This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up friends, listeners, community. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau and welcome as well to our Throwback Thursday segment. This is all about taking an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Recently, we have featured the founders of Budget Savvy Bride and Turnkey Translator.
Before that, we had a Pittsburgh house plant merchant who opens a retail shop in the midst of the pandemic and of course many more. You can find all of them on the Side Hustle School website, sidehustleschool.com, it's completely free. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Kent Yoshimura, one of two friends and athletes who set out to create chewable energy gum. It's gum-believable, what can I say? They had sold 5 million pieces and were getting stocked in CVS when we first featured them, but that's been a while.
So what's happened since, let's hear directly from Kent. One quick listener note, at some point Kent mentions CPG, the acronym CPG, he is referring to consumer packaged goods. So let's hear from him. I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
Hi, my name is Kent Yoshimura, co-founder and CEO of Neuro, and I was featured on episode 772.
And now back here again. My Side Hustle is a functional gum and mint company called Neuro, and you can find us at Whole Foods, CVS, online, and Amazon. Ryan, my co-founder and I were both athletes. I was training with the Japanese Olympic judo team around Japan, fighting Muay Thai in Thailand. Ryan was a cross country and track star, he was tapping his cross country team in high school before he got injured in a snowboarding accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down unfortunately.
But during that time, we were both getting really into supplementation and realized that pills are not the coolest thing to take in public. So if we could take all the healthy benefits of supplements and make them more approachable and put them into a form like gum and mint, which is shareable, we figured that people would like it. And over the last five years, we've been able to prove out that that's the case. And here we are now. Since the last time we aired, if you listen to our episode, a lot has happened.
2020 was a crazy year, I think for everyone. And our entry into nationwide Whole Foods is probably our biggest accomplishment since then. But we've also been on Shark Tank, we've also been featured on Joe Rogan multiple times. We became like a top five grocery product on Amazon. It's been pretty remarkable.
And despite everything, we're so thankful and grateful that we have amazing customers, we have an amazing team and we've been able to survive what 2020 and perhaps knock on wood, hopefully not 2021 holds, but continuing to grow, continuing to become a lifestyle brand and hopefully expand more products beyond just our energy and focus and common clarity. For anyone getting into the CPG business and for anyone getting into the product business, you'll know that there's a bunch of hurdles to get over. And with us, constant experimentation, constantly trying to make our products better is something that we hone in and focus on. And even with our energy and focus product, we're 32 iterations in. I think for us at the very beginning, we created a product that didn't taste that great because we wanted to launch and we didn't have that much money.
But over the years, we've constantly looked at improving ourselves, improving our product and listening to our customers. And for anyone who's looking to follow in our footsteps, don't let your ego get ahead of yourself because the customers will show you where the cracks are. And where to patch up the cracks. It's easy to get consumed in work and it's easy to get consumed in this amazing thing that any of us are trying to build. But the older I get and the more experienced I get in business, I realized that productivity and motivation comes in the form of balance.
For us, mental health is an extremely important part of who we are and how we operate as a business. And we promote people to not only have their work as the main focus of who they are as an individual, but really becoming a comprehensive, like a Vitruvian man/woman that's complete. And with anything that you are pursuing, don't lose focus of that. Don't lose focus of yourself more than anything else because if you are in a right state of mind, if you are balanced as an individual, all the influences and inspirations that you'll get all translate into your success, whether it's for your business or something much larger. [Music]
Awesome, thank you so much, Kent.
Really appreciate you sharing your update with us. Listeners, chew on that for a while and also visit getneuro.com. That's a getneuro, like neurological, N-E-U-R-O. You can also find them on Amazon, functional gum and mints to energize calm and focus you in the moment. I appreciate Kent and the whole team helping us out with this segment.
This was one of our most popular new features of 2020, Throwback Thursday. So as you've heard, we're gonna keep it going this year as well. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. If you've got a question for us or you'd like to update us about your Side Hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Be sure you're subscribed wherever you get your podcasts because so much more is coming up.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
