The Booming Market for Injecting Yourself with Chinese Chemicals

Some notes on consumer startups

A great consumer company isn’t created by a founder, it is birthed from the primordial ooze of culture. Conversely, B2B is an assembly line: bolt on features, tune the funnel, watch the chart go up. In other words, if you want to sell to the masses you need to have a higher tolerance for wandering. Your job is to seek out an opening. After sitting through an embarrassing number of decks, demos, and postmortems, I’ve found three catalysts that can actually move a consumer company:

1. Unique technology that unlocks dramatically decreased costs or increased utility

2. Novel distribution channel or strategy

3. A cultural movement that shifts consumer sentiment

Today the obvious consumer opportunity is AI. In it, there is a unique technology that is cheap for founders to use (open-source LLMs), short-form video to distribute on the cheap, and consumer interest has never been higher in AI products.

That, though, is a boring story. It is one that anyone could tell you. Instead, I want to tell you one that is more dangerous, more radical.

It is a story of billions of dollars, of San Francisco tech workers mixing chemicals in their kitchen, and of the boondongle that is the United States healthcare system. This is the story of grey-market Chinese peptides. While there has been coverage of this story, I’m not quite sure that anyone has fully done the math on just how much money is in play. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars coming from people injecting themselves with illegal chemicals.

It is a story that is remarkably useful because there have been very few big companies built in the U.S. that are taking advantage of the rise in access to peptides, and it can teach us how to spot great opportunities before big tech takes advantage of them.

We begin with brain worms.