Building a Supplement Business With ADHD

What you will take from this episode

A product business can feel more scalable than a service business, but it brings a different set of delays and moving parts.
For neurodivergent entrepreneurs, allowing two to three times the expected timeline can create a more realistic plan.
AI can help organise early research, but specialist professional input still matters when developing a physical product.
Consistent social posting and testing can build momentum, even when most posts do not take off.
Knowing the difference between the main quest and a side quest helps me protect the work that matters most.

Why I wanted to share the messy version

I learn best from stories. You can give me a brilliant list of business tips for an hour and I’ll probably remember two of them, then wander off mentally to think about something else. But show me what happened, what went wrong and what someone tried next, and it tends to stick.

So this is the start of a live case study about building a supplement business with ADHD and dyslexia. Not a polished success story where everything worked perfectly. More the real version, where I had an idea, got very excited, ran into delays, and am slowly getting a physical product ready for launch.

I’m going to keep sharing what I learn over the next few months because I think there’s value in seeing the middle of a business, not just the shiny beginning or the big result at the end. If you’re building something with a dyslexic, ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent brain, you may recognise a fair bit of it.

The idea started at a loud quiz night

Last year, I was at a quiz night in a pub. It was loud, busy and too much for me. I don’t describe myself as autistic, but I do notice sensory overload, and that evening I was anxious, frustrated and not enjoying being there.

I was sitting with my wife and some other people, saying that I should create something to solve the problem. I’d tried a heap of things already and hadn’t found what I wanted, so my brain did what it often does: went straight into making mode.

I bought a lot of ingredients, probably spent more than I needed to, and made powdered concoctions at home. They looked, in my words, like something out of a Pablo Escobar movie. But I was trying things for myself and eventually landed on a mix that I felt helped me relax.

That personal experiment became the seed of Added Nutrition. The wider idea was to explore products around challenges I personally cared about, including sleep, energy and feeling calmer in overwhelming situations. It is important to say this is my experience and business story, not a promise that one approach will suit everybody.

Why a product business appealed to me

For most of my entrepreneurial career, I’ve sold services. I’ve worked across IT services, digital marketing, websites and online forms. I love tech, and those businesses have kept a roof over my head. But service businesses can be hard to scale when you’re someone who wants every piece of work to be just right.

I can get overly focused on delivering the perfect service. Then, if a team member delivers something differently to how I pictured it, I can get frustrated. Management has not been my natural strength. I can be the calmest person in the room one minute, then an erratic raccoon the next. My team have learned there are moments when it’s best to let me settle before acting on every idea I throw out.

That doesn’t mean people with ADHD are automatically bad managers. We’re all different. It means I’ve noticed that one-to-one people management can drain me, while creating, solving problems and seeing the bigger picture can light me up.

A product business felt interesting because the thing I create can be repeated. Whether I sell 100 bottles or 10,000 bottles, the product itself does not require me to recreate the full service from scratch every time. That scale was appealing, especially after years of working in service businesses.

If this push and pull between big ideas, delivery and management feels familiar, I’ve written more broadly about help for dyslexic entrepreneurs.

The first big lesson: physical products move slowly

We decided sleep would be our first focus. At the time, sleep was a major issue for me. I was struggling to fall asleep and sometimes waking at 3am without getting back to sleep. I had been experimenting with what I ate as well, and while I felt some daytime benefits personally, sleep was still a problem I wanted to explore.

The formulation process was not quick. I used AI to help pull together and organise early research in a way that would have taken me far longer in the past. But we also worked with a New Zealand nutraceutical specialist who had experience creating formulations and could check our work. That expert input was a key part of doing this responsibly.

Then came ingredients, orders from offshore, manufacturing, labels and working around other people’s schedules. Every stage took longer than I expected. We had hoped to launch around Black Friday 2025. By May 2026, we were instead preparing for a likely June launch.

That is the reality of a physical product business. You are dealing with materials, supply, manufacturing capacity, labelling and shipping. You can’t just press publish like you can with a website. There are more dependencies, and any one of them can slow the whole thing down.

My practical rule now is to allow two to three times the timeline I first imagine. I know that sounds a bit grim, but it has helped me. Neurodivergent thinkers can see the finished thing incredibly clearly in our heads. The gap is that reality contains many more steps, people and bumps than the mental picture did.

