How I Built a $72,000,000 Business In 5 Years | Julian Hearn Founder Of Huel

Ali Abdaal 0:00 Hey, friends. Welcome back to Deep Dive. This episode is a conversation with Julian Hearn, the founder of Huel. Huel is the multi-million dollar powdered food replacement company that I've actually been using since 2017. And Julian's story is particularly interesting because he started this company at the age of 37 and started off his career digging holes in a road and working night shifts at a petrol station. These days we hear a lot of stories about entrepreneurships and founders who started companies and started doing cool things at the age of, like, 17 or 18 or 19. And if you're older than that, it can be easy to think that you're too late to get started if you wanna do it yourself. Hopefully, this interview will show you that that's not the case and that you can just kind of do this kinda stuff basically whenever you want, and it can be successful if you apply it kind of the right way and you enjoy yourself along the way, which is what we're all about here. But yeah, I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Julian Hearn. So I've been evangelizing Huel since about, like, 2017 [laughs] when I first discovered it. Um, and I was using it a lot when I was in med school, going from placement here and there, 'cause I'd skip meals and skip breakfast, but just having the, the powder at the time, and now the pre-made stuff is absolutely sick. But I still get weird looks from people who are like, "Huel? Like, why do you do that? Like, doesn't it take the joy out of life to do..." And I'm like, "Ugh, n- no, it doesn't. It's, like, just, like, a meal replacement for, like, if, if I, if I... It's better than a sugary, like, breakfast cereal."

Julian Hearn 1:09 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:10 How, how do you guys think about the whole it, it, it, it feels unpalatable to be drinking your meals- [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:16 Okay

Ali Abdaal 1:16 ... vibe? [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:17 Well, we have, we have products you don't have to drink if that's not what you wanna do. But in terms of this, um, this joy element, it's quite interesting. Well, I used to debate quite a lot on, uh, Facebook with people-

Ali Abdaal 1:25 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:25 ... who were answering this. And I was explaining to people you've got to separate happiness from pleasure. So really-

Ali Abdaal 1:31 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:31 ... when people are talking about joy, they're really talking about pleasure.

Ali Abdaal 1:34 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:34 So you know when you sort of eat a sugary thing, it g- it will stimulate your pleasure senses. It's not making you happier. So you know happiness is much harder to achieve, much more long-term, much more fundamental, whereas pleasure... But f- really, you know, drugs give you pleasure. Alcohol gives you pleasure. So actually, pleasure's typically not a bad thing. It usually leads to bad habits. So going back to food, lots of people get pleasure from food, but that pleasure is actually gonna end up with them possibly e- overindulging, eating way too much.

Ali Abdaal 2:02 Mm.

Julian Hearn 2:02 You know, cake might give you pleasure. It's probably not a very good food for you. [laughs] You wouldn't have that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So I think you have to be very careful in separating happiness, and I think joy's a word that probably sits somewhere in between. But really it's on the s- it's on the side, really, of the pleasure. But just think, if you have too much pleasure from food, you're probably gonna have health problems, probably weight problems. You're probably gonna be inefficient. So we try to separate that out. So we say that Huel is, is never gonna replace a, um, your Sunday dinner. It's never gonna replace your Saturday night takeaway. It's never gonna replace your, your, um, a, a restaurant meal. But what it, what it is really good at doing is giving you functional food which gives you the nutrition which your body needs in the most convenient format and ensures you get all of the nutrition. And, uh, I use it for breakfast and lunch during the working week, which are my most inconvenient meals, and not social meals. You're, typically you're on a rush. So I have it for roughly 10 meals a week, which is basically nearly half my meals. So i- instantly I get high-quality nutrition, uh, very conveniently, and they're plant-based. So I'm, I'm sort of 50% vegan without even trying.

Ali Abdaal 3:05 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 3:06 And so I think overall it gives me what I need, and then I can, I can have a traditional family meal in the evenings without any sort of compromise in my eyes. No problems at all. So there's a balance between the two. If, you know, if people said, you know, if you had a Sunday dinner every day for every meal, it's gonna be super inconvenient, super expensive, super time-consuming, and not necessarily nutrition-complete. So I think people forget, we sort of, we've been trained that food is an art form, something you indulge in, something you spend a load of time on, but really your food is nutrition.

Ali Abdaal 3:34 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 3:35 There's a very specific list, pretty much identical across the whole world. From all the doctors and scientists, they pretty much agree it's pretty much identical what you actually do need to eat in terms of the specific, uh, macro and micronutrients. And, um, we provide that. But you try and do that from natural food sources, super hard to do unless you've got a spreadsheet. So you're sort of guessing most of the time in terms of even calories, let alone the, the, um, 26 bits that you actually need. So we do that for you. You don't have to worry at all. And so you can relax the rest of the time and eat what you want the rest of the time.

Ali Abdaal 4:04 I was, uh, I was thinking in the shower this morning, um, 'cause whenever we're h- we're, we're here in studio, which is most days each week, um, we just order for s- some random takeaway from Deliveroo. And I was thinking our default at the moment is, like, Chipotle chicken salad.

Julian Hearn 4:19 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 4:19 But today I was like, oh, you know, we've been having Chipotle chicken salad for the last couple... You know what? Let's get an un- unhealthy Chinese takeaway type thing. And I was thinking, you know, it would be cool if we had, like, a fridge that just had the pre-made Huels just stocked like I do in, 'cause in, in the, in, in my flat in King's Cross, we have a wine fridge-

Julian Hearn 4:33 Yep

Ali Abdaal 4:34 ... which has been replaced with the Huel fridge.

Julian Hearn 4:35 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 4:35 So it's got... The banana one is my favorite. Um, and the salted caramel I've-

Julian Hearn 4:39 Salted caramel's good

Ali Abdaal 4:40 ... been, I've been, I've been having recently. Um, so I've been thinking of, like, incorporating that into the team, and I was just thinking, huh, I w- I wonder how people would feel about that. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 4:47 I'm sure we can bring a fridge along. I think we sorted somebody else with a, a Huel fridge a few places.

Ali Abdaal 4:51 Oh, have you guys got branded fridges?

Julian Hearn 4:52 We've got some branded fridges, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 4:53 Oh, sick.

Julian Hearn 4:53 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 4:53 Yeah, that'd be glorious-

Julian Hearn 4:54 Yep

Ali Abdaal 4:54 ... if we have a branded fridge.

Julian Hearn 4:55 Have you tried the hot and savory one as well, 'cause we're talking about-

Ali Abdaal 4:56 I did

Julian Hearn 4:57 ... drinking your food.

Ali Abdaal 4:57 I used to have those a lot in d- during, during lockdown one. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 5:00 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 5:00 Um, that was quite nice. The tomato, uh-

Julian Hearn 5:02 T- tomato and herb

Ali Abdaal 5:03 ... tomato and herb one, yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:04 We've got some new ones now. We've got a couple of pasta ones which have gone extremely well.

Ali Abdaal 5:07 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:07 So we've got chicken and mushroom. We've got Cajun pasta.

Ali Abdaal 5:10 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:10 We've got mac and cheese, so vegan mac and cheese. Um, yeah, we'll get you some of those. We said earlier [laughs] I'll give you a big box of stuff.

Ali Abdaal 5:16 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 5:16 You'll get loads of stuff.

Ali Abdaal 5:17 I wa- I wanted to kinda take you back to when, when, when all of this stuff started, 'cause you're just about to turn 50. Is that right?

Julian Hearn 5:23 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 5:23 And you started, um... I was, I was, I was trying to work out what age you started various companies, and it was, like, surprisingly later in life than people would initially think.

Julian Hearn 5:31 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 5:31 People think founders are, like, you know, 17 to 19 year olds, Mark Zuckerberg, the Stripe guys.

Julian Hearn 5:35 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 5:35 Um, but you were, like, thir- 30-something when you started?

Julian Hearn 5:37 I would've been 36-

Ali Abdaal 5:39 Yeah

Julian Hearn 5:39 ... 37. And, um, yeah, I, yeah, most of these sort of podcasts can focus around the, the sort of very younger guys.

Ali Abdaal 5:46 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:47 And yeah, you think about the Zuckerbergs of the world, who's incredibly young.

Ali Abdaal 5:49 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:49 Or I think you've done Ben Francis recently.

Ali Abdaal 5:51 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:51 Incredibly young. So I think that it, it's, um, yeah, I think it's interesting that most people probably think when they get to 36, 37, they're sort of stuck in what they're doing.

Ali Abdaal 5:59 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 5:59 They can't retrain, they can't relearn. But yeah, I did. I just sort of, uh, had a, had a need, had a personal reason why I needed to start working from home.

Ali Abdaal 6:07 Mm.

Julian Hearn 6:08 And, uh, had to suss that out, and I did a lot of the stuff you sort of do, is listen to a lot of podcasts.

Ali Abdaal 6:12 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 6:13 Tons of podcasts. Read a lot online and try and work out and sort of- Bodge your way through to start off with. So it took me about a year-

Ali Abdaal 6:20 Yeah

Julian Hearn 6:20 ... before I got the confidence to jack my job in, but worked evenings and weekends. Yeah, must be 36, 37.

Ali Abdaal 6:25 Yeah. So w- when you w- so, um, I, I speak to a lot of people in their, like, so sometimes even late teens, but like early to mid-20s who, who say, "Ah, I don't know what I wanna do. I haven't figured it out."

Julian Hearn 6:34 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 6:35 "It seems like all these other people are sort of like going ahead of me."

Julian Hearn 6:37 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 6:37 Um, what was your kind of experiences during school and sort of like late teens, early 20s, um, and how did, how did we go from that to, and then-

Julian Hearn 6:46 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 6:46 ... then to starting a business at age 36?

Julian Hearn 6:48 Okay. So I left school at 16, um, pretty poor GCSEs. Um, what did I get? Three Cs maybe, Ds, Es.

Ali Abdaal 6:57 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 6:57 Got two E's for English. I do, I do remember that. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 6:59 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 6:59 I can't spell. I'm not really good at reading either really. So I got two E's for English, left at 16, worked at a shop for a year, then worked digging holes in the road for two years as manual labor. Um, then I think my girlfriend at the time was about 19. She goes, "What are you doing? Why are you digging holes in the road? You're too smart to do that." So I wasn't academically smart, but I sort of quite smart at certain stuff. So I went back to college two years, uh, and I thought I'd come out of there and get a job. Came out of college with two, uh, I think it was a B Tech I had. Couldn't get a job off the back of that, so I had nothing else to do really apart from went to uni, thought, "Well, now I'm committed. I've given up work. I might as well keep going."

Ali Abdaal 7:36 Mm-hmm.

Julian Hearn 7:36 So then I got a, uh, a placement at Bournemouth University, did a degree in marketing. Came out of that, thought I'd get a job straight away no problem. Didn't. I had to go and work in a... I remember I worked night shift in a petrol station for six months.

Ali Abdaal 7:47 Okay.

Julian Hearn 7:48 And, um, and then luckily, I think it was my step-mom, she worked with somebody whose husband worked somewhere, and luckily I got a job in marketing finally after all that. So I'd had a degree in marketing. I had a 2:1, but couldn't get a job. Luckily, I got one. Uh, worked in a marketing team from about, I think it must have been 1999, something like that. Worked in marketing for mostly retailers.

Ali Abdaal 8:09 So that was when you were like 25-ish?

Julian Hearn 8:10 Yeah, it would have been, yeah, maybe a little bit older, 25, 26, something like that.

Ali Abdaal 8:13 Yeah. Okay.

Julian Hearn 8:13 And, um, and then, then I started, uh, internet sort of came along.

Ali Abdaal 8:19 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 8:19 So this was still quite early 'cause I think when I was at uni, I think I finished uni in '96, and the internet like was really not really a- about. You know, I think, I think at university you could go and use some of the computers there and you could access the internet, but nobody really had a home computer with-

Ali Abdaal 8:33 Mm

Julian Hearn 8:33 ... internet in '96. And, um, and then when I first got my job, I was just doing normal sort of marketing as a marketing assistant, and then the internet came along. So somebody said, "Can you have a look at this internet thing? Should we have an internet business?" I was working for MFI, which was a furniture retailer at the time. And I sort of said to them, "Yeah, it looks like you should." Um, B&Q, which was a bigger retailer at the time, had a what they called a brochureware site, hadn't... You couldn't buy it, no e-commerce. I said, "Well, we could, we could beat them. We could overtake them if you give me some money." So I sort of persuaded the, the team or the board to give us, I think it was £67,000 to start the first website. Got that built by an agency, got that going, and then of course I was almost a... You know, within one year I was almost a gray beard in terms of internet experience 'cause nobody had it. So then I moved on, worked for some other retailers. And then fast-forward to, um, yeah, 2000 and, what was it, 2008 I think it was. Um, I needed to work from home because of a personal reason, and, um, I thought, "Shit, what am I gonna do?" 'Cause I lived in Aylesbury, which is out in the sort of, out in the countryside. I was working in London and going an hour and a half each way, so it was three hours of driving a day.

Ali Abdaal 9:40 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 9:40 So I wanted to work from home. No marketing jobs of any sort of merit in, in Aylesbury area, so I needed to create my own business.

Ali Abdaal 9:47 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 9:48 And, uh, so started looking around, and luckily at the time we were using some affiliates, and affiliates are people basically who sit at home-

Ali Abdaal 9:55 Yeah

Julian Hearn 9:55 ... and create websites and make money from sitting in their PJs I suppose at home.

Ali Abdaal 10:00 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Julian Hearn 10:00 And I thought, "This is something I can do maybe." These guys, I met, I met them. I went to an affiliate event-

Ali Abdaal 10:05 Yeah

Julian Hearn 10:05 ... and, uh, these guys, I thought, "Oh, they're making..." I knew how much some of them, some of them-

Ali Abdaal 10:08 Yeah

Julian Hearn 10:08 ... were making, like 10, 20,000 pounds a month. I think, "Holy shit, that's loads of money." And, um, and I met them. I thought they were gonna be... I don't know. I'm not saying... I thought they was gonna be geniuses, but when I met them, I thought, "They're, they're bright, but they're not like rocket scientists."

Ali Abdaal 10:21 Mm.

Julian Hearn 10:21 I thought, "If they can do it, why can't I do it?" So that was basically me then thought, "Right, I'm gonna learn how to do this by myself," by listening to podcasts-

Ali Abdaal 10:27 Yeah

Julian Hearn 10:28 ... by practicing, starting websites, learning, learning, learning.

Ali Abdaal 10:31 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 10:32 So I used to get home from work at, say, 6:00 on a workday, um, have my, uh, meal with my, my wife at the time, and then go on the computer at 7:00. I basically had my computer desk set up in the lounge so I could sit in the lounge, watch TV. I had a little mirror set up. I could [laughs] to watch the TV-

Ali Abdaal 10:51 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 10:52 ... while I was, uh, working.

Ali Abdaal 10:54 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 10:54 And worked till, say, 11:00. Do this at the weekends as well. Did that nearly sort of full time for a year-

Ali Abdaal 11:01 Yeah

Julian Hearn 11:01 ... until I got to the stage where I started making about 1000 pounds, maybe 1500, 2000 pounds a month.

Ali Abdaal 11:05 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 11:06 And started thinking, "I know how to do this. If I had more time, I could double the amount of work. I would double the amount of money I could earn." And so I remember saying to my wife at the time, said, "Right. I'm going to have a crack at this. I'm gonna jack my job in."

Ali Abdaal 11:19 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 11:19 "I'm gonna give myself six months. If I can't get the same amount of money I get for my salary within six months, I'll go back and get that job again or get a similar type of job."

Ali Abdaal 11:27 Mm.

Julian Hearn 11:28 And I think at that time I had a good enough experience that I felt confident I could go back and get a job, so it felt like pretty low risk. And, um, I thought as long as I could earn the same salary and I'm working from home, it's a win-win. I haven't got... Three hours a day I'm not traveling.

Ali Abdaal 11:42 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 11:42 So that was the goal. Within three months I was earning more than my salary, and then it just kept on going after that.

Ali Abdaal 11:46 Lots of us go through life with a bit of a love-hate relationship with STEM subjects. In theory, the idea of learning how the world works in science and learning how to build websites with computer science is really awesome, but when you're plodding your way through formulas in a science class or trying to understand code, it can be a bit dry and boring. The way I like to learn more about this stuff in a fun and engaging way is with Brilliant, who is kindly sponsoring this episode. Brilliant have a ton of courses that teach maths, science, and computer science with visual examples and interactive challenges along the way so that you can learn by doing. One of my favorite courses in Brilliant is actually the computer science series, especially the introduction to algorithms and the fundamentals of programming with Python. I was actually considering applying for computer science rather than medicine at university, and I ended up going down the medicine route, which I don't regret, but I never really understood computer science. And although I knew how to code, I didn't really understand the foundational algorithms and structures behind the field of computer science. So I really enjoyed checking out Brilliant's courses on that. And also their course on cryptocurrency is absolutely sick, and without that course, I really would not have understood how Bitcoin, for example, works. Anyway, if you wanna improve your math, science, and computer science, then head over to brilliant.org/deepdive, and the first 200 people to sign up via that link will get 20% off the annual subscription to Brilliant. So thank you very much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this video. Yeah, I think that's, uh, when- I think when, when, when people quit a job, um, I feel like they often have the, the, this idea that, "Oh, you know, I'm, I'm working a 30K job, therefore quitting the job is a 30K risk."

Julian Hearn 13:04 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 13:04 But it's actually not because, like, next week you could, you could probably get a 28K job if you really wanted to.

Julian Hearn 13:09 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 13:09 And so really it's not a 30K risk, it's a 2K risk between the job that you currently have and the job that you could pretty easily get if you needed to.

Julian Hearn 13:15 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 13:16 And even if you, if you take a little bit of a pay cut, maybe you can't get a 35K job immediately, but at least a 25, 28K job is, is, is very reasonable in that context. Um, and I don't know anyone who's kind of done, done that and regretted the decision, 'cause you're sort of, like, going all in on yourself-

Julian Hearn 13:30 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 13:30 ... and giving yourself that be like, "Yeah, I'm, I've, I, I've, I've gotta make this work, and if I don't, then it's not the end of the e- it's not the end of the world. I'll just-"

Julian Hearn 13:38 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 13:38 ... "get another job."

Julian Hearn 13:39 If you talk about it and sort of practice at it forever, you're never gonna do it.

Ali Abdaal 13:42 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 13:42 At some point you do have to make that hard decision to do it-

Ali Abdaal 13:45 Yeah

Julian Hearn 13:45 ... but I would never, I've never would've done it before I'd been, yeah, practicing and learning for a year.

Ali Abdaal 13:50 Mm.

Julian Hearn 13:50 So evenings and weekends was vitally important. I think if you do that, and really do it, and start earning money-

Ali Abdaal 13:55 Yeah

Julian Hearn 13:55 ... you build confidence. The more you do something, the more confidence you get. So I was pretty confident the end of that year. I said, "If I double the amount of time I can work on this," or triple the amount of time, 'cause I probably could've tripled the amount of time, "I know I will do this."

Ali Abdaal 14:07 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 14:07 So I was pretty confident. But yeah, I'd put enough money to one side to pay the mortgage, pay all the bills for six months, which is not a lot. If you just strip everything out of your life apart-

Ali Abdaal 14:14 Yeah

Julian Hearn 14:14 ... from the mortgage and your food bills, you don't need that much. So it wasn't a ton of cash, but I put enough money into, in the bank that I had that, I'd saved that up over that previous year from the money I had earned from it.

Ali Abdaal 14:22 Mm.

Julian Hearn 14:23 Put that to one side. That was enough. Um, but yeah, it was three months and I was earning more.

