Danny Yeung on Scaling IM8 to $100M

Ten years and eleven months are two ways of describing the same finish line. AG1, the greens powder that built the modern supplement-subscription category, needed a decade to reach a $100 million annual revenue run rate. IM8, a red powder launched in December of 2024, got there in eleven months, then doubled to a $200 million run rate within eighteen (08:32, 08:52). The gap between those two numbers is the subject of this conversation, and the man explaining it, Danny Yeung, has spent thirty years collecting the instincts that closed it.

Yeung's resume reads like a list of unrelated businesses: a teenage telemarketer selling timeshares in San Francisco, a restaurant owner at 24, a hotel-furniture importer who landed a $4 million contract with MGM's Las Vegas properties, and the founder of a Hong Kong group-buying site that Groupon eventually bought a majority stake in (00:35, 01:05, 08:35). Then came Prenetics, a DNA-testing company Yeung started in 2014, years before anyone outside a lab cared about genetic testing. When COVID arrived, Prenetics became Hong Kong's dominant PCR-testing provider, running as many as 40,000 tests a day and generating more than $700 million in revenue over three years (02:33, 02:50). Then the market corrected. Eighteen months after COVID, Prenetics' valuation fell from over a billion dollars to about $50 million, a 95 percent drop that Yeung says taught him who his real friends were (03:00, 03:25).

Out of that collapse came the idea for IM8. Yeung met David Beckham around the time he was already circling the supplement category, and the conversation that started it wasn't a pitch. Beckham and his wife Victoria, despite every resource available to them, found supplement routines overwhelming, especially while traveling with a dozen bottles and pills (05:44). Yeung saw an opening: a single daily sachet, mixed with water, that could replace the whole shelf. But he set one condition before Beckham signed on.

"I told David, if we do this together, I don't want you just as ambassador, I want you as a co-founder, but this brand has to live beyond you." - Danny Yeung [06:36]

That distinction, ambassador versus co-founder, is not cosmetic. Celebrity supplement brands fail more often than they succeed, according to Yeung's own board, which initially opposed the whole idea (11:40). A paid face can walk away or get canceled; a co-founder has equity, incentive, and reputational risk baked in from day one. Yeung says he told his board that if the bet was wrong, he would resign (11:16).

The product itself is almost aggressively simple: 90 ingredients, from multivitamins to CoQ10 to pre-, pro-, and postbiotics, compressed into one sachet meant to replace 16 separate supplements. It sells for $90 a month, against an estimated $250 to $300 for buying the equivalent pills individually (07:46, 08:08). Getting the formulation right was not a lab exercise alone. Yeung spent a week living inside the manufacturing factory, testing 20 to 30 flavor variations a day until the team found something people would actually want to drink again the next morning (12:15). The color, a deep red rather than the green that dominates the greens-powder category, came from beets in the formulation, and once the team saw it, they leaned in rather than correcting it toward category convention (12:52).

Building the trust that a red powder needs

A bold product needs bold proof behind it, because skepticism is the default reaction to any celebrity-adjacent supplement. Yeung's answer was to recruit a scientific advisory board with names that don't attach themselves lightly to consumer brands: Mayo Clinic physician Dr. Dawn Mussallem, former NASA chief scientist James Green, and Cedars-Sinai microbiome director Suzanne Devkota (14:40). IM8 ran a clinical trial before launch and submitted the product to third-party testing by both Eurofins and NSF Certification for Sport, the same standard used to confirm a product is free of banned substances for professional athletes (16:33, 16:52). That groundwork paid off in an unusual way: an email arrived from the team of Aryna Sabalenka, the world's top-ranked women's tennis player, saying she'd been using the product for three months on a coach's recommendation and wanted to partner (18:52). Every ambassador who followed, Yeung says, came to IM8 rather than the other way around (19:43).

The marketing engine underneath all of this runs on a different logic than it did even a few years ago. IM8 keeps 2,000 to 3,000 Meta ads live at any given time and tests 500 to 800 new creative assets every week (23:10). Yeung's explanation is blunt: ad buying itself has become a commodity, since Meta's algorithm now handles targeting automatically. The lever that still matters is creative diversity.

"You don't need to do the targeting, you don't need to do all this stuff. All you need to really figure out is how do you get really good creatives and really good creative diversity on the different personas, because now you need the creative to do the targeting." - Danny Yeung [23:41]

The numbers back up the claim in a way that should unsettle anyone who assumes more spend always means higher acquisition cost. In the first quarter, IM8's cost to acquire a customer (CAC) was $305, against an average order value of about $230 (25:15). In the second quarter, the company doubled its marketing spend from $17 million to $33 million, and CAC actually fell by four dollars, to $301 (25:27). By July, spending more than $10 million a month, CAC had dropped further to $239 (27:40). Yeung credits part of that to something distinctly analog: more than 200 in-person events, including seven in seven days around the US Open in New York, where customers meet the scientific advisory board face to face (25:47, 26:24). He doesn't have hard data proving the offline events are lowering CAC, he admits, but he's doubling down anyway, on the theory that in an age when nobody can tell what's AI-generated and what's real, a live human handing over a sample is worth more than it used to be (26:45, 27:45).

The arithmetic of rejection

Underneath the ad-spend numbers is a psychological discipline that Yeung traces back to being a fifteen-year-old telemarketer selling timeshares on the night shift, dialing 100 to 200 people a shift and hearing no from 90 to 95 percent of them (00:35, 31:10, 31:27). He describes the mindset simply: tell yourself the next call is more likely to land, and keep dialing. That same math shows up later in the episode from the host, recounting his uncle Vinnie, a door-to-door salesman who turned rejection into a spreadsheet problem. If a yes is worth $100 and it takes 20 nos to get there, then every no is worth $5, banked progress rather than failure.

"If a yes is worth $100 to me, and it's gonna take me 20 nos to get one yes, then every no is worth $5 to me." - Sean, host, recounting his uncle Vinnie [35:25]

Yeung's version of the same lesson shows up in a story about cold-calling a Hong Kong restaurant group during his group-buying days. A marketing director hung up on him and cursed him out. Rather than quit, Yeung found the man's boss, called the front desk, and got a meeting the next day. The owner, impressed that Yeung hadn't backed off after being insulted, signed all 30 of his restaurants on the spot, filling Yeung's entire next month of deals with a single yes (32:45, 34:09).

The conversation closes on a tension Yeung says every founder has to hold at once: the need to be delusional enough to act on conviction with no evidence, and realistic enough to cut fast when the evidence turns against them. He points to letting go of 2,000 employees the moment he sensed COVID testing demand was ending, a decision that protected Prenetics while at-home testing companies like Cue Health and Lucira, both once billion-dollar-plus public companies, went bankrupt within eighteen months by overbuilding manufacturing capacity that never found a post-pandemic market (44:45, 45:04). Being a founder rather than a hired CEO, Yeung argues, is precisely the willingness to take that kind of risk, in both directions, without a board's permission (48:07).