Kronos/JJ

I was 25 when I became CMO. We built GoLive Mobile to $250M+ in sales. Here's exactly how I did it , starting with zero marketing team, zero brand, and zero inbound 🧵 (thread)

I'm 41. I've done $260M with ecom in 5 years, fully bootstrapped. Here's how I built Hiya Health with 500+ influencers using this exact playbook 🧵 (thread)

I did a complete breakdown of how I built two 9 figure companies before turning 40. in 4 podcast episodes: 1. youtube.com/watch?v=D-wJa6wd… 2. youtube.com/watch?v=E0t1Y_e1… 3. youtube.com/watch?v=LDYtimFr… 4. youtube.com/watch?v=OzHmq6SK… bookmark this and follow me for more :)

If I had to make $10,000 in the next 48 hours, starting from zero, here's exactly what I'd do : Step 1: Open eBay, StockX, StubHub, and Whatnot right now — spend 60 minutes finding what's selling fast and at what price today Step 2: Identify your category — event tickets, limited edition sneakers, trending gadgets, or local marketplace arbitrage — pick one and go deep Step 3: Search sold listings on eBay for the last 7 days: this shows you exactly what the market is actually paying, not what people are asking Step 4: Find the same item listed cheap on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, or OfferUp within 10 miles of you Step 5: Verify the gap — if it's selling for $800 on StockX and listed locally for $200, that's your target. You need at minimum a $300-$500 profit margin per flip. Step 6: Message every single local listing immediately — the person who reaches out first wins 80% of the time Step 7: Negotiate hard — offer 30-40% below their asking price — most sellers haven't researched true market value and will accept it Step 8: That research gap between what they think it's worth and what the market actually pays is your entire profit margin: protect it Step 9: Buy it. Pick it up same day. Cash moves fastest and wins negotiations every time. Step 10: List immediately on every resale platform simultaneously — eBay, StockX, StubHub, OfferUp, all of them at once — more platforms equals faster sale Step 11: Price it at market value, not above, not below, you want it gone within hours not days Step 12: Respond to every buyer message within 5 minutes: sellers who respond fastest close 3x more deals than those who wait Step 13: To hit $10K you need roughly 20 flips at $500 profit each — or 5 flips at $2,000 profit each — event tickets and sneakers get you there fastest Step 14: Reinvest every dollar immediately — flip $200 into $700, flip $700 into $1,500, keep compounding every single hour of the 48 Step 15: This is not luck. Luck is buying a lottery ticket. This is speed plus research plus execution. The underpriced asset is sitting on someone's Facebook Marketplace right now: go find it before someone else does. But if you’re interested in making more even more money with ecommerce, Like this post and I'll send you the full playbook that took me to $260M in 6 years.

I made $260M exiting Hiya Health in 2024. But if I had to pick only 1 thing to focus on for the next 5 years it would be this: Distribution. Not product. Not operations. Not fundraising. Distribution. Here's why: We built Hiya to $103M in annual revenue with zero venture capital and zero retail presence for 4 years. You know what made that possible? We owned our distribution channel completely. Every subscriber was ours. Every email. Every text. Every relationship. No Amazon taking our customer data. No retailer owning the shelf. No algorithm deciding who sees our brand. We controlled the conversation end to end. And that control was worth more than any product improvement we ever made. Here's what I know now that I didn't fully appreciate then: The person with the largest trusted audience wins. Every single time. It doesn't matter how good your product is. It doesn't matter how clean your unit economics are. It doesn't matter how experienced your team is. If nobody knows you exist, then none of it matters. Distribution is leverage. A personal brand online is leverage. 100,000 people who trust you is leverage. 1,000,000 people who follow you is leverage. I've built two 9-figure companies. The next chapter isn't about building a better product. It's about building the largest, most trusted distribution channel I possibly can. Because whoever reaches the most people with the most trust wins the next decade. Build your audience like your business depends on it.

