How Neurogum Makes $100M/Year Selling Brain-Boosting Mints | Kent Yoshimura

Manav: Meet Kent Yoshimura. He's the co-founder and CEO of Neurogum, an investor, a neuroscience major, and even trained with the Japanese Olympic judo team. His company's been around for over a decade, pulling in nine figures in revenue, and today he's here to share the journey.

I want to ask you about Neurogum, because I was at Best Buy the other day and I saw Neurogum in the checkout aisle.

Kent: Oh really, at Best Buy?

Manav: Yeah, at Best Buy — I was kind of shocked, like, "Oh, interesting product placement." So I want you to explain what your gum is and how people use it.

Kent: At Neurogum, we're creating the new generation of gum and mints — that's how we explain it. Traditionally, gum and mints have been a category that doesn't offer much benefit to the body — maybe it whitens your teeth. But the shareability, the portability — gum and mints have so many built-in advantages. When you take those attributes and add real supplementation, things that are actually good for your body, you get Neurogum. Whether it's energy and focus through our natural caffeine, L-theanine, B6, B12 blend in gum and mint format — that's our bestseller — all the way to our sleep product, which is a clinically tested combination of melatonin and botanicals that support your whole sleep cycle. We have products that help you stay focused and refresh your mind and body throughout the day.

Manav: Is there a reason you chose gum and not, say, a caffeine pill?

Kent: A couple reasons. Going back to what I said, the shareability and portability of gum — you don't want to carry pills around in your pocket, and you're not going to share pills with someone. There's a lifestyle component missing from pills. Gum and mints also benefit from buccal, or sublingual, absorption — the ingredients absorb through your mouth and the glands there, which is much more effective than swallowing something and having it break down in your stomach. The combination of the science and the lifestyle attributes made gum and mints the obvious answer for us.

Manav: Interesting — it reminds me of Nicorette, the gum people use to quit smoking. I tried it once and it made me want to gag.

Kent: Yeah, yeah.

Manav: Because nicotine is intense. Caffeine, on the other hand — I'm a big caffeine consumer myself, though I try not to go over 400 milligrams a day, since that's the recommended daily limit. That's already a lot. I think our generation is kind of addicted to caffeine, but used properly it's a great stimulant for productivity. How do you personally think about caffeine, and how do you use it day to day?

Kent: It's incredible — you can look at the research on coffee, which is a combination of caffeine, flavonoids, all sorts of compounds, and the benefits it has on recovery and performance. There's a reason people have been consuming caffeine for as long as they have; it's one of the most researched substances in the world. Obviously there's an upper limit you need to be conscious of. Personally, with Neurogum and Neuromint — I actually just popped a Neuromint — the benefit of a lower dose, 40 milligrams versus our energy mint at 100 milligrams, is that you feel it, but spreading it throughout the day, instead of taking an energy drink where you get 380 or 400 milligrams all at once in a carbonated format that absorbs fast, means you're not burning yourself out or crashing your adenosine with a mega-dose. Balancing and micro-dosing throughout the day gives you a much more consistent performance baseline, which is the philosophy we built Neurogum around — more is not always better.

Manav: Right now the biggest trend is matcha, and there's actually a shortage of it, because it's more of a slow-release caffeine source than coffee, which gives a lot of people jitters. How do you think about jitters, and is Neurogum more similar to matcha than coffee in that slow-release sense?

Kent: It's much more similar to matcha. Dr. Rhonda Patrick actually has a podcast on this — the combination of caffeine and L-theanine, which is the other compound in our product and the primary amino acid in green tea, gives you that green-tea-style focus and boost. There are scientific papers on the combination of caffeine and theanine — it's a very traditional nootropic stack, one I was already taking, that we adopted when we launched the brand almost a decade ago. If you've taken our product, there's a clear difference in how you feel compared to coffee or an energy drink — it's much closer to matcha or green tea: a focused, calm, subdued boost without the jitters.

Manav: What was the original idea behind it — were you just not satisfied with drinking coffee?

Kent: I was never a big coffee drinker. When I was training — I was fighting Muay Thai in Thailand, training with the Olympic judo team in Japan, the Imperial Guards in Japan — martial arts has been a big part of my life since I was five. In high school and college I took it a lot more seriously, trying to get to a higher level. I noticed that even at the UFC level, guys have those big Monster energy cans in front of them, but they're actually filled with water — nobody's drinking an actual energy drink before they fight. I didn't want to drink energy drinks, and I didn't want to take supplements that weren't certified. So I got into nootropics, mixing my own pill-based stacks after research, or buying them online.

