Everything Adam Gillman learned co-building two 9-figure companies — the methods, mindset, frameworks, and decisions that led to a $260M exit with zero venture capital.
Adam Gillman co-founded and sold a $260M company. He has a few hundred Instagram followers. That contrast tells you everything about who he is.
Adam is 41 years old. He grew up between New Jersey and New York, the son of entrepreneurs who ran a chain of baby product stores in Manhattan. His parents divorced when he was young. He moved in with his father, who was building a replacement window company. He watched entrepreneurship from the inside before he ever attempted it himself.
By the time he reached USC in Los Angeles he was already running party planning businesses and selling t-shirts — not because he needed the money, but because he knew early that he would rather make less money on his own terms than be capped working for someone else.
He has two sons and a wife named Lara — they co-founded CycleHouse together, an indoor cycling studio in LA that became the basis for a reality TV show. He moved from Los Angeles to South Florida after having children. His faith is foundational. His stepmom — who devoted herself entirely to raising him — passed away unexpectedly about 10 years ago, right before his first son was born. His son's middle name is after her.
"You don't need to prove anything to anyone. Build something real and let the scoreboard speak for itself."
Adam's path to Hiya wasn't linear. It was a series of calculated bets across completely different industries — each one teaching him something the next one needed.
Already running party planning businesses and selling t-shirts on campus. Knew he would never work for someone else. Entrepreneurship wasn't an ambition — it was the only option he could imagine.
Built the marketing function from scratch and became CMO within one year. The team — including Darren, Adam's close friend who Adam would later co-found Hiya with — built GoLive into a $250M revenue business, $100M in earnings, and a 1000x return for shareholders. Named #1 fastest growing media company in America by Inc. Magazine. When the category commoditized — they wound it down cleanly and moved on.
Co-founded CycleHouse indoor cycling studio in Los Angeles with his wife Lara. Became one of the leading fitness chains in Southern California. Got a reality TV show on E! network — Hollywood Cycle. His first foray into consumer brand building.
Co-founded F/ELD with his close friend and partner, Bert — an ultra-premium California cannabis brand. Raised $6M in venture capital. Got immense pressure to grow at all costs. Hired too fast. Invested in marketing way faster than he should have. Had a complete mental breakdown and vacated his position as CEO. Worked with his co-founders to make sure the business sold. This is where his deep anti-VC conviction was born. "From the moment we raised money we got immense pressure to grow very very quickly at all costs. It literally broke me."
Exited F/ELD. Read a vitamin label one morning while giving his sons their vitamins. Found 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving. Thought "this is garbage." Days later co-founder Darren Litt called with the exact same idea. They met on a bench in LA, drank coffee, and decided to build Hiya.
Hiya launched the same day WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. They thought it was over before it started. They kept going anyway.
USANA Health Sciences acquired 78.8% of Hiya for $205M — implying a $260M total valuation. $103M annual revenue. $19M net income. 200,000+ subscribers. $0 venture capital raised across the entire journey. Adam was alone in a hotel room in Park City — the team scattered across the holidays. No celebration. Just clarity.
The best businesses are built by frustrated customers — not market researchers. Hiya was born from genuine personal frustration, not a business plan.
Adam and Darren Litt had worked together at GoLive Mobile for 7 years. They knew they complemented each other. Adam was the operator — the numbers guy, the team builder, the one who made sure things actually happened. Darren was the visionary — the marketing brain, the idea generator, the face.
The children's vitamin industry had one obvious problem nobody was solving honestly: it was optimizing for compliance — getting kids to take the product — instead of what was actually healthy. Sugar disguised as wellness. Cartoon characters on jars full of synthetic fillers. Every product on the market was an adult brand that slapped a kids label on something they already made.
"Experts optimize within systems. Outsiders redesign them. We had zero experience in children's health. That was our advantage."
The operator. Makes sure trains run on time. Numbers, supply chain, team, unit economics. The builder who executes. "Getting stuff done — it's simple to understand, not necessarily simple to do."
The visionary. Had the original idea. Brilliant on marketing. The face of the company. Co-founded MarketerHire. The one who sees where the market is going before others do.
After 12+ months of development with pediatricians, nutritionists, dentists, and scientists:
Hiya's business model wasn't accidental. Every structural decision was made intentionally on day one and defended without exception for 5 years.
Not a subscription option. 100% subscription only from day one. No one-time purchases. No Amazon. No retail shelf. The rule: subscription only works when it is genuinely convenient for the customer AND good for the business. Both conditions must be simultaneously true.
No Amazon storefront. No retail early on. Every customer was theirs directly — the data, the feedback loop, the relationship. This enabled everything else. The vitamin concierge, the customization, the iteration. None of it works without owning the channel completely.