Sleep is a big topic for plenty of adults with ADHD and dyslexia, and I’ve also shared more of my own thinking in my sleep supplement journey.

Illustration showing the many slow stages of developing and launching a physical product.

Getting close to launch does not mean the work is over

At the point of recording this, our first 950 bottles were coming off the line. We were working on Amazon listings and preparing to send product into Amazon FBA in the United States, where Amazon would distribute it for us.

Even that final stretch has its own delays. Labels need to be ready. Product needs to be sent in. Amazon needs time to receive it. The goal is to be properly up and running well before Black Friday, even if that means we are one year later than our original hope.

It can be tempting to think business owners have it easy or that launching a brand is simply setting up a page and taking orders. At any real scale, there are a lot of unglamorous steps behind the scenes. The mental work is not only creating the idea. It is staying with it when the idea has turned into a spreadsheet, a shipping issue and another email thread.

This is also why I don’t think being late automatically means you’ve failed. Sometimes you were simply optimistic at the start, especially if you have an ADHD brain that wants the exciting version to happen immediately. I’m learning to be more realistic without losing the excitement that got me started.

One social post reminded me why consistency matters

While the product has been slowly making its way towards launch, we have been building social channels. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are a big part of how people discover brands now, so we have been testing a mix of product content and memes that speak to an ADHD audience.

Most of it has been testing. Trying things, learning what connects and encouraging my technically capable team to get more creative with social. Going viral is not a button you press, which is mildly inconvenient when you have an impatient brain.

Then, over a weekend, one meme went off. It reached around 650,000 views and brought roughly 700 people into our database. Our Facebook following moved from about 290 people towards 1,000. For a new brand, without buying fake followers or bots, that felt like a real result.

Could you look at 650,000 views and say 700 followers is not much? You could. But I’d rather have people who have looked at what we are doing and chosen to follow because they are genuinely interested. That is more useful than a page full of numbers that do nothing.

The biggest lesson wasn’t that one post fixed everything. It was that the post only happened after months of showing up, testing ideas and posting things that did not hit in the same way. Consistency creates the conditions for the occasional breakthrough.

For more conversations that are honest about adult dyslexia, ADHD and everyday life, have a look through the adult dyslexia podcast.

You can also browse the full podcast library when you need a topic that meets you where your head is at that day.

Illustration of adult entrepreneurs building momentum through consistent creative experiments.

Keep the main quest visible

I still go off on tangents. I still lose concentration. I still have side quests. I don’t think the answer is trying to remove every side quest from my life, because some of them become valuable ideas or teach me something useful.

What has improved is my ability to tell the difference between a side quest and the main quest. The main quest in this case is getting a product launched, building an audience that cares and learning how to create a sustainable product business. A side quest might be fun, creative or even worthwhile, but it cannot be allowed to knock the important plates off the table.

I think of it like spinning plates on my fingers. I am getting better at knowing which plates matter most, which can wait and which can fall without causing a disaster. That is not perfection. It is simply being more conscious of my attention.

If you are still working out whether dyslexia might be part of your own picture, the free adult dyslexia quiz is a straightforward educational next step.

Building slowly still counts as building

Building a supplement business with ADHD and dyslexia has reminded me that a clear idea is only the start. The real work is handling the long middle: expert checks, supply delays, labels, listings, marketing tests and the moments when you really wish it would all move faster.

I’m not pretending I have perfected consistency, management or focus. I haven’t. But I am clearer on the work that matters, and I’m more willing to give a real-world project the time it needs.

If you’re building something of your own, try this: write down the main quest for the next month, then add more time than your first instinct says you need. Keep showing up for the basics. The occasional big win is great, but it usually has a lot of quieter work behind it.

Read the full episode transcript

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Dyslexic Entrepreneur. In today's episode, I want to do a live case study on a business that I'm building. I know for me personally, I learn from hearing stories and people can talk at me all day long with great ideas and I'll pick up maybe two of them out of an hour. What I wanted to do was actually share what's working for me, what I'm trying to work on myself, and a business that I started last year that's only just starting to wake up, all to do with ADHD, nutrition, supplementation and that cool kind of stuff. So today I'm going to talk about the back story about where we got to last year and where we are today. So let's get into today's podcast.

