Sisun Lee loved his job as an engineer at Tesla . He had dead no intention of stop and commence his own company .
But what start up out as a fun side project to find a remedy for hangover has grown so bad , he felt he had to fall by the wayside his Book of Job this workweek and launch a company .
On July 5 , his startupMorning Recovery , will be open for business , where it will sell an FDA - compliant hangover cure .
The Morning Recovery hangover cure.
The whole affair started about a year ago , when the then 26 - year - old Lee took a slip to his domicile land of South Korea , a land known forits partying ways . And that meant he spent a circumstances of time with his acquaintance getting drunk . But instead suffering from holdover , his Korean buddies twist him on to the hangover remedy crapulence that are popular there .
Those drinks worked for him , Lee severalise Business Insider . " The next Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , I woke up feeling expectant . "
When he repay to the US he searched for similar swallow but they did n’t work for him as well . He bought some Korean ones online and shared them with his friends , particularly his buddies at his former job at Facebook . They loved them and everyone wanted more .
The Korean factory producing Morning Recovery.
" I stress to import them " and become a distributor , he told Business Insider , but these companies were n’t interested in having someone they did n’t recognize , with no background in potable or consumer goodness represent them in the US .
Then he start an idea . Could he just make the swallow himself ? He had taken three class of nanotechnology / biotech engineering in college before changing majors to computer science .
He started research the fixings and fall upon the piece of work of Dr. Jing Liang , a UCLA researcherpublishing document on herbal remediation for hangovers .
Morning Recovery on Product Hunt.
The herb that stops hangovers
It turn out the unavowed element , according to Liang ’s papers , is an herbal chemical compound call dihydromyricetin ( DHM ) found in the Oriental raisin tree diagram and rattan tea , Lee sound out .
Herbal wassail from these trees have been used to cure katzenjammer in Asia for thousands of years , Lee discovered .
hangover are caused when we tope more alcohol than our livers can handle , and a eccentric of toxic acid progress up , he said .
Too much of that acid causes redness like a head ache . Too much too fast can make vomiting . DHM helps the consistence remove this toxic acid , he say . ( Here ’s a data link to a more technical account . )
He also learned that for a holdover drink to really work , " pureness thing , quantity matters , and you need a lot of other element for holdover . You fall back Vitamin B and Vitamin coulomb in the body . These are all things that are not in Korean holdover drinks , " he pronounce .
With the help of Dr. Liang , who agreed to advise him , and a few of his other tech engine driver friends , they create their own chemical formula .
Getting intoxicated for the sake of his company
Once he had the formula , he require a declaration manufacturer to make it in large enough quantities for him and his friends . So he took a two - week trip to Asia . At first , he tested their sample run on himself .
" I was basically getting drunk every single Nox , " he said . His hangover rule seemed to work , " but I ’m passing skeptical . I wondered , did I not booze enough ? "
So he took videos of himself drink it up to verify to himself that he was really getting hammered .
He also tried skipping the drinkable to verify he would still wake up hang over .
" It was n’t sound , " he said . " I advance 15 pounds . "
He need more ginzo pigs . He ask his friends to distribute the drink to more masses and the feedback was good . 80 % said it facilitate them .
" We were still very unbelieving . We want to eliminate bias . We needed to give it to citizenry who did n’t know us at all . But we could n’t get enough alien to say , ' Yeah I ’ll get drunk and take this really unearthly sketchy drinking from you , " Lee laughed .
They put up a round-eyed Web pageexplaining the science behind the drink , he posted it on Facebook and asked his friend to partake it . A VC in Toronto envision the post andput it on Product Hunt , a website that helps set in motion new products .
And his hangover curative bluster up .
" Overnight we became No . 2 on Product Hunt . We were n’t even a inauguration . We were just people doing this thing , " he say . That day 10,000 people signed up to adjudicate it . News stories about the drink began pop up .
" We had to apologize , and changed the web page from offering to air a sampling to a waitlist , " he said .
Word spread . Over the next workweek , 20,000 people signed up on the waitlist . Then 30,000 people . He started a individual Facebook chemical group so he could interact with a reasonable number about the drink , and it ballooned to 800 people . His inbox is flooded with emails asking for it . He was even contacted by Shark Tank , he pronounce .
He raised a little seminal fluid beat from Slow Ventures , 500 Startups , and other saint investor to fund a real yield trial .
And it became more and more obvious that he had to step down his job and give scarper this party a endeavour .
" lead Tesla was a very tough decisiveness . If I could have done both , I would have , " he said . But he feels like he ’s been handed a very specific job to do : cure hangovers . And he ’ll always repent it if he does n’t assay .
While the convention is FDA compliant today , think all component are approve as a food supplement , he ’s even hoping to one day go to the next , big level and get " FDA blessing " for the formula , he says . If that happens , medico would be able to prescribe it as a drug , an genuine therapeutic .
There must be a luck of people in the human race who would say " cheers " to that .
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