From my experience, investors put money into companies when the following conditions have been satisfied, where they have:

1. Traction (sales)

2. A costed plan with a clear focus, and capital allocation on the bottleneck holding the company back

3. Funds going towards something that will make the company more money (an asset) in the future

Now, whilst all of these things are true and will be things they might think about, ultimately, I would say their decision will come down to two deeper motivations:

1. Is this company going to at least 10x in valuation in the next 5 years?

2. Would I be massively missing out by passing on this opportunity?

Investors in the nutrition space are understandably sceptical about where founders put their money, and they should be.

Especially in the nutrition space, there are so many things founders can invest in that often just end up being a massive waste.

If you’re pre-seed up to Seed or perhaps Series A, the responsible decision is just whatever gets you ROI within the next month, because that’s pretty much as far ahead as you can really afford to look.

After all, bad cash flow is what kills companies…

But once your MRR is increasing and your numbers are looking more repeatable and consistent… where do you put the money?

Paid ads often are subject to diminishing returns after a certain point, meaning CAC increases, and your CAC-to-LTV (thanks, Alex Hormozi) ratio becomes much less favourable.

Maybe influencers (of questionable credibility) are what you opt for…

Borrowing the credibility of others to bolster your own brand in lieu of data that your product really works?

But what about margin?

There appear to be two pathways or buckets that companies in this space fall into:

Commodities, or differentiated products and ingredients.

Commodities… a race to the bottom where you cheapen your ingredients, cut costs wherever possible and hope that you can edge out the competition. Aka razor-thin margins. Aka most whey protein products.

But what does a differentiated product look like?

What if you could position your product such that there isn’t another comparable product that people can look to?

Not only does this get you more premium pricing and, in turn, increase your margins… but it also builds real brand value and credibility that compound.

Investors back companies and products with unreasonable advantages and push the gas pedal to help them get there faster.

If you’re building a nutrition or health brand and want to talk about how published clinical trials can get you premium positioning and change your marketing from a pretty colour scheme to something credible, reply to this email or drop me a message.

And if capital is the blocker, this is exactly what we built StudySetGo Connect for: matching health and nutrition companies with investors who specifically back evidence-driven businesses, so you can fund the clinical trials that get you there, covered by NutraIngredients here.

All the best,
Nathan

#1 Will show you the real value that clinical trials can provide and why they can and should be viewed as an asset

#2 Which are the key points that differentiate asset clinical trials from liability clinical trials

Let’s begin…

Why would you classify clinical trials as an asset?

As I’m sure you know, assets provide cash flow (income) and have value in and of themselves…liabilities, by contrast, reduce cash flow.

When clinical trials are done right, they increase knowledge, like, and trust in the company as a whole and in the particular product.

How (good) clinical trials justify a higher margin

More specifically, in a competitive marketplace, buyers trust your product more than your competitors, which allows you to charge premium pricing, in turn yielding higher margins and greater profitability.

Sounds great, right?

But a baked-in assumption here that we’re coming across more and more is that any evidence is better than no evidence.

This is something that I’m increasingly firming against.

More and more companies, consumers, and investors are becoming scientifically aware, both due to increased scientific due diligence within companies in this field and due to AI providing increasingly accurate (although not perfect) summaries of scientific literature.

In short, people can tell good studies from bad, and there is increasingly nowhere to hide.

You can justify a higher margin only if the scientific leads from your buyers are impressed by the trials…

Not if they can turn it into Swiss cheese with a few pointed comments/questions

You NEED serious confidence that the study you’re commissioning is something that you are going to be proud standing behind when due diligence comes.

How can clinical trials increase a company’s valuation?

The area where I think this has been underappreciated among senior management is the ability of these assets to increase the company’s valuation when raising capital and selling the company.

A company that sells products that claim to improve health without evidence is…

flaccid.

A funny choice of words, I know, but let me explain.

Investors have historically asked about unit economics, growth rates, and revenue multiples when it comes to valuations.

This is useful because these are numbers that can be easily measured, tracked and improved within weeks.

But, at a certain point in the business, there are diminishing returns to increasing advertising spend and paying more for larger booths at Vitafoods.

Your competitors will also have good unit economics, and whilst you might have a nice website and some pretty colours… that doesn't count for much in terms of brand credibility.

This is what I mean by flaccid… there’s not much structure or credibility behind the numbers.

Well-designed clinicals become the card in your hand that allows you to negotiate based on this brand's credibility, leveraging higher revenue multiples in valuation.

So what differentiates a study you want to show off in your deck from one you want to hide in due diligence, and what could add millions vs take it away?

What makes a great commercial clinical trial?

Rigorous conduct with appropriate controls
Why it matters: it defines what participants should and shouldn’t do during the intervention, so the result reflects the product, not their behaviour.
Without it: the results could be pinned on anything but your product.

Placebo-controlled design
Why it matters: it isolates your product’s true effect against the placebo effect.
Without it: buyers and investors read the study as weak evidence because they don’t know if it’s an expectation effect instead of your supplement actually doing the work.

Relevant endpoints, measured at the right times
Why it matters: It captures the changes you’d expect to see, making the evidence convincing.
Without it: you're left with a study which shows no significant results… not exactly great for building trust.

Validated outcome measures
Why it matters: Defensible data beats unvalidated self-reported questionnaires.
Without it: the brand looks unscientific, and credibility (and valuation) takes the hit.

In summary

The right trial can buy credibility, which changes how both customers and investors view your products and your company (and its valuation), and, unfortunately, the wrong trial can do the opposite.

If you’re interested in what an “Asset” trial delivered within the next 12 months might look like for your products or ingredients… let me know, and Dr Tom Jameson and I would be happy to discuss.

You can chat with both of us here…

But the asset that most supplement and health brands overlook and the founder never thinks to develop, and that the acquirer’s diligence team thinks about constantly.

Your clinical evidence on your own product.

At the negotiation table, the buyer isn't just looking at your unit economics; they're buying the business as a package, and within that is your brand credibility.

Every claim you cannot defend (with your own primary evidence, ideally done through a well-done randomised controlled trial) is a discount the buyer will calculate while they smile across the table.

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Why a few trials can be worth millions

This is not abstract. Consumer health businesses sell on a multiple, and clinical evidence moves two key levers.

The first is the multiple itself. An acquirer pays more for revenue they believe will survive contact with regulators, competitors, and their own lawyers.

A product whose headline claim rests on a borrowed study, a mechanism hand-wave, or one influential customer’s anecdote is revenue with a question mark stapled to it.

A product with its own defensible trial behind the claim is de-risked revenue. De-risked revenue trades higher. On a business doing a few million in EBITDA, even a small increase on the multiple is already real money.

The second is the structure of the deal, where founders lose the most and notice the least.

A deal is never just the headline number. It is earnouts, escrow holdbacks, warranties, and indemnities.

The more risk a buyer sees, the more of your money they keep behind glass. Held in escrow for a year or two, clawed back if a claim gets challenged after close, tied to reps and warranties you are personally on the hook for.

Strong clinical evidence shrinks that perceived risk.

Less risk means less cash held back and fewer warranties hanging over you after you have supposedly sold the thing.

That gap is millions ($/£/€), and a lot of it is cash that stays in your pocket instead of theirs.

So the clinical cards in your hand are a source of leverage. Played well, they are worth more than almost anything else you can do in the final twenty-four months before a sale.

But only if the science is good

More studies are not the goal. The right studies, done defensibly, are the goal.

A diligence team is paid to find the holes. Hand them a thin, underpowered, or off-claim study, and you have not added a bargaining chip. You have handed them a weapon.

A weak study does not sit there neutrally.

It invites the one question every acquirer is trained to ask: if they cut this corner, what else did they cut?

Suddenly, your clean financials are getting a second look, too.

Quantity gets audited.

Quality compounds.

