From $0 to an 8-figure exit. Here's how we built That Clean Life.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
That Clean Life started out as a single PDF document in 2014.
In 2023, it was acquired by Practice Better for 8-figures.
Today, I’m looking back to summarize what I believe are the key steps we took to build That Clean Life with the hope of inspiring your own entrepreneurial journey.
We scratched our own itch.
It all starts with an idea, and the best ideas are the ones that scratch your own itch.
Create a solution or product to address a problem or need you personally experience or feel strongly about.
For me, that was healthy meal planning. The entire process felt laborious, and I wanted to create something that made eating healthy simple and fun.
When building a business, you have to make multiple decisions a day. If you are solving a problem you aren’t familiar with, you have to make a lot of guesses. On the other hand, when you are solving a problem you’ve experienced yourself, you don’t have to guess. You know what the right answer is.
We provided super valuable, free content to…
For most people just starting out, no one knows who you are, and they certainly don’t trust you.
People need to know, like, and trust you before buying from you.
That is why it is so important to lead with value, for free. Teach everything you know. Create content that helps people solve their problems.
Our first piece of free value was a free meal plan, which took the guesswork out of healthy eating. We set up a basic landing page where people had to enter their email addresses to receive the free meal plan. This allowed us to do these next two (extremely crucial) things…
Quickly grow an email list.
Growing our email list was a huge growth lever in the early days and continues to help us nourish leads and convert them into paying customers to this very day.
The people who say “email is dead” are wrong, full stop.
Invest in growing your email list early on and often.
Build a community.
When people downloaded the meal plan, we invited them to join our community (a Facebook group), where we continued to provide more free value and offer support and connection.
Building a community had a network effect. The more people who became engrained in our community and experienced the value, the more they told their friends about us (and they told their friends, who told their friends, and so on).
The more free value you create, the more your email list grows and your community grows. I call this “The Free Value Cycle”.
We also created free value through actionable blog content, weekly newsletters, and social media content, which helped us grow our audience of health and wellness professionals.
By focusing on creating high-impact content that actually solved problems for our community of health and wellness professionals, we built trust and ultimately attracted more customers.
We built a minimal viable product.
I knew in my heart that a meal planning solution would sell, but before we dove headfirst into building a full-fledged software product that would take months before we could go to market, we needed to validate that people would be willing to pay for this.
So, we built a minimal viable product or an MVP.
An MVP is a product with enough features to attract customers and validate a product idea. It allows you to learn and test how the market reacts to your idea before you invest in building the complete product. It also minimizes wasting time and effort.
So, what was our MVP?
Our MVP was a $9 PDF meal plan that we sold on Gumroad. We simply put together a document that contained a meal plan, recipes with photography, and an itemized shopping list.
And guess what?
People paid for it!
So…
… then we built a killer product.
Once our idea was validated, it was time to build a killer product.
Luckily my co-founder is a legendary developer and designer, so his vision and first principles thinking put the “life” in That Clean Life.
Having a great product that users love makes it much easier to market, generate word-of-mouth referrals, and sell.
Which brings me to my next point…
I learned how to sell.
If I had to choose the most important skill I’ve learned as an entrepreneur, it would be how to sell.
In the early days, I made sales through cold email outreach to every nutritionist I could find on Google, including Nathalie Garcia, the nutritionist and co-founder of Practice Better, who eventually acquired That Clean Life.
Eventually, cold email outreach didn’t scale, so I switched to selling through webinars.
I was terrified of webinars initially, but reading Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, the founder of Click Funnels, gave me a simple, proven framework to follow.
To be honest, the approach was classic “used car salesman” vibes. It felt gross and way outside my comfort zone.
But… it worked.
I continued to riff off of Russell Brunson’s framework until I developed a sales pitch that felt authentic and converted leads into paying customers at a high rate.
Over the past eight years, I’ve brought in thousands of customers through webinars, all because I learned how to sell.
We became customer-obsessed and…
Once we had a product and a few hundred customers, we organically became customer-obsessed.
