The science of healthcare that came out of things like gross anatomy, germ theory and chemistry works extremely well for certain kinds of things. If you have a gunshot wound, a measles infection or a headache, this system will serve you extremely well. In other words, if the only thing that stands between you and health is a single cause that is relatively easy to identify, our current health care approach can do a lot to remove that cause and get you back to “normal.”

But more and more people are coming to realize that this level of health isn’t really the same as “well-being.” Conditions like ADHD, OCD, chronic pain, inflammation, brain fog and lack of motivation are rarely the result of one simple cause. Instead, they are the result of a whole complex of causations tied together in a nest of feedback loops. All too often, we engage these complex systems with tools that are not designed to account for all the factors of a problem, which can do more harm than good.

If we are to move beyond traditional healthcare, and into true wellbeing care, then an adequate approach must account for the complexity of the whole system informing our wellbeing status.

Take, as an example, the most common form of diabetes (Type II). This form of diabetes often results from low-quality diet and sedentary lifestyle. When one looks at the population of diabetics, many of the people suffering have had limited ability to make good choices with respect to their personal nutrition and lifestyles. This is actually a problem of sovereignty - people don’t have good habits or good information and often are in a social environment that gives them bad models and feedback. Better approaches to preventing or delaying diabetes can emerge by reframing it as a problem of sovereignty, as a complex problem of individuals, in a given system, unable to make good choices. To address this will require a fully realized complex systems science which takes into account all of the different aspects of a given problem. Complex systems science is a way of understanding an entire system by understanding the interrelationship between that system and all other pertinent systems.

The good news is that the human body is remarkably good at not dying. It has a whole bunch of biological and psychological feedbacks that were honed by a long evolutionary timeframe to be very resilient and stay alive. We are not smart enough to design complex systems. But we are learning how to work with those natural complex systems to help them get back into balance. The more we understand the rich wholeness of the human mind/body system, the better we are getting at being able to work with those systems to maintain and even upregulate comprehensive well-being.

Neurohacker Collective's approach is considerate of whole systems, and designs to nourish and harness the complexities and interdependencies nature has baked in to life.

That's a hard question to answer. In most ways, we don't have any competitors because what we're doing is fundamentally different than what everyone else in the associated spaces are doing. People will often look at other nootropic companies like HVMN, TruBrain, or Thrivous as our competitors, but as we're expanding our product portfolio, we've started to move into other arenas. With our upcoming cellular energy products, the primary company's that people might view as a competitor are Elysium or TruNiagen.

As we expand the number of product domains that we're moving into our comparisons are moving away from nootropic company's and towards larger nutraceutical companies such as Life Extension, Thorne, or Metagenics. Though there are some great company's in this space it's still hard to think of them as competitors since the basis of our approach is fundamentally different. The unique value of our company lies in our complex systems approach to research and product development, resulting in complex formulas that have the ability to address major challenges with powerful effects in both the short and long term. The scientific approach that we've developed allows us to deliver on almost anything within the spaces of health, wellness, and human optimization, at a level higher than what is currently being done by any other groups that we're aware of.

Our approach to science allows us to understand the regulatory systems of the body & brain in such a way that we can develop powerful solutions for almost any area of health and well-being. Our science isn't limited to particular forms of technology so it's likely that over time we'll begin to work in technologies outside of the nutraceutical category such as wearable tech, diagnostics, molecule development, etc. 

For now though we've made the strategic choice to focus on developing products within the nutraceutical domain since we're able to provide powerful solutions to a wide variety of needs an to do so with a lower barrier to entry than would exist with other approaches. 

We began with a focus on supporting cognition and a subjective sense of well-being since healthy brain function is critical for being able to make improvements/changes in most other areas.

While we're continuing to do more development in this area we've already started making major strides on developing products in a few other categories. First, we've developed a new cellular energy product that's aimed at increasing mitochondrial function, increasing ATP production, etc. This product is just getting ready to go into testing right now and we anticipate it releasing to the public this fall. Strategically this was a relevant next category to focus on since increasing the health and functionality of all the cells in the body will help improve health in other areas of health that we're beginning to focus on.

Now that the cellular energy formula is moving into testing, our product team has turned their research to developing products addressing sleep, mood and anxiety. Each of these are products that we expect to be able to release towards the later part of this year or early portion of next year. 

