we, I m felt at the time like we needed to, to have that image of a big agency, you know, and have an office, people could, clients could come in and sit down. And I was paying a lot of money, so there were times we were just getting by. We always were able to pay our bills, but there were times when that's about all we could do. And I had a job offer about three years in, four years in, to the agency from another TV station, offered me a sales manager position. And it was a very tempting offer. And I went to my wife and said, what do you think? You think we should take this? And she said, five years, dude. Five years. We're not stopping. So she really kept me in the game, throughout that period of time. So, yeah, I, you know, and that's.
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> John Smitty>If there's anybody listening that, is an entrepreneur that's thinking about launching a brand, the very first thing that you need to do is get your head right. It's a mindset thing. And I, you know, there's a lot of, you know, business coaches out there and, you know, different health coaches that will all tell you it's the same approach. Whether you're trying to lose weight or you're trying to launch a business. The battle is up here. You have to get in Your head. You have to make a decision that you're going to do this and you're going to burn the boats and you're going to stick to it no matter what. It was about 10 years before this company started paying me back what I deserved to be paid. and it was a lot of toiling along the way, a lot of finding ways to get by.
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> John Smitty>Sleepless nights, knowing that I had payroll coming up and I didn't have that money in the bank to pay my staff. And if my staff knew that, they'd probably quit. I remember being in a position just like that where I had to wake up in the morning, go into work and find $17,000. And I started picking up my phone and sending out emails and reigniting old deals I had. And I actually, by the end of that week, had closed about $25,000 and saved my ass and was able to make payroll. So for me, you know, I had created a core value of never retreat. It's a core value I still live by today.
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> John Smitty>So when I got into situations I'm trying to grow a company, a lot of founders or business owners will get into situations where they go, you know, we got a dilemma here. We got to make a very large payroll. We're not making that much money. We got three months. Runway. I think we need to let some people go because we need to shrink that payroll.
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> John Smitty>My mindset was that that was a retreat. I don't let people go. I'm trying to grow a team. I'm trying to grow an agency and a company here. What we have is a financial problem. We need more money in the front door. So that's where I would put my efforts, and I didn't put my efforts into stressing about, well, what are we going to do?
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> John Smitty>What if this happens? What if that happens? I put all of that energy directly into the solution, which to me was selling more clients and getting more money in the front door. So that's always been the answer, and that's always what's gotten me through. So that's kind of the story, Curtis.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, I know what you mean. owning a vending small business about payroll and stressing out about this and that and stuff like that.
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> John Smitty>Yeah.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about, you know, you've brought over 200 products to market. So what separates the winners from the products that never gain traction?
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> John Smitty>Yeah, that's a great question. you know, it all starts with, like I said, the mindset. You got to have the right m. Mindset. A Lot of people have a mindset that they can come into this industry because you know, the, the the Internet has made it it's lowered the barrier to entry. Right than it used to be to start a supplement brand before the Internet, you know, you had to get into retail and that was hard to do. now you can put up a website and you can sell through your website, you can sell on Amazon. So it's lowered that barrier.
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> John Smitty>So what has happened is a lot of people get this idea that, you know, I got some money to invest.
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> John Smitty>I'm going to hire an agency like Nutra Marketers that really understands the market. I'm going to invest this money and I'm going to quickly start making money back. And that's really the, the wrong mindset. The mindset that you need to get into right out of the gate is it's going to take at least a year before I start making, getting into some good money. We got to build up what we call brand equity. Brand equity is a combination of the awareness that you have and the credibility that you have as a brand. We got to build that up so that we can start getting sales. We need to build up authority and things like that. And so once you get in that mindset and you've got, you know, now you're not trying to just make quick money, you're building a business, you got that mindset. The next thing is to research the market.
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> John Smitty>You got to understand the supplement industry, who's buying what, how they're buying it, what categories are over saturated. Identifying gaps in the market. Products that, you know, some of the best products that I've sold, one was a product by a brand called Alpha Gold Nutrition. They had a product called, all in One. It was the all in One muscle building stack. The founder created that product because he couldn't find it anywhere else.
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> John Smitty>So he. So anytime you get into a situation like that where you have a need for a product but you can't find it, that's what we call a gap in the market and you can go and fill that gap and, and you can, if you do everything right, you can make a lot of money. So you don't always have to find a gap. You can go into a saturated area. like let's take immunity supplements. Immunity is probably one of the most saturated places that you can be.
