After doing more than 100 interviews for this site, I think I can easily conclude that most entrepreneurs are overworked, at least in the beginning stages. Everyone has their own tricks for staying on top of everything. One of the tricks up my sleeve is EBOOST. When I got my latest order from them in the mail, it occurred to me to try to track down the people behind EBOOST and learn their story.

Where did the idea for EBOOST come from?

Really a void in the marketplace. There was no product out there that spoke to my or my partner’s needs. We’re on the go, working 15, 18 hour days. Out late, up early. Healthy, working out. We’d have to take a variety of supplements and vitamins to really operate at full capacity.

We also knew that those energy drinks and stimulants really irritate your adrenals. That temporary spike in energy is followed by a monster crash, which is your body becoming completely exhausted and depleted of all the important nutrients. So we thought, “There’s got to be a way to vitalize your body with nutrients and get healthy energy.”

That’s fantastic. I’m a huge fan of EBOOST – I got a sample at some event a while back and tried it. What I like is how it doesn’t cause you to crash the way a normal energy drink or coffee would. So once you realized there was this void in the market and you wanted to fill it, was it hard to go about making your own supplement?

Yeah, it took a minute. We originally started with a guy who just didn’t get it. I mean, he was in the business, but he didn’t understand what we were trying to create. So we wasted almost a year with him, and then we got hooked up with the biggest and the best in the industry. And he literally said, “I know exactly what you need. Come back in three weeks.”

We spent almost two years developing EBOOST. Taste was so important. Delivering on the promise was so important. We were our own toughest critics. Once it passed our standard, it was good enough for everybody.

Do you have a business background, or is this the first company that you’ve started?

I had my own marketing agency, prior to this, for 8 years. I worked with P. Diddy, Sean Combs, for 6 years doing all of his marketing.

So when you were launching your product, you definitely had the marketing part down.

That part was easy, but operating and building a company from scratch is not easy and not cheap. It always costs more money, takes longer than you want, and is harder than you think.

What was the hardest thing to learn?

We’re taking a non-traditional approach. We want to be at the cash register at a fashion place as opposed to on the vitamin supplement shelf at GNC. It’s more of a lifestyle approach. So there’s a lot of educating people, getting the product out there, so that people see this like a fashion statement with great health benefits. We’re trying to appeal to a little bit more discerning customer.

Where do you hope for your company to go? What are the plans?

We’re going to put a huge emphasis on trying to scale the business up in New York, and then roll it out to LA and to other markets from there. Trying to really get concentric and dominate in the market as opposed to being a lot of little places.

Have you had the same strategy from the beginning, or has that changed?

No. To be honest, we threw a lot of stuff against the wall the first two years, just to get feedback and proof of concept. We saw what worked and what didn’t work. We realized that as small as we are, and as undercapitalized, we have to really focus on an area and put all of our resources into it.

What’s been your happiest moment along the way?

Maybe seeing the very first sale online come through? Or the very first PO from the W Hotels – that was exciting. Or just hearing people’s feedback, saying that they love the product. When you hear people talk about it on their own, that’s exciting.

Now that you’ve gone through a lot of the work, what’s your advice for entrepreneurs that just have an idea or are just getting started?

I think it’s important to work with experts. Listen to them, and invest in them, because ultimately it will save you time and money. We’ve stumbled along the way because we’ve been under-resourced or spread thin, and not paid attention to some of the details that we probably should have, from an operational standpoint. Operations are the most critical piece. You have to have all that in place so that when you do grow, you’ve got a solid foundation.

Visit the EBOOST site and check out all of their products.