What I Learned Manufacturing a Product With ADHD and Dyslexia

Welcome to the Dyslexic Entrepreneur. In today's episode, we're going to continue going through my journey to launching a supplement, and we're going to talk about manufacturing and shipping and delivery and all this weird stuff that I've learned and all of the challenges I just really want to offload. But I think a lot of this will help you understand how it works when you're setting up a business like this. The fun things, the hard things, where my dyslexic brain helps me and where it hurts. So let's get into today's episode. OK, So if you're listening to this, maybe you've listened to the previous two episodes where I've talked about the Added Nutrition brand and added sleep.

You can find us the Added nutrition. com. Now this is our brand that's designed to be talking to ADHD thinkers like myself and others who have struggled with a bunch of things we're initially focusing on. Sleep is this has been the biggest lever in my life. As I've improved it for myself, it has changed the game for me. So it makes sense that we try and bring together a supplement that helps.

Now I started this journey, I want to say about a year ago, give or take maybe just a touch over a year ago. I was sitting at the pub, had this great idea and I wanted to kind of de stress myself at the pub itself or the bar when when I went to these quiz nights where it was hyper loud. Started going through this journey of creating something. And then I decided, why couldn't I make this into a real product that helped more people than just myself? And so this is where we got to now. What have I learned over the period?

So when you're, when you're creating a product, I've, I've done, I've worked in service businesses all my life. I've created web design agencies, tech companies. I've always played in a quite a small bubble. I've always made more money than the average person, but I've never really shot for the stars. Like that's just not the way I am. If I'm honest, I enjoy life too much.

I'm quite, if I'm honest, I'm really lazy. My brain is lazy. I'm lazy. I, I feel like it's a kind of an ADHD dyslexic thing. My, my executive function just gets overloaded quickly and I need more rest and recovery than some people do. And, and I've kind of accepted that I'm literally actually recording this while I'm having half a nap, you know, at home in the afternoon because I'm just tired from a busy morning.

I woke up real early, started working early and I thought, do you know what? I want to record my podcast and talk about what I'm experiencing at the moment. And so that's kind of why I got into this and so went down this path of looking at sleep supplements. I started by hiring, I actually decided to hire a specialist to help me formulate this. This is my first day of a product and probably what I learned from that is my God, Claude and Chachi BT and a bit of a brain can really work something out yourself. Like I basically created 80% of the formula, 90% of it, and this pharmacist really just backed up that I was right, tweaked a few things.

It was good to give me some perspective on how things hit the road and how things actually work. So they they kind of made sure I wasn't going too far off track. They gave me a couple of good ideas. So, you know, one thing we've done is we've added a probiotic to our sleep supplement and they were very good at helping us work out what that could be. And the benefit of probiotic is it works really well overnight. And for many people with ADHD, we have gut issues.

And so if you can start to seed valuable probiotics, not only does it make everything absorb better, it actually can make your gut track work in a better way, which is quite exciting. And so, you know, I can talk about the supplement itself. It's in another podcast. But you know, this whole journey was new to me. Like I always kind of, I always say this on, you know, talking about entrepreneurship and ADHD. We always think things will happen quicker.

In my mind, we started in May last year and I was so sure that we were going to be launching by November that we will be launching 100%. I was like, we're so going to be launching at at Black Friday 2025. That's what's going to happen. And as I'm sitting here at the end of May 2026, you can tell that didn't happen, right? So first and foremost, it took a lot longer to formulate what I wanted. So we, the nutritionist was really helpful for us, was able to create samples.

I didn't really have the skill set to create proper samples. And he was able to do that. And that was good. I got to test it and see it working and make sure it actually worked for me and we could test some interesting ingredients. So I kind of created this really cool formula. I loved it and and that was a big, big piece of it.

And that took us longer than we thought because ordering all of the actual minute ingredients, especially when you live in New Zealand where I'm based, takes a little bit of work. I'm not going to say, you know, it just felt like it took forever. And I think the hardest thing when you're a dyslexic ADHD kind of entrepreneur is like you, you have all this energy built up to do something. And when I first started this, I created the website, which I think looks good. All the branding, I put the energy in with a team and I love our branding. Like I really love it.

We did all of this hard work and then you hit a roadblock where everything slows down and you just can't push it. I can't, I couldn't push it any faster. I can't like get on. I'm not going to get on a plane. I can't. I could have, but I'm not going to get on a plane, fly to whatever country I need to get ingredients from and bring them back.

It just wasn't happening. So I had to wait for the world to catch up. And that took longer. And then once we, you know, by the time we finally got everything signed off, it was probably, it was probably late October into November and I had to finalize my manufacturer, which again, I talked to 3 or 4. Pricing across all of them was so different. Everyone was so different at the time of doing this.

We were going through, I think part of Trump's tariff craziness. And so trying to work out is a cheaper to send from New Zealand. Should we make it in New Zealand and send them over to the US? Should we manufacture in the US? What should we? You know, there's so many questions and if you've ever not done a product business before, it can be tough to make a decision.

So we finally decided to manufacture in the US. We found a company in North Carolina of all places. So like we're we're a company that's set up in Wyoming. We've got online U. S. bank accounts, we're produced in North Carolina and we're shipping out of Chicago now just I'll get to that point shortly.

But you know, we decided to do it all in the Usus just has a bigger market. New Zealand is really small. I love it dearly, but we're a little country and when you're when you bring a product that's needs to go to a big audience, the US is just such a good location. So we set up our company, we got all that done. We packed our manufacturer and I did what I did decide to do was print our labels in New Zealand and then send them over. Oddly, even with tariffs, that was actually cheaper.

