How Two Supplement Brands Took Market Share From AG1, and What It Teaches Any Business

A greens brand that started selling in August 2023 was acquired by Unilever for a reported $1.2 billion in June 2026. That is roughly 32 months from first sale to exit, widely reported as the fastest billion dollar exit in consumer health. It did it by taking customers from AG1, the brand that had owned the category for years.

A second brand went after the same incumbent at the same time using the opposite strategy, and that one worked too. Which is the interesting part, because it means there is no single right answer here, only a right answer for who you are.

This is for business owners, not supplement founders. I run four treatment centers alongside PELORA, so what interests me is which parts of this a dental practice, a med spa, or a home services company could copy on Monday. Most of it is copyable. Some of it is not, and I will be specific about which.

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Watch the breakdown, 6:10

I recorded the version of this article you can watch instead.

Same funnels, same numbers, walked through on camera: the pricing, the persona targeting, the comparison pages, and what any business owner should actually copy from this.

What did Grüns actually do differently from AG1?

Grüns removed friction from the product itself rather than competing on formula. AG1 is a powder. You scoop it, mix it into water, drink something a lot of people do not love the taste of, then rinse the shaker. Grüns made it a gummy. The daily action takes seconds and there is nothing to clean.

That sounds cosmetic. It is not, because the failure mode in this category is not people deciding a product does not work. It is the tub quietly sitting in the cupboard until the subscription gets cancelled. Every step between buying and consuming is a place where the habit breaks, and Grüns deleted most of those steps.

Grüns was founded in 2023 by Chad Janis, a former Summit Partners private equity investor who conceived the idea about two weeks before starting his Stanford MBA. Product went on sale in August 2023. Each pack carries 60+ ingredients, 30+ organic fruits and vegetables, 21 vitamins and minerals, and 6 grams of prebiotic fiber, at $79.99 for a four-week subscription with intro offers advertised up to 52 percent off.

Grüns markets itself as less expensive than AG1 and much easier to take, citing 6 grams of fiber per pack against AG1's 2 grams per scoop. That is Grüns' own comparison, presented in Grüns' own marketing, and it is worth reading as positioning rather than as neutral analysis.

On revenue, sources genuinely disagree, so I am not going to hand you one clean number. Forbes reported in April 2026 that Grüns did $50 million in 2024 and passed $300 million in ARR by the end of 2025. Inc. reported it crossed $300 million ARR in month 24 while describing a path to well over $200 million in 2025 revenue. Reporting put them past $300 million in annualized revenue around month 24, and the outlets do not agree past that.

Grüns raised roughly $54.8 million in total, including a $35 million Series B in May 2025 led by Headline that valued it at $500 million around 21 to 22 months after launch. Unilever announced the acquisition on April 10 2026 and closed it on June 1 2026, widely reported as the fastest billion dollar exit in consumer health.

Grüns also claims to be the number one greens supplement on Amazon and in US retail, and to ship around 10 million gummies a day to more than a million customers. Those are the company's marketing claims, not audited third-party rankings, and you should treat them the way you would treat any brand grading its own homework.

What did IM8 do differently, and why did it also work?

IM8 led with authority and proof instead of convenience, which is the opposite lever from Grüns and it worked on a different buyer. IM8 launched in December 2024 as the flagship consumer brand of Prenetics Global Limited, a Nasdaq-listed company trading as PRE. Reporting and a Prenetics investor relations release put it above $108 million ARR by October 2025, roughly 11 months in, and past $200 million annualized around month 19.

The part most people get wrong is the David Beckham piece. Beckham is a co-founding partner and shareholder, not a paid spokesperson. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Aryna Sabalenka are shareholders too. That distinction is the entire strategy. A paid endorsement reads as a media buy, and buyers discount it automatically. An equity stake reads as conviction, because the person is exposed to the outcome.

IM8 backs that up with mechanisms rather than adjectives. Entry pricing sits around $89 a month, or roughly $78 a month on the 90-day plan, which is above AG1 rather than below it. To hold that price it runs a 90-Day Transformation Program with coaching and partners with Superpower for discounted biomarker blood testing. If you are going to charge a premium, you have to give people a way to see whether it is working.

One more structural choice worth noting: IM8 launched globally rather than US-first, with US traffic making up only around 23 percent of the total and meaningful share in the UK, Canada, and Australia. Authority travels across borders more easily than convenience does, because a credible name and a blood panel mean the same thing in London as they do in Los Angeles.

What are the top supplement brands doing wrong right now?

Most of them are invisible to AI search, and we measured it rather than assuming it. We audited 30 direct-to-consumer supplement brands, including AG1, Ritual, Thorne, Huel, Kaged and Bloom, and found that 87 percent mark up what their product is in machine-readable structured data, while only 9 percent mark up the reviews that prove it works.

That gap matters more every quarter. When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Google's AI for the best greens supplement for a specific goal, the engine is assembling a recommendation and it needs evidence to justify the pick. Ratings and reviews are that evidence, and almost nobody in this category has made theirs readable.

The same audit found something else worth sitting with: across 121 businesses in five industries, single-location clinics running off-the-shelf website builders scored higher on AI legibility than venture-funded national brands. Full method and raw counts are in the supplement study and the Local AI Findability Score.

Why did both brands attack AG1 instead of finding new customers?

Both brands went after AG1's existing buyers because those people are already educated, already spending, and already in the habit. Grüns and IM8 both run comparison pages targeting AG1, and IM8 bids on AG1 branded search terms.

This is the single most transferable idea in the whole story, and it is the one most local businesses get backwards. Convincing someone that a category is worth paying for is slow and expensive. Convincing someone who already pays a competitor that you are the better version of a decision they have already made is fast.