Ali Abdaal 14:28 Yeah, so o- o- one th- o- one, one thing I, I, I often hear from people is this idea of, you know, "I w- I wanna do this side hustle, therefore I'm gonna quit my job and I'm gonna make it happen." I wanna be like, "Hang on, hang on." Like, "Don't, don't quit your job [laughs] until you've at least done it for a little while-

Julian Hearn 14:43 Yep

Ali Abdaal 14:44 ... in, in the weekends and e-

Julian Hearn 14:45 Yep

Ali Abdaal 14:45 ... we- weekends and evenings." Um, but I guess these days it's, it's sort of become a bit unfashionable to talk about doing the stuff on the weekends and evenings and things, and everyone's like, "Oh, but, like, sustainability and like, you know, work-life balance and-

Julian Hearn 14:56 Yep

Ali Abdaal 14:56 ... mental health," and all that kind of stuff, rightly so. Um, but I think there is still that balance between, like, the people who sort of succeed are the ones who do add in that extra level of hustle, extra level of grind, if you wanna use th- those words.

Julian Hearn 15:09 Yeah. I, I, I think that you've all got to, you know, to, to make something work, there's gonna have to be a period of time when you have to go outside of your comfort zone. You're gonna have to work harder than you, you probably healthily should over a long period of time.

Ali Abdaal 15:20 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 15:20 But you're not doing that forever.

Ali Abdaal 15:21 Mm.

Julian Hearn 15:22 So, um, that was one year when I worked crazy, crazy amount of hours. I'm doing a full-time job with a three-hour drive backwards and forwards to home, about an hour and a half each way-

Ali Abdaal 15:31 Yeah

Julian Hearn 15:31 ... and then working in the evenings. So there was crazy hours for a year. Big deal. And, you know, it felt like there was such an end goal at the end of it, it was worth it.

Ali Abdaal 15:38 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 15:38 And then when I started working at home, when I jacked the job, I wasn't doing all the evenings and weekends.

Ali Abdaal 15:42 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 15:43 So there's only one year. That was pretty easy. In fact, I ended up starting working at 2, 2, finishing at 2:00 or 3:00. Once the money started rolling in-

Ali Abdaal 15:50 Mm

Julian Hearn 15:50 ... I was even finishing earlier to make up for that previous year. Then I suppose when I started Huel, that, that, that, that was tough. When that kicked off, there was two to three years of that when it w- that was crazy, crazy hours. But now I'm 50 years old. I've given you example of basically four years in total out of 50 when I've worked crazy hours.

Ali Abdaal 16:07 Mm.

Julian Hearn 16:07 That feels doable in my eyes.

Ali Abdaal 16:09 Feels, feels doable. Um, so when you were, when you were making this money or attempting to make this money from the affiliate stuff-

Julian Hearn 16:14 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 16:14 ... while you still had the job and you were commuting three hours-

Julian Hearn 16:16 Yep

Ali Abdaal 16:16 ... what was it that kept you going in those, those weekends and evenings while you were knackered from a day of work and driving back and, back and forth, and you get on the computer and you're like, "Argh." What, what, what's, what's going through your mind?

Julian Hearn 16:26 Well, this was that dream of not being able to g- do that three hours. When I'm sitting in that car-

Ali Abdaal 16:30 Yeah

Julian Hearn 16:30 ... 'cause this was the day bef- um, in the days before podcasts.

Ali Abdaal 16:33 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 16:33 So basically just listening to radio, radio with adverts in, driving backwards and forwards into London.

Ali Abdaal 16:37 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 16:37 It's pretty, you know, soul-destroying. And you think there's this dream of I met these guys. I remember going to this event.

Ali Abdaal 16:43 Mm.

Julian Hearn 16:43 These guys were there, no brighter than me. I think one of them had an Aston Martin, one of them might have had a Ferrari, working from home. And you think there's, that's a dream. So you just think, "If I just knuckle down for that one year," it keeps you going to do that. And the thought... And also, you know, there's progress in that year as well.

Ali Abdaal 16:59 Mm.

Julian Hearn 16:59 So during that year you will see times when nothing's happened, and then you might have a little win, little win, little win. So you get, like, little wins all the way through. And yeah, clearly if I'd earned no money through that whole time, and literally just knuckled down for a whole year and nothing had happened, that probably would've been tougher than I thought.

Ali Abdaal 17:14 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 17:14 But because there was wins and monies coming in at different times, it, it, it brings it back to the, "Yeah, if I keep going this, I'll keep going, I'll keep going. I'll get there eventually."

Ali Abdaal 17:22 Yeah. Yeah, I think in my life, uh, it w- it w- it would've been around the same time, like 2008 to 2010-ish, um, I had, like, two distinct moments. Uh, one was when I first started doing freelance web design and made, like, a few dollars through a, a PayPal account where I lied about my age 'cause I was, like, 14. [laughs] Uh, I m- made, like, $10 through, like, editing some, like, MySQL code from someone's website. I was like, "Bloody hell, I can make money on the internet." And the second one was actually through affiliates.

Julian Hearn 17:47 Right.

Ali Abdaal 17:47 Um, I g- I, I made this, like, site that would get people to sign up for LoveFilm affiliates-

Julian Hearn 17:51 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 17:52 ... which was, like, the pre-Blockbuster, pre-Netflix era. And a friend of mine used his own family's credit cards to sign up for four free trials. And I remember getting a check in the mail for 50 quid, which was one of those, like, um, electronic checks where it's like tens of millions, zero, millions, zero, tens of thousands, zeros. Like, tens, five. I was like, "Bloody hell, I made 50 quid."

Julian Hearn 18:10 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 18:10 And I, I, you know, didn't have to work for it directly.

Julian Hearn 18:12 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 18:13 And it was just having those two experiences of, A, making money through selling my web design services, and then making money from building this affiliate site. That just gave me such confidence that this is a thing. You can make money on the internet. I can ma- I can make money through a business. And I think it was that sort of formative experiences that meant when I was at uni and started my first business that actually worked, I had the conviction and the knowledge and the experience and having failed at b- a bunch of things before to be able to make that work.

Julian Hearn 18:36 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 18:36 And I guess it kinda sounds similar, s- similar experience to what you had.

Julian Hearn 18:39 Yeah. I think that I'm... I've certainly, I've said it before, I don't think I'm particularly, I don't think I'm particularly brilliant at anything. I'm, I'm very good at marketing now 'cause I've done it for such a long period of time, but I think naturally at school-

Ali Abdaal 18:47 Mm

Julian Hearn 18:47 ... I wasn't particularly brilliant at anything. The beauty of, like, say, working on, uh, e-commerce or creating content or doing whatever is if you put enough hours in, you can sometimes beat somebody with more talent than you. Whereas, like, I don't know, football, you go on a football pitch, doesn't matter how much [laughs] effort you put in, if you're not really good you're not gonna win, right? With something like this you c- it can be just through pure grind you can out, you can beat other people. And, uh, at the time, most of the stuff that I was earning money through required on SEO. The beauty of SEO is you can see rankings, you can check rankings.

Ali Abdaal 19:13 Mm.

Julian Hearn 19:13 And you know, if I just do that little bit of extra there, I will get a little bit of a bump up that. I'll bump, bump, bump. You can see yourself eventually move. There'll be times when you get- ... you go down as well. So there can be disappointments. But there's sometimes when you get those, you just think, "More hours. I can beat somebody who's-

Ali Abdaal 19:27 Yeah

Julian Hearn 19:27 ... they're not gonna grind as much as m- I can. I can do more. I'll work more." And eventually you can beat them.

Ali Abdaal 19:31 So what sort of stuff were you affiliating back in the day?

Julian Hearn 19:33 This was voucher code websites.

Ali Abdaal 19:35 Okay.

Julian Hearn 19:35 So it was a very competitive space.

Ali Abdaal 19:36 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 19:37 So I remember at the time, I probably got in it late-ish. There was other ones that already existed that were quite established.

Ali Abdaal 19:43 Are we talking like, uh, Hot UK Deals and those sorts of websites, or?

Julian Hearn 19:45 Well, it's more to do with, like, voucher codes. Hot UK Deals with deals as well.

Ali Abdaal 19:48 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 19:48 So didn't really do that. It's mostly voucher codes. So I think it was myvouchercodes.co.uk, vouchercodes.co.uk. They were the big guns at the time. And there was a few others. But there's always niches within e- every category. There's always a niche you can go after.

Ali Abdaal 19:59 Okay.

Julian Hearn 20:00 So the niche for me at the time was, um, you know, I d- I, I'm pretty good at research, and so I dug into it as much as I possibly can. At the time, the key, the key advantage for me was this, that, um, if you go to checkout pages-

Ali Abdaal 20:11 Mm

Julian Hearn 20:11 ... when you look at these codes, people use the term voucher codes, but a lot of them don't use the term voucher codes. It'll say enter coupon code-

Ali Abdaal 20:17 Oh, yeah

Julian Hearn 20:17 ... or enter discount code-

Ali Abdaal 20:18 Yeah

Julian Hearn 20:19 ... or enter promotional code or enter promo code. So there's actually quite different, quite a few different words for the same thing. Everybody chased after voucher codes 'cause that was the sort of generic that people said.

Ali Abdaal 20:28 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 20:28 But when I analyzed a load of people checkouts pages, I noticed quite a few people using promotional code. So I registered promotionalcodes.org.uk I think was the domain name that we had. Very snappy title. And, um, but everybody's chasing after these keywords over here, so voucher codes and discount codes. And that was very saturated. But if you search for promotional codes, so I don't know, at the time, say it was Tesco promotional code, typically the top ranking one didn't even have promotional codes in the, in the title tag, which is one of the key parts of a page for SEO. So nobody's even going after it, wouldn't even optimizing for that. So that was the opportunity I saw. And so I used to, you know, work quite hard to, um, get some rankings. And I just put all my... I, I... When you, when you get links, you point them... So most people point to the homepage. I pointed them to the specific product page, so the sort of deeper page. Let's say you've got a, a site with 60,000 merchants in. You can't point links to every single page. Too many. So I used to just start with a very small site that had, say, five pages, set links to each of those five pages with those optimized title tags, and that would help me get rankings for those.

Ali Abdaal 21:27 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 21:27 It was hard work. Did it, and then I... That's why I knew that if I had more time, I could do more merchants and do them properly and just scale out that way.

Ali Abdaal 21:33 So were you creating the pages manually on, like-

Julian Hearn 21:35 Yep

Ali Abdaal 21:35 ... WordPress or something like that?

Julian Hearn 21:36 Uh, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 21:36 Or-

Julian Hearn 21:36 Yeah. It was WordPress. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 21:37 And so you, you find a website that maybe sells five products. You get the affiliate thing through, like, TradeDoubler or whatever-

Julian Hearn 21:43 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 21:43 ... whatever platforms were up.

Julian Hearn 21:44 Correct. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 21:44 And then you s- manually create the pages and try it. Well, was it a case of trying to write a blog post about the thing to-

Julian Hearn 21:50 Pretty much

Ali Abdaal 21:50 ... rank for-

Julian Hearn 21:50 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 21:50 ... content?

Julian Hearn 21:50 You've got to put some content in there.

Ali Abdaal 21:52 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 21:52 Then you've got to go and spend time to get the links into that. And there was lots of tricks to trade at work. So whether you did a link on a... You'd find a forum there to have tra- uh, for- followable links on, or you probably might have paid someone to do something, you know, at some point or time. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 22:05 [laughs] Yeah.

Julian Hearn 22:05 Might be something going on there. So yeah, I worked with a guy. Actually, interestingly, I worked with a guy who did the website. So I wrote the content and did the sort of the marketing or the SEO. He did sort of tech side of stuff. And it was a guy, I found a guy, I think it was on a forum, and, uh, he was from Serbia. Worked with him straight for three years. I never met him, never spoke to him, never Zoomed him-

Ali Abdaal 22:23 Yeah

Julian Hearn 22:23 ... never Skyped him, never did anything. This was all done through, pretty much through Basecamp, which was like a task management tool back in the day. So we worked together full-time on that project.

Ali Abdaal 22:32 Mm.

Julian Hearn 22:32 Um, but yeah, it's interesting. I've never met him. Still haven't met him today.

Ali Abdaal 22:35 Uh, yeah. That's, that's like, uh, remote work since before, like way before it was cool. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 22:39 Yeah, exactly.

Ali Abdaal 22:40 The whole freelancer thing.

Julian Hearn 22:41 Well, I think it came out of the, the, around the same sort of time. It must have been The 4-Hour Workweek came out around the same sort of time.

Ali Abdaal 22:46 Mm. Yeah. 2007. Yeah.

Julian Hearn 22:46 So that was one of the primary things that I read at the time, sort of motivated as well to think, "Right, yeah, outsource, outsource, outsource. Do, just do the stuff you're good at and get rid of all the other stuff."

Ali Abdaal 22:54 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 22:55 So that was the sort of key learning I got out of that book, and that was influential.

Ali Abdaal 22:59 Yeah, it's amazing how many people I speak to who, who, who've had 4-Hour Workweek as like a, an influential book in their, in their life.

Julian Hearn 23:04 It's, it's, it... Yeah, Tim Ferriss is very good.

Ali Abdaal 23:06 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 23:06 It's very well-written, and it makes you think differently about how to do this where- rather than the traditional way. So yeah, I'd highly recommend it.

Ali Abdaal 23:13 Yeah. Yeah. I, I di- I discovered it when I was, like, 17. It completely blew my mind and just changed the trajectory of my life-

Julian Hearn 23:18 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 23:18 ... in the sense of like, "Hey, I'm doing this medical school thing, but I don't think I want to rely on being a doctor forever for my income. Therefore, let's figure out this passive income thing, mini retirement thing." It wa- it was just, like, such a, such a paradigm shift in, in the way I saw the world. Um-

Julian Hearn 23:33 Well, most have been brought up to be you go to work, you do a job, you get paid a salary.

Ali Abdaal 23:37 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 23:37 But clearly that's not scalable. You know, once your, your hours, you can only work 40 hours a week or whatever. You get paid 40 hours. That's not scalable. But the internet is like, I'm not saying infinite, but it's pretty big. So if you can work something to sell a product or sell a service that's scalable-

Ali Abdaal 23:51 Yeah

Julian Hearn 23:51 ... you don't even have to be the best in the business because there's billions of people out there on the internet now. You've only got to sell to a tiny, tiny percentage of those really, really niche projects-

Ali Abdaal 23:58 Yeah

Julian Hearn 23:58 ... and, um, you can have a really quite bigger business.

Ali Abdaal 24:01 Yeah. So at this point, you're sort of mid-30s. You've worked as a marketing, well, worked in marketing for about 10 years at this point, if I, if my maths is right.

Julian Hearn 24:07 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 24:08 And you decided, "I need to work from home, therefore let's figure out these ways of making money on the internet."

Julian Hearn 24:11 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 24:12 Quit the job. Uh, six months, or three months later, you're making more money than you were in the job.

Julian Hearn 24:15 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 24:15 And then I think you s- you, you started your first off- I gue- I guess official business in 2008, I wa- I was reading.

Julian Hearn 24:21 2008. Let me see. I'm just trying to think. That was-

Ali Abdaal 24:24 Yeah

Julian Hearn 24:24 ... yeah, that was promotionalcodes.org.uk.

Ali Abdaal 24:26 Oh, I see.

Julian Hearn 24:26 That was that.

Ali Abdaal 24:26 Was

Ali Abdaal 24:27 that the one that you sold then-

Julian Hearn 24:28 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 24:28 ... later further down the line?

Julian Hearn 24:28 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 24:29 What was that, what was that like, like building it up and then selling the business in, like-

Julian Hearn 24:32 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 24:33 ... in this sort of genre? [laughs]

Julian Hearn 24:34 It, it, it was nice in the sense of that business was, solved the problem I had. It grew much bigger than I expected. Um, so in the final year, so after three years, that was making more than £2 million per year-

Ali Abdaal 24:46 Wow

Julian Hearn 24:47 ... profit.

Ali Abdaal 24:47 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 24:48 And you know, that-

Ali Abdaal 24:49 Through, through affiliate deals?

Julian Hearn 24:50 Correct. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 24:51 Through manually making website pages and like-

Julian Hearn 24:53 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 24:53 Wow.

Julian Hearn 24:53 Just through that w- w- website really.

Ali Abdaal 24:55 Is it?

Julian Hearn 24:55 That one single website. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 24:56 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 24:56 There was big money to be earned. That affiliate business was very big. I think the affiliate business has changed dramatically since then.

Ali Abdaal 25:01 Mm.

Julian Hearn 25:01 I think they do a lot of, um, I think some of the, the, uh, the payments are much smaller now. I think lots of people don't, don't do it. They might ban voucher code websites. I think that-

Ali Abdaal 25:09 Yeah

Julian Hearn 25:09 ... those days are over. But, um, it was, uh, it was highly profitable. Obviously no s- no product.

Ali Abdaal 25:15 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 25:16 No customer service. Literally just create a website, get traffic to it, redirect it through, um, clicks to, um, the merchant.

Ali Abdaal 25:23 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 25:23 You get paid e- either a bounty or a percentage of the sale.

Ali Abdaal 25:26 Yeah. And how big was your team then when you were doing this sort of-

Julian Hearn 25:28 Two

Ali Abdaal 25:28 ... 2 million profit? [laughs]

Julian Hearn 25:29 I th- I think right at the end there was four of us, maybe five.

Ali Abdaal 25:33 Okay.

Julian Hearn 25:34 Um, but really it was just me and the guy from Serbia for the majority of the time.

Ali Abdaal 25:37 [laughs] Okay. So w- w- what was that feeling like? You know, you're- you've been kinda grinding hard at, at, at this job thing for the last 10 years, and now you, you, you have this business which is making two million plus a year.

Julian Hearn 25:50 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 25:50 How did, how does, how did that feel at the time? Can you remember? [laughs]

Julian Hearn 25:52 Um, it feels quite, um, surreal.

Ali Abdaal 25:55 Mm.

Julian Hearn 25:55 I, I watched your video yesterday where you were talking about the money that you've, um-

Ali Abdaal 25:58 Yeah

Julian Hearn 25:58 ... um, through some of the sites that you've done things, and you just, you sort of, you can't sort of quite believe it sometimes.

Ali Abdaal 26:04 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 26:04 And, um, so I remember going down to the, the pub. It's only about a year, I think it was.

Ali Abdaal 26:08 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 26:08 And, uh, said... They said, "How's, how's this going?" And I remember I said to the guy, "Yeah, I earned 60, 60 grand." He said, "It's pretty good, but I thought you were saying you was earning really good money." I said, "No, that's what I earned last month-"

Ali Abdaal 26:18 Yeah

Julian Hearn 26:18 ... "just profit, 60 grand." He thought it was the year.

Ali Abdaal 26:20 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 26:20 So this was still quite early. But I mean, in the, in the final years it was like £250,000 a month-

Ali Abdaal 26:24 Yeah

Julian Hearn 26:25 ... profit. So it feels pretty unreal.

Ali Abdaal 26:27 Yep.

Julian Hearn 26:28 My spending habits didn't even change really a great deal.

Ali Abdaal 26:31 Mm.

Julian Hearn 26:31 So I didn't actually change. You just, you just knew that there was a great deal of money there and, um, but SEO, being reliant on SEO can be quite risky, so I felt that it was, um, it may not last.

Ali Abdaal 26:44 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 26:44 And I'd rather take the chips off the table-

Ali Abdaal 26:46 Yeah

Julian Hearn 26:46 ... now if I can. So we ended up selling that business to an American company for basically a life-changing multiple of that-

Ali Abdaal 26:53 Mm

Julian Hearn 26:53 ... amount. So I set myself up for, for life. So I was basically 40 years old, maybe just coming up to 41, and had this amount of money that would set me and my family up for life.

Ali Abdaal 27:03 Yeah. So then at that point, what do you do [laughs] when you're like you've, you've ticked the money box, you've, you've completed the game in that sense?

Julian Hearn 27:10 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 27:10 Um, I was speaking to Oliver Cookson, founder of Myprotein-

Julian Hearn 27:14 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 27:14 ... a few, a few months ago, and he was saying that... 'Cause he lives in Monaco, and he w- he w- was talking about how there's a lot of people he meet who get sort of tens of millions in the bank, and then they're like, "Oh, you know that yacht? That's hundreds of millions," and end up doing this thing of chasing more and more money.

Julian Hearn 27:27 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 27:28 Um, but it, it, it doesn't sound like that's the, the direction that you went.

Julian Hearn 27:31 I did probably what a lot of people did.