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> John Smitty>But if you look at that and you go, how can I disrupt the immunity industry? What can I do different with my product? What types of ingredients can we add that's going to make this product more potent. What type of delivery system?
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> John Smitty>should we do a capsule, should we do a liquid, should we do a powder? what type of packaging is it going to be in? Right. And so you want your product to look different and you want it to jump off the shelf to the customer that you're selling it. 2. So what we do is we do, we'll do market research with our clients so that we really understand the landscape. usually, you know, we have a lot of doctors that come to us and specialists. So they, they have like a certain type, maybe they want to do like a nerve pain medication. So we will dissect the nerve pain industry. we'll look at all the brands and the competition. We'll read bad reviews from those brands, customers to. We want to get an idea of what they don't like that they're getting out of these brands. there's a lot of other things that go into that, you know, SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the market in that category. and then what we do is we devise a brand strategy. So what is our strategy on how we're going to talk to this customer in a way that's going to, impact them emotionally. So we need to understand what is the problem that they're having at an external level, an internal level, and a philosophical level so that we can speak with them emotionally. Because we all buy on emotion. Very, very rarely do we buy on logic.
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> John Smitty>It's emotion. It's if it's, you know, if I'm representing a, brand that's selling a weight loss product. Well, there's a lot of emotion behind why customers want to lose weight. Maybe they don't have the energy to play with their kids. Well, we can tap into that emotion, but we want to talk to the customer at their level. And a lot of the problems that brands make is they lead with the what. This is what the product is. It's Fat Burner. That's it. Bye now. Well, we want messaging that talks about what it's like to be in their shoes. Listen, we understand what it's like to not have, the energy to play with your kids and how that impacts your family and the relationship that you have with them. That's why we created Fat Burner plus. And it's designed to do xyz. And this is how the science works, to burn the fat off of you faster than if you weren't using it and you were working out, needing. Right, right.
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> John Smitty>Things like that, so we want to take the message strategy, or what we call the voice of the brand, and then take that into the visual aesthetic of the brand. So all this is based on the research.
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> John Smitty>So now we have the voice and now we're going to do the visual aesthetic. The visual aesthetic is brandscapes. So there are different design directions that we could use that we know based on research will do the job. It's really up to our client, and what their vision is, which design direction they choose to go in. but they'll choose one of those design directions and then we'll flesh out the brand guide. So now we have a full brand strategy in a brand guide or what some call brand bible. That brand guide goes over to our design team and the design team now creates the packaging. So the visual look of this product, the feel of the product, the character of the brand, the messaging is all rooted in research. We don't do any kind of guesswork. Once, that's done, now you have a real product with a real unique selling proposition or a differentiator that you're ready to take to market. And when, when it comes to new supplements, we've found over the years that the very best place to launch your product is on Amazon. Why on Amazon? A lot of people think, you know, the, the best way we can do this, and it's a pretty logical thought, the best way we can do this is have an agency build us a Shopify website.
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> John Smitty>Let's get our product up on the website, we'll start running social media ads in and, and man, we're going to be rich in no time. People are going to buy this product. They love it. The problem is you don't have any brand equity yet. So what we see happen in those scenarios, not always, but in most cases is, because we don't have any reviews, testimonials, they haven't seen the product on store shelves. They've seen very few advertisements for it. They go and check the social media, social media channels because, you know, as customers we all will go and like social media, socially verify, these different brands.
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> John Smitty>And they see there's only a couple hundred or a handful of likes, on their Facebook and Instagram and TikTok pages. that makes them feel kind of leery. On top of that, we know that around 97% of people that see an ad and click for the first time don't take any kind of an action. So if you don't understand how a buyer's journey works and what needs to happen in every step of awareness, consideration, decision and then retention, which is the extra step for supplement brands. There's a lot of different marketing tactics that happen in each one of those. To take that 97% of people that don't convert into a sale and warm them up to bring them back for a sale later. And what happens is before they know it, without any of those components, they discover that, oh my God, we're spending way more on advertisements than we're getting back in sales. This whole thing is a bust.
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> John Smitty>We need to shut it down and, and it's a failure.
