supplement startup advice for beginners

The other day I got an email from a physician looking for advice. He was just beginning the process of creating a supplement startup or product.

He is at the very beginning stage of his supplement business. He did however have a YouTube channel with 70,000 subscribers. Which is the start of something he could leverage.

You may have the same questions on where to start and maybe you don’t have any followers on any social channels or anything for that matter.

Where would such a person start?

I thought my readers could benefit from the answers to that question so that’s what this article will cover.

Here’s my advice to him…

I’d begin with the market.

Get really clear on who you’re selling too.

What problem or health “pain point” are you trying to solve?

Now in the case of the physician with 70k YouTube subscribers, or anyone with access to a following, I recommend you look at your content for the answer. Or simply ask your audience.

This physician had created a lot of video’s to build that following, and those videos already have a ton of data he could look at to gain insights.

What are the top 10 viewed videos about? What is the top pain point they are solving? This is what I mean when I say begin with the market.

Starting a Dietary Supplement Startup From Scratch

For someone without any following the advice is the same. Begin with the market.

Research what’s trending in google search with tools like trends.google.com

For example, in the Vitamin Market Emerging Trends article I break down emerging trends in the diet niche to give you some ideas.

Next I’d look at what supplements sell. What are the best selling supplements on Amazon? What are some surveys from the Nutrition Industry Executive telling you about the market?

Supplement startup research — Supplement startup market research

Starting with the market means looking at what’s selling and finding a gap you can fill.

That marketplace analysis is key to finding that opportunity.

Without it your message to market match is going to be a me-too clone of everyone else in the market.

This leads to mistrust, and inaction on the part of your prospects. But, once you understand where the market is, you can align with it, to help more people and have a bigger impact in the world.

In the article Three Ways to Find a Health Niche, I state that a niche is key to success in the direct to consumer online dietary supplement business. I explore three simple ways to niche down your health business.

The Health Supplement Startup Trap

The supplement startup trap I see over and over is that most supplement startups launch a me-too product.

If there’s nothing special about your product then why should someone buy it?

When it comes to a health supplement product that special something is typically the unique mechanism.

In the article, Does Your Dietary Supplement Marketing Need A Better Unique Mechanism, I go into quite a bit of detail on what this is and how to use it.

So I’ll only touch on the highlights here. The unique mechanism is the “thing” that delivers the promise to your prospect. It is the reason why your product works.

It could be a specific ingredient, a blend of ingredients or the way the ingredients work within the body.

The key here is that you’re likely not going to discover a new ingredient. But you can talk about your unique mechanism in a way that no one else is.

That’s how you add “uniqueness” to the product. You out-market the competition.

Marketing is the key to success

All in all, starting a vitamin supplement company is pretty easy to do with white labeling.

Supplement manufacturers like Ship Offers can even handle the fulfillment and more for you.

The attractiveness of starting a supplement company is in the ease and the profit potential.

The industry’s average profit margin is around 38 percent.

And you can easily make $100,000 per year income and quite a lot more as well.

It’s not uncommon for a supplement company of 14 people to have revenues in the 40 Million range, if you do it right.

But the marketing is the hard part.

Out-marketing the competition takes both time and money. A lot more of both than you expect.

On the money side… As long as you’re willing to weather the storms and if you have enough of a bankroll to keep pouring money into the business, even when you might not be making much today, you can come out ahead in the long run.

On the marketing side… As long as you have the right front end funnel, combined with the right marketing hook and the right unique mechanism, you can come out on top with a supplement startup.