A 50 year old immigrant monk bootstrapped a biz from nothing to over $1 BILLION in sales with 30%+ profit margins.

It took only 8 years.

The crazy part?

It doesn't even have 200 employees.

Buckle up for this one 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
1) Manoj Bhargava was born in Lucknow, India in 1953.

In 1967, his family moved to the US so his dad could get his PhD at Wharton.

His family went from Indian affluence to living in an $80 per month West Philly apt.

At age 17, he started his first business.
2) He bought a $400 truck and cleaned out debris in rough Philly neighborhoods.

Despite the danger and rough work, he made $600 that summer. After turning his first profit, he was hooked.

In 1972, he got into a little college called Princeton.

A year later, he dropped out.
3) His parents were livid.

To make matters worse, it was the “stagflation” economy, so he couldn’t find work!

So 2 years later, with few options, he moved back to India to pursue a spiritual quest with the Hanslok Ashram. For 12 years, he focused on one thing:

Meditation
4) Eventually, his parents called from America asking for his help.

His parents owned a struggling plastics business.

After turning their company around, he spent a decade and a half buying struggling businesses in plastics and chemicals. And then turning them around.
Says Bhargava: "Chemicals are really simple, you mix a couple things together and sell it for more than the materials cost”

This would be very important later.
5) In 2003, Bhargava was 2 years into “retirement.”

At a natural products trade show, he drank an “energy drink” that was 16 ounces and claimed to boost productivity. True to form, it worked on him!

He noted the ingredients. Mmm… this reminded him of something, Chemicals!
6) He realized quickly that 16 oz was too big: a) he didn’t want to compete with Red Bull & Coke and b) tired does not equal thirst.

What if you could have the energy without the liquid?

He figured out how to mix the ingredients into a 2.5oz shot and “5-hour energy” was born!
7) Getting the product into stores was HARD.

But Bhargava came up with a few genius strategies.

He targeted truckers (who better than truckers? They need the energy but don't want liquid).

To get them to market: he focused on Mom/Pop Convenience stores.
The beauty of the small bottle was it could sit next to the register like gum and lighters.

It was an impulse buy.

To further drive sales, 5-hour paid a 50% retail margin to the stores. For a $3 bottle, they gave the store $1.50 per bottle.

The floodgates opened.
8) Next up, his head of sales lined up GNC, then Walgreens and then the King: Wal-Mart which still generates 15% of their sales.

Lots of competitors popped up: 6-hour energy, 8-hour energy. Bhargava played tough, suing them out of existence.
Today, checkout scan data reports 5-hour energy has 90% of the energy shot market.

To what does Bhargava attribute this?

The product: “It’s not the little bottle. It’s not the placement. It’s the product. You can con people one time, but nobody pays $3 twice.”
Sidebar Fun fact: in 2009, while I was an Associate at Goldman Sachs, I cold called Bhargava so we could invest. He was polite but candid: “I have Microsoft like margins, why do I need money from Goldman?”
9) By 2012, 5-hour energy was doing over $1BN in sales and it continues to grow steadily and profitably.

Bhargava (68 today) still owns over 90% of the company.
Claiming to be the richest Indian-American at a net worth of $4BN, Bhargava has started his own separate VC and PE funds.

He has also aggressively taken up philanthropy notably signing the “Giving Pledge” to donate 99% of his fortune.
10) I love this story because it’s a great reminder that: age doesn’t matter, lots of employees aren't impt, tech isn’t needed and you can start with a dime.

What you DO need: a great product, creative/smart distribution and a ton of tenacity. Some luck never hurts either.
Enjoy this?

Follow me @jspujji for more stories on “Bootstrapped Giants,” DTC, Growth Marketing and entrepreneurship!!
RT the first tweet below to inspire the next generation of Bootstrappers!

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More from @jspujji

19 Jun
Over the years, I get 1 consistent Q when it comes to Zuckerberg.

Is he a “visionary” or did he just get lucky?

