How a Party Brand Became the Nasal Strip Athletes Choose | Sam Posthuma

Business summary

Sam Posthuma’s central argument is that e-commerce has become easier to enter: suppliers, tools, and AI are more accessible. As a result, the durable advantage is less about finding a product “winner” and more about building a distinctive brand, story, and customer relationship.

His experience spans early experiments, the fashion brand Old Money, and HiStrips, a nasal-strip brand that grew from a lifestyle concept into a performance and wellness business.

Strategy and positioning

• Build a brand, not just a store. Posthuma sees e-commerce as a sales channel within a broader brand-building effort. Products can be copied; the people, story, community, and feelings associated with a brand are harder to reproduce.
• Make product quality part of the differentiation. He says HiStrips’ adhesion and customer experience distinguish it from generic alternatives. The team aims to pair effective products with premium design, packaging, and a recognizable pink visual identity.
• Use the brand’s story to guide expansion. HiStrips is broadening beyond nasal strips into products linked to performance, sleep, and wellness. The test is whether customers see a new product as a natural fit with the brand—not simply whether it can be manufactured or advertised.
• Choose a category you can sustain. Posthuma sold Old Money despite continued sales growth because he disliked fashion’s operational demands and did not want to keep managing the product cycle.

Growth and marketing playbooks

• Story-led brand building

  • Collaborate with artists, athletes, creators, and other relevant figures.
  • Launch products that continue the brand’s narrative.
  • Use distinctive creative and organic visibility to make the brand memorable.

• Creator-led content engine

  • HiStrips works with thousands of active creators, using discount-code commissions and product seeding.
  • Creator content supplies material for paid advertising, alongside in-house creative and press.
  • The team uses creator-management tools and affiliate systems to organize outreach, content, and sales attribution.

• Keep close control of core growth levers

  • Posthuma remains hands-on in Meta Ads Manager, spending at least two hours a day in the account.
  • He has hired a head of growth but says the founders continue to work together on media buying.
  • His view is that founders should stay close to advertising and customer acquisition because those decisions are central to the business.

• Build for repeat purchases

  • HiStrips is not profitable on the first purchase, according to Posthuma; repeat purchases and customer lifetime value make the model work.
  • He recommends favoring products with a credible path to recurring revenue, including subscriptions where appropriate.
  • The team spent roughly a year and a half building fundamentals—customers, creators, and proof of concept—before growth began to compound.

Product and operations

• Go directly to the source when it matters. HiStrips initially bought nasal strips through a trader, or middleman. After locating the actual factory, the founders switched suppliers to reduce costs and gain more direct control.

  • The factory reportedly said it received requests to copy the product or website almost weekly.
  • Posthuma says direct sourcing could make the strips about 20–30% cheaper, though the team also learned that branding and execution—not just product access—help protect a business from copycats.

• Use customer feedback in product development.

  • HiStrips conducts R&D and feedback rounds, then revises products based on customer preferences.
  • For its red-light product, the team plans to replace a touch control with a physical button after customers said they preferred a tactile click.
  • The team also changed direction on a proposed foldable design after customers favored a smaller, more portable product.

• Let customer behavior inform product extensions.

  • The company asked customers what else they used in their routines. Electrolytes were a frequently mentioned category, so HiStrips developed a product intended for the same performance-oriented audience.
  • Posthuma’s proposed test: if customers on the brand’s email list would broadly welcome a product as a natural addition, it may fit. If it would confuse or alienate them, reconsider the launch.

• Manage fulfillment trade-offs deliberately.

  • HiStrips ships globally from China, with stated delivery times of roughly four to five days. This supports international sales without maintaining multiple fulfillment locations, though shipping is a meaningful cost.
  • The company is also expanding into Amazon and retail, which introduces additional logistics and restocking requirements.

Management and organization

• Divide founder responsibilities clearly. The four co-founders lead growth and marketing, finance, design, operations and suppliers, and legal and platforms. Posthuma says clear ownership and complementary strengths make the group more effective than a solo-founder setup.
• Use a lean but committed team. The company began with the founders and its first employee, a community manager who handles creator outreach and partnerships. The team was described as approaching 20 people, including the founders.
• Hire for mission and energy. Rather than relying primarily on recruiters, the founders have found strong candidates through direct messages and social channels. They emphasize enthusiasm for the brand, initiative, and a willingness to contribute beyond a narrow job description.
• Match management structure to scale. Posthuma says the current fast-moving approach suits the company’s present stage, but expects senior expertise—particularly in finance and operations—to become more important at much larger scale.