As those progress we've already mapped out several other categories that we'll be focusing on next which include pain, sports medicine/performance, immune function, cardiovascular function, longevity.

Unlike pharmaceutical drugs, the FDA doesn't give approval to, nor has an approval process for products in our space, as we fall into the classification of a nutraceutical or supplement company. The FDA does mandate fairly stringent manufacturing, testing, and quality assurance procedures. For this, we contract GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) certified contract manufacturers to help ensure that FDA standards are met and where reasonably possible are exceeded.

First, I'd like to say that I think having some skepticism is important. Rather than referring to it as skepticism I think it's useful to think of this in terms of discernment. 

Whether we're talking about supplements or any other industry, there's an immense amount of marketing dollars that go into convincing us that we need the products/services being shown. These marketing dollars aren't being used with nuance or discernment to actually help determine whether or not the items being promoted are actually useful to the person or if they're in fact the best option available. 

As a result of this it's important that as individuals we become educated enough about the things we're interested in that we can use our discernment in effective ways. 

We celebrate people using discernment to decide whether our products or any products are right for them. To this end, we provide as much transparency and education as can. Unlike most company's in our domain, we don't do proprietary formulas. For each of our products we list exactly which ingredients we're using, in which forms and the exact dosing. Beyond that we have dozens of pages of content on our website that speaks in depth regarding the ingredients we're using, what research is behind them and why we chose to formulate with these particular ingredients. 

I think that education is one of the keys ways to overcome skepticism. Beyond providing education to our customers we also do extensive research into both the safety and effectiveness of our products.

Over the years we've done a number of research projects to show both qualitatively and quantitatively what impact our products are able to produce. Most recently we completed a pilot study with Cambridge Brain Sciences to measure cognitive function before and after taking Qualia Mind. Though this was a small study with only 23 participants and the results are preliminary, they're still incredibly promising and exciting. In total we tested 12 aspects of cognitive function and saw substantial lifts. Because of the number of participants involved, some of the tests have too high of a margin of error to be counted as statistically significant but there were 6 areas we saw major lifts, combined with very low margins of error. These included concentration, verbal reasoning and planning. We're in the process of compiling these results and expect to share them here shortly.

We focused heavily in the beginning of the company on getting researchers, scientists, physicians and influencers familiar with our products and approach. As a result we have an incredibly long list of endorsers, supporters, advisors. Here's a small portion of the industry experts and influencers that currently recommend our products:

• Dr. Daniel Stickler

• Dr. Hyla Cass

• Jason Silva

• Andrew Huberman, PH.D

• Zachary Stein, Ed.D

• Scott Barry Kaufman, PH.D 

• Dr. Rishi Khatri

• Lindsay Briner

• Jon Wilkins, Ph.D.

• Dr. Heather Sandison

• Forrest Landry

• Diego Espinosa

• Andrew Hill, PH.D

• Dr. Jeffrey Becker

• Dr. Nafysa Parpia

• Dr. Kat Toups

• Elias Ladopoulos

• Dan Pardi 

• Mark Divine

• Ben Greenfield 

• Mike Bledsoe

• Thadeus Owen

• Mansal Denton

• Michael Mannino

Our first product is a specific mixture of 42 different ingredients called Qualia. We crafted the formulation by first doing an exhaustive search of the vast clinical data that exists around the psycho-neuropharmacological effects of many different potential ingredients. We then plugged that data into our models of how and why the mind/body interface generates both changes in objective state (like growing neurons) and changes in subjective experience (like increased motivation). We then iterated back and forth between trial formulations and tests until we had a “gold” formula that we were ready to share.

For an example of how this process worked, consider adrenal response. This is a part of the biological system that is designed to help us respond to stressors in our environment (like being chased by a lion). Over the past fifteen thousand years, we have come a long way from the savannah, and our modern environment is full of stressors (cars, televisions, coffee, bosses) that combine to put our mind and body under chronic stress conditions. As a result, many of us have been pushing ourselves into hyper-adrenal response, leaving us neurotic (easily triggered into a fight or flight response) or in malaise (unable to respond at all). The basic machinery of our adrenal system has been bent out of shape. There are a number of nutrients that have been shown to help bring the adrenal system back into balance. Or consider Piperine (an alkaloid found in black pepper). Piperine by itself has been shown to increase both serotonin and dopamine levels (providing certain antidepressant effects), but it is important in our formulation because it is highly synergistic with curcumin (turmeric) - making it both more bioavailable and significantly improving curcumin’s anti-inflammatory effects.