Well, we're to begin. This is an interesting story, this one. And just to be aware, I'm going to try and I'm going to kind of stick to this genre, I think for the next two to three months each week, share a bit about it and try and draw stories that I think can help dyslexic and ADHD business owners to succeed because these are things that are happening to me in real time. And so, so this episode is me kicking it off. So last year I was sitting at a pub or a bar, depending where you are in the world. And I was at a quiz night and I was a bit stressed out.

Like I, I don't have, I wouldn't class myself. I'm not autistic, but I definitely have sensory issues with overload. And I was sitting at this bar and I was getting really nervous and just, I wasn't liking it. It was too loud, I was anxious and I was just frustrated and I kind of was sitting there just chatting with my wife and some other people and saying I should just create a supplement to, to solve this. You know, I'm sure there's different things in and around. I'd tried a heap of them and they hadn't really worked.

So I was like, OK, why don't I think about creating something for me and my ADHD anxious brain? So, you know, knowing me, I bought a lot of different ingredients, spent probably way too much money. I could have probably found something else, but I didn't. You know, that's the ADHD dyslexic mind working at full speed. And I started making these white powdered concoctions. It looked like something out of a Pablo Escobar movie.

I was really all in on trying all this different stuff, and I kind of came up with a concoction that worked. It chilled me out, really relaxed me. And I was like, wow, this is cool. Now for my whole entrepreneurial career, I've sold products for other companies for for clients, but I've never owned a product brand. I've always been in the service industry from different a lot of IT services like there's from digital marketing to websites to online form creation and stuff like that. I've always been looking at tech.

I've loved tech all my life, but there's a part of me that you get to a point when you're in a service business and I love my service businesses. It's the one that keeps my keeps a roof over my head and I do well at it. But it's it's tougher, it is really much tougher in some ways to sell services, especially with dyslexia and ADHD, because you kind of focus on trying to deliver an over perfect service even when you know you shouldn't. And whenever your team don't deliver that you get frustrated. And if you're not naturally a good manager, which is not my skill set. And if I'm honest, many ADHD people are not great managers.

We have a lot of other good facets, but managing people 1 to 1 is not always our best strength because we're a lot more shoot at the hip. We're kind of like we can have moments where we're the calmest person in the room and we can have moments where we are erratic raccoons is what I've found in my life. And so sometimes my team like love me and sometimes my team are like, he's in the he's in that mode. We're just going to ignore him. And, and, and that's actually the way it has to work, right? And so service businesses for me personally, I've struggled to scale it.

I've struggled to allow myself to scale it, even though I probably have the skill set, I just haven't really enjoyed it. So like, don't get me wrong, I'm, I haven't, I have very happy with my financial situation, but I'm, I'm also not, I'm not sitting at the table with multi billionaires either kind of thing. And So what I thought is, you know, this type of supplement business could be a great foray into a product business to actually have products that could scale. Because whether I'm selling 100 bottles or 10,000 bottles, if I apply a skill set to a product, it, it becomes scalable. Something I do well scales and so that there's really enticing. The second key piece was, you know, I've always been in the dyslexia, ADHD space.

I'm such a big advocate for understanding your neurodiversity and understanding what makes you up because it's actually what in my opinion, sets you free. However cheesy that sounds, it's, it's the truth. And so I was like, OK, this could really be, I get a product business, I get to solve one of my problems, which is anxiety at things like quiz night and sleep was the other massive 1 and then also wake up energy. Do I need that? And, and like, these are the three things. And you're starting to see different brands pop up with different success rates.

And I was like, why can't I do something? I, I'm a great product developer. I take a lot of time. I'm a perfectionist and the benefit with a product as you can really be a perfectionist to a point and really decide what you want. And I'll do other podcasts on the whole manufacturing experience and everything that's come along the way. But the goal of added new and then we call it added nutrition.

By the way, I wanted to see if I could sneak ADD into the name legitimately so it kind of without saying it because legally we can't say certain things, you know, we I wanted it to kind of stand out in a cool way that's just trying to be creative. So we call it added nutrition and we sat down to give her, me and my business partner and some other people and we decided that sleep was our first kind of challenge. We said, OK, what have we created? A sleep supplement, something that would help us, you know, help help me go to sleep because that was my killer at the time I was doing keto, which was working really, really well for my brain in the daytime. I actually had more energy than ever. And I can't recommend keto enough.