Same offer for 5 years straight. Tested every variation. This always performed best. Month one is an investment. The goal is getting the right customer in the door so months 2 through 24 can compound. Month one margin is irrelevant. Lifetime value is everything.
Priced above every competitor in the category. "Approachable luxury" — premium enough to signal trust, accessible enough for households earning under $75K annually. That income demographic became their largest customer segment. Price is perception. Never apologize for it.
Five years. Zero price changes despite significantly rising costs — especially during COVID supply chain chaos. Every dollar of cost increase was absorbed through volume growth and retention improvement. Price stability equals customer trust. Trust equals retention. Retention equals everything.
The benchmark Adam and Darren held themselves to — and that Adam now gives every operator he advises. The higher your gross margin — the more money you have to reinvest in marketing and growth. A brand with 80% gross margins can outspend a brand with 40% margins on acquisition and still be profitable. That compounding advantage grows wider every single month.
Total outside funding across the entire history of Hiya: a few hundred thousand dollars from friends and family in 2020. That's it. No Series A. No VCs. No dilution. This constraint forced real unit economics from day one. Founders kept virtually all equity going into a $260M exit.
Hiya's growth engine had three components. Each one was deliberate, systematic, and impossible for larger competitors to replicate at their scale.
80% education, 20% promotion. They explained ingredients they DON'T use and why. Discussed what was wrong with the category broadly. Gave parents information that had nothing to do with buying Hiya. The result: customers looked to Hiya as a trusted expert advisor — not just a brand.
Cohorts of 25-50 influencers. Expected 10% to convert. Killed losers fast. Doubled down on winners. 50 influencers have been working with Hiya for over 3 years. Primary platform: Instagram. Mommy bloggers were the engine by a wide margin. 20-40% of paid budget ran behind whitelisted influencer creative.
Every new subscriber received a personal text from a real human within 24 hours. Not a bot. Not automated. A real person introducing themselves and offering to help. Whether they had 100 customers or 100,000 — same process. This single decision shaped their entire retention curve.
Parents could text "my son only likes the green ones." Hiya would ship exact custom ratios — 47 green, 37 yellow, 0 red — every month. Raised costs slightly. Created a competitive moat that billion-dollar companies like Unilever and P&G could never replicate at their scale.
"Distribution is the moat. The product is just the price of entry. The founders who confuse the two end up perfecting something nobody knows exists."
Hiya grew to $103M in annual revenue almost entirely on influencer marketing. But their approach was fundamentally different from how most brands use creators.
They never selected creators based on follower count or engagement rate. Selected based on trust, authenticity, and genuine connection to their specific audience. A creator with 50K deeply loyal followers consistently outperformed a creator with 5M disengaged ones.
Tested in batches of 25-50 influencers simultaneously. Expected only 10% to convert to long-term partners. That math held up almost every single cohort. Running 5 creators and concluding the channel doesn't work is not a real test. Volume is the strategy.
The category that worked best by a wide margin. Hit them at the exact moment that corner of influencer marketing was about to explode. Audiences big enough to matter. Trust fully intact. Buying behavior — moms making decisions based on what other moms recommended — perfectly aligned with Hiya's category.
20-40% of paid budget ran behind influencer-sourced creative through whitelisting at any given time. The creative is already audience-validated before you spend a dollar. Runs from a real person's handle and inherits their credibility. Unit economics outperform brand-owned creative every single time. This is where the real leverage was.
80% of influencer outreach was handled by agencies — who charged 15-20% of spend. Worth it because building that infrastructure internally would have cost more and taken too long. The right agency partners knew which influencers would convert and had very similar audiences to what Hiya needed.
Over the 4.5 year run — 50 influencers worked with Hiya for over 3 years continuously. These became the backbone of the entire marketing engine. Not transactions. Genuine long-term relationships built on shared values and proven performance.
Adam's answer: Yes — but the math has changed significantly.
Adam and his co-founder Darren ran Hiya with unusual financial discipline for a bootstrapped company. These are the unit economics frameworks they lived by — and that Adam now gives to every operator he advises.
The benchmark Adam and Darren held themselves to — and that Adam now gives every business he invests in or advises. If you're not at 80% gross margins or in striking distance — you better have a very high AOV product where the dollar margin makes the economics work. The higher your gross margin, the more money you have to reinvest in growth. A brand with 80% can outspend a brand with 40% and still be profitable. That advantage grows wider every month.
Most beginners forget this entirely. A product that costs $10 to make but $8 to ship has almost no margin before you spend a dollar on marketing. Heavy products are very hard to build strong unit economics on. Products with 12-16 week lead times require tying up months of capital in inventory before a single sale. These are not small details. They determine whether a business scales or suffocates.
