AG1’s CEO Kat Cole on Why Product Beats Marketing Every Time

We got to over half a billion in annual revenue and never had the tools of the trade. And so this year we did.

And by the time I was 26, I was one of the vice presidents of the company doing 800 million in revenue.

It's product quality. Marketing only gets people to try a thing. It only makes them aware of a thing. What makes my customers keep drinking AG1 for 5, 6, 7? I talked to an 11-year AG1 drinker the other day. It's not marketing. It is the continuous improvement. It is the quality. It is the experience.

My dad, who was an alcoholic, when I was nine, I have two younger sisters. I helped my mom raise them. She worked three jobs. That's why I started working so young. We launched an airline, a casino, a marketing company. We were fully vertically integrated, owned most of our supply chain, and then the CEO died and his son had to take over.

In the cases where it looks like my team or my company or I have taken a big leap, I have gotten very clear-eyed that not taking that leap is a big risk. That is what I have confidence in, not the exact what. But we have the right questions. Questions scale, answers don't.

A few times.

Yeah.

I'll go with the first way you framed it, which one posed the most challenge. So, they all have their challenges. But I have a visceral reaction when one of the options you've provided is the period that I was leading a multi-billion dollar multi-brand restaurant organization and the pandemic hit. Like I just, even when you ask, I just get transported back to that.

It may have, it may not have been the thing that taught me the most about leadership. It was the place where everything I had learned was most tested. So the highlights and the lowlights together are why. Our business was global. We were in over 70, I think close to 80 countries at that point. This is early 2020. Seven brands. So, Jamba Juice, Moe's Southwest Grill, McAlister's Deli, Schlotzky's Deli, Carvel Ice Cream, Auntie Anne's Pretzels, Cinnabon, Seattle's Best Coffee International.

Technically, but Seattle's Best was an international license. So we have these seven and a half brands. I'm managing all the presidents. I'm the COO of the company. So seven presidents of the brands plus two presidents of operating divisions, one of international ops, which was all franchising, and then one of the licensing business, which was our big, probably $300-400 million revenue CPG business with product in restaurants and grocery stores, etc. So several billion together. So that's the landscape, and most of it, other than the licensing business, the CPG grocery business, was restaurants, a brick-and-mortar franchise. So when the pandemic hit all around the world, again, we had significant exposure in Asia. Auntie Anne's is really big in APAC. We knew before the United States knew that this was bad because our business just shut down in Asia. So February, there was this rolling like, oh, you know, this is bad, revenue to zero. There's two buckets of revenue, right? There's the franchises getting revenue from customers coming in that are no longer coming in, and there's us getting our revenue from the royalties of that revenue. So, you know, 8% royalty of zero revenue is certainly zero. So, you know, everyone's revenue dries up. You have all of your expenses, the hourly employees of the franchises, the corporate operations, the franchise support infrastructure, and we were very fortunate that we had a fortress balance sheet, an incredibly well-run company with incredible access to capital to weather such a storm at such a scale. So at least we didn't have that problem. We then navigated region by region, globally shutting down, getting to the United States in early March, and all of a sudden everything shuts down. It kind of happens in a couple cities, couple states, and then lights out. The second thing that was going on is I was the COO. We had just gotten a new CEO who had never worked in the restaurant business, come from the hotel business, and I think he had been there for four weeks. And so I like to joke,

Yeah. It wasn't funny then, but it's funny now. So, you know, I joke this guy doesn't even know where the bathroom is. Not that it would matter because the corporate offices were closed. Like you weren't even allowed in. So I was uniquely in the position to navigate as a leader the decimation of revenue and demand, the questions and absolute fear and terror of our franchises who were looking for answers, leadership and guidance where we were all navigating an unprecedented event together. And then a third thing happened, which was my daughter, who was seven months old at the time, became incredibly ill. She developed a respiratory virus. It wasn't COVID, but it was right as COVID was hitting. She couldn't breathe. She almost died. We went into the hospital. And there was, if you remember when COVID hit, there was a nursing shortage because there were no tests. So people, if they had symptoms, had to quarantine. You had hospitals being overrun with patients with mostly COVID, but normal stuff like this, a different respiratory virus, a shortage of staff. And so I remember this moment being in the hospital when I had my AirPods in, listening to different franchises calling, frustrated, freaking out, corporate meetings about, you know, how do we communicate and support our team? Incredible focus like cash and people is all that matters. Protect our people, which includes our customers and our team, and protect cash. Help our franchises do that, and we do that so we can navigate this storm, whatever it's going to look like. And I have them in my ears, meetings, calls, tears, anger, right? Yelling, people who just don't know what to do and are looking for answers while I'm keeping my eye out for the doctor who isn't typically working in this part of the hospital because of nursing shortages or doctor shortages, taking care of my daughter who's on breathing support and NG tube, which is a feeding tube that goes into your nose because she can't breathe and she can't eat. And I just remember, and this went on for 10 days. It was just a nasty virus that there is no medicine for, that they have to just help her through it, and she's too little to clear it herself and breathe.