On a scuba diving trip with my co-founder Ryan, I realized pill format was never going to be a real lifestyle product — I was never going to carry a bottle of pills around. If I wanted to share energy and focus with other people, it had to be gum or mints — something shareable. You don't share a drink with someone the same way. There are only so many things that fit in your pocket that you can hand to someone else and actually build an ecosystem around.

Manav: Especially now, the product makes a lot of sense — I'm not sure ten years ago people would have immediately gotten it, but the marketing is very clear: this helps you focus, simple as that. If you had to relaunch Neurogum today, what would you do differently? I mean, everyone thinks of Neurogum and thinks of Shark Tank — that felt like the key moment in Neurogum's history.

Kent: Shark Tank, Joe Rogan — yeah.

Manav: Let's talk about how you got on Shark Tank, because a lot of DTC brand owners watching this would want to go on the show. Was that a stroke of luck, or was it planned?

Kent: Shark Tank actually reached out to us very early in our career, but they didn't bring us on — and honestly, I don't think we were ready yet either. It worked out in our favor, because we did a lot of PR going into our launch to build education around the fact that we were creating a new category. If people don't know that caffeine and healthy ingredients in a gum or mint format is even a thing — because it never existed before — you have to educate the consumer first. That led to some early media appearances, which got the conversation around the media going, and that ultimately led to Shark Tank's casting producers reaching out to us.

By the time we actually went on the show, we were still in touch with those people, and they let us know about a casting call happening in Arizona. Ryan and I flew out for one night, did the casting call, and didn't hear back for about two months. Then suddenly, "You guys are going on Shark Tank, get your paperwork ready, let's go." That's how it happened. My advice for any DTC founder or entrepreneur who wants to get on the show: there are casting calls happening for Shark Tank all the time. Go search for them — there are people on LinkedIn, like Brandon Andrews, a casting director for Shark Tank, who post when new casting calls open. Look out for those, apply, and build a good pitch. You need a good product, a good pitch, and a good story — more than anything, the story.

Manav: The viewership of Shark Tank right now is insane — it's exploded over the last ten years. I think it's one of the most-watched shows in America right now.

Kent: I believe it. That's crazy.

Manav: What kind of results did you see from that exposure?

Kent: A pretty significant impact on impressions. It's funny — on Shopify you can see real-time visitors on your site, and you'd literally watch this flood of customers hit as the episode aired across different time zones in the US. From an awareness standpoint, absolutely massive. Post-Shark Tank exposure cuts both ways, though — we got hit with a trademark lawsuit from someone who'd watched the episode, which in my opinion was frivolous, but we settled. It's a story a lot of my entrepreneur friends have dealt with too — that exposure brings a level of awareness that also brings people coming after you. Thankfully we got past it. Any exposure, as long as you're prepared with the right messaging and positioning behind it, ends up being beneficial. For us, it was about retaining those customers — making sure that once they heard about us, we were retargeting them, showing up where they shop, and so on.

Manav: How did you prevent copycats? I'd imagine it attracted companies ripping you off.

Kent: Impossible to fully prevent. We've had so many counterfeiters use our likeness from Shark Tank — literally taking a clip of us from the episode and swapping our logo on the shirt for their own brand name in their marketing.

Manav: Wow — I guess that's inevitable at the scale you're at.

Kent: Yeah, which is fine.

Manav: The other day I was scrolling TikTok Shop, because we're launching a product in the shower filter category and rethinking that whole space, and I saw Neurogum live. I was shocked — I wouldn't have expected Neurogum to be doing a live. But then I thought about it, and it actually made sense.

Kent: We were the fastest-growing brand on TikTok last year.

Manav: Can you explain that? I think a lot of people are sleeping on this — younger generations obviously get how it works, but how do you think about the difference between Instagram and TikTok, and how do you use TikTok?

Kent: TikTok has created a frictionless shopping platform within their app that empowers both brands and creators to make money through affiliate content marketing your brand. Algorithmically, whether it's the lives that drive retargeting, or the shoppable videos and the frictionless checkout format they've built — it's the best shoppable social media platform that exists right now, compared to anything else.

Manav: One click.

Kent: One click, versus Instagram, which I'd say is more brand-focused.

Manav: On one side you've got an army of affiliates selling your product — what's the strategy behind going live specifically?

Kent: The GMV directly from lives isn't actually that significant, but when someone clicks into your live, TikTok's algorithm keeps retargeting your videos into their feed afterward, because it sees them as a high-likelihood-to-convert customer. This is how it works in China too, and a lot of that algorithmic behavior has carried over. So there's real value in doing a live even with no direct GMV, because of the top-of-funnel awareness and retargeting it generates — it's part of the funnel.

