Why you should listen –
Andy Hnilo is a familiar face on Bulletproof Radio. The model, actor, and fellow biohacking geek has appeared on the show two times in addition to today, telling the story of his incredible car-accident recovery and how it led to his skincare business Alitura Naturals. On this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave and Andy talk about tips for having great skin, advice for growing a business, personal diets and routines, motivation, customer service and more. Enjoy the show!
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Andy: To this day that was … I can only remember too much because it was just so overwhelming. I was on an in-flight back from Orlando. I got that little Gogo inflight. Every time I refresh my Yahoo browser because on your podcast I gave up my personal email address. I didn’t have a website or anything. Alitura was not even born. It wasn’t anything. It was just like, “If you guys are interested in my product, contact me.” I had enough for like … I had dozens of pounds of each ingredient. I was just running around town. The orders were flying in but also emails were flying in from people just saying how they responded to the story. I was going to my local whole foods to the bulk section getting those bulk containers. Filling them up, handshaking them, going to FedEx, printing out that label. It was just Time New Roman font Alitura and we finally got a website. We had to go just like that. People reaching out to me and saying, “They like the product.” People were saying the same thing to you. It just went from there step by step just building things like the packaging, the labelling, hiring, doing the proper. We scaled up, tried it on your site and things were history.
Andy: Yeah, clearly. This is such a bonus to be able … I don’t take any of that granted being able to run, work out, shoots. I post pictures where I’m stoked to be here. To have a product, to have a business that … the emails that I get from people that counteract their acne and just overall sense of wellbeing before they wake up in the morning. You cannot put a price on that. That’s…uh… wind out of my sails, that’s impossible to do. I’m human believe me. I understand that it can happen. I do get down sometimes. I have emotions but as far as taking the wind out of my sails with this product, I’m incredibly motivated and driven to … I love the success that its having but it’s nowhere near where I want it to be. It’s just constantly every day I have a plan to do something to continue to grow my company and to make sure that every single part of the business is perfect. It’s a flat out obsession of mine. With that said it’s like any noise that comes in, you really can’t … there’s an obsessive amount of tunnel vision that I have towards what’s the next step. It’s always what’s the next step. It’s just tough if certain situations come in where difficult situations or difficult decisions have to be made, like I said its more of those things. Maybe its athletic background or what but you find a way to handle it and you get it done and you execute and move forward. Earlier when I said I do my best to keep it simple. That’s what I’m truly trying to do. We are only 15 months into this so maybe next year it’ll be a little different. Right now I have a set of products that I need to get out that same day. I need to stay on top of fulfillment. I need to make sure that I continue … my moisturizer took 22 tweaks. We’ve processed one return off that since December and I didn’t even know how to do it. It was through PayPal like I couldn’t do it through Shopify. I had to like PayPal personally. It was crazy but it’s kind of funny that way. It’s like you spend your time to make a perfect product. You let the customer speak for themselves and then you just stay on top of fulfillment and then bring others on who are going to help expand your brand that I know nothing about as far as digital marketing, search engine optimization, things that are already helping. Like you said if it’s something that I’m not good at, I’m extremely aware of my strengths and weaknesses and like let’s bring them on board. Let’s grow this thing. I really think the mission behind it is something that people responding to and like you said in the story of how Alitura was created.
Dave: You said something else in there too like what it does to motivation when you get those emails from customers. When you’re listening to this, if you think it doesn’t matter if you leave a positive review or a negative review, I’ll tell you Andy and I we read those reviews every one of them. As you get bigger it’s harder to do that but I still do it. When you send those emails and you take the time to like, “Hey this changed my life.” You’re actually directly helping an entrepreneur when you do that. If you’re like, “Oh I’m having a bad day so I’m going to go out and crap all over some entrepreneur’s product or something like that.” You got to look in the mirror and ask yourself why you’re doing that. You put everything into it when you start a company like that. I guaranty that if you emailed Andy, at his email address that he put up before or its customer service and stuff and said, “I have a problem.” You’re going to get an answer to it. You go into a public forum and like “This stuff did blah, blah, blah.” but there’s probably a reason for it. The average entrepreneur, we’re here to help. You can help as someone listening when if you really like something if you take 10 seconds to say you like it, actually it motivates.
Andy: Exactly. If it works, it’ll work. I’ve been very … if it works and it sounds great people will reach out to you or you can reach to them. It goes both ways. Just be tasteful about it. If they are your friends they’ll be there for you. Like I said I have a great network of people that I would do anything for. It sounds like the people that reach out to me, the people have always want to work with and that’s the important thing. They’ve reached out to me and then want to come forward and here we are in the same team. That’s how it worked out with me and just going from like you said from the modeling and entertainment industry stuff to “Hey look I’m also really passionate about health, nutrition, skin care.” That was one of my strengths. That’s one thing that you can control is going into that audition room and looking like your pictures. This mask, I would look identical to. A lot of guys have to put on makeup or they don’t eat right or they don’t take care of their skin so they don’t look like their pictures when they go into that audition room. When you go into an addition room it separate yourself from the other guys or in the casting director’s room because you look like your picture. You look healthy and the mask was one thing that I would do religiously to maintain that. I just took that and people, “What’s the mask you do?” Just post by post turn into order by order turn into where it is now. People started to gain knowledge. It wasn’t just in the entertainment industry but I was also really passionate about health, nutrition, overall wellbeing and the accident really helped because a lot of people, bless their hearts, really cared about my health and how I get back and that means a lot to me. It was my responsibility to just give knowledge whatever knowledge may be on what helped me recover skin care wise, health, I’m just here. That’s my bonus.
What You Will Hear
- 0:00 – eHarmony
- 1:43 – Cool Fact of the Day
- 2:07 – Introducing Andy Hnilo
- 7:15 – The clay mask
- 9:25 – Colostrum – “Mother’s Milk”
- 11:09 – The psychology of entrepreneurship
- 22:25 – Bringing friends into your business
- 28:23 – Motivation from customers
- 33:40 – Approaching tough business decisions
- 42:46 – Taking in partners
- 48:44 – Andy’s new personal routine
- 1:00:49 – Top 3 recommendations for a new entrepreneur to kick ass
Featured
Alitura Naturals
Alitura Naturals on Facebook
Alitura Naturals on Instagram
Andy Hnilo on Facebook
Andy Hnilo on Instagram
Andy Hnilo on Twitter
Resources
Colostrum
Pearl powder
American ginseng
Intermittent fasting
eHarmony (promo code: januarylove)
Bulletproof
Bulletproof on iTunes
Bulletproof on YouTube
Bulletproof Diet
Bulletproof Coffee
Bulletproof Cookbook
Bulletproof Coffee Upgrades
Source: Bulletproof