Ali Abdaal 27:33 Mm.

Julian Hearn 27:33 I took some time out to try and suss out what I wanted to do. I didn't, didn't... You know, certainly wasn't, uh, the... It wasn't, it wasn't tens of millions. Like, I'm not allowed to say the amount, but it was less than 10 million. And, um, so I couldn't buy a yacht. I probably could've bought a yacht.

Ali Abdaal 27:47 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 27:48 But I, I couldn't really buy a yacht or anything like that. And I'm, I'm sort of the person who thinks, "Well, just got to last the rest of your life, right? I'm 40. I could live for another 40 years yet, so I'm only halfway there, so I can't spend it all." So we stayed in the same house, took some time out. I had a young baby at the time. Decided to, um, spend some time doing that and trying to think. And I, I think I said to you briefly earlier before, it's very tempting when you're working really hard to go, "Oh, my God, that's the dream. I'd love to take some time off. I'd love to go and sit on a beach for six months."

Ali Abdaal 28:14 Mm-hmm.

Julian Hearn 28:15 But I think when people talk about worth like, work-life balance, I think it works both ways. I think ty- pe- people typically mean work-life balance is you shouldn't be working all the time. You should have a balance with, with, uh, leisure time. I think the, the re- the reverse is true, that if you have too much leverti- leisure time and no work-

Ali Abdaal 28:31 Yeah

Julian Hearn 28:31 ... I think that can be detrimental to probably your health or your mental health.

Ali Abdaal 28:35 Oh, yeah.

Julian Hearn 28:35 So I decided I needed to do a bit of work. Um, but I didn't wanna go back and do the extreme of work again.

Ali Abdaal 28:43 Mm.

Julian Hearn 28:43 So I didn't want to get a full-time job. I wanted a, let's call it a lifestyle business. Uh, three days a week-

Ali Abdaal 28:49 Yeah

Julian Hearn 28:49 ... would be optimum. So I thought, "Well, what am I interested in? What do I wanna do?" And, uh, and, uh, so the business that Huel eventually span out was the business that I started, which was a company called Body Hack. So I started that with the intention of being a lifestyle business that would keep me going forever.

Ali Abdaal 29:05 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 29:05 I didn't wanna start something... There was no, there was no intention to flip it, sell it, or anything like that.

Ali Abdaal 29:08 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 29:08 I wanted to start something that I was gonna be interested in, something to keep me busy, uh, for a long time.

Ali Abdaal 29:13 Interesting. Interesting. I w- I was speaking to another, um, internet friend on a Zoom call a few days ago who, who's, like, 28, sold his startup for, like, 50 million or something like that, and he was also being like, "Yeah, you know, I t- I took two months off. I realized, fuck, I don't, I don't wanna have time off." [laughs]

Julian Hearn 29:29 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 29:29 "I wanna, I wanna act- actually do something."

Julian Hearn 29:31 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 29:32 Um, and I think that's so interesting 'cause I think people who have not... It's that classic thing of if you, if you haven't hit that point, you think, "Oh, I'd, I'd wanna chill on the beach forever." And kinda Tim Ferriss talks about this at the end of The 4-Hour Workweek, that you get this void, this existential void of, like, what the hell do I now do with m- with the rest of my life?

Julian Hearn 29:47 Yeah. And I think some people go back and do what they used to do in, which may be full-time, start another business. Businesses are, can be really hard. They can be really draining on you. I'd, I, I didn't really intend to do something that was gonna be as, um, as demanding what Huel-

Ali Abdaal 30:01 Yeah

Julian Hearn 30:02 ... I, I genuinely wanted to do three days a week. I think if you've got three days work that you're really passionate about, you really like doing-

Ali Abdaal 30:07 Yeah

Julian Hearn 30:07 ... and you've got three or four days that you can spend doing other stuff-

Ali Abdaal 30:11 Yeah

Julian Hearn 30:11 ... I think that has got to be the best. I think-

Ali Abdaal 30:13 Love

Julian Hearn 30:13 ... doing, I dunno, what Elon Musk does, I, I... You know, he- surely he's gonna look back one day and go, "Oh, my God, I've never lived a life. I've just been working all the time."

Ali Abdaal 30:20 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 30:20 I don't think that's good for you and I don't think sitting on the beach is good for you. I think something between the two is good.

Ali Abdaal 30:23 Nice. So w- w- what was Body Hack? How did, how did that happen?

Julian Hearn 30:27 Uh, so Body Hack was, um, I think at the time I just had a bit of time on my hand. I thought I'd try and get myself a bit fitter. I know I've, I... One of your goals this year was to do that.

Ali Abdaal 30:35 Get a bit more fit, yep. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 30:35 Yeah. And, um, so I thought, "Right, I'm interested in this." Went online, and it pissed me off a bit that there's so much, I'm saying fake news out there, but so many people was trying to sell something and giving you these massive promises about how if you did this, it's gonna work, and I was just very skeptical, and I just felt, felt a bit grubby to me some of the stuff that was going on. I thought I didn't like this. So I thought, "What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna speak to some experts, find out how to do this properly, and then make a website where it's evidence-based." So if you wanna put muscle on, we're gonna put people through different programs-

Ali Abdaal 31:08 Mm

Julian Hearn 31:08 ... different me- e- e- uh, eating plans, photographs, measurements, record it every week, so at the end of it we would have these different, uh, programs where you would actually be able to see which ones work, and you go, "Right, I want those results. If I do exactly what he does, I know it's gonna work 'cause I can see it." Uh, if I wanna lose weight, if I wanna, uh, maybe be vegan, different... All different, different, uh, things and goals and, uh, things you wanted to achieve. So I was a guinea pig for one of those. Um, the PT, I saw him three times a week. So no more exercise than normal, three hours a week. But the difference was he gave me a very strict meal plan, which I followed to the letter for three months, and it wasn't... I wasn't starving myself. I was eating three meals a day, three snacks a day, but I was cooking it all from scratch and weighing everything. I was like, well, calorie perfect, hopefully.

Ali Abdaal 31:57 Mm.

Julian Hearn 31:57 I weighed everything very accurately. So within three months I went from, uh, 21% body fat down to 11% body fat. So I was 41 years old-

Ali Abdaal 32:07 [laughs] Yeah

Julian Hearn 32:07 ... and it was the leanest I'd ever been.

Ali Abdaal 32:09 Like athlete standard. Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 32:10 I was the leanest I'd ever been and, you know, like, uh, you know the sort of fat you can pinch off there? That was pretty much what was here. Um, I've put a bit more on recently-

Ali Abdaal 32:18 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 32:18 ... 'cause I've been trying to bulk out a little bit 'cause I was like, I'd got down, like, very light. I'm a five foot 11 and I think I got down to about 11 stone 10 and a half, which is probably too light for what I should've been. But it was just like I'd just stripped this body fat off. I'd never done that before. I'd been going to the gym for the last 10 years and never got the same results. It was very, very clear-

Ali Abdaal 32:36 Yeah

Julian Hearn 32:36 ... in that three months I'd achieved more than I had in the previous 10 years in terms of body composition, and it's because I weighed all my food. So it just shows you, you are what you eat. Um, so friends, um, and I started that, that business, it got some traction, but the consistent feedback was that this is too hard to follow. I can't stop at 11:00 and cook an egg and some broccoli. I can't stop at 1:00 and cook this food. So, um, so it made me think I... This is... There's something very special here, but what the problem is, it's not convenient enough. How do I make this much more convenient and easy to follow? And a protein shake was, uh, the product I was using for afternoon snack. It was the most thing- easy and convenient meal of the day, effectively. But you can't live off protein. Why can't you take all the essential nutrients, put it into a single product-

Ali Abdaal 33:23 Mm

Julian Hearn 33:24 ... have the same convenience of a, a protein shake, but, um, you can live off it if you chose to, or it could replace the meals that you have a problem with. So that was the, the genesis

Julian Hearn 33:33 of Huel.

Ali Abdaal 33:35 It was Soylent, I think, back in the day.

Julian Hearn 33:37 So interestingly-

Ali Abdaal 33:38 How does that come onto the scene? 'Cause I, I-

Julian Hearn 33:40 [clears throat]

Ali Abdaal 33:40 Yeah, I remember that was a thing in, like, the... So at Silicon Valley k- kind of people-

Julian Hearn 33:43 Right

Ali Abdaal 33:43 ... and loads of people taking the piss out of it and-

Julian Hearn 33:45 Yep. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 33:45 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 33:46 So the interesting thing was I wasn't aware of Soylent at this time.

Ali Abdaal 33:49 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 33:49 We eventually looked... So this must have been 2012, I think, when I'm talking about Body Hack, something like that, 2012, tw- 2013. I don't... Oh, sorry, somebody here can Google it and find out exactly when they launched. I w- I'm not sure, but I wasn't aware of it. So this was, this was me trying to solve my specific problem at the time.

Ali Abdaal 34:05 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 34:06 We launched in t- 2015, June. So by the time we'd launched, or before we'd launched, I'd realized that Soylent existed.

Ali Abdaal 34:13 Yep.

Julian Hearn 34:14 There was another brand in, uh, the Netherlands that was doing something similar and, um, there might have been a German one as well. So I was sort of a, a little bit annoyed that there was other things out there similar.

Ali Abdaal 34:26 Mm.

Julian Hearn 34:26 But competition happens in every market, right? So in some ways I wasn't that bothered, and there was nobody directly selling in the UK at the time.

Ali Abdaal 34:33 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 34:33 So we launched. We did get a good, um, good launch. We got quite a lot of national PR because it's quite a novel type of product.

Ali Abdaal 34:40 Mm.

Julian Hearn 34:41 So yeah, fair play to everybody else. I didn't really mind.

Ali Abdaal 34:44 Interesting. Yeah, 'cause I remember when I first started taking Huel, people were like, "What the hell is this Huel thing?" I was like, "It's, it's kind of the UK version of Soylent." And at the time, Soylent was in the news so people knew what it was. But I found myself, like, s- someone asked, "Why do you take..." or, like, "What is Huel?" I was like, "Oh, it's the UK version of Soylent." And they were like, "What's Soylent?"

Julian Hearn 34:59 Right.

Ali Abdaal 34:59 I was like, "Oh, interesting." I think Huel, Huel as a brand, at least in the UK, I don't know about internationally, is now so recognizable and, like, no one really knows what... At least, at least here, no one really knows what Soylent is.

Julian Hearn 35:08 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 35:08 I don't know if that's kind of the vibe that you've gotten as well.

Julian Hearn 35:10 Yeah. I think we're globally number one now in terms of volume of sales.

Ali Abdaal 35:13 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 35:13 I think that we... I think we've done a very good job in terms of execution, brand, service.

Ali Abdaal 35:19 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 35:19 Um, I think our nutritionals are very strong. I think our products and ingredients are very strong. I think we do things really, really well. Um, you know, I think they've had a few problems. I think, interestingly, the founding team are no longer there.

Ali Abdaal 35:30 Mm.

Julian Hearn 35:31 And I think that it just shows that a founder-led, led business-

Ali Abdaal 35:34 Yeah

Julian Hearn 35:34 ... can be very strong and it can be very important. You know, you think of, we said Elon Musk, you think of Steve Jobs. I think sometimes having the founder at a company-

Ali Abdaal 35:43 Mm

Julian Hearn 35:43 ... even if they're just an advisor, I think is really key. Um, but anyway, I, I, I don't know exactly what they did wrong, but yeah, they don't seem to have, um, fulfilled their potential.

Ali Abdaal 35:51 Mm. Yeah. Their founder, John, was actually a student on my YouTuber Academy-

Julian Hearn 35:54 Really?

Ali Abdaal 35:54 ... a few months ago, so he's now, he's gonna- he's now got a YouTube channel where he's actually making really strong, strong videos analyzing businesses and stuff like that.

Julian Hearn 35:59 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 36:00 Um, but it seems like he's, he's living the dream now doing [laughs] his thing.

Julian Hearn 36:03 Yeah. I think they were very young guys, going back to this thing about young guys-

Ali Abdaal 36:05 Yeah

Julian Hearn 36:05 ... starting businesses. Um, maybe they just got, I don't know, distracted.

Ali Abdaal 36:10 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 36:10 They wanted to do something else. They wanted to make videos. I don't know what, what it was.

Ali Abdaal 36:13 Yeah. [laughs] So okay. So what w- w- what was happening at Huel from, like, 2012 to 2015 when you sort of... in, in that sort of pre-launch period?

Julian Hearn 36:21 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 36:21 What does that look like? You have this idea.

Julian Hearn 36:23 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 36:23 Like, where, where do you even begin to-

Julian Hearn 36:26 Okay. So, um, so Body Hack, I ended up burning some money in Body Hack, which is the money... And I think, um, my, my, my ex-wife, she, I wouldn't say she was a bit annoyed with me-

Ali Abdaal 36:37 Yeah

Julian Hearn 36:37 ... but because I was sort of... felt like I didn't need to work. "So why do you need to work? Why would you do this?" I think it's important for me to do it. So, um, I think that, um, I was quite cautious with Huel because I didn't want to go and burn any more money. That'd be two in a row of me playing around, just burning the family money.

Ali Abdaal 36:53 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 36:54 So I was very cautious with it, and I spent a lot of time. It's one of... You know, when you get certain ideas in your head, you can't get them out. They keep coming back no matter how much you try. So I ended up thinking about it a lot. Spent a ton of time on... You know, the first port of call was trying to find nutritionists to talk through the nutritionals of it. So I found James Collier, who ended up being our co-founder. And-

Ali Abdaal 37:12 Oh, James Collier was actually Gordon's first personal trainer.

Julian Hearn 37:15 Oh, right. [laughs] Okay.

Ali Abdaal 37:16 Like 10 years ago or something.

Julian Hearn 37:17 Interesting.

Ali Abdaal 37:17 We were talking about him earlier. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 37:18 Talked to, uh, uh, Body... No. What was the mate's name? Muscle Talk. Muscle Talk. That's it, yeah. Yeah. He got me from first competition. Did he? Yeah. Interesting.

Ali Abdaal 37:27 Oh. So you found James Collier, the nutritionist. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 37:29 Found James Collier. So we did the nutritionals really-

Ali Abdaal 37:31 Yeah

Julian Hearn 37:31 ... quite quick. He did a, a report. You know, I had to find him. I had to interview a few people.

Ali Abdaal 37:35 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 37:36 I spoke to a guy in Australia, flew to a guy in U- um, US, and then eventually spoke to James. So it took... All these things take time because I wasn't-

Ali Abdaal 37:42 Mm

Julian Hearn 37:42 ... 'cause I was trying to sort of get Body Hack going as well, you see. So I sort of wasn't fully committed to, to Huel at this stage. But it just, uh, the more I thought about it, the more I saw the benefits. 'Cause the fact that it's in a powdered form mean that there's no water. No water means no bacteria, no, no, um, preservatives needed. Uh, you don't need a big packaging, minimal packaging. The fact that we made it vegan means better for the planet. Uh, there's no waste because you shouldn't throw food away. Lots of food's thrown away, so it's just solved so many problems, I couldn't get it out of my head. Um, so had to come up with a name. Names take a long time. Names are super, super important.

Ali Abdaal 38:12 Yeah. Where did Huel come from?

Julian Hearn 38:14 So Huel is obviously human, food-

Ali Abdaal 38:16 Yeah

Julian Hearn 38:16 ... put together. Um, it's human fuel, sorry.

Ali Abdaal 38:18 Human fuel, yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:18 Um, and, um, things do take a long time.

Ali Abdaal 38:22 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:22 So I must have... I looked at all sorts of languages, looked at all sorts of different ways, but I think sometimes creating a unique word that's never been used before makes your life a lot easier.

Ali Abdaal 38:31 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:31 So I think, uh, I think it's been quite influential in terms of our success. I think it, it looks like a logo. It looks right.

Ali Abdaal 38:39 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:39 And I think that it's distinctive, and I think the beauty of having a name that... Of course, it does exist. I think there's some- there are some Huels in the world, some people are called Huel.

Ali Abdaal 38:46 Mm.

Julian Hearn 38:46 Surname and first name.

Ali Abdaal 38:47 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:47 So it does exist, but there was a lot, lot of competition in terms of, um, you know, Google, if you search for it. It doesn't mean anything to people's heads, so you can give it meaning.

Ali Abdaal 38:54 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:54 Like, it's an empty vessel.

Ali Abdaal 38:55 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 38:56 And so if you're ever gonna come up with a name, I think trying to come up with a unique name's quite hard. So maybe just write down a los- list of the names that are associated with your product.

Ali Abdaal 39:05 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 39:06 And you can cut them up-

Ali Abdaal 39:07 Yeah

Julian Hearn 39:07 ... and then bash them together, and you might find a word appears in front of you.

Ali Abdaal 39:10 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 39:10 And that's sort of what I did with, with Huel.

Ali Abdaal 39:13 Nice.

Julian Hearn 39:13 So it's, it's, uh, it's, uh, fuel for humans.

Ali Abdaal 39:16 For human.

Julian Hearn 39:17 And you cut it up, and you just bash it together, and it creates a new word. So I think it's a, um, a wise thing. There's a book that I, I read or have read many times, which is called, um, I think it's 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing.

Ali Abdaal 39:28 Oh, I've heard really good things about it. I haven't read it yet.

Julian Hearn 39:30 It's very short.

Ali Abdaal 39:31 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 39:31 It's about 80 pages. The guy makes so much sense when you read it. It's quite an old book, so some of the references are out of date.

Ali Abdaal 39:36 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 39:36 Um, but it's, uh, £7 on Amazon, just buy it. If you're gonna... If you wanna start a business or get anything to do with marketing, I think, um, I think it's just as valuable as my marketing degree, to be honest. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 39:45 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 39:45 I could've saved three years of my life by just reading that. I think it's really, really good, and in there he does talk about the value of names and how important they are. You know, you need a word that you can say-

Ali Abdaal 39:53 Mm

Julian Hearn 39:54 ... you can spell, you can repeat to other people. If you can't, it's making your life a lot harder.

Ali Abdaal 39:59 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 39:59 And you want something that visually looks right. So Huel was not a front runner at one point, but when the guy made the logo, it just looked right as well. So there's a visual sort of aesthetic of a name as well, how it looks on, on the page. So we were just talking about baby names a second ago. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 40:11 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 40:11 And it's, uh, those- that sort of thing can be important.

Ali Abdaal 40:14 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 40:14 And I think that name is the one thing that will probably stay with you forever.

Ali Abdaal 40:17 Mm.

Julian Hearn 40:17 Right? So if you think about logos do change, people change their logos. Your CEO's gonna change. Um, your staff are gonna change. Your product's gonna change.

Ali Abdaal 40:26 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 40:26 But the one thing that's gonna remain constant forever, if you think about long-term, will be the name.

Ali Abdaal 40:29 Mm.

Julian Hearn 40:30 So I'm not saying you spend years on it, but spend some, uh, valuable time on it and make sure you get the best name you can possibly get.

Ali Abdaal 40:36 Yeah. Yeah. I'm, uh... I feel like the, the, the thing with the name, I, I've, I've, I've had so many idea- ideas for things over the years, which have then been like, "Oh, o- once I think of a good name, then I'll make this happen."

Julian Hearn 40:48 Right.

Ali Abdaal 40:48 And I feel like there is a danger, especially when you're young and just starting out a first business or a second business, where statistically it's pretty unlikely to succeed, like overthinking on the name front. Overthinking, "Oh, we need a logo. We need a-"

Julian Hearn 40:59 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 40:59 ... "we need a website. We need a business card. And, and then let's not worry about the product until further down the line." And then a lot of people, I think, get stuck in this cycle of procrastination.

Julian Hearn 41:06 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 41:06 Um-

Julian Hearn 41:07 But remember, I didn't think much on the first one.

Ali Abdaal 41:09 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:09 So my first company was promotional coats. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 41:11 Yeah, true. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 41:12 That was sort of a slightly different way.

Ali Abdaal 41:13 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:13 So I think there's two d- for me, there's been two types of businesses.

Ali Abdaal 41:16 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:16 There's one that's to make, to, uh, has a goal of making money.

