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Nucleus

A Letter from the Captain (Q1 Review)

Published on Apr 11, 2023

Hello,

I’m Logan, the Captain (CEO) and Co-Founder of Nucleus. I’ve been receiving a lot of questions lately about the state of the psychedelics industry amidst everything that's going on in the world right now. While it’s too early to know the long-term impact of some of the recent events, the current economic environment has triggered a great deal of concern and uncertainty for the industry we're operating in.

In the following update, I'll summarize Nucleus's position and emphasize our forward progress toward growth, revenue generation, and profitability. I'll also highlight how Nucleus is transforming concerns into opportunities by leveraging innovation with openness and agility. Finally, I'll forecast a bit of what Nucleus hopes to accomplish the rest of this year (and beyond).

Key takeaways inside:

💥 A Review of Recent Industry Failures

🎈 Nucleus's Strategy and Position

🧬 The Science Hasn't Changed

🔮 New/Future Opportunities

The crash of Silicon Valley Bank wasn't necessarily the start, but it was significant enough to leave an imprint on the optimistic facade of startups working within burgeoning industries. The growing psychedelics industry certainly hasn't been immune to its fair share of bad news of late.

The truth is - the ongoing bank crisis has left behind many unanswered questions for the greater macro-economic environment. This has resulted in unprecedented times for the industry we operate within. Below is a list of some of the recent developments you should know about:

This is all happening amidst glowing optimism across the regulatory front. More and more states are attempting to push psychedelic therapies through. You can check out our legal guide and map on Psychedelic Invest for more information.

Nucleus Has Never Been Better Positioned

We always knew 2023 wouldn't be easy for psychedelics. But did we think it would be this hard? No.

That said, we made a concerted effort back in Q4 of 2022 to take the necessary measures to focus on three things in Q1 of 2023:

  1. Decrease spend
  2. Increase revenue
  3. Maintain recent audience growth rates

Decreasing Spend

Through Q1, we reduced our total monthly burn by approximately 50%. We tightened our belts and slimmed down to the minimum amount of resources required to continue on our journey.

The result has been stellar so far. As you'll see in the next section, lowering our burn while simultaneously increasing revenue has angled us much closer to breaking even.

Increasing Revenue

As CEO, my job throughout Q1 has been to attack the short-term opportunities that will allow our operations to not only survive, but thrive. For us, that opportunity has been through Psyrise. By offering marketing and growth services to ketamine clinic partners, we found a niche that we could scale and continue to polish.

In Q1, we've averaged just over $10,000 per month in revenue, which has served as a consistent base during this time of uncertainty.

Not only that, but this time has allowed us to pilot our robust marketing platform, funnels, and streamline Psyrise's operations for further scalability throughout 2023.

To make things even better, we decided to open up Psyrise's services to a few more ketamine clinics and the response has been overwhelming. We now have a few more proposals out in hopes to secure a few more larger clinics as clients in Q2.

Maintain Growth Rates

Nucleus has always been focused on educating the masses in order to destigmatize psychedelic medicines. We're able to do this via our diversified portfolio of assets that offer several different ways to interact with Nucleus's ecosystem.

Since Nucleus launched last year, we've observed a 100%+ increase in traffic, users, and followers while skyrocketing monetizing metrics (> 800%) such as paid subscriptions, products sold, and revenue.

In Q1, traffic has steadied while user growth for Neuly has increased over 30% within three months.

At this point, it's evident we're hitting all of our prioritized goals so far in 2023.

Nucleus's Recent Success and Strategy

As you may know by now, Nucleus features three fully-functioning startups under its umbrella.

  1. Neuly
  2. Psychedelic Invest
  3. Psyrise

Psyrise's Success Stories

Of our three main brands, Psyrise has become an area of focus in Q1. And rightfully so. We already mentioned the impact it has had on revenue creation, but it's also become clear to us the good that it is serving the world.