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> John Smitty>So we know, on Amazon there's about $33 million a day in supplement sales in the US on that platform. We know that the customer has already become aware that they have a problem. They're aware there are products that can help them solve it. They are now considering which product they want to purchase and they're leaning into decision. That's why they're on Amazon, using Amazon as a product search engine. So we don't have to do a lot of the work that we'd need to do in awareness and consideration with getting in front of them, getting the click, building trust, building authority and all those things that need to happen. Okay, we can get in front of them on Amazon, sell them the product. You know, as long as our messaging really describes the unique selling proposition, why this product's different, what makes it unique, what makes it great, speaking on those emotional touch points, and get them to make the purchase and then bring them back. And now we have one place for them to review where new customers can see those reviews and we can collect up all those reviews. so we start, we look at brand building as three phases. The first phase is launch. That's the first 30 days that the product is live on the market and we do that on Amazon. Second phase is growth. So we take them into our alumni program and we scale them up on Amazon. We start building strong seller history there. we start doing influencer marketing and using user generated content, videos of influencers talking about the product on Amazon.
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> John Smitty>And then phase three is direct to consumer. And that's when we go back, build out a website and start advertising through the website. Because now we have all that brand equity that we can leverage on Amazon and pull that into the website. Does that make sense, Curtis?
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>And which goes into my next question. talk about how the landscape of the supplement industry has changed since you entered in 2016 and what should founders be paying Attention to now.
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> John Smitty>Great question. It's it's changed quite a bit and a lot of it is that there's more brands than ever, there's more products than ever. Like I said, that barrier to entry is lower. So, people are jumping in. And you got everyone from doctors, physicians, specialists, trainers, gym owners, fitness influencers, all the way to kids who just know Amazon's algorithm and how to sell. They're young, they live with their parents, and they're teaming up with companies that will fulfill on demand. And they're just selling white label supplement products, which white label products are already created by a manufacturer. They're pretty basic, there's nothing unique about them. But kids will spin up a label that looks cool and funky and young and hip and sell it to that demographic on Amazon or on TikTok shop. so it's become more saturated. But we have had some innovations that I'm pretty excited about in the industry when it comes to delivery forms. Probably the main one, that really gets me excited is nanotechnology. So if you look at what we call, absorption rates or bioavailability, if you were to take, maybe you're taking like a protein supplement, the absorption rate of a typical supplement that's a powder like that is about 10%. I could be a little off on there, but I think it's right around about 10% absorption rate or bioavailability. with nanotechnology, it can only be done in a liquid right now, but what they do is they run it through a machine that spins the liquid at a very high rate of speed and they hit it with sonic waves.
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> John Smitty>And what it does is it breaks down the molecules that are inside that liquid and what they end up with is a much higher bioavailability, as much as 60%. So you're talking from 10% to 60% bioavailability. There's not a lot of brands doing it yet. It's really an area that I see as a, as a marketer. There's major, differentiation there.
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> John Smitty>They're also getting, we're getting into things, with nanotechnology that I know aren't available yet, but they're capsules that you can take that, you know, basically again, if you're, maybe it's a protein supplement, you take it in a handful of capsules. The capsules actually read your, your body's algorithm and know exactly when to release what you need at the right time. So maybe you take it before your workout and when you get to the peak of your workout, it starts to release like the isolate and the different proteins that are in it. so there's a company out there that's got an app that, sells a bottle with a cap that will light up. So if you're taking a supplement that you need to take on a daily basis, maybe you supposed to take it at 10am Every day, you put it in that bottle, it'll send your phone an alert and the cap will actually light up. So, you know, oh, it's time to take my supplement. also, we're getting into personalized supplementation. Now.
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> John Smitty>There's a lot of companies out there that start with a test. You know, they, you, you sign up, you pay the money, they send a test to you, you poke your finger, you send it back in, they send you back the blood work, they show you where your deficient in what areas, what vitamins, what nutrients, and then they put together a regiment based on that. so those are probably the major changes that we're seeing right now.
00:31:55.060 --> 00:32:07.620
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about monetizing trust without losing it. You know, you talk a lot about that. So how does that look in practice for creators, physicians and expert LED brands?
00:32:08.259 --> 00:32:23.769
> John Smitty>Yeah, you know, people that are in those positions are positioned perfectly to launch a supplement brand because if you're an influencer, you already have, you know, all these people that listen to your content, you have a level of trust with them.