Ali Abdaal 41:19 Mm.

Julian Hearn 41:20 And yeah, you might optimize that in a cert- slightly different way than, say, the way Huel's been optimized and what we've been trying to do here.

Ali Abdaal 41:26 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:26 So if I tried to start Huel in 28, um, 20, uh, 8 when I started my first business, that would not have achieved the goal. I would have run out of money, 'cause it took me two years, two, two and a half years to get to market.

Ali Abdaal 41:37 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:38 I would have run out of money, and I never would have achieved that goal.

Ali Abdaal 41:40 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:41 So you need to write down what the goals are, what you're trying to do, and how quick you need to do it.

Ali Abdaal 41:44 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 41:44 It's, I needed to make money within six months, and so Huel-

Ali Abdaal 41:48 Yeah

Julian Hearn 41:48 ... would have failed, right? And we, we wouldn't be sat here today. So I think you need to understand what you're trying to do.

Ali Abdaal 41:53 Mm.

Julian Hearn 41:53 Do that, and there may be slightly different things that I'm saying that will achieve that goal than achieve this goal over here.

Ali Abdaal 42:00 How did you get Huel.com? Surely it wasn't just available.

Julian Hearn 42:02 It wasn't, no.

Ali Abdaal 42:02 This is like 2014 time, right?

Julian Hearn 42:04 Yeah, yeah. No, it was-

Ali Abdaal 42:04 All these four letters were just gone. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 42:05 It wasn't available, and the guy's, the guy's negotiation tactics were very clever. I think he sold domains for a living.

Ali Abdaal 42:11 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 42:11 I sort of, uh... I think at the time, I think it was about $6,000, and, um, I got Huel... I think I launched with Huel.me. That was, that was free. There was a few, few that were free. So I just found one that was free. When it started getting a little bit of traction, I thought, "No, I want the main domain." I think Huel.co.uk wasn't available. I thought .com. I must go for .com 'cause I wanted this to be a global business, so let's go after that one. I think it was 6,000, and, uh, I just got in touch and said, "Well, the word doesn't mean anything. You haven't sold it. You've had it for 10 years. Surely-

Ali Abdaal 42:41 Yeah

Julian Hearn 42:41 ... it's, I'll give you five for it," or something like that. And he went, "Well, it's 6,000, and it's 6,000 for seven days." Seventh day passed, and I went back to him and, uh, I said, "Do you still wanna sell it?" He goes, "Well, it's, it's £7,000 now." I go, "What do you mean the price has gone up? Surely the price will come down. We're negotiating here. We're not-

Ali Abdaal 42:56 Yeah

Julian Hearn 42:57 ... you can't put the price up." He goes, "Well, the 7,000's for seven days. It's valid for seven days," or something like that. And he did this several times-

Ali Abdaal 43:04 Yeah

Julian Hearn 43:04 ... until it got to over 10, and, uh, I s- I, I left it for a few months-

Ali Abdaal 43:08 Yeah

Julian Hearn 43:08 ... 'cause I thought I can get... I don't need it. I don't need it. And then, uh, then Huel started taking off a bit more. I thought-

Ali Abdaal 43:12 Yeah

Julian Hearn 43:12 ... "I do need this now." I went back to him, and he said, "It's 12 and a half thousand now," and kept on putting the price up. I'd never had this before, and I thought, "I'm not... I never pay full price for anything. [laughs] I'm not paying full price." So in the end, I just said to him, "Look, this is my final offer. Uh, I'm- you can't sell this to anybody else, 'cause nobody else wants it, right? It doesn't mean anything to anybody else. You're never gonna sell it. You've had it so long. This is my final, final. I'm telling you I'm not coming back ever again.

Ali Abdaal 43:32 Mm.

Julian Hearn 43:33 It's 10 or nothing." And I think he took the 10.

Ali Abdaal 43:36 That's good negotiation. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 43:37 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 43:39 Yeah, these, like, these domain squatters are so annoying. Um, there are so many, so many things that I wanted to do with domains, and then the .com's not available 'cause it's, like, owned by some squatter.

Julian Hearn 43:47 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 43:48 So someone even did, um, a, a clever thing. So, so you know, so you know the .eth domains now with... Oh, in, in the crypto world-

Julian Hearn 43:55 Oh, yeah

Ali Abdaal 43:55 ... there can be, like, .eth domains.

Julian Hearn 43:56 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 43:57 And someone has w- has registered my name, .eth.

Julian Hearn 43:59 Right.

Ali Abdaal 43:59 I'm like, "Oh, God-" And he's... I, I, I looked at his thing and he's, you know, h- it's his, uh, uh, his, um, equivalent to Whois. Uh, and he's just ta- gone through YouTube and podcasts. He's got, like, timferriss.eth. He's got, like, Lewis Howes. He's, he's got all of the big podcast names, the big YouTubers. He's just squatting on those domain names knowing that they might become valuable at some point.

Julian Hearn 44:18 There's so many of these extensions now.

Ali Abdaal 44:20 Yeah

Julian Hearn 44:20 You don't need that particular one. You could get one with your name on, I don't know, .agency-

Ali Abdaal 44:23 Oh, yeah

Julian Hearn 44:23 ... or dot whatever it is these days.

Ali Abdaal 44:24 Yeah, I bought my .com a- uh, like, around the time when I was 15, and I was like... At the, at the time, I was like, "Oh, this is a, this is a bit of a twat move." [laughs] Um, but now it's, it's coming in quite handy.

Julian Hearn 44:34 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 44:34 Um, so you got Huel.com after a bunch of negotiating. Um, you got James Collier, the nutritionist, coming together.

Julian Hearn 44:41 Right.

Ali Abdaal 44:41 What... How, how, how did, how did it then sprout from, from the you having a chat with James?

Julian Hearn 44:47 Okay. So I obviously put the name together.

Ali Abdaal 44:50 Yeah

Julian Hearn 44:50 ... got the logo. I, uh, started putting the website together, put it on Shopify, which we've been s- uh, with ever since. They've been good to us. Um, and started writing the copy, trying to get the brand positioning, the brand feel-

Ali Abdaal 45:04 Yeah

Julian Hearn 45:05 ... look and feel. Trying to get all those things together. So I could do all of that. So I did everything I possibly could. The one thing I couldn't do myself was make the product. Even though I can make it in my kitchen-

Ali Abdaal 45:13 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 45:13 ... in, like, not that long.

Ali Abdaal 45:15 A blender. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 45:16 Yeah, you can make it, but to make it a commercial scale to food grade-

Ali Abdaal 45:19 Yeah

Julian Hearn 45:19 ... was a different kettle of fish. And-

Ali Abdaal 45:20 Okay, so, like, how, how do you make it in your kitchen? Like, if you, if you wanted to just make it by yourself-

Julian Hearn 45:25 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 45:25 ... do, do you, like, buy carbohydrate from Bob?

Julian Hearn 45:27 Yeah. You can go on and you can buy individual component parts-

Ali Abdaal 45:29 Oh, okay. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 45:30 ... and you can put it together. The one thing you can't do very easily, well, you can unless you've got really, really accurate scales, would be-

Ali Abdaal 45:34 Yeah

Julian Hearn 45:34 ... the vit blend.

Ali Abdaal 45:35 Okay

Julian Hearn 45:35 So most of the vitamins, I think the majority of the vitamins in Huel come from the, the, the natural sources. So the oats are very vitamin and mineral rich. The pea protein will have some in it. Flaxseed will have some in it. But you will have to top up with certain vitamins to make the thing nutritionally complete.

Ali Abdaal 45:50 And I guess it's hard to, like... Can't you just buy a powder with a vitamin A? Is, is that a thing? [laughs] Or-

Julian Hearn 45:54 You can from certain places.

Ali Abdaal 45:56 Yeah

Julian Hearn 45:56 But the weighing of it sometimes depends on the quantity, but you were talking about sometimes such small amounts-

Ali Abdaal 46:01 Oh

Julian Hearn 46:01 ... you need very, very accurate scales. You can do it in a kitchen in theory. Um, but commercial scale-

Ali Abdaal 46:07 Yeah

Julian Hearn 46:07 ... the, the strange thing I found with the food business is in typically, uh, food manufacturers is quite a closed world.

Ali Abdaal 46:13 Okay.

Julian Hearn 46:14 They... A lot of them don't even have websites. A lot of them are quite secretive because, say, you've got a... Say, you're making a really good, um, a drink or something, you might not want anybody to know where it's made.

Ali Abdaal 46:25 Mm.

Julian Hearn 46:25 Because then people can go there and get it made, and you don't want them to know how to make it, 'cause then that's an extra competition in the market. So not many people talk about where it's made. Quite hard to find them. A lot of them don't even have their own websites. And also, when you ring up and say, "I'm starting a business, can I make a small order?" No.

Ali Abdaal 46:39 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 46:39 'Cause factories are set up to make things, make things very effectively and very efficiently, um, at scale.

Ali Abdaal 46:46 Mm.

Julian Hearn 46:46 So if you have to stop a line, change a line to do a small batch run, they're not really that interested. The feedback I got after a lot of work, after speaking to a lot of people, making a lot of phone calls, was they don't want to speak to you because they've heard this so many times. A startup's gonna come along, they're gonna place an order for a few thousand pounds, they're gonna cause them a load of time and effort to do that few thousand pounds, and they won't be able to sell it and they'll never come back, so they've just wasted their time. So they're not really interested. They'd rather deal with bigger players. So really, really hard to get it live. And I got let down a lot of times. And the most frustrating one was I actually finally got a big multinational company to agree to do this. So I knew they could do it. Uh, the guy said he... It was a UK sales manager at the time. He said he was gonna do it. And they basically strung me along for about four months, and I'd already been a year, 18 months in at this stage. I was scared of burning money. Like I said, I'd burnt money before. And, um, uh, and then it go- I was get- I was getting frustrated. Like, "When are we getting? When am I getting the product? When am I getting the product?" And, um, finally on, on the fourth month after he said he was gonna do it, he was gonna do it, he was gonna do it all the way through, he just sent me an email cold, no phone call, no nothing. He said, "We've decided we're not gonna do it." Um, and at that point, I'd... I think I had enough. I said, "Right. That's it. I'm done." Um, and, um, then I had a few beers that night. [laughs] Woke up in the morning, went, "No, I'm not gonna let him, not gonna let him spoil this whole thing. I have put a lot of time and effort into this." So I went back on the phone the following day and ended up speaking to the, the guys we still work with today. They were a small, small business down in Devon, and, uh, they've grown with us. So six years later, six and a half years later, we're still working with them today. They've grown r- really big off the back of us, and we've grown big as well.

Ali Abdaal 48:27 How did you know this was gonna work? Did you have, like... Uh, d- uh, did you make the stuff in your, in your own kitchen to be, to test the concept first?

Julian Hearn 48:33 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 48:33 To, like... How, yeah.

Julian Hearn 48:34 Yeah. So I think my, my, my very simple logic was this. I don't think I'm com- completely weird.

Ali Abdaal 48:40 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 48:40 And I was using it, and I found there was value in the product. It was saving me time. I knew I was getting very good quality nutrition, and I was using this. My very basic logic was the internet's a big place. Surely I can find 1,000 people, this 1,000 true fan concept-

Ali Abdaal 48:55 Mm

Julian Hearn 48:55 ... that Kevin Kelly came up with. Surely I can find 1,000 people. Slightly different. He said 1,000 people a year. I want 1,000 people a month. Surely I can find 1,000 people a month that will pay £45 for this product. That's £45,000 a month, 600K a year, whatever. Um, make some profit out of that. And I've got a nice lifestyle business to keep me happy. Not to overwhelm me with work-

Ali Abdaal 49:14 Yeah

Julian Hearn 49:14 ... but to keep me to do something that I would be proud of, with a good quality product that will make some people's lives better.

Ali Abdaal 49:20 Okay.

Julian Hearn 49:21 So I thought, "Surely I can do that. Surely I can find enough people that would, that understand the same thing." You know, yeah, I thought, "Yeah. Yeah, of course, of course I could do that." And that was it. That was, that was the, the original sort of principle and goals.

Ali Abdaal 49:35 So you'd kind of d- done the proof of concept in your own kitchen and been like, "Yeah, this is-

Julian Hearn 49:38 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 49:38 ... actually quite tasty. It's n- uh, uh, nutritionally complete."

Julian Hearn 49:40 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 49:41 "This works for me. Now let's scale." And you e- im- eventually found this company in Devon.

Julian Hearn 49:45 Yeah, correct.

Ali Abdaal 49:45 How, how'd you find them? Like, what, what, what was that like?

Julian Hearn 49:47 Google. I think Google. Google... If we've, we're starting any business, Google's definitely your friend.

Ali Abdaal 49:51 And what do you Google? Like, food manufacturer?

Julian Hearn 49:53 Correct. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 49:53 Or [laughs] pretty much-

Julian Hearn 49:54 Every, every keyword you can think of.

Ali Abdaal 49:55 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 49:55 Food, yeah, powder.

Ali Abdaal 49:57 Yeah

Julian Hearn 49:57 Um, even some of the ingredients you might look for.

Ali Abdaal 50:00 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 50:00 Uh, then you might speak to one person. You might land on a few people. Then you speak to them. They say, "No, we can't do this." Then you say, "Do you know anybody who can?"

Ali Abdaal 50:06 Yeah

Julian Hearn 50:06 They might point you in a direction. You go that way.

Ali Abdaal 50:07 Mm.

Julian Hearn 50:07 There's a dead end. You go, k- keep going back. Yeah. So I lost to Google

Ali Abdaal 50:10 Okay. So you found these guys in Devon, small business

Julian Hearn 50:13 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 50:13 Um, were they like taking a big risk in working with you initially, or what was that relationship like?

Julian Hearn 50:16 Uh, I think the answer originally was no from them. Yeah, they said, "No, I'm not interested." I said, "Come on, could... You know, I've just got to..." You know, I don't know how I convinced them-

Ali Abdaal 50:24 Mm

Julian Hearn 50:24 ... but I think I convinced them and said, "Look." I think originally, I think I wanted to order £2,500 worth, and I think they said, "No, it's not worth our time." I said, "Okay," so that was the end of the phone call. We sort of put it down. And I, I thought about it, I thought, no, he s- he s- I think maybe the tone of his voice was it wasn't an immediate no. There may be a little pause, so I thought, "Right, we're nearly there." So I went back and I said, "Look, what about if I doubled the order and order £5,000 worth?" And, um, I think at that point he said yes.

Ali Abdaal 50:47 Okay. So now you have £5,000 worth of powder. Like, is it like in your, in your kitchen, in your bedroom at this point? Like what-

Julian Hearn 50:53 Garage

Ali Abdaal 50:54 ... what's the... Okay.

Julian Hearn 50:54 Yeah. So it all launched out of my garage.

Ali Abdaal 50:56 Right

Julian Hearn 50:56 Um, I can remember the early days, I sort of had pallet loads of this stuff, boxes, and, uh, I got a couple of those like, I don't know what they're called, um, carpenter's horses. You know, like sort of the, the table things like that.

Ali Abdaal 51:08 Oh.

Julian Hearn 51:08 Put a pallet on top, and I can remember I packed all the early boxes. Website was live. We went live in June 17th, 2015. I packed all the early orders and, um, again, I would advise people if you're ever starting a business, try and do as much as you possibly can yourself. I don't mean forever, but going back to the Tim Ferriss concept, you should outsource stuff. But I think the best thing to do is do it yourself first, so then you know how it should be done.

Ali Abdaal 51:32 Yeah

Julian Hearn 51:32 So when you outsource it to somebody, you can tell them exactly how you want it done.

Ali Abdaal 51:35 Yeah

Julian Hearn 51:35 So I, when I sort of packed the boxes, I sort of looked at it, it felt a little bit, what's the word? Looked a bit average. So I, I then got a, um, one of those rubber stamps made. So instead of getting loads of printed boxes, I just made the rubber stamps and then pressed it on the tops, so that, you know, you get that sort of like slightly rustic-

Ali Abdaal 51:51 Yeah

Julian Hearn 51:52 ... looking logo.

Ali Abdaal 51:52 It looks nice, yeah.

Julian Hearn 51:53 Hand stamped, so it showed a little bit of care and attention. It's something, you know, do things that can't scale. Um, uh, I printed these sort of big sort of thank you cards with sort of some sort of inspirational quotes on them, hand signed them, and numbered every single one. I put a T-shirt in there, which we still-

Ali Abdaal 52:09 Yeah

Julian Hearn 52:09 ... give out today. And, um, packed them all nicely and sent a load off to the press. Sent a load off to obviously the, the initial customers. But I hand packed them with sort of, you know, care and attention, so when we scaled up, I could then pass it on to somebody and say, "I want it done exactly like this."

Ali Abdaal 52:22 Yeah. So what happened then? So this, this was June, June 2015-

Julian Hearn 52:27 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 52:27 ... you launched.

Julian Hearn 52:27 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 52:28 Was there sort of, uh, fanfare out of the gates? What, what, what was the s-

Julian Hearn 52:32 Mm. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 52:33 What was it like?

Julian Hearn 52:33 Not quite the fanfare.

Ali Abdaal 52:34 [laughs] Yeah.

Julian Hearn 52:35 Um, but it was sort of quite exciting.

Ali Abdaal 52:37 Yeah

Julian Hearn 52:37 I think we got two orders before the day we actually launched was interesting. I'd mentioned it on a forum... Uh, sorry, on a Facebook group-

Ali Abdaal 52:43 Yeah

Julian Hearn 52:43 ... and a couple of guys came in and just bought it. So I thought, "Oh, there's something interesting." I mean, I haven't even gone live. This was a test site, and they'd bought something. So got an- got orders immediately, and this is something that really hard to know when you're starting a company. There's definitely been companies that have been flatlined for a very long time, then hockey stick up. But I've had three companies now effectively. The first one just went straight like that and pretty much forever.

Ali Abdaal 53:05 Mm.

Julian Hearn 53:06 Um, the Body ハ ck company went like this.

Ali Abdaal 53:10 Mm. Yeah

Julian Hearn 53:10 Got some attraction. We got... I think I got on Hacker News on day one. Do you remember, you remember Hacker News?

Ali Abdaal 53:14 Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a little thing.

Julian Hearn 53:16 So I got on, you know, Y Combinator's Hacker News, so of course we got, I think about 75,000 visits in a first day or something.

Ali Abdaal 53:21 Yeah

Julian Hearn 53:21 So I got those vis- visits, and got quite a few orders on day one.

Ali Abdaal 53:24 Yeah

Julian Hearn 53:24 But that spike didn't last obviously, and went back down again, and then the feedback from the initial customers were they all pretty much un- it was a subscription business, sort of unsubscribed fairly quickly after the first month.

Ali Abdaal 53:34 Yeah

Julian Hearn 53:34 So I thought, "This is, this is gone like that." And it was hard. Whereas, um, first business went like that, and Huel sort of went like that.

Ali Abdaal 53:40 Mm.

Julian Hearn 53:41 So I'm not saying you should give up, but there is an argument that some stage you've got to decide when you're gonna give on something, or do you keep sort of just trucking ahead for years and years and years.

Ali Abdaal 53:49 Yeah

Julian Hearn 53:49 A really tricky one, but we did get initial traction straight away. Initial orders, national press. I paid an agency, um, 'cause in, back in the day when I was doing, uh, voucher codes, I was jealous of one of the, the competitors who ke- kept on getting quite good national press. So I remember looking who was their PR agency, and I remembered it. So when I launched my business-

Ali Abdaal 54:10 Yeah

Julian Hearn 54:10 ... three years later, I thought, "Well, I'm gonna go to that agency." So I found, found that agency, that PR agency. I said, "Right, I want a three-month contract, 5K a month for the first three months. Uh, that's all I want, is I want some press logos." 'Cause when you're buying a food product you've never tasted, um, is not traditional food in the way you'd expect it to look, and you've gotta give me £45 up front. Um, I thought that's quite a hard ask. So I thought if I've got some press logos, it will become more trustworthy.

Ali Abdaal 54:36 Yeah

Julian Hearn 54:36 You know you're gonna put this thing inside your body if it's been seen on all the national newspapers.