One trial that survives scrutiny is worth more than five that collapse under it.

The cheapest study that got you a marketing claim this year is often the exact study that gets torn apart in the data room two years later.

You need to make sure you’re not buying a liability with a publication date.

This is why the cheapest CRO, fastest p-value approach quietly costs you at exit.

Most brands treat a trial as a marketing checkbox.

Get a result, get a claim, get it on the label, move on. But you are not building that evidence for this quarter’s campaign.

You are building it for the buyer who will read it line by line, with their lawyers, looking for a reason to pay you less.

The question was never “what is the cheapest way to get a claim?”, The question is “what evidence will still be standing when someone is paid to knock it down?”

The timeline objection, and why it is mostly wrong

The honest pushback is timing. Good evidence feels slow, and exits do not wait, so founders pick speed and either:

1) just spend more on general marketing spend and become a victim to diminishing returns, or

2) quietly accept weak science.

They assume rigour and timelines are a straight trade-off.

They are not…

Most of what makes a clinical trial slow is not the science.

It is the paperwork, the queue, the institutional drag.

Run it properly and run it lean, and you can have evidence that holds up without setting fire to the runway you need before a raise or a sale.

The thing that actually kills you is starting late. Evidence that you commissioned the quarter before diligence is evidence that you commissioned too late. It will not be mature, peer-reviewable, or defensible when it counts.

If you are eighteen months to three years out from a raise or an exit, the clinical evidence you build now is not a marketing expense. It is part of the price.

Build it well, and it is a bargaining chip worth millions when you sit down to negotiate. Build it badly, and it is the first thing they use against you.

If you want to know which one yours will be, that is a conversation worth having before the buyer’s team has it for you.

I’ll be going to the International Scientific Conference on Probiotics, Prebiotics, Gut Microbiota and Health and Longevity Show next week! If you’ll be attending, do let me know, it would be great to catch up.

All the best,

Nathan

So here are five things worth knowing before you commission anything… aka the stuff I wish more founders had on their radar before they got their first quote.

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1. The product you pick matters more than the protocol

Most founders think the hard part is the study design. It isn’t. The hard part is choosing which product to test. Pick the one where a credible positive result would change the most about your business in the next 12 months. Usually, your hero SKU is the one you want to push into new retailers or the one carrying premium pricing you need to defend.

2. Choose your outcome backwards from the claim you want to make

The outcome you measure dictates everything downstream: the population, the duration, the cost, and what you can say on your label and in your ads afterwards. Starting with the end in mind is best practice here. What’s the headline of the press release you want to be able to write when the data comes in? What’s the claim you want on the website? Then design the study to test that not whatever’s easiest to measure.

3. Your population should look like your customer

If your customer is a stressed 45-year-old with poor sleep, your study should be on stressed 45-year-olds with poor sleep. The closer the study population matches your actual buyer, the more useful the data is, and the more likely you’ll see an effect in the first place.

You can pick a population that both fits your ICP AND is also likely to have a larger effect on your product.

4. Think carefully about study duration and where you measure along the way

How long should your trial run for?

Conventional wisdom says long enough to see the effect you’re hoping for, but not a day longer. Every extra week adds cost, dropout risk, and time before you can use the data commercially.

But, in my opinion, there’s a smarter play most founders miss: interim measurements. For example, if you’re running a weight-loss study and expect meaningful results at 12 weeks. Consider adding a measurement point at 6 weeks, too. If your product has already started working by then, you can say “users saw results in as little as 6 weeks“, and customers strongly prefer products that work quickly, because customers are impatient. One extra measurement point, designed in from the start, can unlock a much sharper marketing claim/angle without changing the underlying study.

The principle: design your timeline around when you expect to see effects, and consider adding interim time points to see if you can detect an early effect.

5. Plan your post-study marketing before the study starts

A really useful exercise to do before commisioning a trial is spending a good amount of time considering all of the different options available to you to help you turn the research into revenue.

A few examples below of how you can do this:

• Website: a dedicated “Our Science” or “Clinically Studied” page, homepage badges, product page callouts

• Press release: distributed through wires (PR Newswire, EIN) and pitched directly to trade and consumer outlets

• Trade press and media coverage: Nutraingredients, Natural Products Insider, NutritionInsight and consumer health press

• White paper or technical brief: a 4-6 page document for B2B buyers, retail category managers, and distribution partners

• Conference presentations and posters: Vitafoods, SupplySide, Natural Products Expo, plus academic conferences if you want scientific credibility

• Peer-reviewed publication: slower but enormously powerful, unlocks citations in marketing and gives your claims long-term defensibility

• Sales sheets and pitch decks: for retail buyers, Amazon vendor managers, and international distributors

• Pamphlets and in-store collateral: particularly for pharmacy and health food retail channels

• Paid ads: Meta, Google, Amazon DSP, with claim-led creative built around the data (Easiser in the US)

• Podcast appearances: You or your team telling the story, and pitching the principal investigator as a guest

• Founder-led content: LinkedIn posts, Substack/newsletter, YouTube explainers walking through the science

• Influencer and practitioner outreach: nutritionists, dietitians, and clinicians who’ll only recommend products with data behind them

• Retailer pitches: clinical data is often the single biggest unlock for Whole Foods, Holland & Barrett, and major pharmacy chains

• Email marketing: a launch sequence to your existing list, including “the science behind it” nurture flow

• Investor and partnership decks: clinical data dramatically de-risks the brand for retail buyers, distributors, and acquirers, whilst also increasing the valuation!
  

  I made this list long initially, not to say you should do all of these things, but to say that there are many more ways you can market research than you probably realise.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve been thinking about running a trial and you’re stuck on what it should include, how it should be designed, or what the road map could look like, please do let me know.

I’m working on a document that walks through this in detail, and I’d be happy to share it with you free of charge to help you plan your clinical trial strategy.

Just reply to this email, and I’ll send it over.

— Nathan

They get run, they get published in a journal nobody outside the field reads, and they get cited once on a product page.

This isn’t because the science is bad. Often the science is fine. It’s because the trial was commissioned to answer a question that, even if answered perfectly, wouldn’t change anything commercially.

And in the world most of my clients operate in, “didn’t change anything commercially” is the same as “didn’t work.”

So let’s be honest about what a commissioned trial actually is.

All trials are commercial trials

When brands talk about why they want a study, I hear three framings.

1. It’s a PR play: we want third-party validation we can put in front of journalists and retailers.

2. It’s a regulatory move: we need the data to access a market or substantiate a claim.

3. It’s R&D: we want to understand our ingredient better so we can build the next product.

In my mind, all three are the same thing. PR builds brand trust, which leads to more product sales. Regulatory unlocks shelves, which sell more products. R&D feeds the next launch, which sells more product.

Once we accept this notion, the question stops being "what kind of trial should we run?" and becomes "what commercial outcome am I buying, and is this study designed to deliver it?"

That second question is the one most commissioned trials fail to address.

The mistake of confirming what’s already known

Let’s take omega-3, which is where I’ve spent the last three years of my life as a PhD student.

The cardiovascular evidence is enormous.

The cognitive evidence is enormous.

If you commission the forty-seventh study showing omega-3 supports heart health in middle-aged adults, it’s better than no trial… but it probably won’t move the needle in a meaningful way.

No journalist will write about it. Big, high-impact journals probably won’t care to publish it. Your sales team can’t open a conversation with the buyer across the table because they already assume omega-3 is good for the heart.

The study confirmed what everyone already believed, so it told nobody anything new.

This is the trap.

Brands commission trials in the most established part of an ingredient’s evidence base because it feels safe, and the result is almost guaranteed.

But “almost guaranteed result” and “commercially useless result” are usually the same thing.

The principle: commission at the edge of emerging evidence

The scientifically interesting question and the commercially interesting question are the same question. Both audiences, researchers and consumers, respond to novelty.

