I went into this one expecting a conversation about NAD+. It ended up being mostly about ambition. Iain sells into 40-odd countries, says Japan is his best market and China is catching up, and barely bothers with the UK. Most UK founders I know (me included, for a long time) start at home, maybe try the US, and leave it there.
Some context. Iain came from finance, mostly based in Asia. In 2015 he invested in a rehab business, was told to look at NAD+ as part of a detox protocol, tried a course himself and came away wondering why it was only being used for addiction. NADclinic started with one product. He now describes it as a mostly B2B business with close to 150 products, supplying clinics, medical spas, hotels and pro sport. The figures he shares below describe NADclinic at the time of recording.
For what it's worth, I've been using one of their products, the AirX inhaler, since we first spoke.
Eight things. Most are Iain's. Where I've added my own I've said so.
01Pick the version of the business that scales
Rehab was where it started, and Iain's read was that addiction treatment, however worthwhile, wasn't going to grow the way he wanted. So he set up a small R&D team in Cape Town and repositioned the product around performance and ageing, at a time when nobody was saying longevity yet. 04:34
He applied the same logic to clinics later. A single clinic, even a beautiful one, is one room. His line was that it's "infinitely not scalable". So the business became the thing behind the clinics: the products, formulations and supply. 12:04
I think this is a useful question to ask every year or so. Which version of what we do could be ten times bigger, and are we building that one?
02Build somewhere to show people, and keep it scrappy
In the early years nobody knew what NAD+ was, and Iain calls it a slog for two or three years. What helped was opening two clinics, one in Cape Town and one on Harley Street, picked for credibility more than footfall. He's quite clear they were practical rooms. Functional, nothing like the multi-million-pound longevity clinics you see now. Their job was to let people try the products and see the protocols. 06:29
They ended up making money anyway, because for a while they were more or less the only people doing it. But that wasn't the point of them. If you're selling something people don't understand yet, a cheap place to show it might do more than a lot of marketing.
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