Ali Abdaal 54:40 Mm.

Julian Hearn 54:40 So I said, "Goal is first three months, I want national news, and I want quotes out of all of these, these, uh, national press," you know, Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail, et cetera, et cetera. And they, they did that, and c- orders came in, and then a few months later started turning on performance ads. And the performance ads then you can just scale that really easy. You just turn the dial up each month to get that nice growth curve.

Ali Abdaal 55:00 Yeah. And connect it to an American Express account, so you get like loads of [laughs] air miles. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 55:04 [laughs] Well, we did do that at one stage.

Ali Abdaal 55:06 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 55:06 They're not as easy to use as you think.

Ali Abdaal 55:08 Oh, really? [laughs]

Julian Hearn 55:08 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 55:08 Oh, damn. Um, how did you arrive at the 45 quid price point?

Julian Hearn 55:13 Interestingly, I did the maths on it-

Ali Abdaal 55:16 Yeah

Julian Hearn 55:16 ... and because it's quite a heavy product, you know, this has always been something we've, I'm not saying had a problem with, but because we force you to buy two, two pouches at once, people go, "Well, why can't I just buy one?" Well, if you buy one, the price is gonna shoot up in terms of cost per meal, because the delivery charge is spread over two.

Ali Abdaal 55:32 Yes. And cost per meal is the number I always look at, be like, "Huh."

Julian Hearn 55:35 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 55:35 And you know, £2.83, that's, that's actually pretty cheap.

Julian Hearn 55:38 It is.

Ali Abdaal 55:38 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 55:38 Yeah. So it, it felt like the optimum way for me-

Ali Abdaal 55:41 Yeah

Julian Hearn 55:41 ... to... Yeah, it is quite a big ask, but I do remember... I can't remember who it was. I think it was one of our non-execs, um, who I'd started working with. That guy who helped me sell my first business. He did say, "It's much easier to bring your price down than it is to put your price up. So go in at a price which is as fair as you can. But if there's a, if there's a..." I think the tempting thing for, for entrepreneurs or people starting businesses is, "If I sell it cheap, I'll get more customers."

Ali Abdaal 56:05 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 56:06 Yeah, y- yeah, you might do, but it might make your business much harder. You've gotta sell a lot more to make profit.

Ali Abdaal 56:11 Mm.

Julian Hearn 56:12 So s- you know, if you, if you, if you don't ask, you don't get. So maybe just start a little bit higher than what you might, because there might be loads of costs you're not aware of-

Ali Abdaal 56:20 Mm

Julian Hearn 56:20 ... which is very true. I mean, over Huel's life, I think we've been profitable four years out of six. And, um, you know, we s- we're, you know, a p- a big business now, and our profit is still, you know, relatively small as an EBITDA percentage-

Ali Abdaal 56:32 Mm

Julian Hearn 56:32 ... 'cause we're still in a growth phase. When you're growing, there's lots of things you've got to spend money on you may not think about. So don't just work out on just your basic margin as it is-

Ali Abdaal 56:40 Yeah

Julian Hearn 56:40 ... what you're, you could sell at. Like, don't cut yourself too short. So that's how I came up with that price.

Ali Abdaal 56:45 Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's something I, I hear from, like, new entrepreneurs a lot, where they're like, "Oh, I've got this idea." I'm like, "Okay, cool. What, what else is in the market, and how are you gonna be better than them?"

Julian Hearn 56:54 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 56:54 "Oh, we're gonna undercut them." I'm like, "Oof."

Julian Hearn 56:56 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 56:56 "Okay. [laughs] This is, this is gonna be, it's, it's gonna be tricky."

Julian Hearn 56:59 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 57:00 Um, I remember when, when I, when I got into med school, basically the standard business that anyone getting into med school who has an entrepreneurial spirit to them is, let me make courses teaching other people how to get into med school.

Julian Hearn 57:09 Right.

Ali Abdaal 57:10 And so every year, there is always five to 10 new businesses that start up-

Julian Hearn 57:14 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 57:14 ... who will undercut the competition.

Julian Hearn 57:15 Right.

Ali Abdaal 57:16 And every year, there's five or 10 businesses that fold because they realize that actually selling courses for 30 quid for a whole day is actually unsustainable when you have all these other costs that add up.

Julian Hearn 57:24 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 57:24 Um, and it's the companies that tend to actually go in at a more reasonable or a higher price point for a few hundred pounds for the day with scholarships for, for people from whatever backgrounds, um, those are the ones that seem to survive longer. And the strategy of undercutting the competitors I think is, is very hard to make it work unless you're like Amazon scale, I guess.

Julian Hearn 57:42 Yeah. It's, pricing is super hard to get right.

Ali Abdaal 57:45 Mm.

Julian Hearn 57:45 There's definitely an argument sometimes that, um, you know, if I was gonna make a judgment call on, say you've got two courses, one's 10 pounds and one's 200 pounds, which one's better?

Ali Abdaal 57:54 Mm. Obviously the 200 pound one. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 57:56 I mean, you know-

Ali Abdaal 57:56 People are gonna pick that. Yeah

Julian Hearn 57:57 ... you know, f- LVMH is one of the richest companies in the world, selling you, um, luxury brands at crazy, crazy prices with huge, huge margins on them, and that, sometimes that makes them more desirable. You know, if you're trying to sell a watch, even, you know, most people can't judge whether a watch is good quality or not. But if you s- charge 50,000 pounds for it, you, you think, "Well, that must be really good. That's really desirable," right?

Ali Abdaal 58:18 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 58:18 So the pricing's hard to get right. It can't be just done purely on margin.

Ali Abdaal 58:21 Mm-hmm.

Julian Hearn 58:21 Can't be just done purely on, um, how much money you need to take in to make the profit you particularly want. Um, you can't just judge it against competitors. So I remember when Starbucks first launched in the UK, I think Starbucks was, like, I don't know, two or three quid a coffee, and the default was 50p or whatever for a cup of coffee, and, you know, in Styrofoam cups, the real horrible ones.

Ali Abdaal 58:39 Mm.

Julian Hearn 58:39 So sometimes if you've got a premium product, you're in a better position. It sounds crazy. W- we talked about Red Bull earlier. They're 1 pound 50 or whatever it is, whereas, um, you know, you can buy alternatives much, much, much cheaper. So pricing is quite hard. It's definitely an art as well as a science.

Ali Abdaal 58:54 So did you get pushback on the pricing as, uh, uh, was it like, like, "Oof, this is kind of bo- bordering on expensive" when you had that 45 quid?

Julian Hearn 59:02 We get it all the time for it's expensive, but I, as you say, I think, I think, uh, a meal is 1 pound 50, right? 1 pound 51, I think, is a, a powdered meal. So for 400 calories, if you wanna go and buy a sandwich from certain sandwich shops is London, it can be really expensive.

Ali Abdaal 59:17 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 59:17 Five, six pounds, I suppose.

Ali Abdaal 59:18 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 59:18 So it, it, it depends, and you know, we want it to be affordable, but we don't wanna sell something, you know, cheap and nasty. We wanna sell a high-quality, premium product.

Ali Abdaal 59:27 Mm.

Julian Hearn 59:27 And when you think about all the stuff that comes with it, you know, you, you get free delivery, you get a free T-shirt that's worth 20 pounds, you get a free shake, which is worth 10 pounds. You know, it's, uh, well-packaged, premium ingredients compared to some.

Ali Abdaal 59:38 Mm.

Julian Hearn 59:39 Um, the, the nutritionals are very strong. You get, uh, very good customer service. You know, everything, the whole thing together I think is in really good value for money, and on, even on a, you know, cost per meal basis. Yes, you do have to buy in sort of a bulk, but still it's relatively affordable.

Ali Abdaal 59:55 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 59:55 So it's, it's just very d- it's very difficult to please everybody all the time.

Ali Abdaal 59:58 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 59:58 You just, you can't.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:00 Um, what was the rationale behind the T-shirt?

Julian Hearn 1:00:02 T-shirt.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:03 And the continuing to include the T-shirt?

Julian Hearn 1:00:04 [laughs] Um, the original rationale, I probably can't even remember now.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:08 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:00:08 So long ago. I think I just felt like there was something... I wanted to give, um, I think there's, it's a, it's, um, uh, there's a book on, um, principles of persuasion.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:18 Mm. Cialdini.

Julian Hearn 1:00:18 I think there's s- yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:19 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:00:19 I think there's seven principles, and one of those is you give something to somebody. So I think the classic example they give is, um, you know, when you go to a restaurant and when you want the bill at the end, they give you some sweets or some chocolates. I think McDonald's have a Ma- Happy Meal where they give kids the, the free toy. I think if you give something, there's been loads of science done on this, if you give something, they feel obliged to give something back.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:37 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:00:38 So it's partly the art of persuasion, and I think I remember reading that book. I remember that, and I thought, "Okay, I'm trying to persuade people to do something that, um, put their hand in their pocket, never tried this product."

Ali Abdaal 1:00:48 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:00:48 "It's a food product they can't eat. They can't sample it before. We can't really send you a sample. It's difficult to do." Therefore, it's, it's an added value. I'd much rather added, add added value rather than give a discount.

Ali Abdaal 1:00:59 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:00:59 So the price I could buy the T-shirt for will, will be more than the discount I could possibly give you.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:03 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:01:04 And it helps spread the brand name, right? See, it's one of the key things. When you're launching something new, how do you get your, your brand awareness up? Yeah, you can spend money on it, but the beauty of a T-shirt is you could wear it for years. You could wear it hundreds of times.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:16 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:01:16 And thousands of people could see that brand name.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:18 It's quite well-fitting as well. It, like, hugs the biceps nicely. It, it's not too much. It, like, it, it kinda makes me feel a bit more hench when I wear it. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:01:24 Yeah. So I've, I, uh, you know, I've done this product, you know, the whole Huel to be something that I wanna be proud of. So I, I'm very conscious about the products that I choose, and, um, the early T-shirt was an off-the-shelf one, but then about two years in we went to a full custom one. We spent nearly a year developing that T-shirt-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:41 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:01:41 ... believe it or not. And, uh, the attention to detail on it I think-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:44 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:01:44 ... is very good. So yeah, we do spend a lot of time to make sure, and, uh, you know, I could probably argue, I could probably justify, I could have an argument with somebody say this is probably one of our lowest CPA, um-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:55 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:01:55 ... advertising techniques. Difficult to prove-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:59 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:01:59 ... or almost improf- impossible to prove, but I could argue that would be the case.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:02 I mean, I've, I've, I've seen loads of people wearing, wearing, wearing the T-shirt, and I've been in the market. I, I, I k- I keep on trying different brand T-shirts to wear, and the, the, the issue with, like, for example, the Uniqlo ones is that they shrink after two washes.

Julian Hearn 1:02:15 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:15 But I still have my Huel black one from, like, from 2018-

Julian Hearn 1:02:18 Mm

Ali Abdaal 1:02:18 ... 'cause it's just a great T-shirt to wear. Like, I, I probably wouldn't wear it in public much, but, like [laughs] to wear around the house-

Julian Hearn 1:02:22 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:02:22 ... and to wear to the gym. It's just a nice fitting T-shirt that doesn't shrink.

Julian Hearn 1:02:25 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:26 Um, and I guess that comes from the attention to detail that you guys-

Julian Hearn 1:02:28 Correct. Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:02:29 ... you guys put into it. So in, in the first year, I read somewhere that you did about a million in sales. Is that right?

Julian Hearn 1:02:34 Okay. So [clears throat] I think we've changed our year ends a little bit-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:37 Oh

Julian Hearn 1:02:37 ... so it's hard for me to remember. But- If I remember the, the original ones, in the first six months-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:42 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:02:42 ... I do remember this very clearly. We launched in June, so by Christmas that year, I think we'd done about £750,000 worth of sales.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:48 Nice.

Julian Hearn 1:02:49 And then the following, uh, calendar year, I think we did about five million, I think it was, and then it, then it was 14 million the following calendar year. That's in calendar years-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:59 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:02:59 ... not

Julian Hearn 1:03:00 the official numbers.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:01 Okay. Um, what was, what was the team like at the time? Like, how did, how did things grow team-wise?

Julian Hearn 1:03:08 Okay. Team was very scrappy to start with.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:09 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:03:10 The interesting thing is, um, okay, when you're starting a business, in the corporate world-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:14 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:03:14 ... most people have got very, you know, small jobs.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:17 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:03:18 What I'm... Sorry.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:19 Uh, very defined-

Julian Hearn 1:03:20 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:03:20 ... narrowly defined jobs.

Julian Hearn 1:03:20 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:21 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:03:21 Yeah. When you're starting a business, half the time you don't even know what you do need.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:24 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:03:24 So what you want is very open-minded people who are willing to muck in and wear many hats. So what I did originally was, again, keeping, keep, uh, costs really low, I got, uh, I think most of our early employees, first few-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:38 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:03:38 ... were basically straight grads. These are people who came out of university, had never done a job before, and I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to have a different culture, and I wanted to not do it the standard corporate way. So I wanted people that were easier to mold-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:53 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:03:53 ... and people who had no preconceptions about what they should be doing or a- any arrogance about, "This is belo- beneath me," because you would have to sweep the floor sometimes. You'd have to do, pack boxes. You'd have to do quite menial jobs sometimes, and then, then you got switched straight away to dealing with buying product or, um, dealing with, um, finance problem or something like that. You had to change and chop and change real quick. So that was the, the, the initial, initial team of sort of people straight out of university and most of them are still there today.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:23 So now you have, like, 200 and something people?

Julian Hearn 1:04:25 Over 200 people now, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:26 What, what was that like, or how, how'd your headcount change over time? Can you, can you remember what-

Julian Hearn 1:04:31 Uh

Ali Abdaal 1:04:31 ... the, the rough-

Julian Hearn 1:04:32 S- I can't remember really.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:34 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:04:34 I think very crudely, very, very crudely you could probably argue around the same sort of number of people per million, one person per million. So in the first year, say one person. Following year, we were doing five million, might've been five or six people. Following year's 14, might've been up to 14 to 20 people, something like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:50 Oh, that's still, like, very small, considered, uh, small, s- like-

Julian Hearn 1:04:52 Scrappy.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:52 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:04:53 It was scrappy. We were very scrappy, yeah. Very scrappy to start with.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:55 Okay. And-

Julian Hearn 1:04:56 Because you don't know. It's, uh, very hard, and like I said, going back to this, this fear of burning money-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:00 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:05:00 ... I wanted to do things really as be- as best as I could, but I didn't wanna go and scale up with loads of, um, you know, C-suite people-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:06 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:05:07 ... in the early days when you don't know, because a, a k- um, a, an early stage business is, um, i- is like, um, you know... We were talking about babies earlier-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:15 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:05:15 ... 'cause my, my, my partner's pregnant, but I, you know, but they, early companies are like babies. They could, it's horrible to say, they could die at any stage, right? Very, very, um, um, they need a lot of care and attention.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:26 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:05:26 So it's high risk to go and take a load of people from very senior jobs, try and-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:30 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:05:30 ... uh, attract them into your business, and you think, "Oh, my God. You know, imagine if the business went under. They've lost their job, and they can't pay their mortgage." So it was very scrappy in the first couple of years. Um, I think it was about the second and a half, maybe third year, we moved from real temporary service office, you know, the sort of ones with the blue carpet tiles-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:48 Oh

Julian Hearn 1:05:48 ... and the sort of, like, white walls in between, real unbranded office. We actually bought an office across the, uh, the car park, and we fully branded it up, and that was the sort of moment when Huel went from a, a flaky business that felt like it could go under at any stage-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:02 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:06:02 ... to a real business. And at that stage, we, that's when we started scaling up the people a lot faster.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:06 Oh, interesting. Can you remember what the s- what the main challenges were when you had, like, 15 to 20 people? This is the position that I'm in at the moment, 15 to 20 people.

Julian Hearn 1:06:13 We were talking about recruitment earlier.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:14 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:06:14 So I think recruitment is, is always a problem in every business at every stage.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:18 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:06:19 Um, you know, when you're, when you're really young, you don't wanna take really good, experienced people in. As you get bigger, you wanna do that, but then you need to attract people in. But because you're not so early stage, some people might think it's not as exciting as your sort of later stage.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:32 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:06:32 So there's always, there's always a reason why it's hard to do, and getting the right people to move to your offices that may not be in the same area they are, 'cause talent is sort of equally distributed in my eyes. So to get talent, you might have to persuade people. We've had people move from Scotland. We've had people move from overseas to come and join us. So to get the right talent can be really hard. I think it's always hard whether you're 15 or 200 people. I think it's always hard.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:53 And what are the challenges, like, how, how, how do the challenges change over time as you go sort of from 20 to 50 to 100? Like, I'm just trying to get a feeling of what that experience is like, having never done it before really.

Julian Hearn 1:07:05 I'm, I'm not sure how much it changes, because while you're in it, it always feels the same sort of level of challenge, if that makes sense.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:13 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:07:14 So I know in the podcast you was talking to Ben about, um, you know, I think he was saying that even people who are running big, multi-billion-

Ali Abdaal 1:07:23 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:07:23 ... pound business are sort of winging it to a certain extent. I totally agree. I think there is a, you know, your company, my company never existed before.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:32 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:07:33 So you could read a book, but that's based on how to run another company.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:36 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:07:36 So it's a different situation you're in. So every company, I think, is unique. Every time is unique. We, we've never lived in this time before.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:43 No.

Julian Hearn 1:07:43 We've never just come out, we're coming out of COVID.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:45 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:07:45 This has never happened ever before quite like this, therefore every time, every moment, every company is unique at that moment in time.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:51 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:07:52 So you are always winging it, 'cause you've always got a different challenge that's never quite existed before.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:57 Yeah. My, uh, general manager, Angus, he, he asked the other day as we were driving back from Gymshark, be like, "Hey, you know, Gymshark's a pretty big brand. Like, you know, have you thought about, you know, we're, we're at 17 people right now. We're at, like, s- four, 4 million revenue, whatever. Have you thought about kind of beyond 10 million, 20 million, 50 million? Like, could we actually impact, like, sort of millions more people than we're thinking? Are our ambitions too small?" And in my mind, I was thinking, "Yeah, but I feel like every time we add more people, the stress level goes up a little bit." Um, it d- it, has that been true in your experience? Or is there a point at which you're like-

Julian Hearn 1:08:27 [clears throat]

Ali Abdaal 1:08:27 ... "Actually, adding an extra 30 people doesn't significantly change your own personal stress levels?"

Julian Hearn 1:08:32 Personal stress is partly dependent on y- what you choose to do.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:36 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:08:36 Okay? So for me, I gave up the CEO role, 2017, I think it was, two years in.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:41 Oh, okay. Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:08:42 So for me, I can argue my stress levels are lower now. So for me, the stress of being a CEO was greater than I feel my role now even though we're a much bigger company.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:52 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:08:52 I think stress is a strange one. I think stress is obviously essential in life. However, it depends on how you define what you're ac- actually mean. For me, the stress of being CEO was I didn't like doing that role.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:03 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:09:03 It was not pleasurable for me-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:04 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:09:05 ... because I was doing stuff I hated doing. So, um, I've got much bigger responsibilities now, but I much prefer doing what I do because I'm, I'm CMO.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:17 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:09:18 I focus on what I think I'm good at, and I enjoy doing that. So if I were CEO now, I would've, I would've broken a long time ago, [laughs] right?

Ali Abdaal 1:09:25 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:09:25 So it's just not the right job for me.