So the trial worth commissioning is the one at the front of the evidence base, not the one at the back.

Where the mechanism is plausible, the early signal is real, but the definitive study hasn’t been done.

That’s where a well-designed RCT changes the conversation rather than appending to it.

Back to omega-3. The cardiovascular and cognitive stories are saturated. But omega-3, skeletal muscle, protein synthesis, anabolic resistance in older adults, recovery, and healthy ageing are areas where the evidence is genuinely emerging.

The mechanism is there. The early human work is promising. The definitive trials haven’t been run.

That’s a commissioning opportunity.

A brand that funds a well-designed RCT in that space gets a result that’s genuinely new, which means journalists will cover it, conferences will feature it, and…

The same logic applies elsewhere: creatine beyond strength, magnesium beyond sleep, protein beyond muscle mass. Every mature ingredient has an edge; that’s where the opportunity is.

Why this is harder than it sounds

If commissioning a better trial were straightforward, everyone would already be doing it. The reason they’re not is that the industry has trained brands to choose between two bad options.

Option one: go to a traditional CRO. You’ll get scientific rigour, but you’ll wait eighteen months, spend six figures you didn’t need to spend, and get back a study designed for a regulator rather than a buyer.

Option two: go to a marketing agency that runs “studies” consumer panels, in-house questionnaires, and small open-label work dressed up as evidence. It’s fast and cheap, but it’s scientifically flimsy, which reduces trust rather than building it, especially with investors.

Underneath this is a simpler reason for the gap: the skill combination is rare. Scientists who genuinely understand commercial dynamics, what a sales team can use, what a journalist will write about, and what an investor will trust are uncommon.

Commercial operators who can read a study protocol and spot the design choice that determines whether the result is usable are uncommon, too.

Most people are competent on one side of the line. The few who can sit on both sides at once are the ones worth commissioning a trial with, because they design the study around the question that actually matters.

That gap is the problem worth solving.

Marketing-led, R&D-assisted

This inverts how most brands run the process.

From my experience, the standard model is: R&D decides what to study, and marketing figures out how to talk about the results.

The result is a study that’s scientifically defensible but not as commercially interesting.

The better model: marketing identifies the story it wants to tell in 18 months.

R&D then designs the study that, if successful, produces that story with scientific integrity intact.

Marketing leads on the question. R&D leads on the method.

Brands that get this right end up with something rare: a commercial incentive and a scientific-quality bar that points in the same direction. The trial is designed well because the commercial story depends on the result being credible. And the next study gets commissioned at the next edge of the evidence base, because that’s where the next commercial story lives.

The bottom line

If you’re a brand sitting on a budget for a study and asking yourself which trial to commission, three questions to start with.

What’s the commercial story you’d want to be telling in eighteen months? Not the abstract, the press release headline.

What’s the question at the edge of your ingredient’s evidence base where a well-run study could produce that headline?

And are you willing to commission it, knowing the answer might be no?

If you can answer those three, the study design itself.

If you can’t, or if you want to talk through what a study at the edge of your evidence base could actually look like before you commit a budget to it, that’s a conversation worth having.

You don’t need to have the answer in-house yet. That’s what we’re here for.

Clinical-level data on commercial timelines, science you can defend in front of either audience.

If that’s the trial you’re trying to commission, book a call.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking about why companies would pay for clinical trials for over 6 years now, since I started my research career with a commercially funded project.

Even now, I’m learning new reasons why the best in the business prioritise the accumulation of clinical evidence, and why it’s increasingly no longer an option unless you’re a cheap brand.

As you may have guessed from the title…

This one relates to Exits and how you can exit sooner and at a higher valuation as someone in the health/nutrion space.

The conversation that reframed it for me

I had this said to me almost word for word by a private equity guy a few weeks ago. He told me his team will not touch a supplement brand without clinical data on the active ingredients. Not because the data drives the topline, although it helps. Because without it, there is no moat. The asset is just a logo and a Shopify store.

That reframed the whole question for me.

I had been thinking about clinical trials as a mechanism for increasing consumer trust and converting sales (which they still are great for), but I hadn’t really considered the implications of trials for valuation.

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Two companies, same revenue, very different multiples

Now imagine you’re an investor in charge of the dream investment fund you want to be acquired by

Across your desk/laptop, come two companies:

• Same revenue

• Same margin

• Same unit economics

• Same category

• One has clinical trials behind its hero ingredient. Five, ten, fifteen studies across different populations and outcome measures.

• Real investigators, real data, real publications.

• The other has one? Just good marketing.

Which one gets the higher multiple?

It is not close. The one with data gets a premium because the buyer is not just buying revenue. They are buying:

• Defensibility against competitors

• Something that cannot be replicated by spending more on ads

• Years of head start that money alone cannot compress

• A diligence story that already answers the hard questions

The KSM-66 counterfactual

Look at KSM-66. They turned ashwagandha, a herb that has been sitting in Ayurvedic texts for two thousand years, into the dominant branded ingredient in the category.

Trial after trial.

Stress.

Sleep.

Strength.

Testosterone.

Cognition.

Recovery.

Different populations, different endpoints, year after year.

Now imagine the alternative universe. Same branding. Same distribution. Same partnerships. No clinical programme. Same ashwagandha, same supply chain, no data.

What is that company worth?

A fraction? Maybe a tenth? Because without an evidence base, KSM-66 is just one of 50 ashwagandha suppliers competing on price.

The trials are the moat. The branding is just the wrapper.

The honest part: bad data is worse than no data

Now, before you go running to do a trial, here is where I would advise you to exercise caution, because the logic only works if you do the research properly.

What do I mean by properly?

A poorly designed trial will hurt you in diligence. An acquirer’s scientific team will read every protocol you have ever run. They will find:

• Underpowered studies

• Methodological holes (Single-arm designs and no controls)

• Endpoints that do not match the marketing claim

• Investigators with no credibility

And they will price it all in.

What actually compounds valuation is a research programme that is hard to copy:

• Multiple trials across multiple populations

• Outcome measures that no competitor has validated against

• Credible investigators and peer-reviewed publications

• Endpoints that map to a clear differentiation story

The Bottom Line

If you are running a brand and thinking of research purely as a marketing line item, I would gently push back. You are leaving the bigger prize on the table.

The marketing return is real, and you’re right that it is the most immediate.

It is, however, also the smaller of the two outcomes.

The larger one is what the company is worth when you decide to sell, and whether anyone wants to buy it at all.

I am still working this out in real time. But the pattern is getting clearer the more investors and founders I talk to. The companies that win the exit are the ones that started building the evidence base years before they needed it.

If that is the game you are playing, the question is not whether to invest in research.

It is how fast you can get it done.

If you want to find out how fast…

Let’s chat

— Nathan

The two halves of the buying decision

Every purchase decision in this category runs on two tracks at once.

The emotional track is what most brands focus on.

It’s the reviews. It’s seeing other people like you take the product.

It’s the lifestyle photography, the founder story, the “this is for someone in my situation” recognition.

It’s the brand showing up at the conferences, the sponsorships, the influencer in your feed who looks like they have their life together.

The clinical track is the other half.

• What studies have been done? On the actual ingredient at the actual dose?

• What was the effect size?

• How big was the sample?

• Is there a mechanism that makes biological sense?

• Is this brand the one funding the science, or are they riding on someone else’s?

The mistake almost every brand makes is assuming buyers are doing one or the other. They’re doing both, even when they don’t know they’re doing it.

Feeling + Evidence = Buying Behaviour

Why picking a side is killing your conversion

Emotionally, only brands look fluffy.

The first time a half-informed buyer goes looking for evidence and can’t find any, the spell breaks.

They start to assume that if you had the studies, you’d be showing them. The absence becomes the answer.

Clinical-only brands have the opposite problem.

