For anyone who is exercising or sweating a lot, it’s important to replace the electrolytes you lose in your sweat, and not just drink plain water. Otherwise, you run the risk of developing symptoms of hyponatremia (i.e. low blood sodium), which involves headaches, fatigue, and brain fog. 

The main electrolytes we lose are sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, but sodium is the most prevalent electrolyte that is lost. These electrolytes are essential to our physiology, and an imbalance can not only make us feel terrible but can sometimes have serious consequences for our health.

Most people turn to sports drinks (like Powerade, Gatorade) to help replenish electrolytes and other nutrients during a workout. Unfortunately, they tend to be high in sugar, artificial sweeteners and artificial flavors. Unless you’re a triathlete or a marathon runner doing long endurance workouts and who needs all those carbs, they just aren’t good for you.

This is where electrolyte powders and hydration mixes come into play. They are more affordable (on a per serving basis), and allow you to fine-tune the concentration of electrolytes once added to water. Many are sugar and additive-free.

We believe that our hydration mix is the best of the best. It’s also the most affordable high-quality zero sugar hydration product in Australia in 2024. We’ll tell you more about how we’re able to do that later in this post. 

In this article, we’ll cover how our hydration mix compares to the rest in terms of formulation, source of ingredients, and pricing. Stick around to the end, as we’ll give you some interesting insight into how we plan to grow our business! 

Drivn Nutrition Hydration Mix Formulation:

Our Hydration Mix contains the following:

• 1000mg of sodium
• 250mg of potassium
• 40mg of magnesium
• 1000mg of creatine
• 500mg of taurine
• 0g of sugar

Note: We also include some ingredients for flavour (natural flavour), sweetness (stevia), and sourness (citric acid). Our unflavoured mix contains none of these. 

We wrote a detailed guide to our formulation here. In that article, we explain why we chose this ratio of ingredients, and go through the science that supports it.

Essentially, our formulation is one of the highest-quality and cleanest mix of ingredients on the market today. It contains all of the key ingredients that you should find in an electrolyte powder. 

We don’t contain any junk ingredients (that many hydration mixes include), such as:

• Artificial sweeteners (e.g. sucralose, maltodextrin);
• Artificial flavours;
• Anti-caking agents (i.e. microplastic particles used to ‘de-clump’ a powder mixture); and
• Excess amounts of sugar.

Our formulation also contains a potent dose of the electrolytes that matter, so that you can actually receive a tangible hydration benefit. Hydration products (like Gatorade and Powerade) fail to do this, because they are too diluted. 

It’s been specifically designed for athletes, followers of low carb diets, and anyone else in need of a hydration fix. You can even use it to recover from a hangover…

We are somewhat unique in the fact that we include taurine and creatine in our formulation. These ingredients are great for you - not only in terms of hydration, but also for metabolism, cognition, athletic performance, and overall health. We go into the science of taurine and creatine in the aforementioned article here. 

And lastly, it tastes great. We use a balanced flavour profile that is not 'sickly sweet' like many of the other products out there!

Source of Ingredients

The other thing to pay attention to is the source and form of ingredients.

You want to assess ingredients based on their 1) quality and 2) bioavailability (i.e. can be readily absorbed by your body).

On quality, the main concern is that the ingredient is free from potential contaminants. A great example is the issue of microplastics in salt. We only use pink himalayan salt that has been quality tested to not contain heavy metals, microplastics or other contaminants that we don’t want our customers to be consuming. 

You should reconsider other hydration products if they don’t openly tell you where their salt is from. Chances are they could be using table salt (because it’s cheap) - which is full of microplastics, lacking in minerals, and often bleached.

Secondly, ingredients should be in their most bioavailable form. This is relevant for minerals like magnesium. Magnesium often comes in the form of magnesium citrate or oxide, as these compounds are readily available and cheap. Unfortunately, they have quite low bioavailability, and they also tend to produce diarrhea-like symptoms if you take too much.

We only use magnesium glycinate - which is both highly bioavailable and doesn’t produce any gastrointestinal side effects. The trade-off is that it’s more expensive.

In a nutshell, we use the highest quality source for all of our ingredients.

Pricing

Pricing is a complicated one.

On the one hand, as a business owner, you want to be able to charge a price that leaves you with a healthy margin on your product. This leaves you with enough profit to reinvest in the business, such as creating additional products, investing in branding and marketing, or hiring people. Over time, a business that has healthier margins will typically grow faster and be more resilient than a business that has lower margins.

On the other hand, the direct-to-consumer category is fiercely price competitive. This is understandable - as people are choosing to spend their hard-earned money on your product. 

Our brand is all about offering the highest quality nutrition products that money can buy, and being completely transparent along the way. 

Yet, our hydration mix is not the most expensive product in its category (of zero sugar hydration mixes). You can see the data on this below. Our product has 40 servings and sells for A$59.95, giving a price per serving of A$1.50.

In comparison, most other zero-sugar hydration mixes cost upwards of A$2.10 per serving. That’s a big difference!

So, how and why is our product priced this way?

Marketing a Consumer Product

It all comes down to how we want to grow the business, and how we acquire customers.

Most consumer product companies acquire customers by creating ads and marketing directly to customers on Instagram and Facebook using paid ads. They also typically also pay content creators to create more seemingly authentic and honest ‘user generated content’ videos. You will have seen these videos all over social media. These methods are collectively known as ‘performance marketing’. 