00:32:24.410 --> 00:32:58.120
> John Smitty>If you're a physician, you absolutely have a level of trust with your, with your patients. And so you're really perfectly positioned, to launch a supplement brand. So how we do that in a way that keeps the trust is we need to tell the story right. A lot of times physicians are creating a supplement brand because they're not comfortable recommending other supplement brands to you that they didn't have a hand in creating. They don't.
00:32:58.120 --> 00:35:29.318
> John Smitty>You know, there's ways to slip things past in a ingredient or a nutrition facts panel, the panel we see on the back with all the ingredients and stuff, there's ways to slip things in. there's products that doctors know aren't that great. And so a lot of times they're creating a supplement because they want their patients to have the best of the best. They're not really doing it for the money, they're doing it for the result. And so we need to tell that kind of a story. And that's only going to give them more authority. you know, when it comes to fitness influencers, it's really pretty much the same thing. they're creating a product that's specifically for their audience and their needs based on what it is that influencer is all about. As a good example of that is a, Tick Tock influencer named Mila Mend. She has a channel on TikTok where she talks to women about hormone imbalances. And she had built up, I think it was around 300, 000 followers or something on Tick Tock, and came to us and said, you know, I want to launch what I'm going to call Mila Men Hormone Balance. And it's a drink for women to help with their hormones and the problems that they're having. And she actually made her audience a part of the creation and the development of that whole, process of making it. So she flew down to the manufacturing facility with her camera team, they shot content, they're making the product. She asked her audience advice and further input on like, what the packaging should be like, what the flavor should be like. and then when it was time to launch, she gave them all discount codes so that they could go purchase at a discounted rate and thank them for being part of it. So she was bringing a product that her audience was really hungry for. And that's really the key, right? You want to get in front of a hungry audience and there in the case of, an influencer, you, you have a hungry audience, you need to keep that credibility. And you're going to do that by creating a great product and making sure every step of the way. And let me tell you, Mila and her, partner were very, very, about this. They wanted to make sure that there were no punches being pulled with their audience. Everything was truthful, everything was out front. the audience was a part of what they were doing. They were creating a movement, right? So they really delivered something that was phenomenal to their audience. And, and her product to this day continues to do, to do well and, and succeed.
00:35:29.558 --> 00:35:30.918
> John Smitty>That's how we approach that.
00:35:31.878 --> 00:35:42.838
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about compliance. Compliance is a huge blind spot for new founders. So what are some of the pitfalls you see when it comes to compliance? And, and how can brands avoid that?
00:35:44.199 --> 00:36:25.078
> John Smitty>So I think a lot of brands start by looking at fda, which they should. Federal Drug Administration in the United States is going to be king. If you say something that violates the FDA's regulation. And you know, a lot of brands will claim that they're FDA approved. There's. In natural supplements, you don't need to be FDA approved, you need to be FDA compliant, which means you do have to be created or have the product, manufactured in a cgmp, you know, certified Good manufacturing practice, certified lab. Right. you need that sort of make sure that the manufacturer has at least that certification.
00:36:26.278 --> 00:36:45.148
> John Smitty>but also if you say something in an advertisement, in an email on your website, you make a disease claim. And when I say disease claim, you can say, this is an anti inflammation product, that's a disease claim. You can't say that. You say that.
00:36:45.148 --> 00:37:30.168
> John Smitty>You put it out in an ad and whoop, you get a warning letter from the fda and it's just a warning, hey, cease and desist. You can't say this. Take the ad down and you go, okay, we're going to comply. You take the ad down, you fix everything. The problem is that warning letter gets published on the FDA's website. And because that website is so powerful now, anytime searches your brand name, the first thing that pops up is an FDA warning letter. And that really kills your credibility. so you need to understand in depth, what those, what those rules are. And we have a guide on our website. If you go to neutral marketers.com, you go into our resources, you can find it, but there's a guide on those regulations.
00:37:31.208 --> 00:37:41.368
> John Smitty>And then you have to make sure not only are you compliant with the fda, but if you're going to sell this product on Amazon, they have their own compliance. And it goes even further than the fda.