And it was super scary. She almost died again in the hospital because someone turned her oxygen up to 10 and sent her into like respiratory duress. And I remember thinking, this is a lot. Like I was on the, I was in tears every day. Not, you know, bawling, rocking in a corner, but teary, just emotion, right? Emotion has a job. It is to be felt. I felt it. It was expressed. But I had to be strong for other people who were fearful in their own way, including my daughter. And my husband was with our two-year-old at the time, and he was also working full-time, so we're trading off. And I just remember thinking, I'm glad it's me. That's it. I'm glad it's me. No one's going to stick up for my daughter and advocate for her more than me. No one's going to fight for my franchisees trying to find answers when there are none more than me. I've worked in these restaurants and restaurants like it my whole life. I'm an operator's operator. These franchises are going through it. I have deep respect and empathy for them. We are a collective unit even though we are separate businesses. And it was the most like badass mama bear leadership energy I've ever felt at one time. And then she was finally better and we went home with her feeding tube. The doctors are like, 'You got to get out of here. As soon as she can, as soon as she's good enough to go, she's got to go because there's really sick people that need to get in here.' So we left. I'm not a nurse. I've never managed an NG tube. And I remember dealing with her pulling it out and having to feed it back in myself while I'm on my AirPods working. I mean, it was just insane. And so whether it's navigating a complete decimation of your demand, the understanding that no one has the answers, but someone must provide direction and decision, and then the personal priority of caring for my daughter and my family and nothing else matters beyond that. That's a lot of leadership to be put to the test at one period of time. And the way the movie ends of that chapter is because of the innovation we had put in place long before the pandemic, third-party delivery, which was a nightmare to get through with our franchises. No franchise owner wants to pay 30 cents of every dollar, that's what it was then, for a delivery driver that's not their worker, right? Like all that stuff to get it in place just to meet the modern consumer where they were. Those were the, and putting in apps and putting in different structures of menu for off-premise. We were one of the fastest sets of brands to come out of the pandemic swiftly, incredibly profitably, with unprecedented sales. So lower costs, fewer shifts, higher sales because we had put in the innovation to allow us to take advantage of what was possible as soon as the world opened up. So that was great. The company performed incredibly well on the other side. My daughter got healthy and we learned more about her airway dysfunction and things that were underneath it, and I went on a multi-year health journey with her, and she's even better now. And my family got closer, my team got closer. So it, you know, it all ended well, but it was really exhausting every single day.

Absolutely. I have experienced a very similar pattern that the more something is an obvious crisis, you know, the benefit of an obvious crisis is that most people understand the difference between nice to have and need to have. When things are good, that is very blurry in teams, leadership, it's just people have different definitions of what's necessary. But when something is a crisis, you get far, you know, the view gets far more concentrated. And so there's more clarity of where to act, less wasting of time and energy, and you often have fewer internal debates and fights around what that action should be. Like during the pandemic, right, it's we have to protect our people and protect cash, don't talk to me about anything, and ideally don't talk to me about anything that doesn't help both. That makes leadership like an arrow, where when times are good, it's sort of radiant, you know, you have these other opportunities. And when you are, when I have been put to the test that way, in those moments, I agree, you come out of it with still that clarity, with more of that sharpness, with more of that muscle, and it doesn't feel intimidating because when you are focused, whether it's because a crisis forces you to or because you maintain that discipline, you're often rewarded for it. And that is the part that for me makes it not intimidating. I know this is right. I know it's hard, but I know it's right. I know the rewards will come. I know there are more penalties for spreading out and being indecisive than there are for narrowing in and being decisive. And even if that decision is wrong, we will have clarity in how to address it. And that's pretty empowering, I think, versus intimidating.

Yeah.

