Selling something nobody has heard of means explaining it to every single person who picks it up. Kent Yoshimura and Ryan Chen have been doing that since 2015, when they took the nootropic powders Kent was mixing in his dorm room and put them into chewing gum—natural caffeine, L-theanine, B vitamins, no category, no shelf, and no regulatory precedent. A decade later, Neuro is a nine-figure brand sitting in CVS, Whole Foods, Walmart, and Costco—doors the brand opened in deliberate order. Here, Kent and Ryan break down how they recognized they were in a blue ocean, the placement mistake that ended their first Walmart run, why they made Costco wait, and the Shark Tank deal they walked away from.
On how they knew they were in a blue ocean:
Kent: We realized we were very blue ocean when we saw how hard it was.
Ryan: When you have to educate 10 out of 10 people about what your product is, you know it’s blue ocean. Untouched. That’s the biggest opportunity, right? The advantage we had was that nobody did what we’ve done. The disadvantage is that you have to educate everybody, and that’s where sampling comes into play.
On the year they spent with legal to get a supplement panel on gum:
Ryan: We’re the first brand at Target or Whole Foods to be a confectionery brand with a supplement label. As novel or as simple as that sounds, it takes a year plus with legal to get that. A supplement has always been in pill form, sometimes gummies. To do it in confectionery, at the checkout counter, in a different place in the store—that was a very novel idea. It took a long time.
Kent: Gum is interesting because you chew it but you don’t swallow it. So there was this whole thing with legal around that. Is it a food? Is it a supplement? [You don’t swallow a mint either], but it dissolves. The retailers literally had no idea. They were like, “What do we do with this?”
On sampling more than 3 million people in a single year:
Ryan: It’s a very blue ocean, so most people have never tried a brand or a product like Neuro gum. This year we’ll be sampling more than 3 million people, and the people who try it in real life might go become a Shopify subscriber, an Amazon subscriber, whatever.
That’s also part of what makes Costco work for us. Foot traffic is insane, and they’re into sampling. They love their demo programs.
On dropping “replace your coffee” as a message:
Kent: In the past we would be like, “Screw energy drinks, screw coffee. Neuro gum is the way to do it, and you should replace your daily habits with this product.”
Forcing people to change their habits versus just making the best product you can, one that would enhance their life, are two different approaches. We chose the latter.
When people realize we’re a perfect product that complements your morning coffee for the rest of your day, it becomes a staple in your purse, your car. That’s when the habits develop. You try to catch them at the right time and drive them into subscription from there. But at the end of the day, we’re an accessible, shareable product, and that’s what we stand behind.
On turning their own team and customers into ambassadors:
Kent: Two people on our team—one is a Pilates instructor on the side, and she gets her entire Pilates community to become ambassadors for the product. She throws events at the studio and from there it naturally expands out.
Ryan: A recommendation from a friend or family member has so much more weight than an online ad or a Google search. If a friend you really trust says, “Yo, you gotta try this. This product really helped me,” you’re going to try it.
Kent: Who do you trust more than your friend? The way we look at channel mix, our D2C [direct to consumer] website has our most loyal customers, so whether it’s the rewards program, the loyalty program, or the discounting on subscription, we make sure our Shopify customers are treated the best.
On pulling out of Walmart before Walmart could kick them out:
Ryan: CVS was first. We went from literally two SKUs at CVS to over 14. Then Whole Foods, then a bunch of regional players.
Kent: Then Walmart, part one. They put us in this bulk candy aisle and were expecting us to do crazy velocities. We’re not even anywhere near that category. So we pulled ourselves out before they kicked us out, and then reentered. Now we’re nationwide with them with multiple SKUs and caps, and we’re a top five energy product there.
Ryan: You could be at the right store at the right time, but not in the right location. We were like, This is not the right place for us. Two years or so later, we came back in the right section—pharmacy checkout, checkout lane—and now we’re in the right place and the right time.
On making Costco wait:
Ryan: Costco has always been the dream partner, but we knew that if we got in too early we would be eaten alive. We didn’t have enough brand awareness. We didn’t have enough movement going into the store.
