Greg entered the tech scene early in his career thanks to a friend who tipped him off on a sales job at a New York startup. He started out by literally sleeping in the office by night and making 150 cold calls per day. Unfortunately, his busy schedule and city lifestyle quickly led to burnout. After buying a one-way ticket to Thailand to decompress, Greg came back to the states and got a job at Twitter as a senior sales associate. Soon, he found himself falling back into his old bad habits, and starting formulating a nootropic beverage that would allow him to do his best work without negative side effects. Next, he worked at Stack Overflow on the enterprise sales team, which dried up during the pandemic. During 2020, he found the momentum he needed to finally become an entrepreneur and found NooWave. 17:56 - Find your “personal monopoly”Thanks to David Perell’s Write of Passage course, Greg found himself talking about his nootropics hobby over and over. A classmate’s interest provided the fuel he needed to get going.“There's this online writing course. I don't know if you guys know David Perell and Write of Passage….The very first week he has this section of the course where it’s called ‘your personal monopoly.’ So, I'm Greg Frontiero. I worked for these tech companies. I love nootropics. I am a professional wrestler. I do MMA stuff. And like, what is this zone where only I can talk about it and nobody else can touch me, right? What's my brand that nobody else writes about but me? And so I would say these nootropics things in these breakout rooms, and everybody had the same question, like what is a nootropic? I would tell that story I just told you, give you an example. Oh, I drink this coffee. And this guy, Robbie Crab who is like a performance speaking coach DMs me in the middle of me giving my speech about it and goes, ‘I want to buy this. Where can I buy this coffee?’ And I was like, oh, like I make it. And he's like, you should sell it. And it was like immediately. So when I tell you I had NooWave in my head for six years, I actually launched the company in six weeks.”21:30 - Tap your networkGreg’s first move was to write a letter about his new venture and send it to his network. The response was absolutely overwhelming, with everyone demonstrating interest in his product.“So I take this one blog post and I launch it to what I think is going to be crickets. No one's gonna care about it. I put it on my LinkedIn. I put it on like Twitter. I put it on whatever. It launches, and I swear to God, it's like a movie where every single person in my entire life like came out of the woodwork. Kids I haven't talked to her since kindergarten, teachers, coworkers, people at my MMA gyms, wrestler friends, everybody. Everybody in my life came out and. And I don't know if they necessarily gave a shit about like a nootropic coffee, but they were backing me and they sorta wrote it for me. It was just such a feel-good moment of, man. All that time in my life was for something, the connections and the people that you met. So we sold out our first run immediately.”25:49 - Cold call manufacturersMost companies require expensive minimums that are out of range for bootstrapped founders. Greg tapped deep into his salesman roots to find a coffee company that would work with him.“I'm also talking to all these manufacturers and how to do fulfillment and all that stuff. And it's a nightmare, right? Like when you're making this product and you have no money and resources and all these companies have giant minimums. And so now I'm looking at this and I'm looking at getting loans and small business loans and all that stuff. So this is what I tell everybody. I think if there's one thing I can tell people that is like the hardest part about starting a CPG brand is like the manufacturing process fucking sucks…The benefit of my experience is I'm so used to making 100 cold calls a day. I'm very used to that. And this is the old school of business. I am making