Yeah. What feels new in daily lessons is a bit of what you mentioned, which is the lessons around action and application. It's less a new principle like, oh, this new value that I have or this new principle that's generally true. We learn many of those things in kindergarten, in our early jobs, you know, in our early career, I think from family experiences. I certainly was very formative for me. But the how and when to apply those lessons and principles and the intersection of other people's experiences, lessons and principles converging on a team to make swift decisions and then the growing body of evidence when you look back, the post-mortem, the autopsy without blame of how effective was that? You know, did we make the best decision? What could I have done differently? What should I have done differently? And those should-have exercises are, I think, freeing. They're really empowering. I try to do them quite often.

It was greatly formative. I'd say there were several formative chapters, and to your point, I've been in each company, although the company has transformed over the time I was there, and I've often had many different roles in the window of time I've been in each company, but for a significant amount of time, and that's a lot of life and a lot of learning in one place. And so the first bucket of learning was childhood. You know, we left my dad, who was an alcoholic, when I was nine. I have two younger sisters. I helped my mom raise them. She worked three jobs. That's why I started working so young in hourly roles in the mall, cleaning gym equipment, eventually a hostess at Hooters. So there was a lot of leadership lesson in that window and in my family life. And then the second big leadership lesson chapter was this 14 years at Hooters, which is summarized as started as a hostess at 17, became a waitress at 18, thought I was just going to pay my way through college as the first person in my family to get into college. And it was just a job that I loved to get me through. And then the company started growing. By the time I was 19, I was opening franchises around the world. By the time I was 20, I dropped out of college and took a corporate gig with Hooters, which is how I got to Atlanta. And by the time I was 26, I was one of the vice presidents of the company doing 800 million in revenue, and then led through so many crazy periods. We launched an airline, a casino, a marketing company. We were fully vertically integrated, owned most of our supply chain in DSD, a direct distribution network. And then the CEO died and his son had to take over. So we had to navigate probate in an estate that was not really thoughtfully planned and was quite messy to live through as the largest asset in the estate, and then finally liquidating that asset in the estate to private equity. So there was that chapter and all kinds of interesting lessons in that chapter. Being a young leader traveling around the world, extending a brand in different countries, being in a franchise system where you are growing in partnership with someone else's capital in addition to our own corporately owned restaurant. So being an operator, a marketer, a brander, and essentially a runner of multiple enterprises. And then navigating being an executive in my 20s when my peers were in their 50s, which brought so much good, a little bit of fresh, a little bit of tough stuff, but a lot of good. And then the sale of the company into private equity. We had been privately held, so going from one ownership structure to the other was an incredible lesson. I went back to business school. I have a master's without a bachelor's, so I dropped out, but I did go to get an MBA. Rare but possible. And then that next chapter was running multiple private equity-owned portfolio companies at Focus Brands, starting as the president of Cinnabon, turning that business around out of the recession, building what was then an unprecedented multi-channel enterprise, taking a restaurant brand and extending it into grocery products because it's the thing people do now immediately, but it was very unique then, and it became so successful that it became a model in and of itself. Then I became group president of that company, managing multiple presidents who had previously been my peers, and navigating that company's growth. I was there for 10 years. So Hooters for 14 and all of that change, Focus Brands, now it's called GoTo Foods, for a decade, and then moved into more, very focused into health and nutrition with then Athletic Greens, now AG1, and I've been here for four and a half years.

So, it's funny. It looks, I'm loyal certainly. But it's not that, right? It's that I have two questions that I ask when I have opportunity, and I was recruited to leave, you know, at each of those points, and I get offers to go other places, or sometimes I think about should I do something differently, of course, like any person as my life changes. But I ask two questions. One, is my work here done? Just is it done as I see what is to be done? Is my work here done? Have I done what I came to do and want to do? And then two, if I'm being honest, could someone else do what needs to be done next? Not now, next. Could someone else do what needs to be done next better than me? Is that what's best for the company? And if the answer to both of those questions is yes, my work is done and someone else could do a better job of what's next, it is time for me to go. But when I would reflect on those questions, the answer was no to one or both, which results in me doubling down, changing something, staying, expanding my role. Like, oh yeah, my work is done, but no, no one else could do what I'm doing, so I need to change something here. Or my work isn't done, but someone else could do this part. I need someone else to do this part so I can go grow a different part of the company. Like my growth, my opportunity, my impact actually is here until it's not, and there's an opportunity to do something different and better that feels more aligned with my values, the opportunity in the market, and what fits with where my life is, my personal life is at that point.

