Feel Goods has racked up more than 100 million organic impressions, over 200,000 social followers, and eight figures in revenue selling supplement mixes direct to consumer (DTC). The brand has never been on a retail shelf. Dustin Pourbaba and Brian Wong built it by putting themselves in front of the camera, sharing everything (including expensive mistakes), and treating TikTok like a free research and development lab for their paid ad strategy.
Their playbook is specific: Educate and entertain simultaneously, use organic content to test what resonates, funnel winners into Meta for paid acquisition, and let the audience tell you what to build next. Dustin and Brian break down how they developed their content instincts from zero and why they’re in no rush to leave the DTC channel that made it possible.
On the $30 juice that started everything:
Dustin: I had a cold one day and went to a local organic grocery store, Erewhon, and spent $30 on two juices. Sitting outside drinking them, it bothered me that the cost was so high to get quality nutrition into my body—and at the same time, those juices are 30 to 50 grams of sugar each. The alternative is the household staple immune product that everyone runs to the store for, and the reality is it’s 70% sugar, a vitamin C mega dose, and packed with additives.
The light bulb went off: Why am I paying for a sugar-filled product that I think is healthy? And is there a gap here? That’s how Feel Goods started, on this mission of creating a better-for-you immune health supplement.
Brian: We went down a rabbit hole looking at healthy alternatives and natural ways to take care of your health. A lot of it went back to growing up—herbal remedies were a big thing in my family. My mom would always go the alternative Eastern medicine route, which back then was kind of woo-woo magic. Now it’s cemented in Western society. We just realized there can be something made a lot more natural, a lot more clean than what’s on the shelf.
On their “edutainment” content strategy:
Brian: We got on TikTok early and started showing people: If you care about your immune health, this is what’s actually in this product you’re taking. This is why it’s not good for you, because half of it is just sugar. And we made it really fun. We call it “edutainment”—it’s one part education, one part entertainment. But everything we’re saying is backed by the research we’ve done and how we formulate our products. That really helped push a lot of our early momentum and brand awareness.
What’s been consistent is putting the founders in front of the camera and actually talking about the product, the brand, what we stand for, and why our products are formulated the way they are. People love seeing behind the scenes.
Dustin: The transparency has been really helpful for us. We position ourselves as your nutritionist friend. Customers can email us, they can text us, and we respond nearly instantly. We’re just sharing everything—we’re probably oversharing—including mistakes and failures.
On making a TikTok series about their biggest labeling mistake:
Dustin: We had a series called Monk Fruit Gate. We forgot to put monk fruit on our ingredients labels for a very large production batch. We didn’t realize until after it was already run. So we had to throw away hundreds of thousands of packets that were mislabeled—we couldn’t ship that.
We launched a TikTok series about the whole process: How we forgot, how we had to throw it all away, how we’re putting in new systems to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Probably to this day, that generated the best comments we’ve ever received. People were saying, “I can’t believe how much you guys are sharing. I love the transparency. I don’t know what you sell, but I want to buy it.” We’ve kept that mentality ever since.
On the content muscle that founders should build themselves:
Dustin: TikTok was a great channel to start because we based everything on views. If we posted a video and it wasn’t getting any, we’d ask: Is the concept bad? Is the hook not engaging enough? Is the setting wrong? We were constantly tinkering every single day, making small adjustments. The first 40 videos we posted just didn’t go anywhere. It’s debilitating. But you just have to keep iterating, increase the frequency, try new things, and eventually you find something that works.
It’s engagement muscle memory. Now when we’re producing content, we can nearly instantly tell if it’s a good video or not. That saves a ton of time and has had a tremendous impact on the business.
Brian: I always tell founders to develop that muscle yourself early on. One of the only things you can truly own as a brand is your marketing and content. A lot of people want to outsource it early or hand it to a social media manager, but to truly understand the nuances—and to go through that whole phase of flopping and not seeing results—it’s eventually something that can be developed. I had no prior experience making content. You don’t need it. But you do need to be part of that creative process as the founder. Watch a lot of content that works. I know people say you’re rotting your brain on TikTok, but you’ve got to understand the platform you’re making content for.
On using TikTok as a free testing lab for paid ads:
Brian: Meta is still where we spend the most, but TikTok is where we’ve historically seen the most impressions and views. The great thing about getting really good at content is it lifts all other channels because we repurpose a lot of it for ads. We test a lot on TikTok because it’s just easier to post; you’re not worried too much about how everything looks. If it does well, it does well. Then we look at what has the most engagement and the most views, and we put that into Meta, which does a lot better with targeting and acquisition.
Dustin: It’s great for cost. We can throw a video on TikTok and let the algorithm do its thing. If it gets views, it’s a good video. If it doesn’t, it’s normally not. So we save a lot of the upfront cost on testing that we’d normally have to spend on Meta. TikTok is really our testing playground, and then we funnel the winners into Meta.
On turning down retail even after raising $4.7 million:
Dustin: DTC is amazing. We can control everything, and there’s still so much room to grow. Our goal is building a massive community of Feel Goods fans so that when the day comes for retail, people already know who we are. We’ve had a few retail opportunities that we passed on, and in hindsight, I’m happy we did.
It changes the dynamics of the business fundamentally. Even the marketing—if we’re in Whole Foods or Target, a lot of our content now has to shift to, “Hey, we’re in Whole Foods.” And that’s taking away from the other types of content we were previously making. Those shifts aren’t worth it for us right now.
There’s also instant feedback with DTC. We do extensive surveying: What frustrations do you have? What products are you taking? What do you like, what don’t you like—is it the flavor, the function, does it not mix well enough? That instant feedback has helped us tremendously on product development and marketing. By the time we’re ready for retail, the likelihood of success should be a lot higher.
Brian: Early on, a big part of not going to retail was really trying to dial in the product and formulations. In retail, you don’t get a second chance to convince someone why your product is great. And selling online and keeping headcount lean is one of the reasons we just love staying DTC.
Dustin: Our philosophy is: If we launched apparel tomorrow, would our community be so excited to rock it because they love the brand that much? If the answer is yes, we’re doing our job right. That’s how we’re navigating every decision.
Hear more from Dustin and Brian on Shopify Masters, including about the pop-up that got outsold by Girl Scouts, how they’re using AI for product development, and the mindset shift from “Should I start?” to “I have to make this work.”