Broadly, one portion of our ingredients has been selected to address things like detoxification (particularly of the brain), anti-inflammation, antioxidants, and cellular membrane repair. For a lot of people, taking them is like drinking a glass of water when they’ve been in the desert for a week. Another portion of ingredients has to do with boosting the function of your basic neurochemical system. These include things like choline and acetyl donors that are metabolized in the brain to produce acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter associated with a number of cognitive functions and Huperzine A which has been shown to support learning, memory, neuroplasticity and executive function. A third focuses on neurogenesis (actually building more neurons) and neuroplasticity. A fourth on upregulating energy and metabolism in the brain. And another that is focused on improving blood flow through the brain. The sixth and final major focus was on improving cell structure integrity (e.g., supporting myelin sheaths and mitochondrial membrane structures).

The net result is an excellent general-purpose stack that meaningfully addresses the entire body/brain system to improve holistic cognitive performance and subjective experience.

Since launching Qualia and our first fundraising round on Wefunder, we've also released an evolution of Qualia, a product called Qualia Mind. It essentially has the same effects and serves the same purpose as Qualia, but is more potent and a lot more user-friendly. Qualia is split into two formulas that people have to take at different times of day, but Qualia Mind is just a single formula taken once a day. Qualia is also 9 capsules, 6 of them very large, whereas Qualia Mind is 7 normal sized capsules.

We will have both products available, but Qualia Mind is now our primary product.

Given the comprehensive nature of what our products are intended to support, the effects that people experience are quite broad.

Some of the most common effects that people report as they start taking any of the Qualia products is increased ability to concentrate, increased sense of motivation combined with an increased sense of overall capacity. Commonly people will report increases in emotional resilience which is basically the ability to be less effected by your circumstances and/or to bounce back more quickly if a stressor throws you off.

Most people report increases in their energy levels, their ability to recall words more rapidly as well as the total amount of complexity they can hold at a given time. 

These are all effects that we hear users report on almost immediately after taking our products. As people take the products for longer (at least a few weeks) we also start to hear about increases in memory, decreases in overall stress and increases in people's overall sense of happiness and wellbeing.

Our initial customer base was predominantly the most educated and early adopters within the nootropic space. We targeted the bio-hacking community very heavily, as well as the academic and scientific communities around cognition, neuroscience, and human optimization. We've done a pretty good job at locking in our market position in those areas. Since then, we've begun to expand and we're seeing interest from a lot of groups.

There are a lot of athletes interested in our product because they track and notice what's causing improvements for them more than the average person. They'll see dramatic increases in their exercise capacity as a result of our product. We also see a lot of people from the startup tech and finance communities. People, who in order to do their jobs, must have  sharp cognitive functions and operate at a quick level for extended hours. Then, we a lot of single mothers, who have far more to do than is reasonable and need the additional support.

There have been challenges in transitioning brand positions, because the hacker concept is something that only subsets of people really understand or are attracted to. With that, when we transitioned to Mind, we elevated Qualia from being a product to being a product line. So now, all of the products that we develop in the psycho-neuro space will produce real-time subject effect in cognition, sleep, pain, mood, etc. We're beginning to elevate the Qualia Mind line as a more prominent brand that people can understand.

I've been interested in increasing the quality of life on the planet for as far back as I can remember. I started my career in education, running a vocational college that taught programs in alternative health and alternative education. The work I got to do at that school with people had huge impacts on their lives as well as the lives of the people they served. 

Working with individuals and classrooms was personally very fulfilling but I always felt compelled to work in ways that could impact more total people. During my time running the college I began to learn about and self-experiment with ways of increasing capacity, quality of life and overall well-being. I ended up getting the opportunity to do an IV therapy in Mexico that had a profound impact on life. In the course of just a few days of doing this treatment, my cognitive function increased dramatically, my sense of happiness and motivation increased, my overall outlook on life improved and my sense of empathy increased substantially. 