50% off month one plus fast growth equals cash negative — even when the business is fundamentally profitable on paper. Every new customer costs more cash upfront than they immediately pay back. The faster Hiya grew the more cash negative they became. At peak growth in 2022-2023 Adam described it as "holding our breath underwater." Plan for this or it will suffocate you when you're winning.
Not gross margin. Contribution margin after all marketing costs. A 55% gross margin product pulling 4x ROAS and rebuying at 60% will outperform a 75% gross margin product stuck at 2x rebuying at 30% — every single time. The founders protecting margin before they have scale are optimizing for a business they don't have yet.
The hire that made Hiya possible wasn't a marketer. It was the CFO — a decision Adam and Darren made early and credit as one of the best they made together. When you're bootstrapped and growing fast that combination breaks businesses. The CFO came in and completely changed how they mapped cash needs. Forecasting got sharper. Cash flow improved. Visibility into where they'd be in 60-90 days became real. When bootstrapped and scaling — the CFO is a growth hire, not a back office hire.
In an industry where 40-60% annual turnover is common, Hiya lost approximately 2 employees voluntarily across their entire existence. That's not luck. That's culture — built by Adam, Darren, and a leadership team that treated people like the asset they were.
Adam's #1 leadership trait. Admitting mistakes publicly and immediately. Saying "I don't know" clearly when he doesn't. Creating psychological safety for the best people to do their best work. "When we made a miscalculation we were completely willing to acknowledge it."
Hire the absolute best in every discipline then get out of their way. The best people want to grow and shine. If you don't let them do their jobs they leave. Simple. The best people want to be empowered — not managed.
The most impressive person Adam has ever met — a billionaire who acquires 8-figure companies — talks the least in every room. Listens first. Always. By the time he speaks he's processed more information than everyone else. "The most valuable thing you can do at the table is often nothing."
Speed of decision making beats quality of decision making within reason. The cost of a wrong decision is almost always recoverable. The cost of waiting two weeks compounds across every department. Indecision is its own decision — and it's almost always the wrong one.
"If you don't believe in yourself you can't expect your team to believe. You can't expect customers to believe. Self-belief is the one universal common denominator."
Most companies sell because they have to. Hiya sold because they found the perfect strategic partner from a position of complete financial strength. That difference changes everything.
They didn't wait for inbound. The Hiya team built the buyer universe themselves — identified every credible strategic acquirer, prioritized the list, ran the outreach, and managed every conversation actively. Most founders sit back and wait for someone to knock on their door. They knocked on theirs. Total time from first conversation to close: 4 months.
At the time they began exploring acquisition Hiya was already highly profitable. $19M net income on $103M revenue. They did not need to sell. That single fact changed every conversation with potential acquirers. Never sell from desperation. Build something that doesn't need to be sold — then sell it on your terms.
They met with many potential buyers. Knew USANA was right after the second meeting. Not because of the price — because USANA wanted to learn FROM them, not impose their model ON them. USANA brought international reach across 24+ countries and 30 years of manufacturing expertise. Hiya brought the DTC subscription playbook. Perfect yin and yang.
The biggest risk in any acquisition process isn't price. It's momentum. Managing the energy of the deal — keeping it moving, not letting it stall, making sure every party feels like they're getting timely answers. Deals don't die in diligence. They die in the gaps between meetings.
December 23 2024. Adam was alone in a hotel room in Park City — the team scattered across the holidays. No team. No celebration. No champagne.
He sat there and waited for the feeling he'd spent years imagining. It didn't come.
What came instead was clarity. The money didn't matter the way he thought it would. The building is the thing — not the exit. The exit is just a transition point.
First thing he did after the deal closed: went for a very long run. Then got back to work.
These are not theories. These are lessons Adam learned building GoLive Mobile, F/ELD, CycleHouse, and Hiya alongside great partners — distilled into their most actionable form.
On the first 6 months of Hiya when almost nothing worked. Month 7 they found their stride. By year 4 they were #1 in category.
His single most important piece of advice. To entrepreneurs and to his younger self.
On what sustains a founder through the hardest periods of building something real.
On how fatherhood forced clarity about what actually mattered in how his time was allocated.
On what successful people actually realize when they start making serious money.
On the compounding nature of showing up every single day without exception.
On when to quit — and when never to. Self-belief is the only common denominator of every successful founder.
Every tier includes everything to its left. 6-month minimum. Renews in 3-month terms.
Pre-engagement survey to confirm stage, fit, and investment alignment.
30 minutes. We discuss your situation and the tier that matches it.
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Two weeks of deep-dive: data, team, calls, and current playbook review.
First strategic working session and a 90-day plan with named owners.
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