Severely damaging his shoulder playing baseball at a camp in Nebraska led San Mateo native Nick Soudah to a business opportunity selling his own nutritional supplement.
While rehabbing his labrum tear, he looked at the ingredients listed in one of the supplements he was taking.
“Almost every preworkout on the market has a formula flooded with filler ingredients and low-dosed ingredients that are simply just inferior,” he said. The ingredients had him and his friends questioning just what they were taking, and led him to start looking into doing his own.
The injury, and trying to play through it, put him in a state of depression so focusing on the business helped.
His business, QP Energy, or Quick Pump Energy, was launched Feb. 3 when he would hand-make custom formulas. Customers could choose their levels of caffeine, beta-alanine and L-citrulline.
“These three ingredients are the only ingredients that you actually need in a pre-workout supplement,” he said, adding the other five in his product hold the powder together and give it flavor.
After about five months of selling the custom-made supplements out of tubes, the word spread across different gyms in the Bay Area, leading to more than 200 orders. The business took off soon after he found a mix that his customers were seeking. Now it is in six locations in California and New York, and he hopes to reach 15 by the end of the year.
“We went into production and eight weeks later we got the product shipped to us after many different taste tests and that’s how QP was started,” Soudah said.
The company was funded through his savings he built since he started working at age 12.
“Every time you have to make a decision in life, you are taking a risk but the biggest risk is not taking one at all,” Soudah said.
Soudah is a Hillsdale High School graduate, a former Skyline College student is now is attending Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He plans to continue working on his business while studying.
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