For a local business that means the highest-intent traffic you can buy is people searching for your competitor by name, or searching for the thing your competitor is known for. It is not people who have never considered the service. A comparison page that treats the competitor fairly and is honest about who they are better for will outperform a page that pretends they do not exist, because readers can tell the difference and so can answer engines.

What does segmenting a funnel by persona actually mean?

Segmenting by persona means writing a different story and a different landing page for each type of buyer, then routing each ad to its matching page. Grüns builds separate angles for people switching from a competitor, people on GLP-1 medications, athletes, and parents. The ad that speaks to a parent lands on a page written for a parent, loaded with proof from other parents.

The common failure I see is one generic ad pointed at a homepage. The ad has to do all the persuading, the homepage undoes it by talking to everybody at once, and the whole thing gets blamed on the ad platform.

You do not need dozens of variations to do this. At around $5,000 a month in spend, roughly four to six genuinely distinct concepts inside consolidated ad sets is the defensible number. Beyond that you are splitting a small budget so thin that no single variation ever collects enough data to tell you anything. More variations is not more learning. It is usually less.

Is a steep intro offer a discount or a retention mechanism?

A steep intro offer is a retention mechanism when the product is used daily, and a margin leak when it is not. Grüns advertises up to 52 percent off for new customers. That is not desperation pricing. It lowers the cost of trying to near zero, and a daily gummy builds a routine inside the first 30 days, so by the time full price arrives the decision has already been made in the customer's kitchen.

The condition matters more than the tactic, and the measured evidence is less friendly to deep discounts than the Grüns example suggests. Recharge, analysing roughly 29.8 million new subscriptions in July 2026, found first-renewal rates fall steadily as the intro discount deepens, and that subscribers acquired at 25 to 50 percent off were worth about $8.48 less over 12 months than a typical subscriber, while those acquired at 1 to 10 percent off were worth $9.58 more. Read Grüns as the exception rather than the rule. This works when your product or service is consumed often enough to become a habit inside the discount window, and it is a margin leak the rest of the time. We audited this across 38 DTC brands and found the category median offer is 25 percent, which sits at the top of that losing band. A monthly service, a membership, a recurring treatment, those qualify. If someone uses you once a quarter, the same offer just teaches them to wait for the next one.

Before running any version of this, you need to know your customer lifetime value against your acquisition cost. Our published guidance is a 3:1 LTV to CAC minimum and 4:1 or better as the target. An intro offer that pushes you under that is not an acquisition strategy, it is a slow way to lose money on every new customer.

What should a business owner actually do differently on Monday?

Pick one lever and commit to it, because the reason both of these brands worked is that each chose a single thing and built everything around it. Grüns bet on friction removal and built the product, the pricing, and the funnel around habit. IM8 bet on authority and built the ownership structure, the price point, and the measurement program around proof. Neither tried to be both.

Three concrete moves, in order:

One, write down who you are taking the customer from. Not a demographic. A specific competitor or a specific status quo, including doing nothing. If you cannot name it, your ads are trying to grow a category instead of winning a decision, which is a far more expensive job.

Two, pick your lever honestly. Are you genuinely easier, or genuinely more credible? Most businesses are one, not both. If you are easier, market the friction you removed. If you are more credible, lead with proof and measurement, and let your price reflect it.

Three, build one landing page per persona and match the ad to it. Two or three personas is plenty to start. The test: read the ad, then the page it lands on, and check whether they sound like the same conversation.

On channels, keep this proportionate to spend. Our published guidance is keyed to monthly ad budget, not retainer: under $3,000 a month is Google Search only, $3,000 to $7,500 adds Meta brand awareness video, $7,500 to $15,000 supports multiple campaigns across both, and $15,000 and up is where YouTube and TikTok earn a place. The persona work above applies at every one of those levels. The number of simultaneous campaigns does not.

Where does this playbook break down for a local business?

The funding is the part that does not transfer. Grüns raised roughly $54.8 million and IM8 sits inside a publicly traded company. Neither was solving the problem of a $4,000 monthly budget, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

What that money bought was speed, the ability to test many angles at once and absorb the losers. On a small budget you do the same work sequentially. One persona, one page, enough time for a real read, then the next. Slower, same method.

The other limit is category. A daily consumable builds habit inside a discount window in a way that a roof replacement never will. If you sell something purchased once every several years, the intro-offer mechanic is the wrong lesson to take from this. The comparison-page and persona-matching lessons still apply.

How would you run this for a brand that is not funded like that?

The same way, just sequentially instead of simultaneously, and that is exactly what we build for clients. We map who you are actually taking the customer from, pick the one lever you can honestly pull, and build the persona-to-landing-page structure before any media spends. We are an operator-run agency ourselves, the same distinction IM8 draws with a shareholder rather than a paid endorser. I run four treatment centers and built and sold a physical product, so this comes from living with the P&L, not just the ad account.

We currently work with product and consumer brands alongside our healthcare accounts, and we have managed more than $5 million in lifetime ad spend across those engagements. Our Google rating is 5.0 with named reviews, and we publish a full client case study with the actual numbers rather than a wall of unnamed logos.

Engagements run a three-month initial term, then month to month with 30 days notice, with no kill fees and a 60-day checkpoint built in. A strategy like this needs a real window to work, and you should be able to leave if it does not.

If you sell a consumer product, our supplement and nutraceutical marketing and DTC brand marketing pages cover how we handle this category. Channel splits and retainer tiers are published on our pricing page.

Updated August 2026. By Preston Durnford. Newport Beach, California. Company figures are cited to the outlets named in the text, and where those outlets disagree the disagreement is stated rather than resolved. Claims described as a company's own are that company's marketing claims, not audited third-party findings. General information only, not legal, medical, or financial advice.