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Grow Your Business By Thinking Outside the Box – Soylent Founder Dave Renteln @ Hustle Con 2016

From My First Million · Published Jul 6, 2016 · Watch on YouTube

TL;DR

David Renteln, CMO and co-founder of Soylent, argues that embracing a business's inherent weirdness—rather than hiding it—generates press, community engagement, and sales. He details how Soylent’s unusual name (taken from a dystopian sci-fi novel), its founder’s 30-day all-Soylent diet, transparent formula sharing, online-only sales, and pro-GMO stance all violated conventional food-industry wisdo

Key insights

  • Naming the product after the fictional food “Soylent Green” (from a 1960s novel and its film adaptation, which features a secret ingredient of human flesh) was highly polarizing but drove massive soci
  • Founder Rob Reinhardt’s 30-day lived experiment (stress test) of consuming only Soylent proved product viability and generated 30,000+ requests from people wanting to repeat the test under medical sup
  • Crowdfunding on Tilt raised over $3 million (the largest food crowdfunding campaign ever) after securing press interest and a pre-existing community.

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