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Deep Dive with Ali AbdaalTurning £500 into £350 Million - Oliver Cookson, Founder of MyProtein
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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
From manual buckets to a sellable brand: Oliver Cookson’s Myprotein journey
- Oliver Cookson recounts building Myprotein while working full-time, doing everything from coding a custom e-commerce site to manual manufacturing and fulfillment in the earliest days.
- He explains Myprotein’s differentiation as selling whey protein online as a vertically integrated brand, including early personalization options and rapid product launches enabled by in-house control.
- He describes acquiring customers from day one via Google AdWords and a key foothold in the MuscleTalk forum community through an early “sticky post” promotion and strong value proposition.
- He reflects on the psychological reality of entrepreneurship and wealth, describing lonely “dark days,” jealousy dynamics, and the post-exit void that money doesn’t automatically solve.
- He outlines how he professionalized the business for sale—building processes, hiring directors to cover weaknesses, and navigating deal dynamics that shifted from minority PE plans to a clean offer from The Hut Group.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSustaining intense work came from focusing on the next moment, not the whole mountain.
He describes being “in the moment” as the only sustainable way he managed extreme workloads—treating progress “moment by moment” rather than being overwhelmed by the full picture.
Myprotein started as a “do it better and cheaper” play, powered by vertical integration and online distribution.
He didn’t try to invent whey protein; he saw a margin opportunity and paired it with an online, vertically integrated model he believed others weren’t executing as a brand at the time.
He advocates MVP-first validation—especially for people without financial runway or support.
He emphasizes doing calculated risks because he lacked capital, mentors, investors, and family backing, and recommends getting a test product out while still studying or working to validate traction.
Early scrappiness worked because he paired manual fulfillment with automation where it mattered.
Cookson explains the early operation was extremely manual (hand-mixing powders in buckets) but made scalable through custom backend systems like works orders and algorithms that removed the need for constant calculation.
Initial growth came from performance marketing plus niche community credibility.
He attributes day-one customer acquisition to Google AdWords and an early community channel: a “sticky post” on the MuscleTalk bodybuilding forum with a strong offer and price advantage.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe mental health of an entrepreneur is something that gets overlooked, and look, we... Everyone thinks we're all strong and we're all okay and we're making money and all the rest of it. And, you know, sometimes it doesn't work out that way.
— Oliver Cookson
Because I didn't, I was still 100% shareholder. I had, didn't have anyone to lean on. Um, I had no mentors, no chairman, et cetera, et cetera. So it was a very, very lonely, very, very lonely space.
— Oliver Cookson
Fear is a liar. I've coined that one a few times.
— Oliver Cookson
However, if you get that bucket and throw it on the rocks every two seconds for centuries or millions of years, it'll erode the rocks. And you know, that's... that... With patience, water can erode rocks. With patience and pers- perseverance, you can ch- do anything.
— Oliver Cookson
Be reasonably unreasonable.
— Oliver Cookson
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SPEAKERS
Ali Abdaal
hostDoctor-turned productivity creator and entrepreneur, host of the “Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal” podcast.
Oliver Cookson
guestEntrepreneur and founder of Myprotein, who grew and sold the business after bootstrapping it from a small overdraft.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