In that moment, getting to recognize how profound of an impact the right kinds of chemistry could have no people, I realized that this was the path by which I could support the largest number of people. I started thinking about what kinds of problems we could solve for individuals and the world if we could figure out how to provide meaningful upgrades in an accessible fashion. 

This is where the idea for Neurohacker was originally born. I wanted to figure out if we could develop solutions that would allow people to become more intelligent, more capable, more motivated and more empathetic; so that people would be motivated to use their increased intelligence and capacity to improve their own quality of life but also, through stimulating empathy, choose to apply their capacities to improve the lives of those around them.

This concept is what eventually became Qualia. In the process of developing Qualia, and particularly in the process of developing a scientific model that could solve for a challenge as large and complex as this one, it also became clear that we could use this same scientific approach to improve quality of life across any aspect of physical/psycho-emotional health. Now that we've become a more established company we're getting the opportunity to apply our scientific model to numerous other health challenges and I'm excited to see the results as we're able to bring additional products/solutions to market.

The company was formally founded in December of 2015. That was when we secured the first round of funding and issued operating documents. We spent the next six months putting together our final formulation, signing up and testing manufacturers, finalizing the brand and launching the e-commerce website. We first started selling Qualia online in April 2016 and very rapidly proved the product had a place in the market. After about three months, we had shown that customer acquisition costs and cost of goods sold were low enough to make us profitable at adequate revenue scale. Since then, we've sold over 75k Qualia and completed our first successful Regulation Crowdfunding campaign.

The suggested resale price is $139 for a monthly supply or $129 if you sign up as a subscriber. About 25% of our customers sign up as subscribers on that first sale. The margins vary widely. We've had up to 55% unit margins, and we've had negative 15%. But generally, we are at about 27%, where for every dollar spent on costs of goods sold and customer acquisition nets $1.37 in sales revenue and 37 cents in profit contribution. The product is quite expensive to make, which is one reason competitors are not playing alongside us. Notably, with 25% of customers ending up as subscribers, our profit contribution margin is higher in the months following the month in which a new customer was acquired.

We have three primary channels for customer acquisition. One is direct marketing, the second is organic, and the third is what we call channel partners. Organic is ostensibly free, though we have to create content and find people who care. About 20% of our traffic comes in organically. With direct marketing, the work horse right now is Facebook, but we also play with Google, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and we've built a robust email marketing program. We manage several different outsourced teams that specialize in Facebook marketing. We usually buy where we have control over what the content is, and we manage it on a PPC or a CPA basis.

Channel partners are people or groups who have established an audience that is likely to be interested in what we are about. We work with our channel partners to tell our story in a way that connects with their community and brand. They bring in about 25-30% of our customers. We only work with people who have high resonance with our long-term vision and have high brand integrity. We do a revenue share with our channel partners which operates on a tiered basis, based on how much revenue they help generate.

A handful of months ago, we also began opening up wholesale channels at a preliminary testing level. When we first opened up wholesale, the majority of our wholesale clients were actually medical practices and so we now have a few dozen doctors, psychiatrists, naturopaths, etc. that are carrying the product in their offices. Since that's been working well, we're progressing further down that path and are in negotiations with major, particularly natural retailers. Then, a key piece of our growth strategy going forward is to branch out to more mainstream retailers. We also began distributing on a number of online supplement sales channels, like Lucky Vitamin.

About 65-70% of Qualia Mind customers choose to subscribe. On average, a subscriber purchases 4 units. Lifetime net revenue per Qualia Mind customer in direct-to-consumer channels (excl. Amazon) is therefore about $310. LTV varies depending on the acquisition channel and it varies by month.

We did about $600K in total revenue in 2016 and about $4.9M in 2017. This year, our revenue run-rate is already close to $7M and factoring in the increased revenue we anticipate from new product launches, we expect to grow further. 

In the last year, we've also kept expenses steady. Since raising at Wefunder, we've been moving from a burn rate of $100-150K a month to crossing over to profitability in the next month or so. This is a major milestone for any startup.

We still anticipate that direct to consumer sales will be the largest portion of the business, though retail may increase revenue at a very rapid pace. We also plan to do more PR, get larger media exposure, increase our advertising budgets and expand our direct marketing teams. Lastly, we started some early development into opening up sales channels in other countries, which may be major growth buckets for us. That's what this fundraising round will support. 