My name is Adam Gillman. I exited Hiya Health for $260M in 2024 at 39 years old. – 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐦𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 : I grew up watching my parents build businesses from nothing. My father. My uncle. Entrepreneurs their entire adult lives. That was my normal. So when I got to USC in LA I wasn't thinking about getting a job. I was thinking about building something big. My first real swing came in my early 20s. I joined a company called GoLive Mobile as Chief Marketing Officer. We became the #1 fastest growing media company in America. $250M in revenue. $100M in earnings. 1000x return for shareholders. I was in my 20s. I learned everything. How to scale. How to market at volume. How to build a team. How to move fast. Then the smartphone era disrupted everything and the industry changed overnight. So I went and built something new. A fitness brand with my wife Lara — CycleHouse — one of the leading indoor cycling chains in Southern California. Then I went deep into cannabis. Built F/ELD — an ultra-premium California brand. Raised $6M. Sold it. Each venture taught me something the next one needed. Then in 2018 something changed everything. I became a father. I was giving my two boys their morning vitamins. I read the label. 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving. In a product designed to make children healthy. I thought: this is garbage. There has to be something better. A few days later my co-founder Darren called me with the exact same thought. We met on a bench in Los Angeles. Drank coffee. And decided to fix it. The problem was obvious: The children's vitamin industry was optimizing for compliance — getting kids to take the product — instead of what was actually healthy. Sugar disguised as wellness. Cartoon characters on jars full of synthetic fillers. Every product on the market was an adult brand that slapped a kids label on something they already made. Nobody was building for children first. Nobody was speaking to the millennial parent who thought about health differently than the generation before them. So we did. We called it Hiya. Zero sugar. Zero synthetic fillers. 15 essential vitamins and minerals in a sugar-free chewable tablet. Formulated by pediatricians and nutritionists. Designed for children. Trusted by parents. We launched March 11 2020. The same day the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. We thought it was over before it started. It wasn't. We bootstrapped the entire thing. $0 venture capital. Ever. 4 years later: → $103M in annual revenue → 200,000+ subscribers → #1 children's wellness brand in America → 50% year over year growth → Acquired by USANA Health Sciences for $260M Here's what I believe: The best businesses are built by frustrated customers — not market researchers. Sustainable unit economics matter more than growth at any cost. Retention beats acquisition every single time. Distribution is everything : own your customer relationship completely. Time rewards those who stay consistent when everyone else gets bored. And you don't need to prove anything to anyone. Just build something real and let the scoreboard speak for itself. That's what I post about here. Every day I share the frameworks, lessons, and hard-won insights from building two 9-figure companies, so you don't have to learn them the hard way. If you're building something big and real — follow along my journey.