The science is there, but the brand feels cold, transactional, and hard to connect with. People don’t share it.

People don’t talk about it at the gym.

The brand never gets the social proof flywheel going because nobody feels anything when they see it.

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KSM-66: a masterclass in stacking both

The clearest example of a brand getting this right is KSM-66, the ashwagandha extract.

On the emotional side, they’ve done the work. Hundreds of positive reviews across the brands that use the ingredient. Constant presence at every major industry conference (I think they’ve sponsored every major one I’ve been to recently). Sponsorships. Visibility. They are everywhere a formulator or buyer might look.

On the clinical side, they have conducted many trials. Real ones. Across stress, sleep, strength, and cognition. Independent. Published.

What that combination has produced is something most brands would kill for: when somebody in this industry says “ashwagandha,” KSM-66 gets named in the same breath.

Not because anyone consciously decided to make it the default, but because the brand became basically unquestionable.

The studies make the reviews believable. The reviews make the studies feel relevant.

Each side reinforces the other.

That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because they invested in both halves of the brain for years and refused to pick a side.

If you’re emotionally heavy, this is the gap

Most brands I speak to are heavy on the emotional side.

They have the reviews, the brand, the community, and the social. What they don’t have is the clinical layer underneath it, and they can feel that something is missing without quite being able to name it.

If that’s you, the fix is to start building out the “right brain” of your company. Get a real trial done on your actual product. Generate the evidence that lets buyers, retailers, distributors, and increasingly sceptical end consumers take you seriously. The brands that do this over the next two years are going to look very different from those that don’t.

It also affects valuation. A brand with clinical evidence behind its claims is a fundamentally different asset from one that relies on lifestyle photography. Anyone who’s been through a diligence process knows this.

The Bottom Line

Your brand is half a brand.

We live in a time where clinical evidence is becoming increasingly more important and prevalent. The brands winning the next decade in this category will have both the branding and softer touch parts, and the harder evidence halves working together. The ones that don’t are going to keep wondering why their competitors are eating their lunch.

— Nathan

P.S.

I’m at Vitafoods Barcelona this week!

If any of this hits close to home and you’re going to be there, come find me. Genuinely happy to have a conversation about what running a trial on your actual product looks like for a brand at your stage, what it costs, how long it takes, and whether it’s the right move for you right now.

At StudySetGo, we run clinical studies on your product or ingredient. Remote, placebo-controlled, double-blind, gold-standard.

If you’re at Vitafoods, reply to this email, and we’ll find time on the floor. If you’re not, book a call with me here.

If this is your first time reading, this newsletter covers how supplement and health brands use science to grow. I send it every week on Tuesday. Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one!

Now I will break the timeline down stage by stage in detail.

I’ll walk you through:

1. The 6 to 9 month timeline

2. What causes delays, and how to avoid them

3. Why the university version takes 18 to 36 months

Does a published paper behind your brand before Christmas sound interesting?

If someone on your team handles your R&D plan or your marketing calendar, send it to them. This article could change how they sequence the next 12 months.

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1. The Seven-Stage Timeline

Seven stages, 6 to 9 months. Here’s what happens in each.

Stage 1 (Weeks 1–2): From first call to a scope you can approve

Every trial begins with a discovery call.

Your product. The outcome you want evidence for. The market you’re selling into. The timeline you have to hit. Downstream, that call shapes everything.

From that conversation, a good commercial partner designs three study options at different investment levels. Different outcome combinations, different sample sizes, different depth of evidence.

Within a week of our first call, we can schedule a follow-up call to discuss the project, the data you would get on your product, and how long it would take us to collect it.

Key Point: Even if you’re not sure where to start, this shouldn’t stop you

At StudySetGo, we’re a team of nutritional scientists who understand how your products work and what is most likely to be some effects that can be measured in these kinds of trials.

Don’t let your uncertainty stop your brand from getting evidence; let us help you.

Stage 2 (Weeks 2–4): Discussing the protocol worth publishing

Once we understand what product we’re looking at and the type of evidence you want to associate with your brand, the team begins designing the protocol.

A protocol is the document that defines

• The research question

• Participant inclusion and exclusion criteria

• Outcome measures

• The data collection schedule

This document is the foundation of every credible study. Every decision you make inside it either strengthens or weakens your evidence.

Key Point 1: Most timeline delays trace back to weak protocol design.

Time spent here buys speed everywhere else.

Key Point 2: Any change to the protocol after ethics approval requires a resubmission, which takes weeks. Get clear on the claim you want to prove before drafting the protocol.

Stage 3 (Weeks 4–7): Independent ethics approval

Once payment has been processed, the protocol goes to an independent Research Ethics Committee for review.

We handle all of these components for you, so you don’t need to worry about it!

Ethics approval is a legal requirement before any participant recruitment can begin. No exceptions.

This is where most university-run trials lose two to six months.

University ethics committees typically operate on monthly review cycles. A submission that arrives the week after the monthly meeting is deferred to the next cycle. Two months can go by before the review even begins. If the committee requests amendments, another cycle.

In contrast, Independent Research Ethics Committees review on a rolling basis. Approval typically lands in three to five weeks.

The benchmark to hold your partner to:

If a trial partner is directing you through a university committee without a very specific scientific reason, ask why. The default for a commercial trial should be an independent board.

Stage 4 (Weeks 7–10): Recruitment

Once ethics is approved, recruitment begins.

This is the single biggest risk to your timeline and the stage at which a good partner earns their keep.

As a PhD researcher, this used to be the bane of my existence; now this is something that is no longer a factor with our recruitment engine.

A managed trial makes this a massive priority because, for you, your timelines are paramount. The advert has been drafted. Once we get the green light from ethics, hundreds of people will see adverts relating to your trial.

Recruitment speed depends on how narrow your criteria are:

• Broad criteria (healthy adults aged 25 to 55) recruit in two to three weeks

• Moderately narrow criteria (adults with self-reported sleep issues) recruit in three to four weeks

• Narrow criteria (post-menopausal women with borderline hypertension) recruit in six to ten weeks, sometimes longer

Key point: The inclusion criteria you set are as much a timeline decision as a scientific one.

Every added criterion narrows your recruitable population. Before you lock the protocol, ask your partner to model recruitment against their existing panel. You want the answer before ethics, not after.

Stage 5 (Weeks 10–22): Data collection running in parallel

Data collection runs for the length of your intervention. Most nutrition and supplement studies run 8 to 12 weeks. Some run 16 to 24 weeks for body composition or longer-term metabolic endpoints.

A traditional trial runs participants through one site, one at a time.

60 participants times one coordinator times one baseline visit each equals weeks of onboarding before the intervention even begins. Then weeks more at the end for follow-up.

A remote-first trial allows for many more participants to be in a study at any given time.

Everyone onboards from home, asynchronously, from anywhere in the country. The queue is removed. The 12-week intervention takes 12 weeks plus a few weeks at either end, rather than 12 weeks plus many months of sequential site visits.

At-home blood kits, validated wearables, Bluetooth body composition scales, and digital questionnaires deliver the objective data.

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Stage 6 (Weeks 22–27): A submission-ready manuscript

Once data collection closes, the statistician runs the pre-specified analysis.

The scientific writing team prepares the manuscript. Data cleaning, statistical modelling, interpretation of results, and a submission-ready paper for a peer-reviewed journal.

This isn’t just a PDF; this is your ticket to be able to go to conferences and shout about how scientifically aligned you are and further bolster your credibility to highlight how you’re different from other brands.

Four to six weeks.

The piece most founders underestimate: a manuscript prepared by a team that has written dozens of them moves dramatically faster than one written from scratch.

Stage 7 (Week 27 onwards): Evidence you can use from manuscript acceptance

Peer review and publication timelines vary by journal.

You do not need to wait for the physical issue to go live.

