1:26 - Rebuilding the vitamin categorySara realized that traditional vitamins weren’t built in a way to truly optimize health.“I was starting to struggle out of nowhere really with chronic inflammation, digestion, sleep issues, you name it. And I've always considered myself a relatively healthy person. I had a healthy diet. I didn't really know what was going on. Went through a lot of allergy tests and blood tests and found out that I had a lot of gaps in my diet. Because even if you eat a well-rounded diet, even if you eat perfectly, actually 90% of Americans are micronutrient deficient. We're not actually getting the nutrients that we need. And so like many of us, I turned to the supplement aisle to try to fill the gaps. Started looking at all these vitamins and pills and complicated and expensive sort of supplement routines, and cobbling together swallowing handfuls of capsules. And the more that I looked into it and questioned it, the more that I found that a lot of these things are built wrong. They're made with a lot of artificial fillers, synthetic binders, just a lot of dirty things. You don't actually question where your vitamins are coming from or how it's made. And so I set out to create an entirely new solution. One that's actually real food. And that's how it was inspired and Gem was born.”9:27 - Organizing a beta groupSara’s first step was to organize a Facebook group of diverse women to help understand if there was interest in replacing multivitamins with something better.“At first I didn't even think about it as the anti-vitamin, as an entirely new idea of a vitamin. I just thought of it as this daily health essential that really worked for me. And I wanted to share it with more people. And so I started a beta group actually, and I joke, on a complicated platform called Facebook Groups. And I had people kind of refer in, so it wasn't just a bunch of my friends, over 300 women across the US. And at first I just formed this community really to see if it was something of interest, to get people's feedback. And I kept iterating on it to address other people's needs, to see what would work. And I got an overwhelmingly positive response of, wow, this is something that could really replace my multivitamin. This is something that really works for me. And that's when really I had the aha moment of, wow, this could be a business and really be a product that is impactful on people's lives. And that's what led me to ultimately raising my first round of capital and then going to market in late 2018.”12:07 - Forming a panel of advisorsNext, Sara surrounded herself with experts who could serve as the scientific backbone for GEM’s products.“I have a team of scientific advisors that I brought together. And our approach and my approach in building this has always been to have a kaleidoscopic array of knowledge and expertise. And so we have an herbalist, a functional medicine doctor, a neurologist, a biochemist, registered dieticians. And bringing these different perspectives together in how can we look at our health in different ways? How can we actually look at it holistically, and not just through this band-aid lens of a pill for this and a pill for that? And so it took kind of bringing them together, getting their input, and then really co-developing it with this community.”15:25 - Embracing a minimalist brandToo often, design eats up a startup’s time and money when it should really be focused on getting the product right. That’s why Sara packaged GEM in black & white until its recent rebrand.“I started out really almost with a brandless platform. So they actually came packaged in a recyclable PET container, a small plastic container. And so it was really nicely designed and had a simple white label on it. It was like white and black. And the idea was I didn't want brand to distract from the core product. I think there's a lot of, and I've had these mistakes too in my own past of building companies, where a lot of people will