If you can stick to it keto or carnivore, whichever suits you. You know, cutting out a lot of like glucose, blood sugar, Sprite stuff like really helped my guts and helped a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't helping my sleep. I was still, I was still not able to fall asleep quickly. I was finding myself up at 3:00 AM and I wasn't getting back to sleep after that and I was in a real bad space. And so sleep became the one that was a game changer. I needed to sort it out.

And so I, I decided to go, OK, how do I create this now this day and age, I was kind of the benefit of this business and what I'm going to try and teach you guys as I go forward is how I've also used AI to supplement this. I give if the old days maybe were 10 years ago, I definitely would have Googled ingredients, but it would have taken me so much work to pull together a formula. You know, we actually ended up getting a neuro. I was going to say neuroscientist, but a pharmacist, a nutraceutical is the terrible words a new nutraceutical specialist in New Zealand who's made heaps of formulations to check all our work and between using AI and him, we built a bunch of different test kind of panels of of supplement to trial. Now they can be really tough building those type of supplements and getting getting those individual ingredients. I'm not going to lie, it's a lot of work and to actually, you know, it just it takes a lot of time.

You know, with ADHD you kind of want things to move quicker. Why I kind of like the IT space is things can move pretty fast reasonably, you know, probably doesn't move as fast as I want, but it still moves very fast. When it comes to product businesses, what I've learned in this last year is my gosh, things move a lot slower. Physical movement of product, it takes time. And so you know, it took us longer than we expected to come up with a formula. We had to order in some of the some of the ingredients from offshore.

We had to bring them in. We then had to find time with our huge surgical guy to pull it together and everything took longer. Like we were hoping to launch this on Black Friday 2025 and you know, me doing this podcast in May of 2026 and we're just gearing up for our launch in most likely June. It's like, it's, that's how crazy it was. Like, and I'm a great fan. I always teach people in entrepreneurship when you're near diverse is 2 to 3X the time you think something will take.

So when we first started, I was like, this will take six months to launch. And at the same time I was like, that's going to take 12 to 18 months to launch the first one. Like I was saying in the back of my head, there's always a part of you that's hoping that you're wrong and it'll be 6 months and smooth. It never, it just never is. I just, I, just, for me, I've just never had that luck. Maybe others have, but for me, it doesn't work that way.

So whenever you're doing something, allow yourself that buffer of two to three times your expectation. Because many neurodivergent thinkers can create stuff so clearly in our brains that we think that just translates to reality like that when there are so many more bumps. We had issues with labels, supply and manufacture. Like America, let's be honest, has been in a bit of turmoil with different crazy government rules that keep changing left, right and center. It hasn't made things easy, should we say? And we're going to launch this in the USA because it's a bigger market.

It's got much more of our target market. And so you know we've been working with manufacturers over there to actually create the product over the last nine months. It sounds crazy, it's taken nine months, but we're finally at a point where we've got product at the end of the line and we're just at the moment rushing to get our Amazon listings all up and to get the product into Amazon's FBA. So Amazon are going to distribute it through America for us. We've got our first 950 bottles going in there and then it's about selling and marketing the product. And as I say over the coming, like maybe next week, I'll talk about main the manufacturing process in more detail because there's some real lessons I think for neuro divergent thinkers in them that if you do it right, you know, there's some things I would have done differently.

And I think they apply to heaps of different business models, whether it's an online business with products or services or offline product businesses, Lots of stuff that you can learn about working with manufacturers stuff. Just just read this realistic stuff. And so, you know, Long story short, and again, I will go back into those and other podcasts. Where we are today is we've got the product off the line. One of my team who I've handed the responsibility of getting us set up on Amazon is doing a great job. But again, things are taking time.

I can't wish it was like, just snap your fingers and you're on Amazon. Sadly, it's not the case. Anyone who thinks setting up a business is remarkably easy and business owners don't have it hard, they don't know how it works, It's so much tougher to really get things running, especially at this scale. And you know, but we're nearly there. We're hoping to this week have the labels so we can start sending product into Amazon, which will take two to three weeks, we hope. I think we're at a reasonable time of the year to be bringing a product to market when we're trying to get in there really, really prepared.