From the moment the journal formally accepts the manuscript, you can use the evidence in marketing. Most advertising platforms and retail buyers accept an acceptance letter as substantiation. Your marketing calendar can begin.

2. What breaks this timeline

The seven stages above assume a well-run, managed trial. Here are two things that most commonly break the timeline:

a. Recruitment shortfall

Slow recruitment is the single biggest cause of trial delays.

The most common drivers:

• Overly narrow inclusion criteria

• Underestimating how long screening takes

• Being limited to certain geographies (Not an issue with remote trials)

The fix is structural.

b. Ethics through a university committee

University ethics committees were not designed to operate at a commercial pace.

For a brand with a launch date already set, the university ethics route alone can add months to the 18-month default. Independent ethics boards exist specifically to remove this bottleneck.

3. Why does the university path take 18 to 36 months

A university-partnered trial typically involves:

• A commercial contracts team processing your agreement: 3 to 12 months is common

• Ethics submission to a university committee: 2 to 6 months

• Recruitment limited to a certain city (Small pool of people)

• Data collection paced around academic terms and researchers’ availability

The total rarely comes in under 18 months.

None of this is a failure of the researchers themselves.

The academic system was built for long-term scientific programmes where an 18-month delay to a paper is acceptable. For a brand with a product launch, it usually is not.

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If you’re at a decision point…

If you have a product launch in the next 12 months, recruitment is where the timeline most commonly slips. Build the conversation with your partner around recruitment before anything else.

If a university quote has already landed in your inbox, compare its contracts and ethics line against the 6 to 9-month benchmark above. That comparison usually tells you which path fits.

If you’re scoping research budget for your next financial year, work backwards from 6 to 9 months from the first call to usable evidence. The 12-month content plan sits on top of that.

The Bottom Line

Three years is the wrong number. With the right partner and the right design, 6 to 9 months from first call to usable evidence is the ceiling for most supplement and nutrition products.

With a 6- to 9-month route, you'll have peer-reviewed evidence on your label while your competitors are still waiting for ethics approval.

— Nathan

P.S. If you want to see exactly what this timeline would look like for your product, book a conversation with me here.

Share this newsletter with your colleagues, founders, and anyone on your team who touches R&D or marketing planning. If this is your first time reading, subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one!

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The first is data quality.

Most founders assume, by default, that lab-based research produces better data. For the majority of questions a supplement or nutrition brand actually needs to answer, that assumption is wrong.

Decentralised trials now produce better data than the lab. Not equivalent. Better.

The second is practicality and speed.

This usually gets filed under “operations”, a nice to have, but secondary to the science.

That’s a mistake.

Let’s take them one at a time.

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Part 1: The data quality question

The lab used to be the right answer. Then the tech caught up.

Five or ten years ago, anyone arguing for decentralised trials over lab-based ones would have been wrong. The tools to capture meaningful data from a participant’s kitchen didn’t exist at scale.

That’s no longer true. What’s now available at a participant’s front door:

• Wearables tracking sleep architecture, HRV, and recovery every night for months

• Finger-prick blood kits returning validated lipid, glucose, and inflammatory panels by post

• Bluetooth body composition scales producing a reading every morning

• At-home gut microbiome kits shipped direct

• Continuous glucose monitors giving minute-by-minute metabolic data

This is the infrastructure shift that makes the rest of the argument possible.

Where the lab quietly loses

If you’re doing acute mechanistic work, stable isotope tracers, muscle biopsies, tightly controlled metabolic physiology, the lab is irreplaceable.

No home-based alternative exists for a biopsy needle.

This is exactly what my own PhD is built on, so I’d know.

But that’s maybe 10% of what brands actually want to know. For the other 90%, sleep, body composition, recovery, gut health, cognitive function, mood, the lab is no longer the gold standard.

Here’s why:

Two data points vs eighty-four

A classic lab RCT measures the primary outcome twice: pre and post.

• Body composition scanned once at week zero, once at week twelve.

• Sleep captured via questionnaire at two time points.

• The difference between those two numbers gets called “the effect.”

The problem: a single body composition scan has enough measurement noise to swamp most realistic supplement effect sizes.

Hydration, meal timing, day-to-day bodyweight fluctuation.

A glass of water before you step on the scale moves the number more than three months of your supplement will.

You’re measuring noise and calling it signal.

Here’s what this looks like in practice.

Imagine a sleep supplement brand running a standard lab trial: 40 participants, one visit at baseline, one at week 12, with sleep measured via the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index at each end. Two years to recruit, run, and analyse.

Outcome: a 0.3-point shift on a 21-point scale. Statistically significant? Maybe.

Meaningful to a customer?

Not really.

Run the same product decentralised with 60 participants wearing a sleep tracker every night for 12 weeks. You get 5,040 participant-nights of sleep data instead of 80 questionnaire snapshots. The noise averages out. The signal tightens.

You see a 14% improvement in deep sleep duration, a number your customer can see on their own wrist, and you’d have missed with the lab design.

Same product. Same duration. Completely different evidence base.

The “objective” lab measures aren’t that objective

A lot of what makes lab studies look rigorous is questionnaire-based:

• Sleep → Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (self-reported recall)

• Diet → three-day food recall (self-reported, notoriously inaccurate)

• Digestive symptoms → symptom diaries

These are the same self-report instruments a decentralised study would use, except the lab version loses the continuous objective layer (wearable, CGM, scale, blood panel) that modern tech makes possible at home.

Ecological validity: the customer doesn’t live in your lab

A lab participant knows they’re in a study. They eat the food the metabolic kitchen gives them, sleep in an unfamiliar bed, and behave like someone being watched.

Your customer doesn’t.

If your product works in a participant’s actual life, their kitchen, their bed, their routine, you’ve learned something real.

If it only works in a windowless basement, you’ve proven very little about what happens when someone actually buys it.

“But how do you know they actually took it?”

This is the first objection every founder raises, and it’s a fair one. In a lab, someone watches the participant take the dose. At home, they could leave the bottle in the cupboard. So surely lab wins on compliance?

In practice, the opposite is usually true. Modern decentralised trials have several compliance advantages the lab can’t match:

• Timestamped dosing logs via app-based check-ins every day, not a single study visit every few weeks.

• Device data as a compliance signal. If a participant’s wearable shows they took the product as instructed, you’ve triangulated adherence from an independent source.

• Participants are in their normal environment, so dosing fits into their routine rather than being disrupted by clinic visits.

The old mental model: “lab = watched, home = trust me” is from 2015.

Today, a well-designed decentralised trial captures far more compliance data points than a monthly in-person visit ever could.

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Part 2: The practicality and speed question

Founders hear “decentralised = faster” and file it under operations. That’s a mistake. Speed is one of the most commercially important things your research strategy produces.

Speed kills — and slow research kills brands

You need data yesterday, not in three years.

A competitor shipping a claim-backed product in twelve months while you wait on a university slot that opens in Q3 2027 is a competitor eating your market.

Iteration velocity compounds

If you can run five well-designed decentralised trials in the time it takes to run one lab-based study, you’re not just doing more research.

You’re building a proprietary evidence base faster than anyone can copy.

One big university trial gets you a paper.

Five trials gets you a moat.

IP and trust compound with every trial you ship, and that compounding is the part your competitor can’t shortcut by writing a bigger cheque.

Bigger, more representative samples

This is where speed and data quality converge. Lab trials recruit from one city, usually within driving distance of a single university. That means your sample is biased toward whoever lives near that university, often students, often one demographic slice.

Decentralised trials recruit nationally.

You get a sample that looks more like your actual customer base, and you get it faster.

More participants and more measurements per participant. Statisticians will rightly point out that a bigger N doesn’t automatically fix biased measurement, true.

But a representative national sample, combined with continuous objective data, beats a small convenience sample with two measurement points on both counts.