Ali Abdaal 1:09:27 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:09:27 You spread yourself over lots of stuff. So maybe instead of thinking about it's gonna get a lot worse or it's gonna get when it gets bigger, maybe if you're feeling a, a lot of, I'm saying stress and you're worried about the future, maybe look at what you're doing and try and get rid of some of it. Maybe you're doing stuff that's not right for you-

Ali Abdaal 1:09:44 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:09:44 ... doesn't fit you. Um, outsource it. Recruit somebody else to do it, um, because typically the stuff that really gets on you, like I had to do, um, I'm not very good at writing. I had to write something personal the other day for a project we're working on I can't really say anything about. But I had to write it, and it took me... I kept on... They, people chasing me, chasing me, chasing me. 'Cause, you know, you sort of put off doing something you don't like doing or you're not very good at. And the stuff you do like doing, you can't stop thinking about and you can't stop doing. So maybe just review what you're doing 'cause I don't think it does. I'm not sure for me the bigger the company, the more-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:17 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:10:18 ... stress you've got because you've got more people there to help out. You could-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:20 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:10:21 ... easily argue it's easier now. I think in the early days when I was doing... You know, on day one of Huel, there was only me, nobody else. I did every single job.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:28 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:10:29 Well, surely that's harder than doing-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:31 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:10:31 ... having five, 10, 50 people working for you.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:33 Interesting. How did you decide that you wanted to not be CEO and become CMO instead?

Julian Hearn 1:10:37 It was pretty easy for me because, um, I think there was one, one month in particular where I think I spent the whole month doing zero marketing, zero brand, zero product, and it just f- it felt like super ineffective use of my time.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:53 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:10:53 The stuff that I'm good at I'm not doing. The stuff that I'm not good at I am doing.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:57 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:10:59 It didn't make any sense to me.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:00 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:11:00 So it was very easy to say, look, this is... I'm wasting my time doing, um, stuff I'm not enjoying. So why not find somebody who's really good at doing that-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:08 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:11:08 ... and then I can focus on what I am good at.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:11 How did you find the CEO?

Julian Hearn 1:11:12 Uh, LinkedIn in one hour.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:14 No way. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:11:15 Yep. It was, it was pretty easy. What I did is I actually, um, I've got the recruiter tool, and you just go in there. And I think I listed out a load of sort of... Well, I wanted somebody with food experience, and I wanted brands which were not the massive corporates 'cause I think sometimes massive corporates you can be, you can... What's the right word? Sometimes you're just too far away from the, uh, the, uh, coal face to actually be doing work. So I wanted somebody who'd been in a CEO role, MD role, um, operation, a director role. Those sorts of... So I just put those job titles in, and I selected about 20 or 30 brands which I, which were in the food business that I thought were small enough to actually have the person doing day-to-day really important work. And, uh, it pumped out 20 people or something like that. I, I scanned through them. James was one of the ones I saw and, um, looked at his CV or his LinkedIn profile, looked good, and then passed it on to, uh, a recruiter we were working with to sort of line up the first interviews. And, uh, that was it.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:17 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:12:18 Pretty straightforward, yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:19 Okay. Did you not wanna recruit from within, like promote from within?

Julian Hearn 1:12:24 Oh, we were too... There was nobody, nobody at that sort of level at the time. You know, we were... It was very early. And, um, because I was doing that role, I think the most senior person below me at the time, hmm, I'm not sure, but I think we had a finance and operation manager-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:42 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:12:42 ... who effectively was, uh, the only person in that team, maybe a couple of people underneath them. That was it.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:48 Oh, okay.

Julian Hearn 1:12:48 So very, very early. They were on, you know, they were at manager level.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:51 'Cause I guess for some people, uh, uh, at least in tech, when, when the founder doesn't become the CEO, it's often like a big, like, ego type thing. They're like, "Huh, this is my company, though. I wanna be CEO of it."

Julian Hearn 1:13:01 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:01 It, it sounds like that wasn't really a thing for you. You'd kinda gone beyond that. You were like, "You know what? I wanna do-

Julian Hearn 1:13:04 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:13:04 ... the stuff I'm interested in. Focus on the marketing."

Julian Hearn 1:13:06 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:06 "That's what I'm good at. That's what I'm good at."

Julian Hearn 1:13:07 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:08 Um, let, let's leave the executiveness to the other. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:13:10 Yeah. I think, uh, I don't think I've got a very big ego, and, uh, I didn't enjoy doing it. And it's, um, it's a hard job, and I think I've said to a couple other founders who asked me about this, I said, "Look, you're always gonna be the founder."

Ali Abdaal 1:13:25 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:13:25 CEOs change. The founder can't change, right? You're, you know, on, you know, Wikipedia the founder of-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:31 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:13:31 ... Nike. He's gonna be the same person forever.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:33 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:13:33 Right? That cannot change. You don't worry about that. You're not gonna get forgotten.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:36 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:13:37 Um, so, you know, sh- you know, the way I see it, Huel's my, my baby.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:42 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:13:43 You want it to fulfill, you want it to fulfill its potential, and if that's the best route-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:47 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:13:48 ... then do it. I think sometimes people hold onto this 'cause they don't wanna... I don't know what it is. They don't wanna get forgotten or whatever it is. They hold onto a role for far too long, and I don't think it... It wasn't fun for me.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:59 So over time, you know, you started off with a powder, and then it seems you've expanded out into the kinda the hot meals, the pre-mades-

Julian Hearn 1:14:04 Yep

Ali Abdaal 1:14:04 ... the protein bars. I've got a friend who I, I was having dinner with yesterday. Um, I think they worked with Huel at some point. Whether they've, like, got a spreadsheet literally, like, rating every single Huel product in terms of, like, its taste in blind taste testing and all this kinda-

Julian Hearn 1:14:17 Right

Ali Abdaal 1:14:17 ... super on the whole optimization of life-

Julian Hearn 1:14:18 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:14:19 ... kind of vibe. Um, how did, uh, how did you sort of evolve the product line over time-

Julian Hearn 1:14:24 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:14:24 ... from powder into, into these other things?

Julian Hearn 1:14:26 One of our values is sort of product and customer obsession. I think if you focus on what customers want-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:32 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:14:32 ... pretty good place to be.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:34 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:14:34 Rather than I think sometimes people look at competitors and copy competitors, I think if you listen to your customers, because your customers will be a different group of people. So if you copy somebody else's product and give it to your customers, they might not like it. But if you c- give customers what they want, you're in a much better place. We've, we're D2C, so we listen to our customers thousands of times a day. You can't give them all what they want. You can't please them all with separate products, and you have to avoid- Um, I think they always talk about tech businesses.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:58 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:14:58 You can't give them all the features they want, otherwise it become too cluttered. So sometimes you need to declutter. So we try and keep our range pretty small. We've only got seven products. Um, but we do listen to what they want. And if you hear it enough times, I, I don't believe in surveys. I don't believe going out asking people. I think it needs to be given to you without them, you asking them. So I look at, um, uh, rejecters of Huel. So on Facebook, you know, on our ads, you'll get people saying, "I'll never buy this product because..."

Ali Abdaal 1:15:25 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:15:25 I'll look at that. Um, if that pops up enough times, I think, "Well, if I do give you that, would you buy it?" And same for customers. They'll say, "I really love your product, but this", and that needs to come through, I'm saying, organic sources. I think if you ask people, they typically will try and give you what they think you're asking for-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:42 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:15:42 ... or what might s- make them sound good at the time. So it needs to be natural. We've got a forum as well, where we hear a lot of feedback from people. So reading between the lines, people for a long time said, "I want more protein. I want less carbs."

Ali Abdaal 1:15:53 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:15:53 "And I want a, a, a natural sweetener." So we created Black Edition-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:57 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:15:57 ... which became our number one product.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:59 Yeah, that's the one I use. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:16:00 There you go.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:00 In the powder form rather than the premium, yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:16:01 So we gave people what they want. So that's typically how we do it. Um, same for Hot & Savory. Same sort of principle. They were asking for, "I want a, I want a-"

Ali Abdaal 1:16:09 I want something hot, yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:16:10 [laughs] I want something hot and savory. I want something that's got more whole foods in it.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:13 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:16:13 I want something I can chew more. I want something more like an additional meal. So we created the Hot & Savory product.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:18 Nice.

Julian Hearn 1:16:19 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:19 So what's, what's, what's next for Huel?

Julian Hearn 1:16:21 Ah. Next, I can't really tell you about.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:24 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:16:24 Um, the product... All I can say is that, uh, MPD team are really good. They re-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:29 I'm sorry, what team?

Julian Hearn 1:16:30 MPD.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:30 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:16:30 So new product development.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:31 Oh, okay, cool.

Julian Hearn 1:16:32 Yeah. So they report into me, and, uh, we work, and we've got a really exciting product pipeline.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:37 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:16:38 And, uh, we're working on anything, like up to 30 projects at a time.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:42 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:16:43 And what I do is we work on stuff, and sometimes you have to go down a path bef- realize before it's a dead end. So we experiment, try stuff, uh, speak to people-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:51 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:16:51 ... mock stuff up, 'cause sometimes it gets rejected 'cause it ends up being too expensive, or it's just not possible to make, or actually-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:57 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:16:57 ... the, the people don't like it for some reason or another. So there's lots of reasons why it ends up we're killing a project, but you got to start it before you find out the answer.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:04 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:17:04 You can't just think of idea and reject it straight away. I wanna try it first. So we work on lots of stuff and, um, yeah, there's some interesting things coming.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:11 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:17:11 So I think people quite often sort of position us as this sort of powdery weird product.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:15 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:17:15 But in theory, you can make anything nutrition complete. Any food category you could go into, make it nutrition complete. So we could go into some quite interesting categories and have a USP ove- over other people, because they don't typically optimize for nutrition. They're optimizing for taste and texture, which is not essential in life. Primary purpose of food clearly is nutrition. That's what you actually need, so we're optimizing for the right stuff.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:33 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:17:34 So if we, we can go into any category and produce something really interesting. Um, and even some other stuff that's interesting as well we could be working on.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:41 Exciting.

Julian Hearn 1:17:41 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:42 Um, if you had your time again, are there any things, any, uh, any sort of ma- big, big mistakes you'd say you've made, or things that you regret that you would, that you would have wanted to do differently?

Julian Hearn 1:17:54 I'm a strong believer in the no regrets. If you go back in time and change something, would you be where you are today? You could be further back. So, uh, probably not-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:04 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:18:04 ... 'cause I think where we got to is really, um, much further than I ever expected.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:08 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:18:09 And, um, would I do anything differently if I really could and end up today in the same place? Um, a couple of times we've recruited and made mistakes. Really hard to recruit. We were talking about this briefly earlier.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:20 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:18:21 It is really hard to recruit the right person for the right job. We spend a lot of time. I think we've got better at it now. So if I went back, I probably would apply some of our recruitment principles today-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:30 Ah

Julian Hearn 1:18:30 ... to those early people. So, um, I'll give you a quick overview of what we do now.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:35 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:18:35 So we, we've got internal recruiters now. I think the beauty of internal recruiters are is they know your brand inside out.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:42 Mm-hmm.

Julian Hearn 1:18:42 They really know what you want, so they can pick better people. So we ha- so that's a benefit. Cost saving too, probably, if you look at it.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:49 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:18:49 Recruiting can be quite expensive. So internal recruiters, I would have probably brought some of those on board earlier. Uh, the recruitment process now is quite extensive.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:58 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:18:58 We probably-- You could have up to six rounds, so, um, not all on s- separate days. Not like it's gonna take six days. I, I insist now on some sort of test, uh, and it should be a, you know, not like a fucking, um, IQ exam or something like that. It should be something very specific to your role. So you might give somebody a case study. Do a case study, present it back to us. The reason is, is 'cause I think that, um, interview processes or interviews can be quite artificial environments.

Ali Abdaal 1:19:24 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:19:24 And I've experienced people who've been very good at interviewing, um, terrible at the job-

Ali Abdaal 1:19:28 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:19:29 ... and vice versa. One of my best employees, he was a terri- [laughs] he was terrible at the interviews. Quite, you know, uh, very nervous. Um, d- didn't g- but I saw something in him-

Ali Abdaal 1:19:40 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:19:41 ... and gave him a chance, and this was very early. He's ended up being one of our best employees, right? So I think that you can't judge just purely on an interview process, 'cause it's a very fake environment. You're never gonna go for an interview process at work. You're gonna do work. So why, why not do a test which is closer to work?

Ali Abdaal 1:19:53 Okay.

Julian Hearn 1:19:54 Um, we always have a culture fit interview as well that the person can veto. So say you're the hiring manager and you're looking for a graphic designer.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:00 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:20:00 You find this graphic designer is really, really good, but he has to fit in with the rest of the team. So we make sure two people who've got nothing to do with your department interview him from a culture point of view. If he doesn't fit with the rest of the team, we don't want that person in the business, 'cause that can end up causing conflicts or problems somewhere else in the business, and that's why people leave, and I don't want anybody leaving who's joined.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:18 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:20:18 Uh, that, that team can veto that person. Even if they're the best graphic designer in the world, they can still say, "I don't want them."

Ali Abdaal 1:20:23 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:20:23 Um, I do a culture fit interview. Still do it now.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:26 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:20:27 I can veto.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:28 Right, on the, on the culture fit interviewer-

Julian Hearn 1:20:29 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:20:29 ... uh, in- interviews-

Julian Hearn 1:20:30 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:20:31 ... are you, like, are, are you trying to ask a question of, is this someone I wanna have a beer with? Like, are you doing, like, a I, I get a good vibe? Do, do you have, like, specific questions that they need answers to? What's, what's the purpose here?

Julian Hearn 1:20:40 Yeah. I, I personally do have a, a range of questions that I ask same, uh, each time. So questions could be simple as, like, um, "Tell me which culture you've worked in which has fitted you best."

Ali Abdaal 1:20:52 Ooh, nice.

Julian Hearn 1:20:53 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:20:53 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:20:53 Um-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:53 'Cause then there, there's no clear right answer to that.

Julian Hearn 1:20:55 Correct.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:55 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:20:56 Yeah. So- Just because, uh, it might just not fit you as an individual.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:00 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:21:00 And also, I always ask them the same question, "Which culture have you worked within th- that you've not, that's not fitted you at all, that's you've..."

Ali Abdaal 1:21:06 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:21:06 And clearly, if that doesn't sound like our culture, then they wouldn't be the right person, right? So it could be questions along those lines. Yes, I, I typically, I think in the back of my head, could I spend a lot of time with this person? Because you're gonna be at work for 40 hours a week.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:18 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:21:19 That's a long time. And, um, so if you think that person's gonna be, you know, difficult to work with, gonna be a bit rude or arrogant, that's the sort of people we don't wanna work with, right? So one of our key values is don't be a dick, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:30 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:21:30 Um, so, you know, we want people that you're gonna wanna spend time with because you've got to sit next to them, they've got to interact with other people, and they've got to speak to people outside the business who represent the brand as well. So there's, there is lots of sort of nuance to that, but really, yeah, fundamentally, are they a nice person?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:44 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:21:44 Do you wanna spend time with them?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:45 Okay. So you've got the test, you've got the culture fit interviews.

Julian Hearn 1:21:47 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:48 Um, what else do you have in the recruitment pipeline that-

Julian Hearn 1:21:50 Uh, so you would probably see your immediate manager. You might see the senior person in that particular team as well.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:57 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:21:58 You might see some juniors in that particular team. Culture fit, me culture fit, and then obviously the, the, um, the recruiter will spend time with you, and they do the first stage really fundamentally to get past. And then one of those stages you, you do a test in. So you might see up to s- six, six different stages to that.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:13 Wow, okay. That's quite a lot.

Julian Hearn 1:22:15 I think it's, it's... Uh, our churn rate has been incredibly low.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:17 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:22:18 So over the years we've lost very few people. Like I say, we're 240 people. Of people I really wanted to keep, three, four people. Really low. We have had people leave-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:30 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:22:30 ... but sometimes that's fine. That does happen. People might leave 'cause they wanna move countries, they wanna... My first employee that I always sort of re- regret, she, she left, but she'd done Spanish at Cambridge. Uh, sorry, Russian at Cambridge, and she wanted to speak Russian on a regular basis. We don't sell Russia, so she couldn't. But, so nothing we could do about that. That's, that's, so be it. But in terms of people that actually wanted to go and work for another company-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:51 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:22:51 ... very, very rarely has that happened.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:53 For... L- let's say someone's listening to this, and they're sort of, you know, just coming out of university. They're w- they're applying for jobs and want a m- want a job at one of the dream brands.

Julian Hearn 1:23:02 Yep, yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:02 As someone on, who's been on the other side of, uh, kind of recruiting a bunch of people-

Julian Hearn 1:23:05 Mm

Ali Abdaal 1:23:05 ... what are, what are some things that potential candidates do that helps, helps them stand out in a good way?

Julian Hearn 1:23:11 Okay. This is so, this is so easy, I can't believe this still happens, right? I reckon less than, I reckon less than 5% of people actually write a covering letter.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:21 Oh.

Julian Hearn 1:23:21 Right? So because it's so easy now to sort of spam people with CVs, you go to Indeed or wherever it is, and you just drop your CV and just send it. In the early days, I was being really ruthless 'cause I was doing all the recruitment. The first 10 or 15 people, I did all the recruitment myself.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:35 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:23:35 Because I was trying to run a business, be the CEO, do all the work, do all the... D- I didn't have time to do this, so my easiest filtering technique was if you didn't write me a covering letter-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:43 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:23:43 ... I'd just say, "Why you wanted to work for Huel? I feel like you don't care. If you don't care, I don't care about you." So if you did that, and you delete all the ones that have got no attachments apart from the CV-

Ali Abdaal 1:23:53 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:23:53 ... you, you'll have 5% left. So it's a very quick f- filter mechanism.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:57 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:23:57 Out of those five, there will be probably half of them, maybe more, will be standard covering letters.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:04 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:24:04 "I want to work for your company," insert company name.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:07 Yep.

Julian Hearn 1:24:08 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's very rare that anybody goes beyond that.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:12 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:24:12 What the best... I think if you wanna stand out, it's two things I would say, is write a company, um, you know, s- choose the company you wanna work for, and then, and then find out why you wanna work for them and, and say that. S- uh, mention some things about yourself or why you can add value to that company.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:28 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:24:28 So I could add s- value to Huel because of these things, and make it specific to Huel.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:32 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:24:32 Right? So, I don't know, say you was looking at graphic design. Say, "I've looked at these two pages," or, "I've looked at something on your website, and I saw there was a mistake here and I could have made it better there." That shows you've put some real time and effort into it. And then the final thing is if you want to go really far and go, um, and really stand out, I think in the whole time I've had a few people do stuff like this where they would actually, uh, create something physical and send it in.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:56 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:24:56 So I think I said to you earlier, there was one of our employees. She, and I think it was her dad actually helped her, she wanted to stand out. There was no job for her at the time, so she just, she, she'd seen Huel or used Huel and she wanted to work for the brand. So she loved the packaging so much that on our sort of label on the back, she took the same template and, um, uh, turned her CV into one of our labels.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:19 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:25:20 So instead of saying, uh, best before date, it would say born on date. That was her date of birth. And instead of like ingredients, it would be her attributes and skills or whatever, and nutritional profile would be her employment history, and she changed it all around and did that. So that really makes you stand out, and then send it to the hiring, uh, team leader sort of thing. So I think she wanted a marketing job, so she sent it directly to me at the time, so, so that... And when you, when you get one of those, it really does stand out.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:44 Mm. Yeah, we did a big bunch of recruitment, uh, a few months ago to... recruiting for like eight positions at the same time, and one of the positions we were recruiting for was a videographer, and we had like 100, 200 people apply or something like that, and there was one guy who actually made a video and was the only person who, who made a video to be like, whatever. And, uh, sort of we ended up not going with him in the end 'cause he just didn't have the right level of experience that we needed.

Julian Hearn 1:26:08 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:08 But that was an instant hack to just get to the top-

Julian Hearn 1:26:10 Correct

Ali Abdaal 1:26:10 ... be like, "We need to bring this guy in for an interview."

Julian Hearn 1:26:12 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:12 Whereas everyone else was like, "Okay, let's send them the asynchronous interview. Let's look through their CV. Let's make sure..." This guy was immediately, by just standing out with a bit of effort, you know, a day's worth of putting, putting something together-

Julian Hearn 1:26:22 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:26:22 ... um, just immediately got to the top of the pile.