In 2024 we were one of the fastest growing brands on TikTok, and in 2025 we had about 5 billion views. We went from low single digit US unaided brand awareness to 15%, 16%. So now it’s, “I’ve heard about it but I haven’t tried it, and now it’s at Costco. I trust Costco and whatever products they put on the shelf, so let me try it.” When you look at the number of SKUs at a Walmart, it’s thousands and thousands. Costco is a quite curated list, so being in that company creates a trust factor.
Kent: The consumer who shops at Costco is not the consumer who shops at Walmart, so the narrative and positioning around how you drive people to each retailer changes too.
I do think we could have gone in maybe a year earlier, when brand awareness from TikTok was at its all-time high. But most people who start an ecommerce site—the one million in top line person—are more focused on performance media and driving efficiencies and getting the analytics right than on building an awareness program that gets people to know about you. That’s a major mentality shift in a company when it happens.
On the retail costs founders underestimate:
Kent: Slotting fees, promo cycles, inventory commitments, cash flow. Demos are very expensive at Costco. But are you able to sell through? And if you’re only regional, is there a sell-through story that gets you to national, or are you hedging your bets?
We talk about making your backyard pretty first before you try to make the world pretty. If you’re a small startup, how are you maximizing the community you’re closest with, first and foremost, and then taking those learnings to expand out? You can really only do that with ecommerce. The benefit is you get as much learning as possible and apply it the same way to what you’re doing in retail.
On turning down every offer on Shark Tank:
Kent: We felt like we had a duty to our existing investors and the people who helped us build the business. Robert Herjavec came in and he wasn’t willing to meet us in the middle on where our valuation should be. He’s really nice, genuinely great, but it just didn’t make sense for us. Given the network of investors and people who had helped us, it did not make sense in that moment to devalue ourselves. And we were willing to negotiate. That’s the thing.
Ryan: Know what your worth is. A lot of people who go on the show—lights, camera—get in that panic and accept a deal they really wouldn’t accept behind closed doors. We just had a hard line. We can’t go below this. When we didn’t get there, we were OK stepping away.
The valuation at the time was $15 million. It’s crazy to think we were willing to go to that, but that’s what the company was worth and we had other investors who believed in that number. We stuck to our guns.
On the cold DM that ended a federal lawsuit:
Ryan: We shot Shark Tank in September 2019, when the world was normal. By the time we aired, April 2020, the world was in full lockdown. Our sales spiked, but [the] supply chain was in a crunch, we’d bought all this inventory, and shipping got really expensive.
Then two weeks later we got hit with a federal trademark lawsuit for trademark confusion. We own Neuro, we own NeuroGum, we own Neuro Mints, all registered and approved under the USPTO. How is this even contestable? But that didn’t stop this person from suing us. I reached out to all our investors and a lot of people didn’t know how to help. They were just like, “Hey, congratulations, you made it. You’re getting sued.”
We were very cash strapped, and we’d signed about a million dollar retainer with a law firm to defend us. I was losing sleep. I think I was losing hair.
On the show, Daniel Lubetzky kept saying, “I really like you guys. I feel like we’re gonna cross paths again.” He seemed so genuine. I told Kent, we have no choice, this is a Hail Mary. I cold DM-ed him on Instagram asking if I could get his advice on something, and he messaged me right back.
I told him about the whole lawsuit, and for the next 18 months he defended us on it. We kept asking, Can we offer you equity? We don’t have cash, but can we offer equity? He said, “I consider you guys my friends. I don’t wanna see you get bullied. This happened to me in the early days of KIND. I’m getting PTSD from this.” He was on the calls with their lawyers and our lawyers, mediating the whole thing. During that time he sold KIND to Mars Wrigley for $5.1 billion. We won and settled, he came on as an investor, and we became the first company ever to not take a deal on camera and still get an update episode. Shout out to Daniel. He’s a legend.
Kent: This is a lesson in no doors are ever closed.
Kent and Ryan get into plenty more on Shopify Masters, including the scuba trip that turned their pill supplements habit into gum, how they won Chess.com without a seven-figure offer, and where AI earns its place as a sidekick on their team.
