Week 1. Eat What You Kill.

What an intense first week. Waking up excited and *barely* going to bed nervous has been the norm. The culmination of almost two years worth of blood, sweat, and well….sweat… with the official launch of Citadel Nutrition on May 14th, 2012. It wasn’t with too much fanfare as we quietly posted our Tier 1 / Jack3d comparison on one of the smaller training and nutrition forums we frequent and spent considerable time answering questions (why no Citrulline? Why not Arginine? Why don’t I just mix this myself? Why no DMAA?) It was rewarding to see that regardless of what people kept telling us initially there appears to be a market for a product without a cluster of ingredients.

After trying to move up to some of the bigger forums, we realized we’ll probably limit the time we spend on forums. It is a jungle out there. We’re going to continue contributing and recommending our product and trying to educate – but I don’t think we’ll reach our target market most effectively that way. We’re going to try to reach people slowly through word of mouth and hope they like our product and our message enough to say good things about us.

On the bright side, we sold a grand total of five bottles of Tier 1 this week and sent out what seems like hundreds of samples….slowly but surely. While that’s nothing to brag about – life tastes good when you eat what you kill. The hustle of responding back to each individual customer asking a question or requesting a sample is very rewarding. When someone pays you money for the product or service you’ve created and they let you know that it benefits them….doesn’t get much better than that. Five bottles is better than none! 

High Points this Week:

• Getting a couple positive reviews from Tier 1 on the smaller forum we frequent. Glowing feedback on taste. It is really rewarding to hear someone comment positively on something you’ve put a lot of effort into. Citadel started with us scratching our own itch and ended up spiraling into a full blown obsession. The entire week it felt like a:

• Alan Aragon liking our facebook page and giving us a compliment…Better ask somebody.

Low Points This Week

• We had counted on some of the larger forums as a platform for marketing and gaining wider exposure – but it looks like we’re going to re-think that strategy for a couple reasons:

• In order to even talk about your product as a company, you have to pay a monthly fee and become a board sponsor on many of the forums. That definitely doesn’t make sense for us right now.

• Flooded with representatives.

• People don’t really trust yet another supplement company trying to pontificate on why their product is better when they are already hammered constantly.

• We’ll try to adjust next week and let you guys know how it goes.

High points drastically outweigh the low. Everything still feels surreal. The road is long but we are prepared to work our asses off. Check back and we’ll share our experiences as we hopefully grow, formulate our small stable of products, and share interesting tidbits from the entire process and industry.