Manav: Interesting. When you guys launched, I read that you did an Indiegogo campaign, and apparently you or your co-founder went on Reddit to explain the technology behind it, which helped fill out the campaign. Ten years later, in 2025, if someone wants to launch a product and validate demand for their idea — and I know you're an investor now, so maybe you can speak to this more concretely — how would you launch a product today? Just run ads?

Kent: You can run ads and all that, but the principles behind any brand, in my opinion — there's a book called Crossing the Chasm I talk about all the time — come down to: is there a specific cohort you can position and message toward that becomes your early adopters, the high-retention, high-LTV customers for your brand? Once you attract that cohort, how do you expand your messaging outward to the next group of customers that overlaps with them, so you gradually widen your customer base?

When you can identify and capture a hyper-loyal, hyper-attentive market segment, upselling and cross-selling them, and building on that base, becomes so much easier — and you can be hyper-focused with your messaging, marketing, and positioning. A lot of brands come out of the gate with a good product but such broad messaging that they're marketing to everyone, which really means marketing to no one — that's how you burn through money fast.

From a principles standpoint: minimum viable product — a term most people have heard — means, have you found a customer base that's attracted to and loyal to the product, with messaging and positioning that's accurate for them? Second: can that messaging, positioning, and marketing translate incrementally to a broader customer base, toward your total addressable market? That's how I'd think about it at a foundational level. Then there's stage two — brand strategy, pillars, the imperatives that shape how you represent yourself as you go from product to brand.

Manav: One thing I really like about Neurogum is the TAM — it's massive. When does someone start taking caffeine? I started when I was around 15. Conservatively, say 18 — though that's not really true, people in America start way earlier. Is there actually a legal age limit for caffeine?

Kent: We have about as much caffeine as a Coca-Cola, and you know how young people are drinking Coca-Cola these days.

Manav: Right, right — people way younger than that are drinking Coke nowadays.

Kent: I don't think it's great for them, but yeah.

Manav: I love that the TAM is so big. At this point you can be a lot broader with Neurogum, but when you were starting out, who were you targeting — athletes, since you're an athlete, or people doing manual labor, people always on the go?

Kent: I was really big in what you mentioned earlier — the Reddit nootropics community. I knew instantly that community, people hyper-conscious about the ingredients they put in their body for cognitive benefit, was a market I could go after. That's why when we posted on Reddit, we picked up this incredible base of early adopters. From there, athletes were definitely one avenue we expanded into.

But the way we look at consumer data now — ignoring broad, generic data sets and looking at real customer segmentation from our media appearances and targeting — is how are people responding to different ads and segments, so we can go deeper and get more nuanced. And hook testing applies across the board, whether we're talking DTC marketing, Meta ads, TikTok ads — is your hook, the way you're capturing a consumer's attention, resonating enough that they'll watch the video and buy the product? And then how do you expand that hook, positioning, and messaging — those words I keep repeating — to reach deeper into customer insights?

Manav: Do you have a story about a key inflection point in Neurogum's growth — besides Shark Tank, which we covered — maybe a piece of organic content, like a street-style interview or something personal, where you saw a huge spike in visitors or sales?

Kent: Joe Rogan, obviously, was huge.

Manav: Explain that — did he mention you guys?

Kent: Oh man, he just mentioned us — completely unexpected. I got a text from a bunch of friends like, "Dude, Joe Rogan just mentioned Neurogum." We saw sales spike immediately. He was just talking about how much he loves the product, and he's mentioned us probably thirty or forty times since then.

Manav: Awesome.

Kent: Yeah, Joe's been a great advocate for the brand — I'm really appreciative, to the point that there's a video series cataloguing everything Joe Rogan takes, kind of an alphabetical list, and we're on it. That's how associated our brand has become with him. But in terms of what we've actually done — I'm more of an operator than a marketer, so a lot of my focus is on how we take these moments and build processes around them, operationalize them to drive continued, incremental growth. Jonathan on our team, our VP of Growth, is the one looking for these moments to capitalize on and activate our engine behind. There's no single thing that can make or break you — unless you're Dollar Shave Club with one iconic commercial — unless you already have the system in place: messaging, positioning, a good product. Without that foundation, an amazing exposure moment can happen to you and you won't be able to capitalize on it. I do think there's a ceiling you can hit with pure DTC, though.

Manav: Clearly you're a great operator — you're in every big-box retailer. Like I said, I saw you in Best Buy.

Kent: That's great, I honestly didn't even know we were in Best Buy — good to know. The sales team's doing a good job.

Manav: When did that transition happen — getting into Walmart, Whole Foods, and so on? How does a brand get into big-box retail?