I would call my executive tenure at Hooters as the first, right, from 26 to 31. Then from when at 31 I became president of Cinnabon, this global franchise. So that was my first like CEO of the brand running the role. A few years into that, so that would be number two. A few years into that, four years into that, I became group president and started a whole innovation division. So that would be number three. Becoming COO of the parent company of all divisions, all things president and COO would be number four. And then AG1 would be number five. So fifth president or CEO of brands since 2010.

I've heard many people reference the concept of ikigai, right? These circles that overlap, and I don't remember what they all are, but it's like mission and impact and purpose. What are you good at and what does the world need, and yeah, all that stuff.

Yeah. So it's a version of that certainly, but more specifically for me, I have had such an unbelievable and incredible and at moments tough but mostly incredible life, and that has included meeting my husband, the love of my life, later than many do, and having kids later in life than at least they used to. It's becoming a little more common now, but I had my son Ocean at 39. So I had a miscarriage, my son Ocean at 39, two miscarriages in between, my daughter Arrow at 41. And so that is such a force in how I think about things now. There's beauty, I think, in being a more mature or seasoned parent and partner. My husband and I literally, we met and proposed to each other within two weeks, and then he rode across the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat. He's an ultra-endurance athlete on the side. We got closer through the row. It's not his job, it's his hobby. And we got closer through the row, not farther apart. When he landed, we tattooed our rings. We got married at Burning Man, and then we started this like miscarriage and babies journey all while I was COO of this multi-billion dollar company. You know, we grew by M&A, so I'm traveling around meeting with brands to acquire, we grew our own businesses, and just wild, right? That season of my life from my mid to late 30s to now, I'm 47 now, we've been together for 10 years, almost 11, and it is the answer to what colors my thinking now. And so the way that plays out in my decisions is, you know, my purpose and pride, what am I proud of, what feels real and important. What can I grow and impact and put out into the world that is deeply aligned with who I am and what I believe? I want as little disconnection of that as possible. Not that you can't find purpose in any work and meaning in any work, but truly being able to grow a business and a brand that helped me. I was a customer for multiple years before I ever met the founder, before I ever was asked to advise him. And it helped me as a busy mom running companies so much. I had all these separate pills and powders. I was trying to be a super supplement. I was going to Whole Foods getting like vitamin C and ashwagandha and all of that stuff. And it wasn't working for me. I had a lot of challenges around the birth of my second child. And so my husband, who's an ultra-endurance athlete, was like, 'Just try this. Like half the stuff you've bought is expired. You travel so much you can't keep up with separate pills and bottles anyway. Try this.' And AG1 made such a difference for me. My gut, my energy, my hair, skin, and nails. I was getting sick less. It's not a medical claim, just my experience. And so I was a super fan of the product, and that is an example of the alignment where I'm a customer, I'm a user, I'm a believer. I absolutely fell in love with the overall approach to nutrition. My mom had breast cancer while I was having kids late in life, and so I just got really serious about health and nutrition, and I couldn't unlearn what I had learned. And I also saw the business opportunity there, that the consumer was moving in that direction. So for me, making decisions in this like post-economic state is about that. It's about layers of impact, layers of integrity and authenticity to how I live my life, and what makes me proud for my husband and my kids and the structure of that work. We're a fully remote company, and that's very difficult to do at this scale. But it works for me and it works for us, and that enables me to show up for my kids even at a very busy time in my life.

