Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Rigney. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Maju Superfoods, a successful and growing San Diego-based health supplement company, began in 2014 when Ryan Rigney and Gunawan Wiyono were both students. Since 2014, Maju has been successfully bootstrapped into a thriving business with $30M sold & 1M orders placed.
The journey to where Maju is today was a difficult one with many lessons along the way. Ryan and Gunawan were both struggling with student loan debt and fatigue from juggling studies and side jobs. Ryan was studying law at the University of San Diego and experienced firsthand the negative effects of overwork and exhaustion on him, his classmates, as well as lawyers working at the major firms everyone strived for. It wasn’t long before he knew he wanted to take a different route in life. The never-ending burnout quickly inspired Ryan to turn to more natural and healthier ways to be more energized; eventually, this turned into an obsessive passion, and he realized this was an avenue to get to where he wanted to be. While studying, Ryan used the little free time he had to build a business that aligned with his values of work-life balance. Gunawan, an MBA student, found himself in a similar situation. Worked down to the bone and depleted of almost all his energy, he relied on prescription pills to maintain focus and soon realized this was not sustainable, expensive, and a long-lasting unhealthy solution.
Ryan and Gunawan, who were high school friends and kept in regular contact, both came together when they realized they wanted out and had similar interests in the health supplement industry. They set out to create a company that would help others adopt healthy habits and improve their overall well-being.
The key to Maju’s success?
Ryan and Gunawan’s boldness for experimentation, mindset, heavy focus on quality, consistency, and customer support, has been the formula to keeping the brand growing organically. That is how Maju became famous for being the leader in potent black seed oil (a natural product from Turkey with a range of health benefits they truly believe every person should take daily.) Black seed oil is a widely studied ingredient with potential benefits for hair, skin, nails, digestion, and immunity–referred to as some as an ancient superseed.
Creating a category:
The active support and continual open dialogue with customers combined with the founders’ fearlessness for pushing the envelope led to Maju becoming the original creator of the world’s first black seed oil gummy. This sparked an entirely new category of products that continues to grow to this day. Ryan and Gunawan feel Black Seed Oil should be incorporated to everyone’s daily routine & they strongly feel Maju is well positioned to help grow awareness for the category over the coming years.
Maju has always been mission-focused with the goal of helping 1,000,000 people create healthy addictions in their daily routine. The company is based in San Diego and has a fully remote team of 11 that prioritizes work-life balance and health above all else– within the company and outwardly with customers. The team consists of several mothers of young children as well as people who love to travel, so work-life balance is essential to Maju.
Ryan and Gunawan plan to continue to raise awareness for Maju and its range of existing products, focus on helping customers find their healthy addictions here in the USA and continue expand their proven products internationally.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ryan & Gunawan built the company while still enrolled in graduate school. Ryan was working a job as a law clerk, studying for the bar, and building Maju all at the same time–not a feat he would recommend to anyone. Ryan & Gunawan learned the importance of having professional eyes on finances, particularly on the cash flow. Building a physical products business is demand on cash flow, when sales increase due to popularity of product, you need to ramp up the size of your orders to meet demand. In retrospect, the process of building Maju was difficult for the first few years, once we found our product-market fit and learned what we excelled at, we were able to scale more quickly.
We’ve been impressed with Maju Superfoods, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Maju Superfoods makes products decisions based on a combination of: 1) what we love, 2) what our customers introduce us to, 3) what the data supports. When we learn of a new opportunity, we verify it with data and have a philosophy to continually improve how we communicate what our products do to our valued customers. We have had a lot of success growing customer communities on Facebook and striking deals with ambassadors for our brand on YouTube. A good product, a strong community, and influential people who love what we do is the combination for our success. We operate some of the largest Black Seed Oil Facebook groups with a combined 40,000 members who talk about our oil every single day.
What were you like growing up?
You would have described Ryan as a quiet & independent thinker who did not know what he wanted to do in life. Ryan discovered online business & e-commerce when he was 17 & began to earn a side income with affiliate marketing while just out of high school. Up until that point, he was not sure where he was going to go exactly. Ryan has always been obsessed with figuring things out, finding more efficient ways to complete tasks (growth hacker), & is a long-time video game nerd with a competitive streak. He has always had a passion for creating new things from scratch, so creating new products for Maju is a dream come true.
Contact Info:
- Website: MajuSuperfoods.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/majusuperfoods
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/majusuperfoods/
- Other: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@majusuper
Image Credits
Ryan
Gunawan
