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 healthcare 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 “wellbeing”. 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.

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 wellbeing.

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.

As you might imagine, our approach is not limited to nootropic products. Over the next year we intend to extend our product line to provide support for things like pain, sleep, and hormonal balance as well as to help improve performance around things like meditation, learning, compassion and creativity. Beyond that, we are already looking at new technical modalities like EEG feedback, transcranial electromagnetic stimulation, and a host of experimental techniques that work with the mind/body interface in useful ways. We are also bringing together scientists, doctors, biohackers and other kinds of wellbeing practitioners to participate in a collaborative movement to bring the insights of complex systems science to the broader population in whatever form makes sense to them.

If we look ever further into the future we’ve personified a science fictional character. We call her our Fairy Godmother. You can imagine the Fairy Godmother as being an artificial intelligence agent who knows you intimately. She knows your psychology, she knows your values, and she knows your body in detail. She's been tapping into quantified self information about you for a long time. She knows your blood chemistry and your serotonin response to different kinds of experiences. She’s also plugged into a scientific model that knows more about the way human beings respond to their environment than has ever been available. Her job is to help you maximize your individual wellbeing by helping you choose the right experiences. For example, she may know that right now what you need to do is have a nice conversation with your romantic partner. We know from psychology that healthy relationships are vital to human wellbeing, and the Fairy Godmother knows (from watching your behavior and your biochemistry) which relationships needs some attention. Or perhaps you have been struggling with a creative project. The Fairy Godmother might suggest that you take a break and go have a picnic with a group of friends that you haven’t seen in awhile. Naturally, she would also see to it that the food at the picnic is just what your body needs to refuel your creative juices and that the site of the picnic (perhaps a park overlooking the ocean) is just the right kind of place to get those juices flowing again. Imagine this fairy godmother available to everybody on the planet for free. That would be the ultimate fulfillment of our vision.

Unlike pharmaceutical drugs the FDA doesn't give approval to, nor have an approval process for products in our space. They do 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.

One of our challenges is that the supplement space is crowded with products, many of poor quality and often with claims overstating their benefits. As a consequence, the category has garnered a blemished reputation.

We believe that the the answer to overcoming that challenge is found in building the right kind of brand in the right kind of way. We began by focusing on the most discerning people - scientists, doctors, dedicated biohackers. People who have already done the work to be able to tell the difference between “the real thing” and “snake oil”. We provided them with the information they need to make that determination for themselves. We have been transparent about our methods, our formulation, and our science. Even our full ingredient list is open for anyone to look at. We make it all publicly available and share it with as much precision as anybody cares to access. If you're a pharmacologist or a practicing psychiatrist, and you know what we're talking about, then you can take a look at it and see it’s all real. People who know the difference between the fakes and reality can look at our stuff and confirm its legitimacy.

We have been doing this for a year and a half now and the results are starting to speak for themselves. We are now having doctors come to us to purchase Qualia in bulk to provide to their patients and both biohackers and scientists have begun doing their own tests and experiments on Qualia, sometimes sharing their results online. In fact, Dr. Daniel Stickler of the Apeiron Center recently joined the collective after seeing early positive results of Quantiative EEG tests on people using Qualia. Moreover, our customers are also spreading the good word. Even among the minority of customers for whom Qualia wasn’t the right choice, many are still recommending it to their friends and family Why? Empowered responsibility. They know that this is a complex problem and even if this particular formulation doesn’t work for them, it can be very valuable for the people they care about.

Advisors. These are all people who are helping us with our approach and are actively helping us make products that are better than others on the market.

• Dr. Daniel Stickler
• Dr. Hyla Cass
• Jason Silva
• Dr. Andrew Huberman
• Dr. Zachary Stein
• Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
• Dr. Rishi Khatri
• Lindsay Briner
• Dr. Jon Wilkins
• Dr. Heather Sandison
• Forrest Landry
• Diego Espinosa
• Elias Ladopoulos

The product is a specific mixture of 42 different ingredients. 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 have 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 have 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 wholistic cognitive performance and subjective experience.

This product is designed for people who have a sense of empowerment around their wellbeing. For starters, some of Qualia's nutrients are taken when one first wakes up, with the 2nd grouping of nutrients taken after a meal. There are a lot of ingredients in the stack, so taking Qualia requires commitment. But there is a lot more it than that.

In fact, we talk about the necessity of taking your first month with Qualia as a “mindful month”. Your first few weeks with Qualia are no joke. It is important, for example, to be responsible with your sleep habits and to be very aware of how your dosage is relating to your overall practices and habits. Most people find that the need to “dial in” their Qualia dosage to determine how it is best optimized into their current routine of things like coffee, meditation, exercise, and other lifestyle preferences.. If you are ready, willing and able to sign up for this level of engagement, then it is very likely that Qualia will improve your wellbeing. 

That said, the variations from one individual's neurology to another are significant, and therefore no stack, including Qualia, works for 100% of people. For example, there is a segment of about 7% of the population who are what's called “over-cholinergic”. For this segment, Qualia is a bad choice. (Fear not, we have a formulation in mind that should work very well for our cholinergic friends). For the rest of the population, when used appropriately, Qualia will provide a meaningful positive response - and about 25% of the population can expect a serious win.

As is often the case with good things these days, Neurohacker started out in the deep Playa at Burning Man - where our co-founder James had retreated to contemplate how he could best be of service to the world. He came up with the foundational idea of bringing applied pharmacology to enhance human well-being.

