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Sharrifah Al-Salem and David Firth-Eagland founded Bright Day, a startup producing pills that help prevent hangovers
It was a normal night when David Firth-Eagland did something abnormal. He’d just received a panicked cap-locked text from his wife, Christine. Minutes later, Firth-Eagland was stuffing an envelope with pills and handing it off to an Uber driver to deliver to his wife who was at a bar across town with friends.
The pills weren’t of the partying type. Quite the opposite: They were the beta version of BrightDay, Firth-Eagland’s Ph.D.-backed hangover killer.
If you haven’t heard of BrightDay, you might want to look into it before your next night of libations. A capsule of antioxidants, botanicals, amino acids and vitamins B and C, BrightDay is the product of four years of research by a team consisting of a chemistry Ph.D. and two MBAs. It’s not a magic pill, but Firth-Eagland and co-founder Sharrifah Al-Salem say if your hangover is in the “zero to eight” range, taking three of their pills before a night of drinking will help your body recover quickly.
“Essentially what we are doing is fortifying your liver with the exact elements it needs to break down toxins from alcohol. We’re helping your body with natural processes,” Firth-Eagland tells Poets&Quants on a phone call. “That being said, if you’re going to run a motorcycle at a wall, don’t be surprised if it gets broke.” Running a motorcycle into a wall is the equivalent to consuming 15 to 20 drinks, Firth-Eagland clarified.
RAVE REVIEWS FOR THE VITAMIN B-PACKED CAPSULE
But don’t take his word for it. Check out the reviews on BrightDay’s Amazon page, which was launched in January. Of its first 29 reviews, 28 were five stars. “I actually kind of hate to admit it, but this stuff seems to work,” reads the “most helpful” comment. “I am a trained Ph.D. scientist, so normally I call B.S. on this sort of thing.”
“This skeptic is a believer,” writes another. “I bought these (skeptical but hopeful) for an upcoming vacation in Mexico. I decided to try them out on tequila shots (which I normally avoid because of the extreme hangover it gives me). I had more than I usually would but when I woke up, no headache and very, very little stomach upset.”
At $36.95 per 90-capsule bottle, a serving size of three pills certainly packs a punch. One serving pumps you full of 6,000% of your daily requirement of thiamine (vitamin B1), 4,667% of vitamin B12 and 1,000% of vitamin B6. Still, Firth-Eagland maintains it’s a chemically backed enhancer of a natural process. And it very much seems he’d know.
ROUNDING OUT BUSINESS SKILLS WITH AN EMBA
“I’ve always been very sensitive to hangovers,” Firth-Eagland admits, noting he’s had a keen interest in chemistry since being an undergrad at Humber College in Toronto. “I had quite a few go-hard friends,” he says. As those friends kept going hard, Firth-Eagland zoomed through his mid-20s, and hangovers began to sting a little more with the time. “As I became older, it became something I was increasingly whiny about,” the 36-year-old says.
Meanwhile, Firth-Eagland wasn’t satisfied with his career and ability to read financial statements. Not surprisingly, with a computer science background, he spent the better part of his early career focused on tech support and operations at IBM and BlackBerry in Canada and Singapore.
“I hated not understanding as much around the financial statements or what earnings per share meant,” he says, adding he entered the UC-Berkeley Haas MBA for Executives Program with a growing chip on his shoulder. “You can Google these terms, but as I moved up in my career I grew intimidated by the aspects I didn’t know.”
‘HE USED TO TAKE PILLS ALL THE TIME AND I THOUGHT IT WAS WEIRD’
Aiming to increase his finance prowess, Firth-Eagland applied to and enrolled in Berkeley’s executive MBA program. It was in a classroom on the Northern California campus where Al-Salem noticed Firth-Eagland and some odd behavior — specifically that anytime classmates planned to go out for drinks after class, Firth-Eagland started popping pills.
“I used to sit next to Dave. He used to take pills all the time and I thought it was weird,” Al-Salem laughs. “So I asked him about it and he explained to me what it was for. I still thought it was ridiculous, I didn’t believe in it.”
But Firth-Eagland was armed with research. For about four years, he had been researching journal articles and white papers in search of a remedy to his hangover problem. What it led to was a “pre-gaming” routine akin to your grandparent’s morning prescription pill routine.