The single-lab bottleneck

Lab studies run at the speed of one researcher bringing one participant into one lab at a time. That’s not a queue, it’s a structural cap.

60 participants × one coordinator × one baseline visit each = weeks of onboarding before the intervention even starts. Then weeks more at the end for follow-up. Decentralised trials run participants in parallel. People onboard asynchronously, from anywhere, with no lab slot to book.

The same study that takes 18 months in a lab can run in 6 months decentralised not because the science is shortcut, but because the bottleneck is removed.

Tangible outputs your customer understands

And then there’s the piece that actually sells product.

A statistically significant shift on a clinician-administered Likert scale means nothing to the person buying your sleep stack.

A 14% improvement in their Oura sleep score?

That’s tangible.

That’s shareable.

That’s a claim that translates into behaviour change, and repeat purchases.

The bottom line

The useful question isn’t “lab or decentralised?” It’s: what’s the fastest route to high-quality data that holds up and that your customer can actually feel?

For acute mechanistic work, still the lab.

For basically everything a supplement or nutrition brand needs to substantiate a structure-function claim: sleep, body composition, gut health, recovery, cognitive function, wellbeing, the answer has moved.

And for these claims, regulators and retailers are not asking for a university-stamped RCT. They’re asking for rigorous evidence. Decentralised trials produce that.

The brands figuring this out first are going to ship better products faster, build a compounding evidence base, and run circles around the ones still waiting on a university slot that opens in 2027.

If you’re thinking about what an evidence roadmap looks like for your brand, chat with me.

— Nathan

Four weeks and a few rewrites later, the ad gets pulled again. Same problem, different wording. The problem is not in the copy itself. It is in what sits behind the copy.

Google’s Healthcare and Medicines policy requires that health claims are factual and verifiable. Meta’s ad standards require that claims are truthful, not misleading, and supported by evidence. The FTC requires “competent and reliable scientific evidence” before you make any health benefit claim.

The words are the symptom. The evidence, or the absence of it, is the cause.

Here is what I see founders getting wrong, and what the ones keeping their accounts alive are doing differently.

What we’ll cover today:

1. What Google and Meta are actually checking for

2. Why rewriting your copy is not the solution

3. How to tell what evidence holds up — and what the FTC says about it

4. How to unlock claim language your competitors can’t copy

5. How to sequence research before ads, and why it matters

6. A note for UK and EU brands — why the rules are different

P.S. Save this article. The next time an ad gets flagged, you’ll want sections 3 and 4 open. And if someone on your team handles ad accounts or compliance, send it to them. The common mistakes section alone is worth their time.

1. Account survival lives in evidence, not wording

Both Google and Meta use automated systems to handle the first pass of ad review.

These systems scan for before-and-after framing. Superlatives attached to health outcomes. Language that connects your product to a specific condition. Body function claims about “boosting metabolism” or “balancing hormones.” Implied diagnostic language.

If your copy trips one of those patterns, the ad gets blocked.

But here is the part most founders miss. If you appeal that decision, or if the platform escalates your account for deeper review, a human gets involved. Google has confirmed it uses a combination of AI and human evaluation, where AI models either block policy-violating content outright, or flag it for trained reviewers when a more nuanced determination is required.

That human reviewer is looking for something behind the patterns. Most founders only prepare for the automated check. That is why the account keeps getting pulled, they pass the first check and fail the second.

2. Softer copy doesn’t make your account safer

Most brands respond to a suspension by softening the language.

“Reduces bloating” becomes “supports digestive comfort.” “Shown to improve sleep” becomes “helps you unwind.”

You strip out the superlatives, you remove the before-and-afters, you swap condition words for function words.

This works for a few weeks, then a different line gets flagged. You are back in the same position, except now the appeal process is harder. The reason it keeps happening is that you have made the copy more vague, but the underlying question has not changed.

The platform is still asking: can you prove what you are saying?

Vague function language lowers your automated flag rate, but it gives you nothing to show in an appeal or manual review. The trade-off is worse than it looks. By using the same language every other brand in your category can use, you have softened yourself into the middle of the market.

No differentiation and no protection.

3. Product-level evidence is what holds up and the FTC agrees

When your account lands in manual review, the reviewer is looking for documentation that maps to your claims. Not every kind of evidence carries the same weight.

Ingredient studies: generic research on an ingredient you happen to include in your formula carry the least weight. They do not speak to your product, your dose, or your consumer.

White papers and internal data carry slightly more, but reviewers treat them as marketing documents, not evidence.

Published, peer-reviewed studies on your actual formula carry the most. This is the strongest kind of evidence you can bring to a review, and the hardest for anyone to challenge on relevance.

This is not just my experience working with brands through the review process. The FTC’s 2022 Health Products Compliance Guidance says it directly. The FTC states that a “clinically tested ingredient” claim on a product not only implies that the ingredient has a benefit, but also that the product containing the ingredient confers that benefit. Because the product may contain other ingredients, the FTC says an advertiser should consult with a qualified expert to determine whether experts in the field would generally require a clinical test of the product itself, rather than the isolated ingredient, to confirm the benefit.

Federal courts have gone further. In FTC v. Wellness Support Network, the court accepted expert testimony that RCTs for dietary supplements should be conducted on the exact dosage and formulation rather than on individual ingredients, because “there may be interactions between the ingredients that affect their physiological actions.”

This is what I call product-level evidence. Evidence you have generated yourself:

• On the exact product you are selling

• At the dose you are selling it at

• To the consumer you are selling it to

Platform reviewers and regulators are looking for the match. No match, no proof, no ad.

4. Product-level evidence unlocks claim language no competitor can use

Here is the part most founders miss.

Product-level evidence does two things at once.

1. It protects your ad account

2. It opens up claim language nobody else in your category can use

Without it, the best you can say is “supports X.” Every competitor can say the same.

With it, you can say: “in a 12-week study on our formula, participants saw a Y% improvement in X.”

That claim is specific, it is verifiable, and it maps to documentation the platform can check. You go from fighting the platform on every ad to having a set of claims the platform has no reason to question.

Important: this specific claim language applies to US-market advertising under FTC structure/function rules. If you are a UK or EU brand, the claim landscape is different — see Section 6 below.

5. Research before ads, not after

There is a way to change the order of operations.

Most brands launch ads, get suspended, rewrite the copy, get suspended again, and only then start asking about research. That sequence is backwards. The research should come first. A small, properly designed study on your formula, run before you scale paid media, with the ad account built on top of it.

In practice, that means running a pilot study ahead of your next big ad push.

Remote, placebo-controlled, randomised, double-blind. It runs in roughly six months from protocol to data, rather than the 18–24 months a traditional academic trial takes once you factor in ethics review, funding cycles, and publication. It gives you product-level numbers you can cite in your ads, and documentation that holds up in a manual review when it comes.

The pilot gives you proof behind your claims. It unlocks differentiated language your competitors cannot copy. And it empowers the study you will design for publication later.

6. A note for UK and EU brands

Everything above applies cleanly to the US market, where the FTC operates on a substantiation model: prove what you say, and you can say it.

The UK and EU work differently, and the difference matters.

Under the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation (retained in UK law as the GB NHC Register), you can only use health claims that have been pre-authorised and listed on the Register. It does not matter how strong your evidence is — if the claim is not on the Register, you cannot make it.

You cannot say “clinically proven.” You cannot cite specific study results in your ads. The ASA has repeatedly upheld complaints against supplement brands using those phrases, even when clinical evidence existed. The issue is not whether the proof is real. It is that the claim type itself is not permitted.

Claims are authorised at the nutrient level, not the product level. “Zinc contributes to normal cognitive function” is permitted. “Our formula improved cognitive function by 15%” is not — regardless of the evidence behind it. Even small wording changes can breach the rules. “Contributes to” cannot become “improves” or “increases.” The ASA has ruled that dropping the words “contributes to” from an authorised claim constitutes an exaggeration.