Kent: It's harder than ever to enter retail, because even if you get in, if you don't survive on the shelf, or don't have the margin behind it, you die on shelf — you get hit with chargebacks and your company goes under. We took our time entering retail — we didn't rush it. We built a presence in DTC, worked with smaller and regional retailers we could actually manage, and then moved to national retail once we had the level of US-wide awareness we needed. You need to know where your customers are, where they shop, and then activate against those data points to minimize your risk of failure and increase your velocity.

Manav: How would you rank platforms in terms of priority? I'd guess Amazon is number one for you.

Kent: Yeah, Amazon — for supplements especially, you can't beat it.

Manav: It's also just the price. The other day I ordered a seasoning item that cost like a dollar fifty, and I was doing the math thinking, how did Amazon ship this to me for free on an item that cheap? I think our generation, especially guys, is getting more and more used to just ordering everything on Amazon. I notice women still go into Target and big-box stores, but busy guys like us — Amazon is the way to go.

Kent: Target's struggling — their stock price says it all. Foot traffic through their stores has dropped significantly. Walmart's still a juggernaut, their stock's doing well, biggest retailer in the world. But to win in those spaces, it's hard to point to just one retailer that carries you — Amazon is massive for us, but a lot of people see a product in retail first and then go buy it on Amazon. There's a double effect when you're in, say, 4,200 Walmarts nationwide — people see Neurogum at Walmart or Best Buy, build that brand recognition, "oh, that's Neurogum," and then they go buy it on Amazon because that's their usual touchpoint. You don't get into retail unless you're a real, credible product, and there's a lot of fake product on Amazon — so how do you leverage that retail credibility and tie it back into every other channel to keep growing?

Manav: You're an ultra-athlete, so I want to talk about biohacking. What's your daily workout routine, and what supplements do you take besides Neurogum? I don't know if I'd even call Neurogum a supplement — more like a performance-boosting gum. What else are you taking, and what's been trending for you lately?

Kent: It depends on whether I'm in training season. I'm working out almost every day regardless, but in training season I'm running 50, 60, 70 miles a week, sometimes more, depending on what I'm training for — usually an ultramarathon. Right now, fitness is pretty important — I was going to run in the Grand Canyon, but it's on fire right now, so I've just been doing lighter running, a few miles, a lot of hill runs, swimming, and dynamic lifting.

From a supplement standpoint, I take beet powder — nitric oxide production is important for cardiovascular health, and there's a lot of science behind beet powder helping VO2 max and cardiovascular health. I mix that with a product my friend Sebastian turned me onto called Omni — a combination of beef organs, colostrum, probiotics, and prebiotics — real whole-food super nutrients without needing a typical supplement format. I also mix in a scoop of protein and creatine — creatine is a staple for me, and I use whey isolate for the protein. Those are the four main things in my smoothie every morning, plus a banana. If I'm training, I add maltodextrin for simple, digestible carbs to build up my carb stores. Beyond that, fish oil and nicotinamide as daily supplements, and before bed, five grams of glycine, which helps sleep quality — it's a precursor to glutathione and to collagen, so it helps me recover and perform better the next day.

Manav: When you work out, do you take a pre-workout? I love working out with caffeine — it just makes it more enjoyable.

Kent: Because you're pumped, right?

Manav: Exactly — you can put on music and really lock in. Without it, it can get boring. What do you take before a workout — just Neurogum?

Kent: Yeah, honestly, usually just Neurogum. I've been swimming more lately, so I'll pop a mint and go swim. I used to take beta-alanine, but I don't like how it makes me feel, and I feel like you build a dependency on it — though from a lactic-acid standpoint, it is genuinely helpful.

Manav: Beta-alanine gives you that tingly, itchy feeling, which is good for the pump — I use it a lot, but it's another stimulant you don't want to rely on constantly.

Kent: Yeah, not all the time. The cleanest one, in my opinion, is caffeine — just caffeine.

Manav: It works every time.

Kent: It works every time — you don't want to switch up too many variables. What else — I saw you also invest. What do you look for in companies?

Manav: [asks about investing]

Kent: We touched on it a bit already — do they have a minimum viable product? Do I personally like it? Is the messaging and positioning clear? Is the founder genuinely passionate about what they're doing, or are they just chasing a trend because it's popular right now versus something they actually believe in and have a real vision for? Those are the key things I look for. I still get passed bigger deals occasionally, but I typically prefer investing in smaller companies where I can see the vision and see where I can actually help it grow. I also look at the financials — do the contribution margins make sense, does the COGS make sense, is there a realistic path to an acquisition or exit for certain products, how would it stand out on shelf. I usually only invest in CPG, since that's the world I know.