The answer is visionary.

How do I know?

Bc in 2005, we spoke for an hour and he shared the 10 year $FB plan w/me.

The kicker? It all came true.

Thread time👇
In the 2004, @aniketkshah, @chrisamos and I were amongst the first Facebook users (we were in one of the first 8 schools where it started).

Being ambitious young entrepreneurs ourselves, we thought: let’s start HIGH SCHOOL version of Facebook!
At that time, like many, we believed FB would never go beyond colleges because it would alienate its core user base.

In the summer of 2005, we would work 9am to 11pm at our finance internships.

And then nights and weekends, we worked on building this website.
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18 Jun
This is the most successful thing I've ever done.

And it is not directly tied to Business/Entrepreneurship.

If you are a new/expecting parent, it will change your life.

🧵 about how to get your newborn 👶🏾 to sleep through the night by 4 mo old without cry it out or coddling
Some background: when @tweepika and I were fam planning, we met a lot of young parents. We asked questions, listened, observed and learned.

It seemed parental happiness was directly correlated with:
+ how well their baby slept
+ Childcare
+ Alignment with spouse.
Regarding baby sleep (topic of this thread), we were told there are only two approaches, either:

A) At 6 mos old, "cry it out" - put baby in crib at 7pm and don't return until 7am regardless of their cries (there are modified versions)

or
Read 25 tweets
16 Jun
Not every business can be bootstrapped.

For 10 years, this business raised and burned >$2BN with ZERO dollars in revenue.

Then, it became the most important business in the world.

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
Today, we released a business breakdown on Moderna

Here are 3 amazing facts about about it:

1) The actual vaccine was developed in less than a WEEK.

Normal vaccines take ~3 years to develop.

The rest of the time pre-release was spent on clinical tests.
2) Moderna purposefully built itself as an mRNA platform vs the “norm” of a single drug therapy.

This platform allows them to quickly code new dna/mRNA sequences via software that within days shows up as a testable physical protein.

This platform approach was key for the vax
Read 5 tweets
13 Jun
Everyone has only ONE problem.

And it's the same problem.

It's called: The Upper Limit Problem.

Trouble celebrating a big win? When everything is going well, do you wait for "bad stuff"? Then know it

Read this 🧵to to learn abt it, id it and fix it...
Each person has an "inner thermostat" of success/happiness that was set for us as children.

When we exceed our "setting," we unconsciously do things to sabotage ourselves to come back into the familiar/comfortable "temperature."
The classic example: a lotto winner.

It's a proven fact that most lotto winners, regardless of the size of the prize, report similar or LOWER happiness 5-10 years post win.

So much "success" in one area overwhelms their neurosis and they "bring themselves down" in other areas
Read 26 tweets
9 Jun
Sooo… I’m stealth-ishly launching a dtc brand.

Here is how I’m testing on FB ads from zero (with a bootstrapped approach)

Of note… it’s not working, yet!

🧵🧵🧵
First, conceptually there are 5 categories any idea can live in:
1) backlog
2) test
3) validate
4) scale
5) cash cow.

An idea has a full funnel orientation meaning targeting/ad type/creative/price/offer and landing experience.

There are an infinite amt of combos.
There are a ton of levers btw: targeting, creative, messaging, price, offers, landing experience (content, quiz, etc).

That’s why some testing system is important vs throw sh!t against the wall or doing too much too fast.

I prefer to test in series vs parallel.
Read 23 tweets
2 Jun
What do a 77 year old billionaire woman in wisconsin, Facebook ads, Philippines outsourcing, cash conversion cycle, online university leads and @patrick_oshag all have in common?

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
They are all part of my most read Twitter threads!

60 days ago I announced @GatewayX and started actively tweeting and since then my Twitter following has gone up by ~5x or nearly 10k followers.

Here’s a countdown of those threads...
6) my favorite metrics for bootstrappers
Read 9 tweets

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