My First MillionHow we scaled to $100M in under a year (ft. IM8 co-founder Danny Yeung)
My First Million
Danny Yeung Introduces Himself 0:00
Danny Yeung explains that he has been an entrepreneur since age 15, when he worked as a telemarketer. At 24 he opened a restaurant, then moved into importing hotel furniture from China, including work on the MGM CityCenter project in Las Vegas. In 2010 he moved to Hong Kong to launch a group-buying e-commerce company, which Groupon later acquired a 51 percent stake in, turning it into the largest e-commerce company in the region. He left in 2014 with the business doing about 200 million dollars in annual revenue, calling it his first big financial win.
From Prenetics To COVID Boom 1:30
After e-commerce, Yeung founded Prenetics, a life sciences and DNA testing company, in 2014, well before such testing was a mainstream idea. When COVID hit, Prenetics built a testing kit in two weeks and became the top PCR test provider in both Hong Kong and the UK. At its peak the company ran 40,000 PCR tests a day, totaling 28 million tests and over 700 million dollars in revenue across three years. Prenetics listed on the NASDAQ in 2022 at a billion-dollar-plus valuation, but eighteen months later its market cap had collapsed to around 50 million dollars as testing demand vanished, a 95 percent revenue drop that taught him, he says, who his real friends were.
Meeting Beckham And Building IM8 5:00
While weighing whether to shut the company down or pivot, Yeung happened to meet David Beckham, who described how overwhelming it was for him and Victoria to manage 12 to 15 supplement pills, especially while traveling. After months of conversation, Yeung proposed that Beckham join not as a paid ambassador but as a genuine co-founder, insisting the brand had to be able to live beyond Beckham's name. This became IM8, a supplement brand built around a single daily drink.
What IM8 Actually Sells 7:00
IM8's core product, Daily Ultimate Essentials, is a powder with 90 ingredients that replaces 16 separate supplements, covering multivitamins, CoQ10, MSM, probiotics, prebiotics, and postbiotics. Mixed with 12 ounces of water each morning, it is priced at 90 dollars a month versus the 250 to 300 dollars those 16 products would normally cost. Launched in December 2024, IM8 hit a 100 million dollar annual revenue run rate in 11 months, faster than Ghost's 22 months or AG1's decade-long climb to the same mark, and reached a 200 million run rate in 18 months.
Fighting For Category And Positioning 9:30
Yeung's board initially opposed the supplement venture, pointing out he had no background in the category and that celebrity-backed brands usually fail. He told them he would resign if he was wrong. His conviction rested on making a genuinely better product, spending a week at the factory testing 20 to 30 flavors until the taste was right, and choosing a bold, unusual identity: red instead of the typical green supplement powder, a color that emerged naturally from beet-based ingredients, paired with premium red packaging designed for a strong unboxing experience. The name IM8 was chosen for simplicity, with "I am" suggesting affirmations like "I am strong," and the number eight symbolizing infinity and doubling as a lucky number for an eventual entry into China.
Recruiting Scientists And Proving Results 14:31
To back the product, Yeung assembled a scientific advisory board including Dr. Don Mumford-type figures from Mayo Clinic, James Green, NASA's former chief scientist, and Susan Decotiis, a microbiome expert from Cedars-Sinai, building on personal relationships and cold outreach on LinkedIn. The team ran clinical trials before launch and secured third-party testing from Eurofins and NSF Certified for Sport, meaning the product is verified free of 280 banned substances for professional athletes. Yeung points to recurring subscription revenue as proof the product works, and cites an inbound email from world number one tennis player Aryna Sabalenka's team describing improved recovery and fewer illnesses while traveling, which led to a partnership; every ambassador since has approached IM8 rather than the other way around.
Scaling Ads And Offline Events 20:00
On marketing, Yeung runs two to three thousand live Meta ads at any time, about 55 to 60 percent static images and the rest video, drawing on a pool of top ambassadors plus over a thousand affiliate creators, with a proprietary "creative fatigue score" to know when to retire an ad. Between Q1 and Q2, IM8 doubled its ad spend from 17 to 33 million dollars while its customer acquisition cost actually dropped from 305 to 301 dollars, against an average order value of about 230 dollars. Alongside digital scaling, IM8 has run over 200 offline events, including seven in seven days in New York, where scientific advisory board members and formulators meet customers directly, a deliberately hard-to-scale approach Yeung considers especially valuable in an age when audiences struggle to tell what is real.