We have three major ones. The first is simply managing the rate of growth. Making sure we grow but don't grow too fast. There's been such a high degree of interest in what we're doing so we have a tremendous opportunity, but we have to evaluate each opportunity and make sure that we can adequately execute on and resource each thing. That often means that we actually have to say, "No," or slow down potential growth.

Then there are supply chain risks that come into play. We use a lot of different types of ingredients and those can be subject to different things like natural disasters, import issues, price fluctuations, etc. 

The last risk is regulatory. While we’ve taken care to navigate the FDA and FTC requirements (and have hired one of the best law firms in the country as our counsel here), regulation in a space like this is always tricky and, particularly as we start to expand our product offerings, it never gets easier. Though we feel like we have a good handle on regulatory compliance this remains a risk since much of what happens in regulation is beyond our control. 

At the global scale, the nutraceutical market is growing at an average 9.9% per year. That'll be a $590B global market by 2024. The cognitive market, which includes the nutraceutical and pharmaceutical space, is currently about a $12.6B market and is one of the most rapidly growing market segments around. 

Last year, we raised $808,454 on Wefunder. 

The process was quite meaningful for us. We chose to fundraise on Wefunder rather than raising from VC's or private equity groups because we wanted to be beholden to the people we're actually serving, our customers, rather than be beholden to a financial institution whose primary focus is going to be maximizing quarterly profits. This way, we have an alignment between the mission of the company, the care of the investors, and the needs of the customer. That's why we chose Wefunder last time and also why we're choosing Wefunder again.

We also found that many investors on Wefunder have important connections and other types of strategic value. Some of the investors in our last WeFunder round have since become meaningful parts of the company as strategic advisors, connectors, content creators and more. 

The funds we raised last year through WeFunder allowed us to make some substantial strides forward as a company. We were able to invest more heavily in R&D and have had some great successes on that front since. Most notably we re-designed our original Qualia formulation and were able to make it 1 formula instead of 2 that needed taken at different times of the day, we were able to reduce the number of capsules needed and bring down the price.

We've now finished development and testing on a more mainstream version of Qualia Mind that'll be an even lower price point than our premium version. This product is expected to hit shelves in October at a retail price of $69.

We've also been able to complete a new formulation for increasing cellular energy which is just now going into testing. 

Beyond product development we've also been able to improve our operational efficiency and are now crossing over into profitability as a company.

We're incredibly fortune to have a world-class team. In fact world-class feels like an understatement for the people I get to work with each day. 

The scientific model that we've developed shows promise in so many areas of increasing human potential that it's allowed us to attract a level of talent that's unprecedented for a company of our size. Several of our team members previously held executive & C-suite positions at fortune 500 company's and large public company's. Though we couldn't offer similar compensation packages since we're a startup, people have routinely given up MUCH better paying roles with other company's to become a part of what we're creating here. 

I could easily gush for hours about each of our team members but for timing sake I'll just point you to our team section above so you can read a little bit about the amazing individuals that make up Neurohacker. 

Yes. And it's unlikely to occur.

We started Neurohacker because of the impact we want to have on the world. Part of accomplishing the goals we have requires us to be a highly profitable company so we can resource the ongoing work that we're doing. 

Because the mission of the company comes first and foremost it's not likely that another company would be interested in acquiring us and continuing the important work being done here. If that was to come along we'd absolutely consider it. But overall our plan is to build a company that's profitable enough that we can throw off substantial distributions each quarter for our investors. 

As we continue to grow we plan to put systems in place that will allow investors to sell their stake, either back to Neurohacker or to others; though I suspect most wont want to given the planned distributions. 

We're also likely going to have a series of mini-acquisitions along the way. We're already in conversations with a few of the largest food and beverage company's in the world to do custom product development with them. This allows us to use our unique formulation capacity to develop products that are best-in-class but not core to our business model, to then build these products into substantial company's and sell them, offering a series liquidity events for our investors while simultaneously adding more funding to Neurohacker

Our biggest challenge is actually storytelling. What we're doing is very complex and large in scope, not just at a mission and concept level, but even at a product level. Having people understand what the capacity of complex systems design is and seeing the benefits across our products is an extremely difficult story to tell to a broad audience in a concise and short way. It's something that we continually work to improve on.