I grew a business from $0 to $260M exit in 6 years with zero VC, zero retail, and zero experience in the industry. Here’s how I did it in 30 steps: 1. Start with a problem you personally hate. We didn't find Hiya in a market report. I read the label on my kids' vitamins one morning and saw 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving. The average kids vitamin had as much sugar as a piece of chocolate cake. That frustration became a $260M company. 2. Understand your market size before you build. The US children's vitamin and supplement market was valued at $900M when we started. Expected to reach $1.4B by 2029. We weren't guessing there was opportunity. We knew exactly how big the ceiling was. 3. Find a co-founder who's already won with you. Darren and I had already built GoLive Mobile together — $250M in revenue, $100M in earnings, 1000x return for shareholders. We didn't start Hiya as strangers taking a leap of faith. We had 7 years of proof we worked together. 4. Spend at least 12 months on product before launch. We spent over a year mapping formulation, finding manufacturers, working with pediatricians and nutritionists before a single bottle shipped. Most founders spend 4-6 weeks. We spent 52+. That's why our product worked from day one. 5. Validate with experts not just instincts. We assembled a team of pediatricians, nutritionists, dentists, scientists and parents to formulate our product. Not 1 expert. Not 2. A full network. The result was 15 essential vitamins and minerals in a single chewable with 0 grams of sugar. 6. Outsiders redesign systems. Insiders optimize within them. We had 0 years of experience in children's health. That was our advantage. We questioned every industry default — sugar levels, gummy formats, synthetic fillers. Experts couldn't see what we saw because they were too deep in the system. 7. Your consumer and your customer are not always the same person. Our consumer was the child. Our customer was the parent. 100% of our marketing was aimed at parents while 100% of our product experience was designed for kids. Most competitors solved for 1. We solved for both simultaneously. 8. Launch on the worst possible day and keep going anyway. We launched March 11 2020. The exact same day WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. We thought it was over before it started. It wasn't. We hit $103M in annual revenue 4 years later. 9. Price is a signal of quality. We priced at a premium from day one — roughly $30/month per child. Above every competitor in the category. Not because we were greedy. Because $10 signals $10 quality. "Approachable luxury" — premium enough to signal trust, low enough that households making under $75K annually could still afford it. And they did. That demographic became our largest customer segment. 10. Never change your price. Change your value. Our price has never changed in 5+ years. Costs increased significantly — especially during COVID supply chain chaos. We absorbed every dollar of that by growing volume, improving retention, and expanding our product line instead of passing costs to customers and losing their trust. 11. Commit to 100% subscription from day one. Not a subscription option. 100% subscription only. No one-time purchases. No Amazon storefront. No retail shelf. Pure recurring revenue from the first day. This single decision defined our entire business model and cash flow trajectory. 12. Offer 50% off the first month. Never change it. We've tested every possible variation of this offer over 5 years. 50% off month 1 has been the highest performer every single time. The goal isn't margin on month 1. The goal is getting the right customer in the door so months 2 through 24 can compound. 13. Solve the cash flow paradox before it solves you. 50% off month 1 + bootstrapped growth = brutal cash flow problem. The faster we grew the more cash negative we became. Every 1,000 new customers we signed up created a cash hole that took months to fill. We raised $0 from VCs so we had to get creative with debt financing. Some partners were horrific. Some were great. Find them before you need them. 14. Text every single new customer personally within 24 hours. We built an entire vitamin concierge team. Every new subscriber — whether we had 100 customers or 100,000 — received a personal text from a real human introducing themselves and offering help. Not a bot. Not an automated sequence. A real person. That 1 decision shaped our entire retention curve. 15. Let customers customize down to individual units. Parents could text us "my son only likes the green ones." We'd ship custom ratios — 47 green, 37 yellow, 0 red per monthly shipment. Raised our costs slightly. Created a competitive moat that billion dollar companies like Unilever and P&G could never replicate. Drove a tangible measurable lift in both retention and brand sentiment. 16. Iterate relentlessly on your core product. We launched 1 multivitamin in March 2020. We are now on the 8th iteration of that same product. 8 rounds of improvements based purely on customer feedback. We changed flavor profiles, ingredient ratios, and texture based on what the data told us. Never stop improving what's already working. 17. Build your brand for 2 audiences simultaneously. Our packaging had to make a parent want to put it on their kitchen counter AND make a child excited to take their vitamin. We made a reusable glass bottle with stickers kids could decorate. Parents Instagrammed it. Kids personalized it. 1 product, 2 emotional hooks, zero sugar. 18. Insource fulfillment until scale makes it impossible. We ran our own warehouse operations in the early days. Complete control over every touchpoint. It enabled the customization. It enabled the quality control. Eventually when we reached a scale where the warehouse was becoming its own full business we outsourced the majority. But those early years of full control were invaluable. 19. Don't launch product 2 until product 1 is undeniable. We waited 2.5 years — approximately 30 months — before launching our probiotic as our second product. Not because we lacked confidence. Because we wanted 30 months of data, customer feedback, and retention proof before we risked our brand reputation on something new. 20. Survey customers before formulation begins. Every new product in our lineup was validated by existing customers before we spent $1 on development. We asked parents directly what problem they wanted us to solve next. They told us probiotics. We made probiotics. We knew it wouldn't fail before we made it. Today more than 50% of our customers purchase more than 1 Hiya product every single month. 21. Educate before you sell. Always. Our social and email strategy was 80% education, 20% promotion. We explained ingredients we DON'T use and why. We talked about what's wrong with kids nutrition in America. We gave parents information that had nothing to do with buying Hiya. The result was customers who trusted us as an expert advisor not just a brand they bought from. 22. Build a team with near zero turnover. In our entire existence as a company we lost approximately 2 employees voluntarily. 2. In a period where most DTC startups had 40-60% annual turnover. We did that by hiring the absolute best people in every discipline, never micromanaging, and building a culture around shared values not fear. 23. Vulnerability is the most underrated leadership trait. When we made mistakes we said so internally immediately. When we didn't know something we admitted it publicly to the team. When we entered retail — something we knew nothing about — we said so clearly. That honesty created a culture where people felt safe enough to do their best work. 24. Know your gaps before your gaps know you. We knew nothing about international expansion. USANA does 90%+ of their business internationally across 24+ countries. We knew nothing about large scale manufacturing optimization. USANA has been doing it for 30+ years. We picked our acquirer based on who filled our exact gaps. Not who offered the most money. 25. Never raise institutional capital if you can avoid it. Total outside capital raised over our entire existence: a few hundred thousand dollars from friends and family in 2020. That's it. No Series A. No Series B. No VC board. No dilution. $0 institutional capital → $103M annual revenue → $260M acquisition. Founders retained virtually all equity going into the exit. 26. A profitable company negotiates from strength. At the time we began exploring acquisition we were already highly profitable. $19M net income on $103M revenue — roughly 19% net margin. We did not need to sell. That single fact changed every conversation we had with potential acquirers. Never sell from desperation. Build something that doesn't need to be sold. 27. The subscription cash flow trap will suffocate you if you're not ready. This is the thing nobody in DTC talks about honestly. Growing fast with a discounted first month means every new customer cohort creates a cash hole. Sign up 10,000 new customers in a month at 50% off and you're immediately deeply cash negative even though your business is fundamentally healthy. Plan for this or it will kill you when you're winning. 28. Pick your acquirer like you pick your co-founder. We met with many potential buyers. We knew USANA was the right partner after our 2nd meeting. Not because of their offer. Because they wanted to learn FROM us not impose their will ON us. Post acquisition my day to day changed by approximately a few phone calls per week. That's it. Culture fit in an acquisition matters more than price. 29. Time is the only thing that can't be negotiated. Compounding only works with patience. The first 6 months of Hiya almost nothing worked. Month 7 we started finding our stride. By year 2 we were growing 50% year over year. By year 4 we were the #1 children's wellness brand in America. You cannot accelerate compounding. You can only show up every single day. 30. Let the scoreboard speak for itself. We never chased press. Never sought validation. Never announced funding rounds because we had none to announce. We just built. $0 raised. $103M revenue. $260M exit. 200,000+ families trusting us with their children's health. Zero VC. Zero regrets. Comment “X” if you’d like the full playbook and more details (retweet and follow to receive)