Doubling Down on Offline Marketing 27:00
Danny notes that even in July, cost per acquisition fell to $239 despite spending more than $10 million a month on marketing. He admits he has no hard data to prove it, but he believes offline events matter a great deal for building the brand, and he plans to keep investing there even without clean attribution numbers.
Dropping Out and Learning on the Streets 27:31
Danny dropped out of high school in San Francisco after getting kicked out for fighting. With no schooling to fall back on, he had to learn everything on the streets, which he credits for making him street smart and able to figure things out with very little information. At fifteen he became a telemarketer selling timeshares, working night shifts and calling one hundred to two hundred people a night with a rejection rate around ninety to ninety five percent. He says those chaotic teenage years, constantly reinventing himself and changing schools, taught him he could survive anywhere, even somewhere like Nigeria, because he had already learned to adapt under pressure.
Directness Over Sales Tricks 29:31
Rather than studying scripts or psychological hooks the way some sales-focused entrepreneurs do, Danny says his approach has always been to be direct and transparent, especially when meeting someone for the first time. His guiding philosophy is to figure out what he can deliver for the other person first, rather than asking what is in it for him. He says that mindset works even if the other side never reciprocates, because you simply move on and keep learning.
Cold Calling His Way Into Deals 31:30
Danny describes cold calling his way into major breakthroughs. In his group-buying business in Hong Kong, a restaurant director hung up on him, so he tracked down that man's boss, Sandeep, who owned more than thirty restaurants. Sandeep doubted the business model but agreed to work with him purely because he admired the persistence, handing over all thirty restaurants at once and filling Danny's next month of deals. A similar pattern got him into the hotel furniture business: after helping a designer friend source furniture for small hotels, he realized the effort was the same whether making fifty chairs or thousands, so he cold called Las Vegas hotel chains and eventually landed a four million dollar contract with MGM.
Explosive Growth in COVID Testing 37:30
When COVID hit, Danny's lab in Hong Kong pivoted to testing. He launched an at-home PCR test within about two weeks, pricing it at 100 US dollars while hospitals charged 300 to 400. By July, the Hong Kong government asked him to test 300,000 restaurant workers across 18,000 restaurants in three weeks, forcing his company to scale from 200 tests a day to 10,000, with headcount growing to two or three thousand people almost overnight. The business eventually did about 700 million dollars in revenue over a couple of years, with more than 100 million net, and stood out because it never had a false positive or false negative spike the way rival labs did, which led Hong Kong to mandate its test for every airport arrival.
Cutting Fast When the Music Stopped 44:00
As soon as Danny sensed COVID testing demand was ending, he laid off 2,000 people quickly, a decision he says was right for the company and for the employees themselves. He contrasts this with competitors like Q Health and Lucira, once billion-dollar-plus companies that overbuilt manufacturing and bet on at-home testing continuing, then went bankrupt within eighteen months of the pandemic easing.
Founders Must Build the Best Product 45:32
Asked what most entrepreneurs miss, Danny says building the best product in the market makes everything else, branding, positioning, premium pricing, far easier. He also insists founders must stay involved in every part of the business regardless of size, because founders can take risks a hired CEO never would, pointing to his own decision to start IM8 as something no professional CEO would have risked. He and the host compare this to Paul Graham's idea of founder mode, and Danny illustrates the product point by having ChatGPT compare IM8 to AG1, which favors IM8 for using useful ingredients at meaningful doses rather than just a higher ingredient count.
No Real Hacks, Just Being Better 48:30
The host shares a story about buying a company that ranked number one for gold sales online, expecting to learn SEO tricks, only to be told there were no hacks, just an honest audit of whether the product actually deserved to rank first. Improving the real experience, brick by brick, was what eventually earned the top spot. Danny agrees this reinforces that success starts with the product itself, not clever shortcuts.
Balancing Delusion and Realism 50:31
The conversation closes on the idea that founders must alternate between delusion and realism, believing in an idea with no evidence and no relevant experience while everyone around them says otherwise, then switching to hard-nosed practicality when needed. Someone who is never delusional tends to end up an employee, while someone who is only delusional ends up a failed founder, and the ability to move between the two modes is what separates people who succeed. Danny says he had to lean on that delusional belief when building his ventures, piecing things together with only the limited information he had at the time.
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