Don’t get me wrong. This strategy can work fabulously well, especially when you use creative that is funny, interesting, and catchy. In that circumstance, you can create a video ad, spend some money promoting it in Facebook Ads manager, and quite soon you will receive a return on your investment in the form of sales. Return on Ads Spend (‘ROAS’), which is basically how many sales you get resulting from your ad spend, is a metric that measures this. Anything over about 4-5x is very good (i.e. spend $20 on marketing to make $100 in sales). 

This method of acquiring customers is fast, efficient, and straightforward.

The problem is that 1) it is expensive, and 2) it is not very sustainable. 

It can cost as much as $25-40 to acquire a customer through paid Facebook or Instagram ads. If it also costs you something like $15-20 to make and fulfill your product, and you want at least a 20% profit margin, you’ll have to charge quite a lot for your product to make financial sense. Otherwise, you’ll either lose money, or you won’t make enough profit to reinvest in the business, and it’ll never grow. 

So whenever you see a consumer product selling at a premium price, know that it often doesn’t have much to do with the quality of the product, and has much more to do with how they are marketing it.

Facebook Ads can also be very temperamental. Some months your ads can perform well with a ROAS above 2.5x and a cost to acquire a customer of $25. Other months it may cost as much as $40, with the same ad. Part of this is due to changes in the Facebook/Instagram algorithm, but it is also the consequence of the changing attitudes and interests of consumers. This is the reason why brands that heavily rely on performance marketing spend much of their time testing new and recycling old ad creatives.

Some consumer businesses will even acquire customers unprofitably and rely on repurchases or a subscription model to generate most of their profit. Athletic Greens is a good example of this model. 

So while performance marketing is quick, potentially scalable, and can produce cash flow immediately, it doesn’t make for a very resilient and sustainable business model. The success of your business is always at the whim of the algorithms…

Our Pricing Philosophy

While we do use paid marketing, we also plan to focus a lot on creating content (e.g. writing these blog posts, creating videos, etc.) that provide value and engage directly with our customers. 

That way, our customers can find us organically, and we can have a more authentic connection with our audience and community.

Organic traffic is great for consumer businesses. Other than the time and effort to produce content that generates the initial awareness, organic traffic is essentially free. That means that you’re not spending >$20 to acquire every customer that buys your product. Given that the cost of acquiring customers is such a huge part of the overall cost of a consumer product, this allows businesses with a healthy mix of organic traffic to earn higher profit margins. This makes them more resilient and sustainable, and puts them in a better position to reinvest for growth. 

Our goal in marketing our products is to have a healthy blend of sales through organic traffic. We choose to share plenty of that value with our customers by offering significantly lower prices in our category, and to use some of the other profit that we make to reinvest in the business. By doing this, we can create other products that we know our customers will like, and continue to grow our brand. We may even lower our prices even more in the future. It’s a win-win!

Why Getting Organic Traffic Is Difficult

The problem with getting organic traffic is that it is hard and requires a huge amount of work.

Organic traffic doesn’t just grow on trees. It has to come from somewhere. 

The main method of generating organic traffic is creating content. That content has to be valuable and interesting for people to engage with it. Otherwise, you’ll just be posting your content into the universe, and hearing nothing in response… 

Even if you’re skilled and knowledgeable enough to create good content, it takes a lot of time and effort to do so. The truth is that most business people just want to make money. They want to sell stuff and get results. 

In the direct-to-consumer or eCommerce space in particular, and especially in the sports nutrition/supplement industry, brand owners will tell you all sorts of things (like how they use ‘special ingredients’) and use various marketing tricks to get you to buy their products. They aren’t particularly passionate about what they’re doing, and they don’t really care if their products are actually helpful to their customers. They may claim to have read and understood the science, but the truth is that they probably haven’t. From their perspective, they think that if what they’re doing makes them money, then so be it! 

So, these types of people don’t have the time, effort, or interest that it takes to produce enough content to acquire customers with organic traffic. 

As an example, one of the main types of content we are producing is blog posts. We know a bunch of questions and keywords that customers use when they search things related to sports nutrition, hydration, and electrolytes in Google. Our aim is to produce articles that are the best and most relevant answers to these questions. 

For some slightly complicated questions (such as ‘does sodium really cause heart disease’), we’ll do a lot of work reading, understanding, and synthesizing the scientific literature to create an article that is good enough to properly answer the question. It might take us at least 10 hours of work to produce a high-quality article. 

Ultimately, we’re happy to do that work because we find it interesting, we want to provide value to our customers, and we are in no rush to grow our business. We don’t really want or need to be an overnight success story, and would rather build something great while taking our time. 

Key Takeaways

As you can see, our approach to business is a bit different.

We’re in this game to create high quality products that our customers love, and to be transparent about how we make them. 

Our goal is to acquire customers organically by providing value through our content and fostering genuine connection with our audience. 

In doing so, we’ll strive to share the economic value that we create by offering the most competitive prices in our industry. 

We’re also passionate about fitness and curious about the science of sports nutrition. For us, building this business is fun!

You can check out our hydration mix product here. Stay tuned for future product releases or blog posts. If you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch with us!