FACULTY AND CLASS PROJECTS ESSENTIAL TO PRODUCT AND BRAND DEVELOPMENT
Weirdness aside, Al-Salem, who was assigned in a group with Firth-Eagland and three others, saw an opportunity. “No one is doing this except for Dave’s weird solution,” says Al-Salem, who has a background in finance and equity research. There was no real dominant product in the space, Al-Salem explains, which made it a “fun product for our class projects.”
According to Firth-Eagland and Al-Salem, the faculty and coursework at Haas were instrumental and necessary to the development of their brand and product. Up first was an Introduction to Marketing course where their team of five flexed their digital marketing skills to build the brand and test product-market fit. After all, what better place to test a hangover cure than a B-school?
Firth-Eagland says classmates became believers when, after a night of drinking, they still were able to get up for runs at 6 a.m.
“Without that, we wouldn’t have realized what a tremendous opportunity it is from a market perspective, looking at the competitive landscape, understanding that category awareness is really low,” Al-Salem says of a marketing analysis they conducted in the marketing course. Other professors and courses became product development opportunities. They conducted customer interviews in Sara Beckman’s Innovation course and developed a finance model in Maura O’Neill’s New Venture Finance and Advanced New Venture Finance courses.
$25K IN INVESTMENTS FROM CLASSMATES
As the business model came together, Firth-Eagland worked with two Ph.D. students at UC-Berkeley to develop the recipe. He provided his own aggregated research on what he thought would work and the Ph.D. students read it over and offered suggestions. Soon they had a capsule, and Firth-Eagland began interviewing about 60 manufacturers before finding the right fit, an FDA and current good manufacturing practices-compliant manufacturer. What once was a class joke was now a full-fledged product.
“My handful of pocket pills ended up as something a lot more thoughtful,” Firth-Eagland says.
The duo sunk about $25,000 of their own money last fall to launch a site and bring the product to market. The team quickly learned a valuable lesson. “Some people want to sample it first,” Firth-Eagland concedes. So they decided to create sample packets.
One problem: they were out of money. Instead of turning to crowdfunding, they opted for a friends-and-family round. But that quickly became a classmates round that got them another $25,000, primarily from their fellow Haas classmates, to create the higher per-unit sample packets.
The big break for BrightDay came in January when they were able to go live on Amazon Prime. Al-Salem says they have enjoyed doubled revenue growth month-over-month since then. “Admittedly, we started at a low base, but we’re excited to see that it’s been a fantastic channel for us,” she says.
NOT A ‘MAGIC PILL’
Of course, the market isn’t totally barren. Products like Drinkwel, LYTEshow and After PartyPal have footholds in the market. But Al-Salem and Firth-Eagland believe their target market and go-to-market approach sets them apart. Competitors, Firth-Eagland explains, are going after the party crowd. Conversely, BrightDay is aimed at those who want to enjoy a night out and still be productive the next day — “People that say, give me that time back,” Firth-Eagland explains.
“We say, get up in the morning and go for that hike on the mountain. Have your beer at night and enjoy the morning.”
They’ve also begun establishing relationships with hotels to get the product in mini-bars, and with alcohol delivery services. Additionally, the team has been guerilla marketing at beer and wine-fests and building relationships with potential retailers.
Still, the product comes with a word of warning from its creators.
“A lot of people are very surprised the way it works so well. But it’s not a magic pill,” Al-Salem cautions. “If you’re going to drink yourself to oblivion, of course you’re going to feel like shit the next day. But the vast majority of people feel better than they would’ve otherwise.”
Perhaps the biggest skeptic was Firth-Eagland’s wife Christine, who he says was “pumping the brakes” on him considering this path, especially when their own investment was involved. The Firth-Eaglands are a family of four, and the potential risk wasn’t small. But on a four-day trip to Hawaii, Christine changed her tune — and now BrightDay’s biggest skeptic is sending frantic texts and requiring Uber drivers to awkwardly deliver envelopes of pills to the bars and restaurants of Redwood City, California.
DON’T MISS: HAAS’ BOOTSTRAPPING MBA ENTREPRENEURS or THE MBA GATEKEEPER TO BERKELEY HAAS
The post Haas EMBAs Want To Help The Hungover appeared first on Poets and Quants.
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