Capital, cash flow, and exits

• Plan around cash conversion, not just profitability. Buying inventory, packaging, advertising, and shipping can require cash before customer payments arrive. Posthuma says a company can be profitable on paper and still run out of cash.
• Use financing to fund inventory when the return justifies it. The founders invested several hundred thousand dollars in HiStrips, supplemented by a working-capital loan for inventory ahead of a peak season. Posthuma argues that debt can be appropriate if the business has a credible plan to turn inventory into growth and repay the borrowing.
• Prepare for a sale before you need one. For an e-commerce exit, he emphasizes clean, verifiable trailing-12-month profit that is stable or growing. Buyers will conduct due diligence, even on smaller deals.
• Sell before performance collapses. In his view, buyers are reluctant to acquire a declining business. A strong, growing earnings trend can support a better multiple; waiting for further growth can backfire if the business turns down.
• Treat the exit as a strategic decision, not only a valuation event. Old Money was sold through a broker’s buyer network in a relatively quick, discounted process. Posthuma sold 80% and retained 20%, expecting the buyer to invest in inventory and improve U.S. fulfillment. He says the buyer did not execute those plans, and the business later became substantially smaller.

Key metrics and figures mentioned

Figures below are as stated in the interview; some are approximate or lack a clearly specified period.

• HiStrips creators: About 4,000 active creators making content for the brand.
• Creator content: The team said it generated about 7,000 videos in two months through a UGC platform.
• Meta advertising: Posthuma said the company was approaching $2 million in Meta ad spend; the precise time period was not specified.
• Customer base: An email list of about 1 million people; Posthuma said roughly 90% of customers run or participate in Hyrox, though the basis for that estimate was not detailed.
• Retail: A goal of nearly 500 retail doors before year-end; the brand was already in about 30 Intersport stores in Greece.
• Team: Roughly 15 hires, with the company expected to approach 20 people total, including four co-founders.
• Product pipeline: 21 product launches planned before year-end, according to Posthuma.
• Red-light product: Sold for about $100 and described as approaching 100,000 units annually at the current pace.
• Old Money audience: About 500,000 Instagram followers, with some posts reportedly receiving around 100,000 organic views.
• Old Money exit: Posthuma said the business had approximately $800,000 to $1.2 million in pre-tax profit in the period discussed; the exact figure and period are unclear in the subtitles. He retained 20% equity after selling the other 80%.
• Exit multiples: Posthuma described 2–3× profit as a possible range for a young, less-proven business, while saying he would have considered a 1× annual-profit offer to exit a business he no longer wanted to run.
• Low-budget testing: He estimated that a committed founder might test a product for about $2,000–$3,000, using samples, branded creative, a professional site, and paid traffic before committing to a large inventory order.

Concrete examples and recommendations

• Old Money’s positioning: The brand began with loafers and a message akin to “get the thousand-dollar look for $50,” then developed into a more complete fashion identity through seasonal campaigns and branded packaging.
• Fashion’s operational burden: Multiple suppliers used inconsistent sizing. Seasonal collections also created a large assortment and sampling workload; Posthuma said a dedicated fashion business would need a larger product and design team to manage it properly.
• Intellectual-property risk: An earlier print-on-demand venture, Song Shirts, used music artwork on T-shirts and received copyright claims from Sony and Universal. His lesson: check rights before building a business around third-party intellectual property.
• Validate before buying significant inventory: Posthuma advises creating samples with the brand identity, producing credible ads and content, and testing demand before committing most available cash to stock.
• A preorder-style fallback: If an initial batch sells out, he describes contacting customers with a choice between a full refund or partial cashback in exchange for waiting for the next batch. This can preserve customer choice while testing whether demand supports a restock.
• Build assets that compound: His advice to younger founders is to stay with a promising brand, skill, relationship, or personal habit long enough for its value to accumulate rather than repeatedly abandoning projects after a few months.

Presenters and sources: Sam Posthuma (guest, HiStrips co-founder); Matt Kelly (host, The Midnight Pod).