00:37:41.848 --> 00:38:45.608
> John Smitty>One of the things that surprises m a lot of people is you can't say free. You can't say our product is dairy free. The algorithm looks at that like you're trying to give something away for free, which is against their rules and you're going to get flagged for that. there's a lot of other nuances in there, but you know, if you're going to advertise on Google, they have their own set of compliance around supplements. Meta has its own set of rules around supplements. So what will happen is if you continue to advertise on, on any of these platforms and say things that you're not supposed to say, well, guess what, you're going to get flagged. And if you keep getting flagged, you're eventually going to get blacklisted. And that's the worst thing that can happen to a new brand. A warning letter from the FDA or blacklisted from a platform, is going to sink you really, really quick. So for us, compliance is built into everything that we do, every step of the way it starts at the brand strategy. It goes into the brand voice and the messaging. We map all that messaging out before it ever hits a landing page or a website or an Amazon listing or a lab.
00:38:46.338 --> 00:39:13.978
> John Smitty>and our team is, is not only trained in FDA compliance, but also we stay up to date, with all the platforms that we advertise and sell on. So anytime we launch a new brand, the first thing our ad buying team does is they open up, usually meta's compliance, our own supplements. They read through it and they just make sure that nothing was changed or updated. Because in the world that we live in online, things are changing all the time. And they do, they update those policies.
00:39:14.048 --> 00:39:52.878
> John Smitty>Policies. So you know, we're kind of insulation for our clients when it comes to that. You know, on top of that, when you, when you send the, we send the label design work over to the manufacturing facility, before it goes into bottling, it will go through the manufacturer's compliance and they'll approve it as well. So now you've been not only approved by Nutra marketers, you've been approved by your manufacturing compliance team. And in addition, a lot of clients, will take an extra step and have an attorney look over their label, look over their ads and their marketing assets just to make sure, which is never a bad thing to do.
00:39:55.438 --> 00:40:34.708
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, you know, many brands focus on acquisition and you know, leave out retention. So what, efforts do you feel like they should do to focus more on retention instead?
00:40:35.988 --> 00:40:51.278
> John Smitty>Yeah, so there's, it's not just retention. So what we want to look at, first is what we call cac. So that's customer acquisition cost. The customer acquisition cost should never be higher than the aov, the average order value that's happening.
00:40:52.318 --> 00:41:23.608
> John Smitty>That's where people get out of whack on that new customer acquisition. Right. They don't understand why they're bleeding money. And if we dissect it, we can find rather quickly in those cases where they're losing that the customers, it's costing them more money in ad spend than the customer is spending once they hit the website or the Amazon listing or whatever it is. So in order to combat that, we need a really good pricing strategy and we need to develop a really good front end offer.
00:41:24.008 --> 00:41:55.568
> John Smitty>And I think a lot of brands. I just had a call with, a larger brand that's kind of falling off a couple weeks ago and the founder was really focused on we need new customers. We need new customers. And I asked what's your customer acquisition cost? And he said, I have no idea. But all I know is we had to shut off our ads because that we're just spending money and we're not making enough back. And I went to his website and I looked and I, I told him, you're really, you've really engineered this for one time purchase. I can come here and get a great deal on one product.
00:41:55.568 --> 00:42:19.838
> John Smitty>And you have, you know, 45 products and you're not bundling any of them. What we need to do is put together like a bundle that's the Digestive Health bundle and it's got these four, three or four products in it and we need another one that's the ultimate pump bundle or something. You know, I don't want to say who the brand was, but engineering those types of bundles so that you're getting larger purchases.
00:42:19.918 --> 00:42:36.508
> John Smitty>And then in the supplement game, the real money is in the subscription value and what we call, customer lifetime value or ltv. So we need to understand at what rate are people making a one time purchase and then moving into a subscription.
00:42:37.068 --> 00:44:05.468
> John Smitty>And once you understand what that is, you know, we know it's about 33% of people that purchase one time move into a subscription and once they subscribe, they stay on for about four months. Now we can calculate what that customer lifetime value is. And now we know we may be after actually a, I don't know, $350 sale, not a $35 sale on the front end. And because we have a 33% subscription rate conversion rate, let's engineer a front end offer that our competitors can't compete with us on and don't understand how we can even make money on that offer. Because we're not making money on the front end offer, we're making money on the lifetime value. So we may take a $35 product and we may say, maybe we have a front end offer where the products $10 now because we know if we can get them to buy and get them into our marketing funnel, we 33% of them will convert to a subscription and we'll make a lot more money. Or we may say, hey, if you subscribe for four months, the first bottle's free, right? And then our competitors are like, how are they engineering these front end deals? Well, we just know the math. And I always say that most brands don't have a traffic problem, they have a math problem. You really got to understand that math. And some of the biggest brands and the brightest CEO minds that I've worked with, they understand that math.
