Everything Starts With the Product

Danny Yeung is the co-founder and CEO of Prenetics, the Nasdaq-listed health company behind IM8, the supplement brand he launched with David Beckham in December 2024. He was kicked out of high school in San Francisco for fighting and started cold-calling timeshare buyers at 15. He later ran a restaurant, sourced hotel furniture from China for Las Vegas casinos, and moved to Hong Kong in 2010 to start group-buying site uBuyiBuy, which sold a 51% stake to Groupon. Prenetics began as a DNA testing company in 2014, became Hong Kong's largest COVID PCR provider, then lost 95% of its revenue when the pandemic ended. These signals are from Danny Yeung's interview with Shaan Puri on My First Million.

1. Category Speed Record. IM8 hit a $100 million annual revenue run rate 11 months after launch and $200 million at 18 months. Yeung compares that with Grüns, which took 22 months to reach $100 million and sold for $1.2 billion after 3 years, and AG1, which took 10 years. Last month IM8 did $20 million in revenue. He still tells his team the milestone is good progress and nothing more: "We're just getting started."
2. Co-Founder, Not Ambassador. Beckham had turned down supplement deals for 30 years. He and Victoria found the category overwhelming and couldn't keep up a routine of 12 to 15 pills while traveling. After 3 to 4 months of conversations, Yeung pitched him as a co-founder with one condition: the brand had to outlive him. Yeung knew any failure would be pinned on Beckham, not him, so Beckham took significant precautions before agreeing.
3. Betting the Job. Prenetics' whole board opposed the move, pointing out that Yeung knew nothing about supplements and that celebrity brands fail more often than they work. He told them he would resign if he was wrong. Yeung argues only a founder could have made this call, because hired CEOs think about the paycheck and grow conservative. That's also why he stays in every key decision, whether IM8 is a $200 million or a $1 billion company.
4. Product, Then Taste. IM8's daily drink packs 90 ingredients that replace 16 separate supplements, which Yeung prices at $250 to $300 a month bought separately, for $90. He knew consumers wouldn't notice formulation quality if the drink tasted bad. So he spent a week at the factory testing 20 to 30 flavors a day until he got one people wanted to drink again. His advice to founders is to check honestly whether the product is better, because a better product makes branding, positioning and premium pricing easier.
5. Red in a Sea of Green. The formula came out red because it contains beets, and Yeung decided to "go hard" on the color. Every competitor sold a greens powder, so a reds powder stood out by default. IM8 ships in a big red box designed for unboxing. The name reads as "I am," and an 8 turned on its side is the infinity sign; 8 is also a lucky number in China, a market he planned for from the start.
6. Science as the Trust Test. Beckham isn't a scientist and neither is Yeung, so he recruited an advisory board that includes Dr. Dawn Mussallem of Mayo Clinic, former NASA chief scientist Jim Green and Cedars-Sinai microbiome researcher Suzanne Devkota. Mussallem, whom he reached on LinkedIn, was skeptical at first because supplement brands pitch physicians constantly. IM8 ran a clinical trial before launch and got third-party testing from both Eurofins and NSF Certified for Sport, which screens for 280 banned substances. The advisors also appear at IM8's live events.
7. Retention as Proof. Yeung says a brand can't reach $200 million in 20 months without recurring subscriptions, and people only keep subscribing if the product works. His best evidence came unsolicited in spring 2025. Aryna Sabalenka's team emailed to say the world number 1 tennis player had been on IM8 for 3 months on her nutrition coach's advice, had recovered well and hadn't gotten sick while traveling across time zones. Every ambassador after her came to IM8 inbound.
8. Creative Is the Targeting. Yeung calls ad buying a commodity now that Meta handles targeting itself. What's left is producing enough creative for each customer persona. IM8 keeps 2,000 to 3,000 ads live at once (about 55% to 60% static), tests 500 to 800 new creatives a week and feeds the pipeline from roughly 1,000 ambassadors and affiliates. An in-house creative fatigue score flags when a winning ad is about to decay so the team can remake it.
9. CAC Fell as Spend Doubled. IM8 doubled quarterly marketing spend from about $17 million to $33 million between Q1 and Q2. Customer acquisition cost fell anyway, from $305 to $301, against an average order value of about $230. By July CAC was $239, with monthly marketing spend above $10 million. Yeung credits a brand that's working, and he can't prove how much of it comes from offline events.
10. 200 Offline Events. IM8 has run more than 200 in-person events, including 7 in 7 days in New York, where customers meet the formulators and scientific advisors. Yeung admits events are hard to scale. He says that when people can't tell what's real online, meeting the people behind the science makes the brand more believable. He plans to keep doubling down even though he can't measure the return.
11. Call the Boss. At 15 Yeung made 100 to 200 timeshare calls a night with a 90% to 95% rejection rate, which taught him rejection is a numbers game. When a restaurant group's marketing director swore at him and hung up, he called the owner, Sandeep, who ran more than 30 Hong Kong restaurants. Sandeep told him the model wouldn't work but signed every restaurant anyway because Yeung hadn't given up. That filled uBuyiBuy's one-deal-a-day calendar for a month and brought other groups in.
12. Cut Fast When the Music Stops. In July 2020 the Hong Kong government asked Prenetics to test 300,000 workers at 18,000 restaurants in 3 weeks, so it scaled from about 200 tests a day to 10,000 and hired 2,000 to 3,000 people. Prenetics did 28 million PCR tests and more than $700 million in revenue over 3 years, with over $100 million in net profit. When COVID ended, Yeung let 2,000 people go right away. Cue Health and Lucira Health, once worth billions, overbuilt manufacturing and at-home testing and went bankrupt within about 18 months.

Watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHUMarocxy4.