Yeah, likely because of my background. Like when I'll share often when my mom came to me when I was nine and said, 'That's it. I'm done. We're leaving.' What she meant was we were leaving my father. And I didn't get upset. I looked at her and said some version of what took you so long. I was ready to go. I knew it was bad. There is something in that. And then the many experiences I had as a young professional, as a waitress. You know, as a waitress, it would be interesting to see the corporate office show up and give all the praise to this manager because their sales were up. And meanwhile, you're like, 'This person's awful. The sales are up because there's construction down the road and all the construction workers come here.' So you kind of learn the people who are closest to the action know what the right thing to do is long before the leader does. The people who are close to the action have a detail that you don't have, but they don't have the authority to make a decision. They don't have the ability to name a scaled problem or a scalable solution. And I have become obsessed with knowing the true truth, staying crazy close to the customer, staying really close to people's perspectives and their experience so that I don't have blind spots or I have as few blind spots as possible and I can make the best decisions for my life, my family, my business. And many of my practices, which of course I didn't know were frameworks and practices then, they were just kind of things I would do to get through stuff and be helpful. And then upon reflection or when asked, I could call them a thing and put them into a succinct way to help other people use it. They're all a version of checking in. Checking in with myself, checking in with others, checking in with customers, checking in with my husband. The hot shot rule is a version of checking in. It's just checking in with my understanding of what I'm going through and using the inspiration and perspective of someone I admire. So it's simply this. And I practice it weekly. I have for a very long time. Talking like, you know, well over 15 years, 17, I don't know how long now. I practice it once a week. It used to be quarterly and it was so effective. It became monthly and then so effective. It became weekly. And anything more than weekly is a little much. And candidly at this point, it just becomes part of how I think about my role that I want to do better in, which could be my role as mother, my role as a wife, my role as a daughter. I'm so fortunate to have my mom still on this earth. Or my role as a CEO. And so I think of my role and just a few details around it. Like what's going on right now, my Slack, my team dynamics, the business. I just ground myself in what's up. Then I envision someone I admire. Could be anyone. Could be my mom, could be someone I've talked to recently, could be someone I've read about. So I envision someone I admire. Then I envision them in my seat tomorrow in whatever that seat is. I think of them in my role as CEO. They're looking at my Slack, they're reading my interactions with the team, they're in my team meetings, if it's my role there, or they're seeing how I show up for my husband or my family. And I just ask if when they see that, when they're in that seat, what's the first, what's one thing and the first thing they would do differently to make it better? And for whatever reason, when I see my life through their eyes, something comes to mind immediately. And I think the reason is because one, we often know the next thing we could and should do to be better, to have impact. We just for whatever reason aren't.

Yeah. It requires more intention. It has less serendipity. But it still happens and it happens at the same frequency. So the way I do it and then our team as well. Well, so it's a mandatory part of our leadership structure and schedule and certain teams that have even more impact on outward-facing decisions have more frequency with customers. So we have our CIP, our customer interview program, and it's as simple as our team, because we do have emails, because we do have the ability to communicate with customers, which you don't have in a restaurant setting. We reach out and say our CEO would love to chat with you. This is what she does regularly. Would you be interested? We'd love to hear more about your experience, your advice. That's it. And we just, you know, we have a big member base, so there's a lot of people to reach out to. And plenty of people say yes.

On Zoom or the phone, often Zoom.

It is constant, constant. It is my joy. It fills my cup. It sometimes makes me mad because when you talk to customers, everything is so simple and often so consistent. And in an effort to continue to evolve a business, to grow a business, to bring more sophisticated things to market, things you know are right and good, sometimes you talk to a customer and they're like, 'I don't care about that.' And you're just like, oh no. So it's grounding and it's empowering. So I do it, my team does it. The other is we recently expanded into retail, into Costco. And so we went direct to National and to Costco. And so my team, a good portion of my team, we are in Costco with the samplers.

And so you're just, that's a little bit of a hybrid like my restaurant days, right? You're in there, you're talking to people, you talk to people who are considering but not trying. You talk to people who are trying but not buying. You talk to people. And that is, oh, I miss that. You know, I do miss that in-person ability to just talk and feel people's energy and really spend time. But we do get it virtually through our Zooms and phone calls. And then we have traditional like quant work, proper work with prospects, with existing customers, and more kind of sophisticated company legitimate customer insights work.

The other place we do it is we, over the last few years, have really ramped up the investment in community and activations, our run clubs. AG1 is very morning-oriented, and so being with people there too is, and that's got a special layer because it's not just interacting with people around the product and what's your experience and what are your questions and what's your advice. It's building community around that, and that adds a different and very deeply often missing layer to e-commerce and DTC, like a deeply fulfilling layer to what is typically an e-commerce or predominantly DTC business.