So, so that was a really interesting learning lesson. So we printed 3000 labels, got them all the way to North Carolina, took a little while. And just as we're about to, to actually start, it took us two or three months to get all the labels. Once the Christmas holidays had gone, all this stuff that happened, we're probably about three months after we decided the manufacturer. So we get these labels there and the manufacturer comes to us and says we can't get the capsules we promised you. And So what what's happened is that changes.

We can use another type of capsule, which is great, but it changes the label information. It actually changes it. So we have to actually print new labels and send them over. And I was just like, I was like, not in tears, but I was just like so disheartened by that just because everything takes time. So we had to, we had to decide to do that, change the actual copy on the labels, get them, sort of tweak the design, get them reprinted and then send them over. And so like that takes a while.

And then DHL just decided to slow down and be really terrible. There was there was a Frank from memory, there was winter storms or something. And so things arriving, it was like a riot. It arrived in like snow and it was they finally got the labels, finally went through production. And you know, as I'm on this call, they produce the the the supplements. We've currently got some coming on their way to New Zealand.

The rest are going to go to Chicago. Now, originally when we decided to start this out like, so we've got all these pills, all these supplements sitting there and we were going to sell them through Amazon, but I don't know about you, but Amazon, my God, try and get an Amazon take so much work, you know, and we was trying to, we got stuck trying to sort out our branding and our trade marking, which took us longer than we needed to. Everything was painful. And so we decided to make the call to actually sell direct to market. So cut Amazon out and sell from our own Shopify website only to kick us off. And so we just got off the call actually this morning finding a three PL.

provider. These guys are in Chicago. They're able to take our stock in early next week, and there's a chance we might be able to start selling this in the next week. You know, actually could actually be on sale in the next week, which would be amazing. It feels kind of crazy even to say that just because of how long this has taken. But yeah, I was just kind of, I was thinking like, I want to share some lessons in this whole process because, you know, in things that I see from the ADHD dyslexic point of view, and I've mentioned a few of these.

One again, I can't stress enough, things are going to take longer than you think. Make sure you really want to do something before you start and realize you're going to have fluctuations on motivation. I'm very lucky that I'm doing this with a business part, a couple of partners or a business partner and a staff member. The staff member is much more meticulous than I am and she's much more an operator. So she's operating the business day-to-day and doing a great job and that's really helpful. She's sitting through filling in a lot of forms that I would just like jump off a bridge, mind my language there, but I would not be happy to do.

I would my brain just sometimes when I think about filling in forms, I just like will will not do it. I just hate it so much. And so finding people who can do the stuff you don't want to do is great. The second thing I've learned over time is, is AIAI is such a tool at the moment. And if you've got a big thinking ADHD brain or dyslexic brain, use it to help you and support you. My gosh, it can do things that you know, can really make businesses viable for people where I just couldn't see them owning a business or having a business.

AI can really be the team member many people have always needed, so I can't stress enough about learning it. I'm thinking of putting together a bit of a course on it if I'm honest. I just think it's so hyper valuable it's a no brainer. But yeah, use it for whatever you're doing. It doesn't have to be a supplement business. This is just what I'm sharing my experience with.

Also thinking, being willing to change your tack and realizing that's OK is a big one. Like deciding to not go with Amazon at the last minute and go direct to market. It's quite a shift, but being agile like that really helps you when you're starting up and realizing like. Like for me, the trick is getting our products saleable in the USI want a friend of mine to go and buy, make an order and buy something, put money in my bank account and us to send them a product. The minute that happens, everything wakes up in my brain and the world starts going. Does that make sense?

Like everything starts to change because we're alive, we're well, we're we're flying, which is just so exciting. Like I'm so excited by that and I just can't stress it enough. And it means that we can go into Amazon later. There's not a problem with that. It's just sometimes you just need to get something moving to actually start the business process. The minute that happens, you start to get excited and can continue.

And what's quite powerful about this is we've got a formula that works. We've got a great brand when the website can sell while I'm sleeping and these guys are going to ship the product out while I'm asleep. That is hyper. That is so exciting to me. So that it's a massive learning point. I think the other piece as well for the last point I'll share from my entrepreneurs out there is, is just really at the beginning.

Again, make sure it's something you want to do. Like I'm an idea factory and many of us out there are like our ADHD brains, our dyslexic brains can see all these different futures. We can sometimes spend way too long chasing different futures we don't really care about. And when I started the supplement brand, I took time to visualize five years in the future. And then visualization, even though my motivation has waned at times because of stuff out of my control, I've let myself ride those moments. And I come back to this five year vision of the supplement company.

I can see people getting in touch with me going, this has really changed my life. I can sleep finally, you know that you know that that to me is huge. And I just keep coming back to it. So make sure you've got a really powerful why you're doing this, because there will be times where society, the world just keeps kicking you in the nuts or in other places if you're female, because I don't want to be sexist. Like can kick us all in different places and so, but no, we're all going through it. If you're an entrepreneur, you're probably a sucker for punishment.

And like, I think with being a being a business owner, being a self-employed, you sometimes have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And if you can get through them, you will create a really good business. Does that make sense? Hope it does. Thank you for those that have reached out and have liked this, the shift to entrepreneurship and talking about dyslexic and ADHD business owners. I really appreciate the comments and the messages and I'll be back next week.

Have an epic rest of your day. 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 at Right Brain resetters. 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 head to rightbrainresetters com and we'll put the link in the show notes.