00:44:06.428 --> 00:44:16.318
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, what Is one of the biggest myths about the supplement industry that you wish new founders knew about?
00:44:18.398 --> 00:44:31.668
> John Smitty>Biggest myths for new founders. As far as, like, I know I can tell you what the biggest myths for customers who buy supplements are, but do you mean like what the founders think going in?
00:44:32.388 --> 00:44:33.188
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Absolutely.
00:44:33.588 --> 00:45:31.588
> John Smitty>Yeah. Well, I would say the biggest one is just thinking that they're going to make a ton of money really fast. And this is, this is not a get rich quick industry. This is a slow build. Now I have seen, I have seen brands sell. I think the fastest one was about 5, 000 units of their product in about 90 minutes. That was insane. That's not typical. most brands were hitting really good monthly sales strides by about month four. That's pretty typical for us. but you know, I tell people, get in the mindset of we're going to have to fight and we're going to have to earn our spot in this industry. So don't think that we're just going to jump in here and we're going to make$30,000 in our first 30 days of selling this product. It's not going to happen. I've seen it happen. The potential is there, but it's not very often that that happens. That's probably the biggest myth.
00:45:32.938 --> 00:45:37.658
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.
00:45:39.498 --> 00:46:56.578
> John Smitty>Oh, let's see. I have a new brand called Tri Keto Energy that's coming out. energy, cognitive function, metabolism. That's going to be a really good one. We have a thermogenic that's coming out called stay warm. This is the first thermogenic on the market that's created to actually help you do what. The name is stay warm. So it's for people who are like, maybe you're a cocktail waitress and you wear like kind of a skimpy outfit and you're cold all night. Working at the club, you would take stay warm. It would heat you up internally so you'd feel warmer. Maybe you work in road construction. You're outside during the winter, you know, holding signs or whatever you do on the crew. You would take a shot of stay warm and it would heat you up internally. that's going to be a really exciting product. There's a lot of things coming out around collagen right now. A, lot of new things happening within Collagen beauty peptides. We have a brand called the collagen Project that has a new beauty peptide product out, that you can find on Amazon. So yeah, there's, there's lots of new, new brands coming. We launch five new brands every single month at Nutra Marketers. So, yeah, lots of new stuff coming to the mic, coming to the market.
00:46:57.218 --> 00:47:01.298
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, throw out your contact info so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.
00:47:01.778 --> 00:47:44.378
> John Smitty>Yeah, you can reach me at jsmitty smiddyutraalmarketers.com you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search John Smitty. There's only two of us in the country. I'm the guy that's on the east coast, not the west coast. You can visit our website, Neutral, marketers dot com. my calendar link is right on that website. If you'd like a free consultation with me, if you're thinking about launching or if you already own a brand and you're looking to scale up, I do give a free 30 minute consultation. I'll take a look at your brand, at what you're doing, at any problems that you're running into, or your product idea, if you're thinking about launching and give you some good insight from that call.
00:47:45.258 --> 00:47:47.218
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>We'll close this out with some final thoughts.
00:47:47.218 --> 00:47:52.698
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about, that you would like to touch on, any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
00:47:54.538 --> 00:48:26.578
> John Smitty>You know, I guess the final thought here is that if you have a vision, if you have a dream, whether it's, you know, a supplement brand or it's any kind of company of your own, or if you want to be, an artist or whatever it is, you know, I think the most important thing, or surely has been for me is to stick with it and see it through and find a way. There's going to be low, low points in that journey, I promise you. But those low points, are not there to break you, they're there to define you. And in the end, it will all come together and make sense.
00:48:27.778 --> 00:49:01.068
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, and for all you supplement lovers out there, please follow rate review Share this episode to as many people as possible and keep up with everything that John and his company is up to. If you would like more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, please visit www.craveball337.com and share the website to everybody you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show And John, thank you for all that you do and thank you for joining me.
00:49:01.548 --> 00:49:02.428
> John Smitty>Thanks, Curtis.
00:49:03.238 --> 00:49:15.878
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.craveball337.com until next time, keep living the dream.
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