Launching Yo! Focus - Vietnamese Coffee

My new D2C venture

This past week I launched Yo! Focus - a Vietnamese instant coffee designed to keep you laser focused without any of the usual jitters and crash.

Funnily enough - the end product was a different evolution from a thesis around a health and wellness trend gathering steam. Here’s my notes on it four months ago.

What is the idea?

An aging Asian American millennial demographic is slowly turning towards more health optimizations while being simultaneously underserved and overlooked by current existing health products. Brand it for Asian Americans that all watch Huberman and Tim Ferriss.

Aka → Athletic Greens but for Asians. Athletic Yellows?

What is the estimated market size?

The supplement market size x the Asian American market size.

Supplement market size: $150 billion

Asian American supplement market size: 6% to 8% x $150 billion = ~$10 billion.

Asian Spin on things → also a growing market. People want to try Asian flavors of things and Asian things in general.

Sleep Supplements → definitely a growing market as people realize that melatonin usage can be rapidly abused. Fight against big melatonin and using less intensive supplements instead.

Now four months later I’ve launched under the energy bucket with a unique Vietnamese coffee that combines the best ingredients and antioxidants from tea and mushrooms.

For example - one main adaptogen is L-Theanine. It's a naturally occurring amino acid found in green tea that promotes relaxation by reducing stress and anxiety levels. Combined with caffeine it is clinically proven to increase focus and attention and limits caffeine's vasoconstriction efforts, keeping your blood pressure and heart rate in check, aka, the jitters!

As a side note, I started testing different kinds of coffee and tea for a few months and doing a lot of research on key ingredients that actually work to increase focus. Eventually iterating enough to get to the current product. And I think I got wired enough from my own supply to eventually launch! So it works!

Post-Launch Blues and Why E-commerce?

So in launching Yo! Focus - I decided to post on LinkedIn and my personal Instagram account. And then I went on vacation. And so here’s an insight into my launch success and analytics so far…

And…..I’m feeling the post-launch blues that naturally happens when the anticipation of getting your product live meets reality. Of course when you don’t have any existing marketing channels - it’s rather hard to get the ball rolling.

One thing people have asked me if why I’ve decided to go into E-commerce now in 2023. We are past the peak of Covid where everything D2C products boomed. Most are now focused on expanding into omni-channel and retail. And plus I now have to learn a bunch of marketing tactics I never had to do for Interview Query (FB ads, Google ads, Amazon, etc..).

To be honest - I don’t have a good answer. One part is the collective self-reinforcing feedback loop from personal interests in health and supplements. Another is diversification across my existing digital business on Interview Query. But the strongest narrative is that it’s just something new that I haven’t done before. But I think even for businesses in wildly different domains - there will be surprising parallels.

Action Items and Building in Public

One thing I’d like to do differently this time is also to document the journey. For Interview Query, as my first business, I felt very secretive. I was wary of competition and kept to myself when I probably should have embraced more collaboration in the beginning.

E-commerce lends itself to less secrecy. I’m selling a product that you can 100% read the ingredients for. Growth is achieved through very similar marketing channels. Maybe someone copies me but they would only do so if I’m succeeding.

My action items for the next month:

• Getting product feedback from customers. I want to know what people think about the product. This means re-targeting all the people on Instagram and LinkedIn that were interested in the product. Emailing customers what they think about the product. And sending it out to influencers for free that are interested.

• Optimizing the website funnel. I have a bunch of stuff on my website that I need to fix before running paid ads.

• Understanding CAC, unit economics, and pricing. I’ve created a cash flow model to try to get to profitability. I’d like to know if I can back into the math to see how it works at scale.

• Start Facebook ads. I’m a little skeptical of when I should start running paid ads. But it’s kind of necessary to understand core unit economics feasibility, as long as the overall initial product feedback is still good.