Julian Hearn 1:26:25 Correct. I mean, clearly if you wanna be CEO of Nike or something like that, just send in, doing this one label or something like that [laughs] is not gonna get you the job. You need to obviously have it, have it backed up with being the right person for that job.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:34 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:26:34 But if you're the right person for that job, and you, you strongly believe it is-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:37 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:26:37 ... an hour of your time, half an hour of your time, it's not gonna take very long to do, but you could land your dream job just by doing that little bit of extra work. Your CV already exists. There's no work.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:44 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:26:45 So a covering letter, which you sh- you can attach when you're doing to an Indeed or most things, there should be a covering letter thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:49 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:26:49 You could attach that. Half an hour, an hour of your time, really spend a bit of, you know, not a lot of time-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:55 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:26:55 ... but spend some time on it and you will stand out. I cannot believe... I reckon it's less than 5%.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:00 Can I ask a li- a little bit about firing people?

Julian Hearn 1:27:02 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:02 That's, like, often people who s- who start companies say that's the hardest part of the job. Um, I've had to do it once, um, and it wasn't a nice experience. Uh, d- do you have, like, a, a ph- a philosophy or a mental model when it comes to kind of if, like, recognizing someone's not right for the role and then what you do about it?

Julian Hearn 1:27:20 Yep. It's... Yeah, it's horrible.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:24 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:27:24 I think if they are not performing, then obviously, in some cases you can move them, right? There could be a better job for them within the same organization. It depends.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:32 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:27:33 If they're not performing because they just are lazy or whatever-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:37 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:27:37 ... then that's much easier to do.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:40 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:27:40 So we've had people where, I don't know, in customer service it's very easy to see performance because there's, there's tickets. So there's the number of tickets per day. One person's tickets were 15... T- 10 times smaller than nearly everybody else's. They just weren't working as hard as anybody else. That's quite easy, 'cause you just pull them up for it, explain to them that you, everybody else is doing this number, you're doing this number. You're, you're, you're not working as hard.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:01 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:28:01 You can't, you can't be. Um, so those ones are fairly easy. The ones which are tougher is ones where it's a little bit more difficult to put your finger on exactly why they're not fitting in or they're not performing. Um, and we've had a couple which have been quite, uh, emotional when people have been told. Clearly, you, you, you want to give people a chance to improve, so the first stage is to go through a process of explaining to them where they've gone wrong-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:26 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:28:26 ... and what you think or what is expected of them.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:29 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:28:29 Um, uh, a recent example of somebody where we did this, and we gave them multiple opportunities to, to up their game-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:37 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:28:38 ... and they didn't. They just didn't respond. They just didn't show willing. And it was quite interesting, 'cause the person had come on board, um, and had [laughs] sort of bait and switched us, really. They had put a load of effort in to get the job, got it, and then once they'd got it and got their feet under the table, they just sort of chilled out.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:54 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:28:55 And then they got told it wasn't good enough. Didn't respond. Got told they weren't good enough. Didn't respond. Got told they weren't good enough. So eventually then it w- it was, it was fairly easy, 'cause we'd given them multiple opportunities.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:05 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:29:05 So all I'm saying is I think you need to speak to the individuals, explain to them what's wrong, how they can improve, what is expected, and then give them an opportunity to, to improve. I've never really experienced anybody where there isn't, there is a valid reason why that's happened. If they're obviously experiencing problems, you need to sometimes ask the question-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:21 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:29:21 ... "Is there something else we don't know about you're not telling us?" I haven't really had an example of where that's-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:25 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:29:25 ... actually happened, but, um, you know, it's important to find that out, you know.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:30 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:29:31 Usually the... if there's something really bad going on at, at home or, or, or in their personal life, that comes to service quicker. And actually, the ones that, where that's happened, it's usually us saying to them, "We can see you're not happy," but their work was still good.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:42 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:29:42 They were still grafting.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:43 Have you found that in instances where you do give feedback and say, "Hey, this thing needs improving," has it improved more often than it's not improved or-

Julian Hearn 1:29:52 No.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:52 Oh, ha-

Julian Hearn 1:29:53 No.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:53 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:29:53 Typically it doesn't change.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:55 Oh, okay.

Julian Hearn 1:29:55 It doesn't improve a great deal. I think it's because they're just either out of their depth-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:01 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:30:01 ... or they just don't have the, the desire or the oomph to, to change.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:07 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:30:07 That's just the way they are.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:09 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:30:09 And sometimes, um... It usually happens quite quickly within somebody joining a company I, I've seen. It's, it's very rare you have somebody, you know, working for two years really good and then their performance drops.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:18 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:30:19 It... Usually they join, and it's, it's never been great. It's always been a bit bad. Typically, my experience has been typically they're ni- I m- they can be really nice people-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:28 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:30:28 ... and you give them... I, I think in the early days we were probably worse at this, and so sometimes you'd have people for six months or a year, and you just think, "Oh, if we do this, we could get them to do that. We'll give them a bit of extra training, give them a bit..." It typically never changes. So I think once you see it-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:41 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:30:42 ... work on it. But in the early days, probably should've pulled the plug on people a bit quicker on some of them. Because if it's not right for us, it's probably not right for them either.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:48 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:30:48 They probably would be better off somewhere else.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:50 Yeah. So I guess philosophically speaking, you're, um, you wanna give them a chance, but you're pr- thinking in the back of your mind that, like, last... 90% of the times I did this it didn't work out, but hey, we'll give you a chance anyway-

Julian Hearn 1:31:00 Of course, yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:31:01 ... 'cause that's, that's typically-

Julian Hearn 1:31:02 Got, got to give people a chance. I can't even think-

Ali Abdaal 1:31:03 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:31:03 ... of an example. Actually, I can. There's, there's, there is a, a person I'm thinking of now where they, um, they have improved. Yeah, there has been one more example of somebody that has, has improved. They've definitely upped their game. They're still, um, got some fundamental traits which probably aren't quite role for that, um, right for that particular role.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:22 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:31:23 So I think we probably will have, have to replace them eventually, but they've definitely upped their game, and that will probably, um, extend that, that period where they'll be able to work for the company for another year or two, I think. But eventually they're gonna hit the ceiling.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:32 Yeah. How do you, how do you think about things like culture? Like, culture is one of these big words everyo- every- everyone talks about.

Julian Hearn 1:31:37 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:37 What's the sort of culture that you're trying to make at Huel? And, and I guess how do you, how do you mold it in that direction?

Julian Hearn 1:31:42 Okay. So I think culture is... Yeah, I think it's, uh, super, super important, and super important to give it due care and attention. It will happen naturally, but I think, uh, the hardest culture will probably be a company that's been existing for a very long time. I've worked at places, and once you've got a culture, it's very hard to change that culture. Luckily with Huel, because I started with a blank sheet of paper, and I was a founder and I was there-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:04 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:32:05 ... I think it's been fairly easy to do in some ways, because I didn't start this company just to make money. I wanted something I was gonna be proud of. I wanted a company where I was gonna work there as well.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:14 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:32:15 So it's very easy to sort of say, "I wanna work somewhere where, you know, there's no dicks. I wanna work a place where people are nice."

Ali Abdaal 1:32:20 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:32:20 And I want... But I want to perform. I want to get good results. To create a culture where, um, we, we are, you know, market leader, we achieve great things, but we don't burn people out, and people don't wanna leave every two years 'cause it's such soul-destroying place to work. You know, they, they, they don't... There's no fights, there's no crying in the office. Don't want any of that. So we wanna really look after people, but we don't want to have... We wanna have that energy and that, that sort of passion to achieve great things, and so have higher targets. So I've tried to merge those two together. So sort of stuff that we do is we do recruit well. I think that we do have ambitious targets, but not, not so ambitious you're never gonna achieve any of them.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:57 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:32:57 Um, we do look after people. We have a people team.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:00 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:33:01 Uh, that people team look after the team and make sure if there's anybody with any problems. We do provide a lot of perks. Huel's got share options, quite generous share options as well. And so again, we're all hopefully more on the level playing field together and rowing in the same direction. And then we do lots of additional perks, like we got a gym at work. We, we bring in a PT. We have, um, you know, free Huel around the office. I went to a posh office the other day in a very rich company. They're charging £1.80 for a coffee. You don't have to do [laughs] pay... You know, even stuff like that I think makes a difference. We've... You know, we really try and think about doing the right thing at all times.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:35 Nice. That's very cool. Yeah, I think that's one thing we're s- we're starting to think about a lot harder now that the team has, like, sort of, sort of accidentally become 17 people where we're like, "All right, now we need to really think hard about this culture thing." And yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:33:47 Have you written anything down?

Ali Abdaal 1:33:49 Uh, we've got core values and stuff-

Julian Hearn 1:33:50 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:33:50 ... but they're all very f- rough first drafty. But no, we haven't really, really written down any culture principles.

Julian Hearn 1:33:55 Yeah, I would start it.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:56 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:33:56 Just think about what it is and words that you may use-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:59 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:33:59 ... and phrases you may use, and just write it down. I f- I mean, I can, I probably could send you my first deck that I did. It's pretty crude and pretty rough. We've refined it and made it better.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:07 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:34:07 But there's, there's some very famous culture decks out there. I think that, um, Netflix one is one that's often used.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:13 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:34:13 Very long now. It's probably a bit too long, maybe a bit too specific.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:16 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:34:16 If you looked at the, the Netflix one-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:18 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:34:19 ... did a crude version of that, a quick crude version, um, talk about, you know, principles-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:25 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:34:25 ... some stuff, stuff you don't wanna do, the stuff you do wanna do. Um, but yeah, so we have two sets. We have, uh, in terms of values, we have, uh, Huel's DNA to us as a company, so nutrition first, taste a close second.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:38 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:34:38 And then we have how to be a Hueligan, which is what we sort of call-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:40 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:34:41 ... all of our customers and all of our employees will be Hueligans, and there'll be stuff in there like, um, you know, number one is, uh, make customers happy. Number two is don't be a dick, stuff like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:51 Yeah. Sick. Um, any tips-

Julian Hearn 1:34:54 Oh, sorry, just one other thing on that-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:55 Yeah, please

Julian Hearn 1:34:58 ... is, um, I still induct everybody who comes into the business, and I think that it's very easy for a, a culture deck to become dusty-

Ali Abdaal 1:35:05 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:35:06 ... put in a drawer. Nobody sees it. So what we've done is that when everybody joins, I do it.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:12 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:35:12 So I induct everybody who joins, and, um, give them my thoughts on culture from my perspective. So instead of don't be a dick, it's like, you know, don't, don't gossip around the office. You know, that's not allowed. I don't accept that.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:24 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:35:24 If I hear that, you'll be in big trouble. Uh, uh, we print out those two sets of values on a... just a little sticker. Everybody's laptop in the business should have it on. Stick it on there when they first join, so at least they sort of try to keep it top of mind. And then, um, you know, then you've got to live it. You have to live those. So you don't wanna work, uh, write sort of flaky stuff that's a bit aloof and never gonna happen.

Ali Abdaal 1:35:47 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:35:47 So just try and remember, and try and quote those things back to somebody if they're doing something wrong, and try and, you know, make sure you, you try and, yeah, bring them to life. And so it's very easy, I think, at Huel to a certain extent. We don't have a floor which is just for management. You know, like James and... Just our CEO and myself, we all sit, you know, open plan office. We all sit together and try and sort of live those values together.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:10 Awesome. Yeah, I think when I first started out in the business, the... I, uh, I, I, I came across things like culture and, and, like, values and missions. I was like, "Ugh, what is this bullshit?" But now I'm like, "Oh, crap, I really wish I had paid more attention to this" sort of thing.

Julian Hearn 1:36:21 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:22 But like I say, you live and learn.

Julian Hearn 1:36:23 One thing that I think is harder now is the working from home. I think that has made culture harder.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:28 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:36:29 So I think when you're all in the office together, and you have beers on a Friday afternoon-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:32 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:36:32 ... it's very easy or much easier to build that together.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:35 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:36:35 It's a little bit like a, on a football team or something, much easier. Imagine a football team if you never got together.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:39 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:36:39 The, the team can't be as together.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:41 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:36:41 So I think you, you've lot... got a lot of remote workers, I'm assuming. Correct?

Ali Abdaal 1:36:44 We do, yeah. I, I, I, I do find that it's so much nicer when people are in the office.

Julian Hearn 1:36:49 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:50 But also it's like I can't insist on people being in the office 'cause COVID and stuff. So it's like, like how do we-

Julian Hearn 1:36:54 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:36:54 ... keep the, you know, people who are not coming to the office fairly regularly as involved as the people who are in here and just hanging out and just daily and lunch and coffees and things like that?

Julian Hearn 1:37:04 Do you do, um... Like we have, uh, our Christmas party's quite big.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:08 Oh, yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:37:08 It's put quite a lot of time and effort into the Christmas party. Again, it has to be everybody together. No teams allowed to go and have their own-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:14 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:37:14 ... Christmas parties. It's, it's one team or no teams. Uh, and then we have a birthday party on our anniversary of our birth, um, each year as well, but that's another big party. So we had a big one. We spent a lot of time and effort. It takes months of organizing.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:27 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:37:27 Have those two big ones. We have two big ones. People will... The American team don't fly over, but the London team, the Tring team, and the Birmingham team all have those parties together. So those can be events-

Ali Abdaal 1:37:38 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:37:38 ... where you get sort of home workers together.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:40 Yeah, that's a cool shout. Yeah, we, we, we had sort of a mini Christmas party, but it then... Again, COVID put a pr- 'cause we had, we had this whole plan. We were like, all right-

Julian Hearn 1:37:46 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:37:46 ... let's, let's really pare it down. But I do wanna do things like twice a year kind of either a ski trip or like an adventure holiday where everyone goes off to somewhere, and we fly in the remote workers as well and-

Julian Hearn 1:37:55 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:37:55 ... do that as, like, a, a thing. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:37:57 We did do, we did, uh... Yeah, during COVID we did do one that was quite good. I think they set out k- these kits, these cocktail kits.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:03 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:38:03 We were all on a remote party where we had to sit and make cocktails at home by yourself, and then we broke up into little groups, like little groups of 10 or something, where you had like... You'd have a chat together and sort of drinking together. That was, it was the best that-

Ali Abdaal 1:38:14 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:38:14 ... you could do remote.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:15 You could do, really.

Julian Hearn 1:38:15 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:16 Um, any tips for juggling, uh, family life, relationships, that kind of stuff while building a business and being quite, like, entrepreneur vibes?

Julian Hearn 1:38:26 I don't think there's many things you can do in terms of juggling in the, at certain

Julian Hearn 1:38:30 times. So I think hopefully you'd want your, your partner or your husband, your wife, whatever, to, to really understand there's gonna be a time when you have to knuckle down.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:37 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:38:38 And, uh, you might get a bit manic. You might get so, you know, long, long hours. You might look a little bit unhealthy. [laughs] You might have been doing crazy hours.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:47 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:38:47 And you might get, you know, a bit of pressure to sort of relax. But sometimes if you know this is the right thing to do, as long as you know there's an, that they know and you know this is not gonna go on for... Well, it might go on for years, but it might not go on for 10 years. It might go on for a year or two. Then I think if you're both aware there's a, an end goal there, then I think, I think that's the best thing you do. I think it's the best thing you can do.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:10 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:39:10 Clearly, you, you can't do that seven days a week for years on end. So there will be times when you can go out.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:15 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:39:15 But obviously sometimes the, the, the day when you're not working is a day you don't really wanna go out 'cause that's the day you wanna chill out and relax.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:22 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:39:22 So that doesn't work either. I think that can be, um- It g- th- um, well, I'm trying to say I think it will cause conflict sometimes

Ali Abdaal 1:39:28 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:39:29 I, I'm not sure I've got much-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:30 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:39:31 ... much advice on that. I think that sometimes you have to just do it.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:33 Yeah. Yeah. So do, do you th- do you do things like, you know, having, having a hard stop in the evenings and you, then you're not gonna check email? Or is it all kind of integrated with work and life?

Julian Hearn 1:39:42 I, I'm not a massive, um, regimented planner.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:46 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:39:46 I think that it's, uh... When there's something to be done, I typically try and do it.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:50 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:39:51 Um, and I don't like saying, right, Sundays are clear. 'Cause imagine if you had a massive panic or massive problem on a Sunday, I wouldn't like to say, like, Sundays are always clear, or I'm always finishing after 7:00 at night. I'm not very good at doing that, no. When we're on holiday. Sorry? When we're on holiday-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:03 [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:40:03 ... and he relax, his brain just goes mental. Yeah. He'll be on a sunbed-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:07 Hacks a million ideas

Julian Hearn 1:40:07 ... and he's like- [laughs] ... he's like, "I've gotta do this." [laughs] Well, it's a little bit like shower in the morning, right? You know you're supposed to think very clearly-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:13 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:40:14 ... in the shower. I think sometimes when you go, do go on holiday and you're supposed-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:16 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:40:16 ... to be, or you're having a meal out with somebody-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:18 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:40:18 ... that's when you're not at work.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:19 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:40:19 And sometimes your brain is still thinking about work.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:22 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:40:22 And so stuff p- comes into your head and you think, "Oh, my God, I've gotta tell someone about that now."

Ali Abdaal 1:40:26 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:40:27 I, I think if you're dating... I think it may be the other way around, rather than the entrepreneur changing-

Ali Abdaal 1:40:33 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:40:33 ... I think it's could be the other person [laughs] right the way. Could you, could you tell them to be more understanding sometimes? I think it is tough, but I think if you're, if you're, um, yeah, dating somebody who's just, uh, you know, got a 9 to 5 job, then that's a different experience than da- dating somebody who's, does this.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:52 Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, that's something I find if I'm, if I'm on holiday or if I'm, you know, on a weekend, I'm not working, that, that's when I have the best ideas, and suddenly I'll open up Slack and be like, "Prr." And everyone's like, "Whoa, what the hell's going on?" And I'll be like, "Oh, crap." [laughs] I need to refrain from just spamming the Slack, uh, channels with various, like, ideas and like, "Oh, we could do this. We could do that." And I just be like, I'll s- I'll, I'll either schedule it for a Monday morning or I'll save it. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:41:16 But you are, I think you are in a manic world. I think it is-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:18 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:41:18 ... I think sometimes that was the most exciting times, is the early days for me, when you are making everything up from scratch.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:23 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:41:24 And sometimes those, those-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:25 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:41:25 ... odd ideas that are springing into your mind at the odd times-

Ali Abdaal 1:41:28 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:41:28 ... sometimes can be really important.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:30 Nice. Um,

Ali Abdaal 1:41:32 this has been great. Sh- uh, can we end with some qu- social media questions?

Julian Hearn 1:41:34 Yeah, sure.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:35 Sick. Oh, fantastic. Okay, so we posted on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, so we have a bunch of questions, um-

Julian Hearn 1:41:40 Excellent

Ali Abdaal 1:41:40 ... so we'll just pick, pick some good ones. Uh, we've got Cameron, who asks, "What's been your biggest mistake, and what have you learnt from it?"

Julian Hearn 1:41:45 [sighs] I get asked this one a lot.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:50 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:41:50 It's a very hard one to answer, 'cause I think we sort of asked this a little bit earlier. Biggest mistake. Probably the biggest mistake Huel's ever made, I probably can't tell you about. Uh, [laughs] and, uh, I think there's nothing to learn from that really. Uh, it's just mistakes happen, right? Some things happen, and sometimes they're unavoided. You're gonna make... I sort of talked to somebody today. Over your career, you're gonna make tens of thousands of decisions. You can't be right all the time, even though I think I am generally right all the time. [laughs] I, I, I'm not sure what the really the biggest mistake really would be in terms of value back to the, the, the, this person. I'm not sure.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:25 Um, Trevor says, "How do you power through the part of starting a business when you're not making money?"

Julian Hearn 1:42:30 Okay, that is a good one. I think, uh, we sort of talked about this a little bit. I think you have to have this vision, this goal of where you want to be. And, um, you know, if you, if you, if you want to be up here, then y- I think sometimes it's the exciting times when you know you haven't got there. You know, like, I think quite often, Steve talked about this, where some people have already got to the top, sometimes that's the worst time. So sometimes it's exciting when you know you're going up a, up a hill. Um, when you're not making money, uh, it... Okay, so in, in the affiliate world, it was quite easy, because quite quickly you can make some money.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:01 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:43:01 Whereas for Huel, it was two years before I made a penny.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:05 Mm-hmm.