I knew that the business's future would include multiple products and multiple channels. But what I didn't know was when would be the right time. I didn't know in what sequence would be optimal at first. And certainly as a new member of the team, I didn't know what might be in the way of that desired expansion. But generally when a business is getting that big. So when I joined, this is public information out there. When I joined, we had just done, we were doing 160 million in annual revenue, bootstrapped, and growing crazy, right? Growing at multiples, not percent. And we completed our only big fund raise, 120 million at a 1.3 billion post valuation. And then continued the company's growth. And there were a few things that I learned early on that helped me get clarity on when will we be able to expand, how should we expand. The first was when I joined, we were only blending AG1. We were globally sourcing, but we were only blending AG1 in New Zealand and we were air freighting that green powder to the US. Most of the business was in the US. 90% of the business was in the US. I think we were like a top five exporter out of New Zealand or something like that. So this idea of being single-sourced, not blending locally, was a real operational issue to improve before we did anything new. So blending exclusively in New Zealand and air freighting powder to the US for where 90% of the business of the 160 million annual revenue was located was a thing to deal with. And in my mind, I have no business creating new product. I have no business putting my product in retail where the inventory demands are very different until I address the operational structure. And so we put all of our focus on three things. One, making sure that our customer experience for what was still a crazy high growth business was excellent. And it wasn't. It was getting bumpy. We had shaker bottles that were leaking. We had gone through the supply chain crisis post-COVID where it was hard to have consistent suppliers of lids and bottles, and so I had all kinds of customer experience issues we needed to improve. Second, we needed to stand up US blending facilities so that we had domestic production for a domestic business, which we did in the following year. And that was scary, right? Moving your recipe, your blending IP, all of your operations. And so we completed that. Then it was very clear that the consumer was moving to a much more science-oriented marketing message versus just like, hey, a person I trust trusts this. And so we did a few things. One, put a ton of investment in building out a team of PhDs, scientists, and human clinical trials that take years to conduct and complete, which is painful, right? You're taking tens of millions, plowing it into something you can't talk about, you don't have the outcomes for, and you can't tell the world about for a number of years. But it was so clearly the right thing to do to continue to level up that global sourcing, add in more third-party certification, so more quality work, bigger QA team, more third-party labs, NSF for Sport, Alkemist Labs, Informed Sport, Cologne, which is the German version, the EU version of NSF for Sport, because our customers are people whose bodies are their jobs, right? Athletes, Olympians, etc., in addition to everyday folks like us. And so we needed to do all that work before we launched a new product. That took two years. That was '22 and '23. But we had our product innovation on the roadmap. We knew what we were

going to launch. We had AGZ and its formulation in the works. We had the AG1 NextG formula upgrade already happening. And so we did that work quietly behind the scenes: the product development, the diary studies, hundreds of people drinking the stuff for months as it was iterated and formulated. So we understood what does the science say about the ingredients, what does the customer say about their experience, and then what do the human trials say about the outcomes, and pull that together to in 2025 launch a very different company. AG1 NextG, more human clinical trials than any other similar product. AGZ, our first ever truly second product, going from DTC and now to Amazon, going from D to Z and Amazon to Costco, adding flavors to AG1. All that happened in a six-month period.

And normally I wouldn't recommend that speed of that much commercialization, but it was overdue because of the things we needed to prioritize: keeping up with demand, shoring up operations, building the QA and science team and body of research rigor. And then once it was ready, we're like, we're only going to learn how it goes if we get it out into the world. And so month after month, last year was just launch after launch.

Yeah, it's not only so slow, we add layers of third-party certification rigor that add months to anything we do. Anything we do, if I change one ingredient, it has to go back through NSF for Sport. That is 9 to 11 weeks of review, testing, consideration, validation, and money. So it's extra slow for us in a way, which you can then understand why, like if it's ready and we've now completed these things, let's get it out, even if it's being launched in close proximity to a more frequent launch.

No, it was obvious. There was the board, which is a very simple board and not overly complicated and really supportive. And so the energy was more around: we have wanted, we and the board, including me on the board, have wanted to do this for some time. So the energy was actually, 'When are we going to get it out? When are we going to start doing this?' And the friction or frustration was we all want it to happen fast, but it has to be done to a different level of thoughtfulness given our brand and our scale. We're not a tiny company anymore. We're not a startup, and so just putting stuff out carries risk. So extra months of diary studies and people's experiences, extra bodies of development and research on flavor and taste, because it's not just a supplement. It's not a pill. It's a drink, right? It's got to taste good enough for people to make a ritual. And that takes a ton of iterations. So the board was more... there was much more energy around, you know, when is this coming? When are we going to get it out? We all agreed it was needed, wanted, and in some ways overdue for very good reasons because of what we needed to prioritize. So there was just like anxiousness and energy to get things out.