Today we’d like to introduce you to Jack McNamara.
Fed up with drinking sugary sports drinks, former pro hockey player, Jack McNamara, formulated TruEnergy, a sports energy shot that delivers a clean boost for anyone from elite athletes to weekend warriors.
Despite surfing couches, crashing offices and even living in a gym, Jack and his team have already funded a Kickstarter, added strategic brick and mortars, online stores like Amazon, a national distributor, and the largest vending company in New England. All in all, Team Tru has achieved 480 locations.
While playing in the top pro hockey league in Denmark, Jack McNamara participated in Copenhagen Business School’s student incubator, CSE (one of Europe’s top incubators). Following pro sports, Jack moved to NYC to participate in the Startup52 pilot accelerator and then moved on to Food-X, a global food accelerator backed by SOSVentures.
TruEnergy has been already featured in Forbes, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Startup Grind, HuffPost, Buzzfeed, and BevNet among many others while working with pro athletes from leagues like the NHL, MLL, and NFL.
In the next 3 months, the team will be launching a campaign to introduce 4 new SKU’s; TruSleep, TruPower, TruFocus, and TruRally. With this play, they hope to offer healthy herbal alternatives to the current drug solutions that inundate the market.
With the practically unregulated supplement industry infamous for its Wild West Ways, DrinkTru is changing the way people think about nutrition and performance. Despite a growing audience of consumers looking to live a healthier lifestyle, the world of supplements is deflecting trends and adopting natural ingredients at a snail’s pace.
At Tru, they are on a mission to deliver athletes and anyone looking to live a lifestyle functional products that they can truly trust as they believe real performance is the result of real ingredients.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Thus far, we have taken a jagged cobblestone road to get to where we are today. In 2015, while participating in the NYC accelerators, Startup52 and Food-X, we had some very interesting sleeping arrangements.
For Startup52, my business partner, Bobby Avakian, and I slept on a couch and mattress on a living room floor in Harlem with no air conditioning during the summer. We then moved to the Upper West Side and slept at a friend’s parents place.
Ironically, the friend wasn’t even living there. After being accepted in Food-X, we rented a cheap AirBnb in Bushwick but after realizing that the commute was an hour, we started to sleep in the office right near the New York Stock Exchange.
As we had grabbed a job at Equinox to be a front desk “greeter” in order to pay for lunch which consisted mainly of Chipotle and dollar slices, we showered at the local gym.
Upon completion of the accelerators and Kickstarter, I then moved back to my parents’ place and coached tennis and babysat on the side in order to keep working on the business full-time.
After bumping into a close friend who owned a gym within a giant warehouse, he offered me a place to live and work. I have been there ever since. All in all, I have surfed couches, crashed offices, moved back in with my parents, and lived in a gym to launch DrinkTru.
I have had large investments fall through at the last second, had multiple buyers commit to big purchase orders only to back out, and continually had to play credit card roulette in order to keep the lights on. By doing so, I have learned to find innovative ways of solving cash flow problems.
We have received demand letters from billion dollar corporations ordering us to stop the use of specific trademarks. Instead of backing down, we have decided to fight for what is rightfully ours by leaning on friends and family with the necessary experience. In one example, we had to purchase an existing mark and negotiated them down from $20k to $4k.
With much-needed press for our brand as marketing is king in beverage, we reached out to hundreds of outlets. Instead of continuing to beg contributors to hire us or hiring expensive PR firms, we started contributing to these magazines by offering valuable insights into the beverage industry.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about DrinkTru – what should we know?
The launch of the new SKU’s will make us the most functional shot company in the world. Our goal is to create herbal healthy alternatives to many of the drugs and supplements that are being abused in the country. With products for the gym, the club, the office, the bedroom, we are hoping to solve any major problem someone may face on a daily basis.
If you can’t sleep or are hungover, we have healthy solutions. If you can’t focus or need some energy, we have natural alternatives. Even if you are looking for a boost at the gym, we got you. At the end of the day, we want to be the one place everyone goes when they need to perform at their best without sacrificing their health.
I am most proud of our mindset. Other companies sacrifice for the sake of speed or money, while we will take the long route to ensure that the product we bring to market is the best possible product with the highest quality ingredients.
We have endured a lot in 3 years, but everyone involved in DrinkTru seems to enjoy being an underdog and the challenge of battling a billion-dollar brand. Despite competing against brands who have been well capitalized since day 1.
We have grinded on a bootstrapped budget without salaries for 3 years taking on unsexy gigs to pay the bills. This business is built 100% on a passion for health, nutrition, entrepreneurship, and a desire to build something great.
If we had been granted $1M to start the company, we would have failed because we would have never learned the lesson of adaptability, negotiation, and perseverance. We would have ended up with impossible COGS, launched too many products before learning the industry, and overspent on advisory services.
Being undercapitalized forced us to learn the business in and out. Rather than hire people for one-off jobs, we learned how to design our website, implement packaging changes, build out projections, track financials, manage social media, and more well rounded and adaptive as a business owner.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Although I am the only full-time person in the business today, it takes a village to raise an entrepreneur. I owe special thanks to my mom and accountant, Katie McNamara, as she has supported the dream ever since the beginning.
Whenever I have hit an especially difficult roadblock along the journey, she has always been there to provide emotional, financial, and business support. On numerous occasions, my parents have taken on great risk in order to save me and the business in dire situations.
The business would likely be dead without them. Another advisor who I will never be able to repay for his generosity is Warren Cross. A successful serial entrepreneur from Natick, Warren has advised me for the last year and a half giving me a place to live, work, and warehouse product while also advising me every step of the way without ever asking for anything in return.
Other people who have helped me include my good friend and old business partner, Robert Avakian, who dropped everything to move to NYC with me, my investors like Steve Malley, Phil Corrinet, and Wes Gardner, and the accelerators, Startup52 and Food-X, who gave me a shot.
Pricing:
- TruEnergy Drink, Healthy Energy Shot (4-Count) Amazon $12.99
- TruEnergy Drink, Healthy Energy Shot (16-Count) Amazon $39.99
Contact Info:
- Address: Tru, Inc.
19 Tech Circle
Natick, MA 01760 - Website: www.drinktru.com
- Phone: 6178339750
- Email: jack@drinktru.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drinktru/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drinktruenergy/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/_jackmcnamara
Image Credit:
Daniel André Stentz, Michael Gykiere, Nick Vigue
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