How we scaled to $100M in under a year (ft. IM8 co-founder Danny Yeung)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We hit a hundred million annual revenue run rate at eleven months. Gruins did it in twenty-two months, right? And they were acquired for one point two billion. AG1 took them ten years to hit a hundred million. We hit two hundred million run rate in eighteen months.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like no day's off on a roll it.
All right, Danny, welcome to the show, man. Why don't we start off? Why don't you give a little little intro to yourself? So who
Are you? What do you do? Hey Sean, thanks for having me. Quick background myself, always been an entrepreneur. Started working at a very young age at 15. I was a telemarketer. So that's how I got started working. Age 24, had my first business, was a restaurant, did that for three, four years, then ventured in hotel furniture business, import export from China into the US, eventually working on some big projects like the MGM City Center in Vegas. Did that also for the three, four years. Then in 2010, I took a leap of faith and moved to Hong Kong to launch an e-commerce company that was doing group buying. And then when group bond went international, they acquired 51% of my company. Yeah, we became the largest e-commerce company in the region.
I left in 2014. We're doing about 200 million annual revenues. I had a good exit. That's where, you know, I made my First million, yeah, that's it. More than a million. Um, but and then after e-commerce, I was like, hey, you know, what do I do next?
How did Danny Yeung’s early entrepreneurial experiences shape his later success?
Had a lot of options at my disposal. And I didn't just want to go back into e-commerce, even though that was the easy route for me. Um, I ventured then I actually, you know, got started in diagnostics and DNA testing. So founded Prunetics, which was a life sciences DNA testing company. Yeah, again, this was 2014, right? So very early, no one was really talking about this stuff. And then you'll see that in my entrepreneur career, it wasn't the obvious choice, but everyone's like now looking back, it's an obvious choice, right? I mean think about in 2010, no one was using e-commerce in Hong Kong. Yeah, everyone, in fact, told me to go back to US. They're like, Danny, just go back to US. This model's not gonna work in Hong Kong.
We but we made it in them one e-commerce. Company at the time. But going back to Prenetics, you know, started out sublife sciences company. When COVID hit, you know, we were prime position to take advantage of it. We worked very fast. In two weeks, we got our COVID testing kit. We then became Hong Kong's number one COVID PCR provider, as well as in the UK. So those yeah, three years we yeah, we I would say we were like printing money. I would say, right? Right. Um they exploded. At one point, we're doing 40,000 PCR tests a day. We totaled it 28 million. This is laboratory PCR tests. Those three years we did 700 million plus revenue in three years' time. We list it on the NASDAQ in 2022 where household name everyone that arrived.
In Hong Kong at one point had a mandatory prenetics PCR test. And then of course that led goes into you know IM8, which is kind of what happened after COVID. You know, we had a billion dollar valuation during COVID in 2022 because COVID was still going on. 18 months later, our market cap hit, I think was like 50 million. Went from billion. Plus they're fifty million, we all are shit, right? You really know who your friends are at that point, right? Because at a billion You got a lot of fri got a lot of friends at a
billion. You got a lot of friends at a billion. When you're down ninety five percent, uh okay, the stocks down ninety five percent. Were the friends also down ninety five percent or wasn't so bad?
No, I mean the friends wasn't L 95%. But when you're when you're going up, everyone wants to be involved, which is natural, to be fair, right? Everyone wants to be surrounded by winners, but very few want to be surrounded and associated when you're going down, right? Because I think the path to recover is significantly much harder. I mean, we had a few options, like you know what, why don't we just close the business?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:28
2
How did Danny Yeung’s early entrepreneurial experiences shape his later success?
1:28–8:35
3
What lessons did Danny learn from scaling COVID‑19 testing to 40,000 tests a day?
8:35–19:57
4
How did the partnership with David Beckham influence the launch of IM8?
19:57–39:25
5
What was the strategy behind IM8’s product formulation and branding?
39:25–53:40