With our marketing platform, Psyrise, we helped match 187 people with ketamine treatment in Q1 alone. That equates to over $400,000 in value for our practitioner partners.

Considering how lean we're currently operating, these numbers tease the exciting growth opportunities we have with Psyrise alone.

Psychedelic Invest's Competitive Analysis

While we prefer to think of our "competitors" as our friends and allies, it would be silly for us not to monitor behaviors that might better inform our decisions as a company.

A great example of this is our constant awareness of the search landscape within the psychedelics industry. Psychedelic Invest is fortunate enough to be well-positioned for organic traffic across thousands of search terms.

Of the top 12 informational outlets within the industry, Psychedelic Invest is sitting pretty at...

  1. 6th in domain authority
  2. 4th in organic traffic
  3. 7th in total backlinks

We'll continue to monitor search behaviors, the evolution of technologies, and ways we can expand the reach of the content we create - whether that includes additional channels or not.

Planning for the Evolution of Neuly

In May, the Neuly team will begin an overhaul project that will include the following:

  1. An update to the formatting of the database and all source materials
  2. Re-factoring of data presentation
  3. Additional product feed and dashboard deployments
  4. Implementation of AI models and automation

Alongside this Q2/Q3 project, we've identified KPIs that will truly move the needle for Neuly as a business by year's end:

  1. +1,000 active users
  2. 100 paid customers/subscribers
  3. Piloting at least 3 unique revenue streams

Nucleus Events

Nucleus's own Psychedelic Series continues to present intimate events in South Florida. In addition, Nucleus has begun taking part in more charity events in the area. In February, Nucleus sponsored an event for the Faulk Center, which recently celebrated 50 years offering free and low-cost mental health programs in South Florida.

Pictures from the event can be found here.

Recent Interviews and Other Articles

Educating Through Content Creation

In Q1, we published the majority of our content on Psychedelic Invest. This not only includes written articles and press releases, but also our video and audio shows. Season three of the Psychedelic Invest Podcast even launched with new episodes in March.

Below is a complete list of all published content in Q1.

Press Releases: 167

Original Articles and Events:

Industry Reports:

Investor Hotseat:

Weekly Extractions:

Psychedelic Invest Podcast:

More Industry Reports To Come

We'll be publishing a Q1 report in the coming days. Be on the lookout for that.

The Glaring AI Opportunity

We've been spending a lot of time the past few months running tests using language models and AI tools. We not only believe that AI, like ChatGPT, is changing behavior, but we feel strongly about the ways it will enhance technologies like ours. Because of that, we view AI as an opportunity and look to roll out some very cool features in Q2.

With AI on our side, you can expect to see a completely overhauled Neuly database with a great deal of intelligence surrounding the many ways our users can obtain knowledge and information. The sky is the limit here.

AI Tools We Use

We've also utilized this time to enhance some of our own internal processes with AI technologies. It's amazing how much "busy work" you can automate when you're bootstrapped and have GPT-4 on your team.

Some of the processes we've ironed out thus far are...

  • Article ideation
  • Image creation
  • Code auditing
  • Data collection
  • Table building

The list truly goes on. We currently have dozens of other experiments running right now. It's an exciting time to be alive.

The Science Hasn't Changed

For many people, it's easy to write-off the psychedelics industry right now. And I get it. But if you look under the hood, you'll still see the same evidence-backed data that supports an imminent future filled with greater access to these efficacious medicines and therapies.

Mental health problems aren't going away. And neither is the science that backs psychedelics.

Stick with it. Stay close to the science. Stick with Nucleus.

We plan to be here for many years to come. We'd love for you to be right there with us.

Closing the Wefunder Campaign

We plan to shut down the Wefunder campaign in the coming weeks. Time is running out to be a part of this journey. We'd love to have you on board before the round closes on April 30th.

Thank you! Here's to an amazing Q2!

Liked by Charlie Kerrigan, Tom Rhodes, and MN Hendershot