To make an authorised claim, you need the right amount of the nutrient in the product. That is it. If your formula contains sufficient zinc to meet the conditions of use, you can make the authorised zinc claim. You do not need an RCT for that. So if the value of product-level evidence in the UK were only about compliance, it would be a hard sell.

But compliance is not where the value sits. The real value is everywhere else.

The advertising rules lock down your ads. They do not lock down your brand.

The GB Register governs paid advertising and product labels. It does not govern what goes on your website, what you discuss on a podcast, what you present at a conference, what you put in a pitch deck to a retailer, or what a journalist writes about your product after reading your published research.

And increasingly, that is where supplement marketing actually happens. The brands that are winning in the UK market right now are not winning because of what they can say in a Meta ad. They are winning because of the credibility they carry everywhere else.

A study on your actual formula, not borrowed ingredient research, but your product, your dose, your consumer, gives you material that works across every channel the advertising rules do not touch:

Your website. You can present your study methodology, your results, and your data in full. No character limits. No automated review. Consumers who care about evidence, and that segment is growing fast and they will find it.

Podcasts and editorial. A founder who can say “we ran a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial on our formula and here is what we found” gets invited back. A founder who can only say “our product contains ingredients that have been studied” does not. The study gives you a story worth telling and a reason for someone else to tell it.

Conferences and trade shows. If you sell B2B, to retailers, distributors, or practitioners, the study becomes your most valuable sales asset. It answers the question every buyer is really asking: how do I know this product works?

PR and organic coverage. A published study is a newsworthy event. It creates a reason for industry press, health journalists, and influencers to cover your product without you paying for the placement.

This is what I call scientific brand alignment. It is the difference between “we sell a product with ingredients that have been studied” and “we are a company that studies our product.” That distinction matters to retailers, to investors, to podcast hosts deciding who to feature, and increasingly to consumers who can tell the difference.

And there is one more move. Article 13(5) of the retained regulation allows for the authorisation of health claims based on newly developed scientific evidence, including requests for the protection of proprietary data. If your RCT generates genuinely novel evidence, you can apply for a new authorised claim that only your product can use. That is the UK equivalent of “claim language your competitors cannot copy.” It is a longer play, but it is the endgame.

Most common mistakes I see

Appealing with the same claims and different wording. Google evaluates whether you have genuinely resolved the underlying issue, not just acknowledged it. Saying “we fixed our landing pages” means nothing. Explaining that you removed specific unsubstantiated claims and added substantiation documentation gives the reviewer something to work with.

Creating a new account on the same domain after a rejection. Google treats this as attempting to circumvent their system, an egregious violation that triggers immediate suspension without prior warning. Do not do it.

Leaning on a supplier’s ingredient study because “there is research behind it.” The FTC’s own guidance says studies on individual ingredients may not be sufficient to substantiate a claim about a combination product, because the ingredients together may affect the body differently than they do individually. Reviewers can tell the difference between ingredient research and product research, and so can your consumers.

Letting your compliance person rewrite claims without checking what evidence your research lead has generated. If they are not talking to each other, the claims and the evidence will not match. That is where the gap opens up.

Key Point. If your account has already been suspended, start with Section 3. Get your evidence sorted before you appeal again. If your account is still live but your strongest proof is an ingredient study at a different dose, Section 5 is the move. If you are a UK brand, Section 6 is essential reading.

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The Bottom Line

Your ad account does not have a copy problem. It has an evidence problem. Fix the evidence, and the copy stops being the thing that gets you pulled.

— Nathan

P.S.

If this problem sounds familiar, at StudySetGo we run pilot studies on your actual formula, remote, placebo-controlled, double-blind, gold-standard.

This allows you to have product-level evidence behind your claims.

The pilot runs in roughly six months from protocol to data, costs a fraction of a university trial or CRO trial, and the documentation it produces is the same documentation a manual reviewer is looking for.

For US brands, that means stronger claim language your competitors cannot copy. For UK and EU brands, it means scientific brand alignment, the study that powers your website, your podcast appearances, your B2B sales conversations, your PR, and eventually a proprietary health claim application on the GB Register.

If you want to map out the fastest path to evidence for your product, book a no-obligation conversation with me.

If this is your first time reading, this newsletter covers how supplement and health brands use science to grow — and stay compliant while doing it. I send it every week on Tuesday. Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one!

“They show up with a stack of clinical references. Looks credible. Then you read them, and none of them are on the product. They’re just general ingredient studies. The same fifty papers everyone else in the category is citing.”

He called it borrowed credibility. I call it Paper Science. And here’s the thing nobody’s saying loudly enough:

PE firms (and consumers) are actively penalising it. And it’s getting worse.

The Industry Is Splitting Right Now

According to him, every supplement and functional food brand is built on two pillars.

Pillar One: Commercial. Revenue, marketing, brand, distribution, taste, community, retention. Always mattered. Always will. No argument.

Pillar Two: Scientific. Credible, product-level clinical evidence that proves what you sell actually does what you say it does.

Most founders have Pillar One dialled. They’ve got a great brand, a loyal community, a solid DTC engine. And they’ve told themselves the science is aspirational.

Something for later, when there’s more budget, more bandwidth, more time.

That logic is expiring.

The number of consumers actively demanding evidence is rising. Strategics: Nestlé, Unilever, the big acquirers, are doing deeper technical diligence than ever. And investors who used to back a great story are now asking for the data behind it.

Marketing-only brands are becoming commodities. The window to differentiate on science is now, not after your Series B.

Paper Science vs. Product Science

Here’s what Paper Science looks like in practice:

• A brand cites 500 clinical references in their investor deck

• Every single one is a background study on an ingredient category

• Not one study is on their formulation, their dose, their population, their endpoint

• The references exist to look like evidence, not to be evidence

Sophisticated buyers see straight through it. In an M&A process, Paper Science doesn’t just fail to impress, it raises a red flag.

It signals that the brand knows its underlying science is vulnerable and is hoping nobody looks too closely.

That’s a time bomb. And if this is you, the clock is ticking.

Product Science is the opposite. It’s a clinical study on your actual product.

Your dose.

Your consumer.

Your outcome.

It’s data that no competitor can replicate, cite, or claim.

It’s IP.

It’s a moat.

And it tells an acquirer something Paper Science never can: we know this works, and we can prove it.

There’s also an important distinction in what evidence actually means, and it depends who you’re talking to.

If you’re a consumer brand, product-level evidence is what matters. Not “omega-3s support cognitive function”, we know that. Show a study on your product, your dose, your consumer. That’s what builds trust and justifies a premium price point.

If you’re B2B: selling ingredients, raw materials, or formulations, ingredient-level evidence is your currency. Brands buying from you want to know the mechanism works, the dose is validated, and there’s published science they can stand behind. That’s what gets you onto a formulator’s shortlist and keeps you there.

Same principle. Different execution. Both require you to actually build the scientific pillar.

“But Science Takes Forever and Costs a Fortune”

Yeah, it used to…

It doesn’t anymore, but let’s be honest about what we’re actually comparing here.

A product-level clinical study is a meaningful investment. More than a month of Meta ads. More than a mid-tier influencer activation. And if you’re purely optimising for short-term return, you’ll always be able to justify putting that money into paid acquisition instead.

The numbers will look better on a 90-day dashboard.

That’s not the wrong answer. It’s just the answer if you only care about one pillar.

Because here’s what digital spend doesn’t do: it doesn’t compound. It doesn’t create IP. It doesn’t sit on your cap table as a defensible asset when an acquirer opens the hood. Every pound you put into ads resets to zero next month. Every study you run owns a permanent place in your brand’s scientific story.

Short-termism built a lot of great DTC brands. It’s not building the platforms that exit at a premium.

Running your first credible, publishable, product-level study is more accessible than it’s ever been.