Manav: I'm going to put you on the spot — you don't have to answer if you don't want to — what's your hot take on Zyn?

Kent: I think it's great, honestly, I like it. I don't love that you're sucking on microplastics. There are a few other companies doing cool things in that space too, but I'm actually pretty close with the Zyn team — I know them quite well, including their executive team.

Manav: Really? Interesting. Nicotine is such an interesting product — it's rebranded itself as a nootropic, which, honestly, it kind of is.

Kent: I think the combination of nicotine and caffeine is insanely powerful.

Manav: Totally agree. I work out with one of the founders of Cameo, Martin — we're both training with firemen — and he told me about this gel for runners with caffeine in it, kind of a honey-based gel, but he said it can upset your stomach.

Kent: Wait, what's it called — not Honey Stinger?

Manav: I forget the name, but it's a gel with honey and caffeine, designed for runners. He said a lot of marathoners take it, but while running it upsets their stomach and they end up needing a bathroom.

Kent: Honey Stinger does have a caffeine version. It's basically just pure carbs — sugar — which makes sense that it would hit some people that way. I think I know the product you mean, even if I forget the exact name.

Manav: What do you take on long marathon runs?

Kent: Honey Stinger has hooked me up with a lot of product, so mostly that — it's a maltodextrin or sugar gel, basically. If it's available, I'll take GU too. I used to take one called Spring Energy, but they ran into a controversy — someone did a spectral analysis of their ingredients and found that the carb content they were claiming wasn't accurate. It tastes great, but I stopped taking it after that. Honestly, a lot of the time I just eat real food.

Manav: That's the hard part, I imagine — consuming that much food while running.

Kent: Yeah, it gets exhausting eating that much.

Manav: For people watching — what's next for Neurogum? A new product, or a specific focus?

Kent: Ultimately, continuing to build ourselves as a cohesive lifestyle brand across all our products is really important. I think about Red Bull — they don't sell energy, they make energy, through everything they do: their media, their presence, their products. Where are we in that sense? How do we evolve past being just an "energy-focused gum" brand into something bigger?

Manav: Last thing — international expansion. Is Neurogum only in the US, or are you in other countries, and how are you approaching international growth?

Kent: Compliance is the biggest factor — it's not as simple as deciding to enter a country. Labeling laws, compliance laws — we assess the size of the market and the "size of the prize," and expand slowly based on that. California alone has more people than all of Canada, you know? So when you start thinking about international expansion, you have to ask what the actual size of the prize is, compared to just staying focused on the US market.

Manav: That makes a lot of sense. California has so many laws — actually, yesterday I found something interesting. I was using my business partner's Instagram account to test one of our apps, and I noticed his account, since he's based in Spain, in the EU, had an option for $4.99 a month to use Instagram without ads. I checked, and we don't even have that option here.

Kent: Oh, they have that option? That's kind of wild.

Manav: How big is the Neurogum team right now?

Kent: About 75 people, give or take.

Manav: Wow, that's awesome.

Kent: There's headcount, and then there's revenue per teammate — I don't think people should get too caught up in employee count, more the efficiency and strategy driving growth. But after a certain point, hiring becomes inevitable — we run our own fulfillment, which requires a lot of people. We've got maybe 16 to 20 people just in fulfillment.

Manav: For people watching — Neurogum is doing nine figures in revenue with about 75 employees, so you can do the math on revenue per employee. There are a couple of companies right now, like Craigslist historically, or newer ones like Cursor or Sierra AI, doing insane revenue per person — like nine or ten million dollars per employee, which is ridiculous.

Kent: SlickDeals is another one.

Manav: No way.

Kent: Not a huge company — about 200 people — and I think they do almost a billion dollars a year.

Manav: Really? That's crazy. The industry is changing a lot, especially with AI.

Kent: It really is.

Manav: Thank you for coming on the show, Kent — I really appreciate your time, you've been really generous with it and answered a lot. As a closing message for D2C founders — what would you tell them so they don't overthink things, or don't take five years to launch a product?

Kent: The overthinking part is a big one. In the past I'd talk about resilience, keep going, all that — but I think the most important thing is finding your focus. There are three words I kept repeating on this podcast: minimum viable product, messaging, and positioning. If you nail those three and funnel them up into a real brand strategy, you'll know not to chase shiny objects. When you're starting out, everything looks exciting, but you have to stick to your guns and ask yourself: does this actually make sense for the brand strategy I've set up, does it tie back to my messaging, my positioning, the product I'm building? Just stay focused — that takes energy and focus.