Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverages but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Douglas Giampapa, Founder and CEO of Healthycell, located in Charleston, SC, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Healthycell is a nutrition company that created a new category of dietary supplements – the nutrition gel – that utilizes patent-pending MICROGEL™ technology to deliver nutrients you can absorb, results you can measure, and a pill-free experience you'll love, so you can optimize your health and reach your potential in life. Our customers are people who have trouble swallowing pills and people who want a clinically proven supplement delivery system that drives 165% more absorption than tablets.
Tell us about yourself
I am a problem solver at heart. I love figuring out how to make things work. At the end of the day, that's what entrepreneurship is: problem-solving. Even dali lama has stated that entrepreneurship is the way to fix many of the problems in our world today.
The entrepreneur's task is to figure out how to solve a problem in a way where the cost of doing so is less than the value of the solution. This task, along with witnessing our solutions' value to users, motivates me.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Innovating into product-market-fit. Innovation is required to solve problems. However, often the innovation is not scalable beyond a prototype, or it can't be done economically, or it can't be done in a way where customers understand or want to use it. You can only build a business around innovation if it checks all these boxes, which gives it a higher probability of reaching product-market fit.
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
Managing people. The study of business, similar to the study of economics, is based on the assumption that people behave rationally. However, people often do not behave rationally in the real world, which significantly impacts businesses. Learning how to interact with people and manage people, even when rational thought is lacking, is a requirement for business success.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Continual learning is one of the biggest predictors of entrepreneurial success. The world changes, and you must constantly learn to keep up and build value. Invest in yourself. Consider yourself a human IP portfolio that gains value with each new learning.
- Perseverance is underrated. Never give up, but with one caveat you should only pursue an entrepreneurial dream with endless determination if you have indications of product-market fit (PMF). Otherwise, you may spin your wheels forever, making things people don't want, can't afford, or can't use, forcing you into a spiral of frustration that leads to an unhappy life. And I don't mean anecdotal indicators of PMF like NPS score or product ratings and reviews, but rather formulaic mathematical indicators like an asymptote on your retention curve that drives a healthy LTV/CAC ratio.
- Don't sacrifice your health to gain wealth. If you're fortunate enough to succeed, you'll only end up sacrificing your wealth to regain health (if possible). So keep a work-life balance and build a healthy routine.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.healthycell.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/healthycell/
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/healthycell
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/healthycell/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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