So Black Friday we can, we'll be ready up and running and flying, which which this year we should be able to meet. It's just one year late. So that's been big. And I guess what kind of got me thinking about doing this case study is, is I wanted just to share a little story that happened to us over the weekend. Because when we first set this up a year ago, give or take, we set up our Facebook page or Instagram or TikTok and we started posting different things because social media is a big part of whatever you do these days. Like, I still think it's a massive medium that's required.

And we've been posting, we've been trying to post different things, we've been testing different stuff, you know, a mixture of product stuff and memes that are talking to our ADHD group, our ADHD market, because we know if we can get into the ADHD market, we can get more followers in that space. When it comes to selling, we know we can use that audience to sell more too. And so the key has been how can we start to break down and get things going? You're welcome to go to add a nutrition's Facebook page. You have a little search, you'll find it or make sure it's in the in the show notes that you can have a click. I really appreciate all the likes if you want to follow this business growth.

But like what was really great is we put up this one of my team. I've been trying to inspire them to get creative with social and if I'm honest, they're good technically, but trying to learn how to pick stuff that goes viral is not always easy. But they finally had a hit over the weekend and I was just watching it and it ended up getting 650,000 views on this meme that we put up. It got something like 2000, I want to say 2000 shares. Maybe it's 2000 com somewhat ridiculous, like it just went on fire and it gave us what it really did was add 700 people to our database, which is what we wanted. We wanted to add 700.

We wanted to add like we were sitting at about 290 odd followers and now we're just they're just about to hit 1000, which is huge. When you're a brand new brand and you don't have money to you don't want to. I don't want to buy a fake followers from Bangladesh. I'm not going to lie. I don't have any interest in buying bots that sit on a Facebook page. That was something people used to do in the old days and it was pointless.

What we've done here is we've bored people with ADHD because no one is following us unless they have got some interest in this brand. And like, when you think about it, you might go actually 700 followers based on 600 thousand 50,000 views isn't much. And I agree. And and I think the benefit of that is that you're only really getting people who have done a little look at your page and go on, Oh yeah, I should follow these guys. That sounds like what I might be interested in. So that's that's like the power of this.

And so one little free post that went well after months of trialing stuff has gotten us a really great result just at the right time. But if we hadn't done all that work up until this point, we might not have had this hit. Some people have it the other way where they get the hit really early on and something goes really well and then they take another six months to get their next hit. But what what I would tell you in business and what I'd want you to take away today from this lesson is consistency is what makes you money long term. And it's taken me years to get in to realize that it's taken me. It took me years to realize that.

And then when I realized that it took me years to perfect consistency. And if I'm honest, I haven't perfected it. I still go off on tangents. I still lose concentration. I still have side quests that I go on and I understand my brain now and I understand the value of those. I'm also much better picking my side quests, you know, so that they don't interfere with the main quest.

I'm always conscious of what the main quest is versus the side quest. And I think that's valuable. But as I've gotten better, the core consistency is right. It's kind of like spinning plates on your fingers. I now know which plates to spin and which plates can crash and what plates are the important ones to not lose. Does that make sense?

So that's what we see today. Guys, if you're interested in this, if you, if you want to follow along on a case study of a business being built, stick around. I appreciate any shares follows. You know, I really appreciate people, you know, give us give me feedback on what you think. If you've got any questions, if there's something you would like to know about this type of business, I'm happy to share everything I know That's what I'm here for. Follow along on the journey.

You can find me on LinkedIn as well under Steven Martin, Steven with APH and yeah, under the dyslexic entrepreneur. Have a fantastic rest your day guys and I'll be back next week. Thank you for listening to today's podcast on the truth about dyslexia. If you're looking for a group of awesome humans to help you with ADHD, dyslexia and the neurodivergent brain, maybe the Right Brain Resetters is for you. You can find us@rightbrainresetters. com and for just $7.

00 a month you can join our amazing group where you'll get Q&A's. You're going to get little mini courses and heaps of stuff. It's way more value than you will invest in joining, so make sure you hit to rightbrainresetters. com and we'll put the link in the show notes.

Building a Supplement Business With ADHD and Dyslexia: A Live Case Study