At the age of 17, James started taking classes at the Body Mind College in San Diego. By 18, he became the college’s president. He was simultaneously attending the college and running it. After several years of doing this, he was burnt out. Tired and with massive adrenal exhaustion, his experience of life was struggling in a way that clearly wasn’t sustainable. He kept trying to look for solutions, but with his background, he knew the solution couldn't be found in just psychology. He started looking for solutions in the biochemistry side of the domain. He found a new IV treatment (initially designed for addiction recovery) that had just been introduced more broadly. He underwent the treatment and it completely turned him around. James then spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to launch something into the world that could bring a new approach to biochemical healing - for the purpose of fully addressing the potential of an optimal life.

Then finally, at that fateful Burning Man, James and Daniel had a conversation where James talked about this thing that he's been trying to get off the ground, and Daniel turned his head and said, "Actually, I think I can solve that.”

Daniel is trained as a multi-disciplinary scientist who was working with global nonprofits. He’s one of those people who don't fit into an obvious box and therefore have to figure out a path for themselves. He was working in the NGO world, trying to do things such as saving the white rhino and addressing climate change, but he discovered no matter what approach these organizations took, they failed to solve the problems - because they didn’t fully address all the complexity in the overall system.

By sheer circumstance, Daniel had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and, simply in order to resolve his own problem, he had turned his formidable complex systems models on human biochemistry. This is what he brought into the conversation with James on the Playa, and for two years after this epiphany, he and James had collaborated on evolving this framework into what is now the Neurohacker model.

My background was as a technology entrepreneur in the digital media space. I founded a company called DivX in 1999 and took it public on the NASDAQ in 2006. Before that, I was part of the startup teams for a company called Interview and another called MP3.com, also in San Diego (both of which had gone from startup to IPO). From 2007 to 2013, I was basically retired from the entrepreneur schtick and joined a bunch of think tanks around the country. Most notably a group called the Santa Fe Institute where complex systems science was invented.

My personal path to Neurohacker started improbably with the 2008 financial crisis where, as I watched my stock portfolio shrink at an alarming rate, I first really started to get the feeling that something was seriously amiss. I dove into the rabbit hole and as I dug into things like the economy and how the financial system worked, I began to realize that the people who are ostensibly in charge didn't really know what was going on - and that they were making significant errors as a consequence. As things began to spiral out into the global financial sector and into geopolitics, I concluded that this problem was part of a much larger issue. We have problems everywhere in our civilization largely because we don't yet know how to manage complex systems. After researching this further, I came to the conclusion that essentially all of the institutions that we have built over the past few centuries (everything from governance to education to healthcare) have this same problem. Precisely as things are becoming more and more complex, this “social fabric” is going to fail in more frequent and obvious ways. We are going to need to “reinvent everything” to be adaptive to real complexity, and I set myself to work on trying to figure out how.

 At the same time, Daniel was working on the same thing, and when a mutual friend introduced us, we quickly got to work trying to figure out how to best collaborate. As it turned out, the notion of using complex systems science to create products that could meaningfully improve individual sovereignty in large numbers of people proved to be the most powerful lever we could imagine.



So here we are.

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.

The suggested resale price is $149 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. 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, Bing, Display, and Pinterest. 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. Customer acquisition in the direct channel averages around $100 per new customer. 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. 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.

Right now our blended lifetime revenues per customer across all channels and all product SKUs is about $275. This varies widely by channel and even month to month. For example, one of our channel partners tracked an LTV of $405 for customers acquired in November of 2016 and $286 for customers acquired in December of 2016. Looking at it from the other direction, our subscribers are generally churning out at a rate of 20% per month, but again with high variability between channels and month of first acquisition. The bottom line is that we are still very young and are still very much experimenting with customer acquisition and customer retention.

We did about five hundred thousand dollars in total revenue last year, and we did about $1.6M in the first five months of this year.

We have four major ones. The first is simply managing the rate of growth. That's what keeps me up at night. We buy the product before we sell it. We pay half up front, and eight weeks later we pay the other half. When you're growing at the rate that we're growing this means carrying heavy capital costs. The second challenge is that we are still very much tuning up and optimizing our marketing channels and constantly learning new things about how to market to the right people. For example, with our Channel Partner program, we're only six months into having channel partners at all and there is a lot of learning left to do. We've only got 100 channel partners and we've got a list of over 1,500 that we ultimately want to be in partnership with. The process of bringing them on board and getting the right kind of content is a massive piece of work.

The next operational challenge is good old-fashioned scaling the organization. We're at 17 people now, and we're about to cross over into new product development. As we get into more cash flow, I've got a list of a lot of people who we want to hire. Scaling the organization is going to be the next major challenge.

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.

The primary risk in our space is around claims - the way we describe our products and the kinds of things you claim that they can do. The FTC is the real hammer in this space. If you make claims that they don't like, they can and will come down hard on you. The FDA is the primary regulator in the market and, in particular, if they become concerned that we are doing something that is hurting people, they won’t hesitate to do their job and protect the public.

As mentioned, we have already hired people out of DC who are some of the top people in the world on this question. Our strategy is to be the good guy - transparent, honest, real. We really share the same objectives as both the FTC and the FDA. We represent what the FDA wants in the market in a way that isn’t common in this space.

We see four different markets, all concentric circles. At the center is the market for Qualia, our first product. Outside of that is the market for other kinds of products that we can build in the biochemical modality. Outside of that are other types of products that we build in the neurotech modality. Outside of that is the kind of product that we can build in the full domain of maximizing individual human sovereignty.

Even the first core market is large. For example, if you look at just the off-label use of Adderall and Modafinil, you're looking at about a $10 billion global market. What fraction of that market Qualia really addresses is hard to say, but a $1 billion dollar market for the top-tier nootropic is reasonable. In the second category we're looking at everything including sleep, anxiety, depression, learning, and meditation. This is easily a $50 billion market and maybe as big as $100 billion global market. Some fraction of this market can be addressed with biochemistry - other portions will require us to reach out in the other neurotechnologies.

When it comes to maximizing human sovereignty? Priceless.