We religiously listened to our customers feedback to shape the product and we owe much of what That Clean Life is today to our incredible customers (thank you!).
I learned a few things about being customer-obsessed.
First, being customer-obsessed does not mean you build everything your customers ask for. While customers can usually articulate the pain, they aren’t clear on the solution. You must be able to read between the lines to interpret their true needs and deliver innovative solutions they didn’t even know they needed.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
–Henry Ford
Second, you must prioritize customer needs. It is easy to fall into the trap of building something one customer asks for because they are the loudest or because it is a “low-hanging fruit.”
This is the fastest way to build a bloated product that is hard to use.
Over the years, I’ve become a big fan of adopting a utilitarian approach to product building. Utilitarianism focuses on outcomes and states that the best choice is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Translated to product, prioritize product features and improvements that will have the greatest impact for the greatest number of people.
We built with a point of view and guiding principles.
Once you know the problem you are solving, it is imperative to develop your guiding principles, which are your core beliefs and principles that guide your behavior, decisions, and actions.
Building with a POV will set you apart from a sea of competitors and help you develop a following of loyal supporters because they know what you stand for, and it resonates with them.
While building That Clean Life, our guiding principles have remained consistent over time:
Simplicity
Focus
Ruthless prioritization
Radical candor
Integrity
Creativity
Agility
Professionalism.
“First principles thinking, which is sometimes called reasoning from first principles, is one of the most effective strategies you can employ for breaking down complicated problems and generating original solutions. It also might be the single best approach to learn how to think for yourself.”
- James Clear
We invested in partnerships.
Partnerships have been another main growth lever for us at That Clean Life.
By partnering with influential people and companies in the health and wellness industry who believe in our product, we’ve introduced That Clean Life to thousands of people who may have otherwise not heard of us.
Never underestimate the power of a great partnership.
We invested in a small (but mighty) team.
Our approach to hiring is that we hired once we felt the pain.
We hired an incredible recipe developer and content creator to help us make the product more valuable.
Next came a nutritionist and then a standup dietitian when we started feeling the pain of more advanced templates and evidence-based meal plan requests.
We hired a passionate customer support lead to better respond to our customer’s needs.
Then we brought in more amazingly talented contractors to help with recipe development.
And that was it.
We hired people with high agency, who raised the bar and who could do the job better than we could ever do. That is the secret sauce.
We got lucky while also creating our own luck.
Much of what has happened with That Clean Life has been pure luck.
The fact we had this idea on the brink of a health and wellness boom, that our co-founder skills complemented each other so perfectly, and so many other things – it all comes down to luck.
However, the harder we worked, the luckier we got.
Funny how that works!
Persevered through failures and setbacks.
The way this story is unfolding is very much a highlight reel. So I’d like to take a moment to sprinkle in some painful failures and heartbreaking setbacks at every step of this process.
Mistakes. Failures. Setbacks.
Oh boy, did we have them!
We’ll save those stories for another day, but I want you to know they were there, and we felt them hard.
I think the big lesson here is you have to persevere. You just have to keep going.
“It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.”
– Albert Einstein
We trusted the data but mostly our intuition.
Unless you live under a rock, you know how important data is in SaaS.
But I have to admit, we haven’t been that data-driven.
I’ve always understood high-level data, but most of our success comes from gut and intuition.
Never underestimate your intuition as a founder.
I'm often asked how you know if an idea — product, business, or otherwise — is good. Good enough to pursue. Good enough to follow. Good enough to invest in. Good enough to get behind.
You don't know. You feel. You give into your intuition, you tune into your senses, you notice goosebumps. What does it feel like? What's the vibe of this thing? That's the experience.
Good ideas are like slipstreams — they have their own effortless, accelerated pull. They slide rather than grind. They have a smooth, silky texture — like a perfect milkshake being drawn through a wide straw. Everything has a nature, and good ideas have theirs.
Feeling like you're on to something is an unmistakable feeling. Don't look for it, don't ask about it, don't fish for opinions. Feel for it.– Jason Fried