Julian Hearn 1:43:05 Right? That must, that was hard. Like I said, I nea- nearly, nearly gave up. So if it's something you can, if you buy... If you can generate some money, so say you're starting a, a restaurant, so you have to build a restaurant and you have to start that from scratch, it could take a lot of time. But could you do, I don't know, a dinner party event or something to at least get some money in the door, do something around a similar type of subject? Could you do a mini version, a pop-up or something like that? If it's something that's like building some tech that's gonna take years, that would be really hard to, to, to, um, push through. But I think you have to just remind yourself there's some motivating goal, not that I just want a bit of money-

Ali Abdaal 1:43:39 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:43:39 ... that my life's gonna be better, my family's life is gonna be better. Something a bit more motivating. That should keep you going.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:44 Sick. Um, Zach says, "What's the hardest part of being a business owner?"

Julian Hearn 1:43:52 Um, I like it. I'm not sure there's... For me, it doesn't feel hard as such.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:59 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:43:59 Um, I think trying to please, trying to keep, um... You've got a lot of sort of, I'm not saying stakeholders is the right phrase, but you've got, you know, you've got your team, you've got your customers. You're trying to p- keep a lot of people happy, and you can never keep everybody happy.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:14 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:44:14 Impossible. So there's gonna be some times. But I've got a bit of thick skin now, and I'm in sort of in marathon mode now that I feel that in the early days you're sprinting, later on you're in a marathon mode, and therefore, you know, you can only do so much. So before I used to be really sort of quite sort of, um, hectic of a night. I wouldn't go to bed until stuff was done. I've got to go da, da, da, da, da. Now I'm a bit more chilled, and I can let those sort of things... I can deal with them a lot more easily now. I think you have to just relax a little bit sometimes.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:48 Yeah. Nice. Um, Ash says, "What's your advice for teenage entrepreneurs?"

Julian Hearn 1:44:52 Teenage entrepreneurs. Well, you were a teenage entrepreneur, correct?

Ali Abdaal 1:44:56 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:44:56 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:56 I guess so. I didn't make any money while I was a teenage entrepreneur. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:44:59 I think the, the key thing for, for, you know, um, is to probably learn. I think podcasts are excellent way to do that. I, I see you've got loads of books here.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:10 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:45:10 I'm, I'm a terrible reader. I don't like reading at all. Um, but reading books would be good as well.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:15 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:45:15 But for podcasts, for me, hearing someone's voice, I'd listen to that. It's much more like storyteller. I can hear it. I can hear the inflection in someone's voice. I, I can get it. So I'd say, I would say listen and learn.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:24 Mm-hmm.

Julian Hearn 1:45:25 But also do. You can read and learn for the rest of your life and never do a single thing, so you have to start at some point. So start something which is not gonna cost you a lot of money. Start something and just get some experience under your belt, and then obviously you should be able to apply some of the things you've heard in the podcast. And if you're not making progress, then something's wrong, so course-correct and do something different. But I would say start something. The chances are the first business you- you start or the first website you start is gonna go nowhere, right? The fifth one might go nowhere. So start, get something, and maybe drop it quite quick and move onto something else. But then the 10th one you start might be better. So I was sort of, you know... The- the s- the business that I started that year, I probably did five or 10 websites in that first year, and, um, and then I sort of started getting some traction with one of them, and that's the one that went on. But don't worry about it. Don't commit. Don't, like, spend six years planning something and then realize this is going nowhere. I would sort of start something, but there's so many little sort of things you could do. You could sell on Etsy now. You could sell... Uh, you could start a website. You could do a course on Skillshare. You can do- you can do lots of things w- quite quick and easily now, and if they start getting a bit of traction, then double down on them. If they don't get any traction, then move onto something else.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:39 Yeah. I think- I think that's something that we did really well in the early days of this business when it was just me or just, like, a few of us. But as the team's grown in size, I've found that we're just taking a lot longer to do things. And I guess this is-

Julian Hearn 1:46:50 Oh, yeah. Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:46:50 ... this just happens naturally, but I'm- I-

Julian Hearn 1:46:52 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:46:52 ... I keep on trying to think, "Oh, could we maybe be a little bit more scrappy like we used to be back in the day?"

Julian Hearn 1:46:57 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:46:57 While at the same time... Yeah, is- is- is that... Uh, how- how do you think about that trade-off between, like, k- kind of like team- team getting bigger and just stuff getting slower?

Julian Hearn 1:47:06 Yeah. I... Well, that's- that is absolute classic, isn't it?

Ali Abdaal 1:47:10 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:47:10 That's just like, um, you know, we use the example of, um, Halo Top, which is an ice cream. Do you know Halo Top? So Halo Top is an ice cream, I think it came from North America. You can buy it in this country now. So they started with two people, I think less than seven years ago, maybe about seven years ago, and they- they sell hundreds of millions of pounds worth of ice cream per year. And they were two people, and, uh, they got to market with a low-calorie ice cream. So what they did is noticed people like ice cream, took out the sugar, put some stevia in, and put a little bit of whey protein in. Pretty simple. They made a product which tastes less- less good, arguably, than, um, uh, Ben & Jerry's or something like that. But because it's lower calories, it sells loads. And they started with two people. Um, Unilever, that owns Ben & Jerry's, they took years to get that to market, a sort of similar type of product.

Ali Abdaal 1:47:57 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:47:57 So you can move a lot faster. It's a lot ca- classic sort of innovator's dilemma. The bigger you are, the slower you're gonna move, right? I think Coke Life, which was a one with stevia in, took five years to get to market or something crazy. You could make that in the kitchen in five minutes. So I think the beauty of being young is that you've got less commitments. You can do anything you like. So just do something. Do it scrappy. Do it... You know, scrappy's good. I think scrappy's excellent. Get stuff done, because if you take a long time to plan until it's perfect, it's probably too late. You know, you wanna launch something, read a book on minimal viable product. That is a good- good concept. Um, but as you get bigger, you don't wanna do minimal viable product anymore-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:32 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:48:32 ... 'cause you're thinking-

Ali Abdaal 1:48:32 You wanna make it good, yeah

Julian Hearn 1:48:32 ... "This is too sh- this is too crap. I can't launch this." So yeah, we do experience that for sure.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:36 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:48:37 And you have to fight against that, and there's a sort of balancing act. So yeah, our products we launch now, we can't be as scrappy as we first were.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:44 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:48:44 So the beauty of being young is that you... Or you're early and you haven't got a business, you haven't got a brand, is that you could do a really scrappy, crappy version.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:51 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:48:52 But give it to your friends, sell it to your friends, and get some- get some feedback and learn, improve, learn, improve, learn, improve.

Ali Abdaal 1:48:59 Nice. Yeah, one thing we've been thinking since the discussion with, um, Steve from Gymshark is that can we reorganize our sort of team of 15, 20 people into sort of these three-people squads for each different project? 'Cause I find that three- three- three or four is, like, a good number.

Julian Hearn 1:49:14 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:14 'Cause it starts to get to, like, six, seven, eight for a single project, it- it starts to feel like everything is slow for no reason.

Julian Hearn 1:49:20 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:20 Um, so now we're, as of Monday, we're gonna- we're gonna experiment with what it's like to do three-man squads for a bunch of our different things, see what that's like.

Julian Hearn 1:49:27 And how are those squads organized? You have... They all- they have got a project lead, or how is it done?

Ali Abdaal 1:49:31 Yeah, so what we're thinking is when it comes to YouTube videos, um, it would be the- it would be, like, the host, a writer, and a producer.

Julian Hearn 1:49:37 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:49:37 And that would be it. Um, at the moment what we have is, like, a team of four writers and a team of, like, four hosts, and everyone's sort of trying to do a bit of everything, and-

Julian Hearn 1:49:43 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:49:43 ... it's, uh... whereas this would be host, writer, producer working in, like, three-week sprints to just come up with an idea, write it, film it the following week, edit it the following week, release, repeat that process.

Julian Hearn 1:49:53 Do you scope it out before you do it? Do you actually sort of-

Ali Abdaal 1:49:56 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:49:56 ... research the market, come up with a concept, think it through-

Ali Abdaal 1:49:59 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:49:59 ... or you just do work?

Ali Abdaal 1:50:00 Um, we do a bit of that.

Julian Hearn 1:50:03 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:03 Um, so we spend about a week doing the whole figuring out what's going on, competitor analysis, market research-

Julian Hearn 1:50:07 Okay

Ali Abdaal 1:50:07 ... that kind of stuff.

Julian Hearn 1:50:08 Yeah. I spend... I try to do a lot of that-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:10 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:50:10 ... 'cause I think you can think a lot faster than you can do.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:13 Yeah. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:50:13 So think.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:14 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:50:14 Spend a lot of time thinking, and I think one thing people make a mistake of is that they might think, "I want this as the- the solution. This is the right solution, and I'm gonna take six months to get to that solution."

Ali Abdaal 1:50:23 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:50:24 Well, it- but that's maybe only thinking one- one level ahead. You know, we talk about when you, you know, a good chess player would think, I don't know, six, seven, eight, nine moves ahead.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:32 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:50:32 So you've got to think about the, not the next move. You've got to think about the next six, seven moves, and I think it's far easier, like a chess player probably would, they would go through those, and what's the- what's the competitor or the alter- what's gonna happen? What's gonna come back? What's gonna be the problems? How that's gonna work, da, da, da. So if you think through all the permutations of all the things you could do, all the directions you'd do-

Ali Abdaal 1:50:49 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:50:49 ... you can think that through. A lot of thinking faster than doing it. And you might realize that is good now, but actually has boxed m- boxed me in for the future.

Ali Abdaal 1:50:59 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:50:59 So come back, go down a different path, and then that's still not right. Go down a different path, and then you hopefully will get to the- get to the right path, and then you commit to that path.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:08 Nice. Yeah, like a really solid, like, whiteboard stage. [laughs] Just, like, getting ideas on the page and-

Julian Hearn 1:51:13 I don't know how to even... I don't even use whiteboards. I just, I do sort of research the markets a lot, and sometimes you might f- Say you've got an idea. Chances are you can find somebody's done something similar.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:22 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:51:23 And if you see that idea never took off, then I'm not saying you killed that one, but it's sort of a bit of a signal, bit of a tell-

Ali Abdaal 1:51:30 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:51:30 ... that that probably there was something fundamentally not, not appealing in that idea or that, that execution. So it might be that you can iterate on it, make it better.

Ali Abdaal 1:51:38 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:51:39 But it might be that, oh, no, I've seen that. I've seen that done a few times. That's not gonna work, right? So that might help you rule out the options you've got, because when you've got a whiteboard, you've got unlimited options. There's so many things you could do. Which one are you gonna do? Which one are you gonna commit to?

Ali Abdaal 1:51:52 Yeah. Okay, so we've got, uh, Leppo who says, "With so much information overload and so many quick ways to make money on the internet, how do you find the one thing to get into?" Or yeah, how do you, how do you, how do you get started with, I guess, picking, picking your option-

Julian Hearn 1:52:05 Mm

Ali Abdaal 1:52:05 ... when there's all these options-

Julian Hearn 1:52:07 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:52:07 ... related to what we just talked about?

Julian Hearn 1:52:08 If somebody's trying to sell you a course on how to make money, that is really tricky because that might not be the right one.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:16 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:52:17 It's re- it is really tricky to know. I think, uh, I would always think niche is better than, um, the big win.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:25 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:52:25 Especially if you're very early, try and pick something very, very small.

Ali Abdaal 1:52:28 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:52:29 And that can be incredibly valuable because the competition will be less, and it's much easier to do something very bespoke, and you know where you're gonna reach that person. Trying to solve one of the world's great problems is gonna be bloody hard to do-

Ali Abdaal 1:52:41 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:52:41 ... right? So start simple, do a very simple thing, and just do it, and do it scrappy. Get it going. Get a little bit of money, because when you've got money, you can invest money in other things. So trying to pick the idea, you g- you are gonna guess. You're gonna guess, but you... I, I think it's always easier to be, uh, you know, um, what's the word? Um, scratch your own itch.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:04 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:53:05 So Huel was scratching my own itch. My first business, uh, pretty much chose that particular idea because there were some big mouths saying how much money they were earning in that category. So voucher codes, I remember there was an affiliate forum.

Ali Abdaal 1:53:19 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:53:19 Forum's a good place for doing research, and there were some people on there sort of saying how, not saying how easy it was, but just saying, "There's so much money here. Da, da, da. It's crazy. Da, da, da." And I thought, that was definitely made me dig into it deeper. I did my due diligence, my research-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:31 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:53:31 ... looked into it, and then found the opportunity to do a niche, which is just a keyword variant of what they were doing that nobody was competing with. So that gave me an easy little niche to go after. I didn't even want massive money. These guys were talking about big, big money. I didn't even need that or want that. I just wanted enough to be able to make myself self-sufficient. So I think niche down on something that maybe already exists. Um, and if it's quick and easy, test it. I think going back to Tim Ferriss, I think he's-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:56 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:53:56 ... quite keen on testing those sorts of ideas. You know, there's a-

Ali Abdaal 1:53:58 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:53:58 ... that little example. He said, if you want to test something, you put, uh, what did he say? You do an ad.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:04 Yeah, like a few d- a few dollars of AdWords behind it and-

Julian Hearn 1:54:06 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:54:06 ... see what happens. [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:54:06 You can test something quite quick.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:07 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:54:08 Or even, you know, there's, there's different ways you can run tests, but that was one of the easier ones. You set up a website. You don't even have to put check, credit cards.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:13 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:54:13 You can send people to it. You can see all the traffic. You can work out the conversion rate, da, da, da. You can do some number crunching on it as well.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:18 Definitely. Um, and final question from the Q&A, uh, Maura says, "What resources would you recommend to students who want to start a bus- business, podcast, the books, et cetera?"

Julian Hearn 1:54:27 What resources?

Ali Abdaal 1:54:28 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:54:29 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is obviously number one. Um, terms of podcasts, you mean actual, like, things that you're gonna learn from?

Ali Abdaal 1:54:35 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:54:36 So we-

Ali Abdaal 1:54:36 Nice public podcast

Julian Hearn 1:54:37 ... Uh, back in the day, I used to listen to, um, This Week in Startups. It's become more of a news program now, so you don't learn so much, I don't think. It's m- newsy. But I think the early podcasts, they were really good at talking about how you pitch a business, how you, uh, position a business. There was lots of that. Um, so that was really useful. I think there's a whole series of podcasts which have... or yeah, podcasts which have been done by Y Combinator.

Ali Abdaal 1:54:58 Oh, yeah. Startups school. They've got a whole thing as well.

Julian Hearn 1:55:01 Yeah, there's the, the... Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I'm not su- I'm not sure exactly what it is, but there's about 20 videos they did, and they're really good lectures. They are the lectures, the really early ones. I think there's a guy called S- Sam, which is one of the founders, did... It might be Startup School, I'm not quite sure, but you can probably put it in the show notes. We'll find it. That is really good stuff. Some of the first two or three podcasts they did on there, really, really good, and, you know, there's been some pretty serious businesses come out-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:24 Yeah

Julian Hearn 1:55:24 ... of Y Combinator, so they must know what they're talking about. So they were really, really influential. I think if you Google my name, Julian Hearn, bio, I think there's a list at the bottom there. There's some podcast links there, and, um, there's some really good s- there are some really good places where you've, I've learned. There's no way I would be where I am today without listening to podcasts.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:42 S- yeah, same, to be honest. Um, okay, final few rapid-fire questions that we ask, we ask everyone. Um, who's had the biggest influence on your career-

Julian Hearn 1:55:50 Well-

Ali Abdaal 1:55:50 ... would you say?

Julian Hearn 1:55:51 I would probably argue that one book, that 22 Immutable Laws. The guy's called, a guy called Jack Reis. Um, I would say without that, I wouldn't be here today, no.

Ali Abdaal 1:55:59 Oh, okay. I'm gonna get that book today. Thank you. Uh, what's one tip for someone looking for success?

Julian Hearn 1:56:04 [sighs] I think the biggest thing for tip for success is you've got to find some, this motivating thing. If you can try and find something that's gonna motivate you through the thick and thin-

Ali Abdaal 1:56:15 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:56:15 ... and it can't be just money, I don't think. If you can find something, then that is the thing that will make, drive you fu- further and faster.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:23 Nice. Um, what does the first and last hour of your day look like?

Julian Hearn 1:56:28 Um, I'm pretty simple.

Ali Abdaal 1:56:30 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:56:31 First hour's just get, [laughs] just get up. Uh, I don't really have any m- routines. I'll literally get up fast as I can, shower, get to work. That's what I typically do. Um, anything interesting in there? Not really. You come home to a nice cooked dinner. [laughs] Then the last hour, last hour, I do try and, um, sle- my sleep has never been particularly fantastic. I don't think anybody's is really. I do have one of these, um-

Ali Abdaal 1:56:58 Oh, yeah

Julian Hearn 1:56:58 ... Oura Rings. I try to monitor it, try and improve it. So I know that it's not particularly good. If I get 80, that's really good. I quite often get 60 or 70s. So I do try and be a little bit semi-strict with myself towards the end of the night. Don't eat anything late at night. Don't do, don't go on your phone too much late at night. So the last hour is pretty much probably chill time, watching TV, not too much, um, and try and get some decent sleep.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:23 Nice. Um, what material item under around about 100 pounds has, has added large amounts of value to your life?

Julian Hearn 1:57:31 Under 100. I think this is 250, I think

Ali Abdaal 1:57:33 Yeah, the ring. Do you find it useful? 'Cause I've got one, but like I don't really act on the data. It's like, oh, 80.

Julian Hearn 1:57:38 There's, there's two, there's two things I monitor on this.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:39 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:57:39 There's only two that I'm interested in. One, I try to hit... Th- th- this does a calorie count in terms of the exercise you've done.

Ali Abdaal 1:57:45 Oh, okay.

Julian Hearn 1:57:45 It's not great for like weightlifting or anything like that. It's purely just to encourage me to do steps, I suppose. So they, they do a calorie count thing on there. I try to aim for 1,000 burn per day. Uh, just an arbitrary number. Good. And then sleep score, I try to aim for sort of 70 plus. So it just keeps me a little bit aligned because, you know, I don't know without this whether I'm getting really bad sleep or really good, so at least it keeps me... I know that if I go out and I eat late at night it will be low. If I drink, it's gonna be even lower.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:11 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:58:12 So I think this has been useful. It's over 100, but I think it has been helpful.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:16 I guess the, the next question is, uh, what book would you recommend to anyone? [laughs]

Julian Hearn 1:58:19 That's probably pretty easy. I think my whole life I've read about five books. Um, but we have, we have mentioned briefly that 4-Hour Work with, uh, Work Week, that has pr- was probably, um, super influential in the early career.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:31 Nice. Um, so let's say Hu- Huel gets acquired or dies for whatever reason, and you've now, you're now back to square one.

Julian Hearn 1:58:39 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:39 You've got y- you know, you're financially set, but, um, and you, and you've got all the skills, but you wanna start a new thing.

Julian Hearn 1:58:45 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:58:45 How, how would you go about building that up?

Julian Hearn 1:58:47 Okay. So on a slightly different, um, st- uh... I'd have slightly different objectives than probably most of your, um, listeners. So in terms of me, I have sort of put a, a little bit of time into this because obviously I know that I'm, I'm 50 now, so I'm assuming I've got a certain number of years left-

Ali Abdaal 1:59:02 Mm

Julian Hearn 1:59:02 ... getting towards it. So what would I do? At the moment, I'm still 1000% committed to Huel. This is, this is, this is the sort of once in a lifetime company for me.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:10 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:59:11 So I haven't really thought what I would do post, but you do think, if Huel died, which it won't, I've got no idea what I would do.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:19 Yeah.

Julian Hearn 1:59:19 If Huel's very successful and it gives me, you know, a huge life-changing amount, that's the one that's obviously more interesting.

Ali Abdaal 1:59:25 Mm.

Julian Hearn 1:59:25 What would you do? Would you... You'd do something which I