The timeline has compressed.

The process has professionalised.

The barrier is lower than your instinct is telling you.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to do it. It’s whether you can afford to keep deferring it while your competitors don’t.

The Exit Multiple Conversation

Two brands. Both doing £10M revenue. Both with strong commercial stories. One has three well-executed clinical studies behind its hero product. The other has a deck full of ingredient references and a great brand identity.

One is a marketing asset. The other is a platform.

The multiple reflects that. Materially.

Your scientific pillar isn’t just about doing right by consumers — though it is that too. It’s a direct, compounding investment in your own exit valuation. Every study you run, every piece of product-level evidence you own, makes your proposition harder to commoditise and harder to discount in a deal room.

The brands that will exit well in the next five years are building both pillars today.

The Market Is Moving. Are You?

If you’re building a functional food or supplement brand and your scientific strategy is “we cite the ingredient literature”, that’s no longer a strategy. It’s a liability.

Consumers want product-level proof. Investors want defensible IP. Acquirers want a platform, not a brand.

I want to help you along your journey to a nice big exit. Let’s chat.

— Nathan

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P.S. We’re actively working with supplement and functional food brands to build the scientific pillar behind their hero products, product-level evidence, designed to move at the speed a growing company needs.

If you’re weighing up how to start building your evidence base, or you’ve been putting it off because it felt too slow or too expensive just reply to this email, and we’ll take it from there.

If you've been reading these articles, this is how the pieces fit together. If you're new here, start with this article. I'll point you to the deeper dives along the way.

By the end of this article, you'll have a framework for building product-specific evidence, from the first pilot to the published study, with the lowest possible risk and the highest possible return at every step.

1. Why Research Is the Highest-ROI Investment Your Brand Can Make

Most supplement brands don’t have product-specific evidence.

They lean on ingredient studies done by someone else, on someone else’s formulation, in someone else’s population. And for a while, that’s been enough… not anymore.

The cost of not having your own evidence shows up in retail access, ad spend, margin pressure, and rising regulatory standards.

• Retail access.
  Your retail pitch stalls the moment a buyer asks for proof you don't have.

• Ad spend at risk.
  Platforms are flagging unsubstantiated claims more aggressively.

• Margin pressure.
  Without evidence as a differentiator, you’re competing on price, packaging, and influencer spend, all of which your competitor can match tomorrow.
  Evidence is the one moat they can’t replicate by spending more.

Here’s the other side:

Evidence helps your marketing with content that stays relevant, strengthens your retail pitch with data, protects your ads, builds trust with practitioners, and gives investors something to evaluate.

We know we need data, but there is one question most brands get stuck on.

How do we do research without committing hundereds of thousands and three years before knowing if the product even performs?

2. How to Get Evidence Without Wasting Time or Funding

The cost, the timeline, and the risk of a negative publication, these are three things that keep most brands stuck.

Those fears are reasonable. And every one of them is solved by a specific sequencing decision.

You start with a pilot.

A pilot study is a small, fast, controlled study designed to answer one question: does this product produce a measurable effect?

Here’s what makes a pilot different from the traditional route, and why it eliminates the risks:

• ~6 months to first results.
  I received a comment that laid it out well:

  “If a university contract was signed today, the earliest a PhD student would start is October. Six months of waiting before anyone even begins. Nearly a year until you start collecting data. The pilot compresses the entire timeline into roughly six months from kickoff to results in hand.”

• Remote-first.
  All data capture is digital. Participants complete the study from home with daily micro-surveys, electronic consent, digital screening. No in-clinic visits. No lab space as a bottleneck.

• You control the data.
  In a university collaboration, the researchers typically publish regardless of the outcome. With a pilot, the data stays with you. You decide how it informs your messaging, your product development, and your next move. This is research de-risked.

• Publication on your terms.
  If the pilot shows a strong signal, you use that data to design a properly powered trial built for publication, one where the sample size, outcome measures, and methodology.

• Investment.
  ~£30-60k, compared to the £100K–£180K brands regularly get quoted for a single RCT through traditional channels. On top of this, the R&D expenditure credit scheme means up to 20% of your research investment can come back as a tax credit.

More about setting up sequencing here.

So you have the evidence. Now the question is: what do you do with it?

This is where most brands leave the biggest opportunity on the table.

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3. Turn Your Research Into Traffic and Trust

Most brands treat research as something that happens in private and gets announced when it’s done.

That approach wastes 6 months of marketing content that could be building trust with your future customers. Every milestone in the research process, from the day you kick off to the day the results land, is a content moment.

Here’s what the timeline looks like when you use research for a marketing campaign:

• Announce your scientific advisor.
  Their credibility becomes your credibility. Feature them. Let them explain what you’re measuring and why. A respected researcher publicly associated with your brand sends a signal that your product has been scrutinised by someone who knows what they’re looking at.

• First participant enrolled.
  Momentum. The study is moving.

• Talk about recruitment milestones.
  Another comment described it well:

  “Most studies generate months of recruitment activity, but almost none of that is turned into a narrative that builds momentum over time. Instead, everything gets compressed into a single ‘we’re recruiting’ message and then silence.”

• Results.
  By the time the data lands, your audience has been watching the story unfold for months. Now time to go to conferences with data!

Your marketing gets stronger.
Your sales conversations get easier.
Your ad accounts are protected.

But there’s one more return from this investment that’s bigger than all of those.

(I mapped out the full marketing strategy here and I covered the compliance side here.)

4. What’s Good for Your Customer Is Good for Your Brand

Everything in the first three chapters is framed around what the brand gets.

The ROI.
The risk reduction.
The marketing engine.

This chapter is about who the investment actually serves.

Evidence is how your customer decides to trust you. Trust is how they decide to stay.

Your competitor can match your ad spend, replicate your influencer strategy, even reformulate something similar. What they cannot do is replicate the study you’ve already run, the data you’ve already published, and the credibility you’ve already earned with the audience that watched you do it.

The path that’s best for your customer is the same path that’s best for your business.

The bottom line.

Invest in evidence because the cost of not having it is becoming high.

Many people I talk with act like they’re making decisions in a vacume and that other companies in their vertical aren’t also in the game of generating evidence.

So, how to get the ball rolling so you can have first mover advantage?

1. Start with a pilot so the risk stays low
2. Turn every research milestone into marketing content
3. Remember. Evidence is how your customer decides to trust you. Trust is how they decide to stay.

Research isn’t the cost of doing business. It’s the reason your business will keep growing.

— Nathan

P.S. At StudySetGo, we’re building what we believe will be the number one way for health brands to accumulate evidence around their products, gold standard science, backed by researchers from academia with strong publication records.

If you want to talk about what an evidence roadmap looks like for your product, book a
no-obligation conversation with me here. Or just reply to this email with your biggest question about getting evidence for your product, and I’ll get back to you personally!

Thank you for reading!

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Archive of my past articles: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GAvcKovk_cwSNPWIofyWzaSA5RycZC2U1h-xayVDDI/edit?usp=sharing

Your compliance person is not the enemy. But their incentives almost certainly are.

Think about it. They’re on a flat rate. No upside from a campaign that converts. No bonus when a product launch lands. Their professional reputation rests on one thing only: not getting you in trouble.

So when marketing comes to them with a bold, honest claim about a product that genuinely works, what’s the rational move? Water it down. Add a qualifier. Say no.

Not because they’re malicious. Because that’s what the incentive structure rewards. Caution is costless for them. Risk is asymmetric. Of course they default to saying don’t.

These are good people with the best of intentions. But let's be honest about something. The kind of person drawn to a compliance role is, almost by definition, not a natural risk-taker.

That's not a criticism. You want your compliance person to be thorough, careful, and slightly paranoid. That's the job.

The problem is when that same personality ends up with de facto veto power over your marketing strategy.

Letting your most risk-averse hire lead your brand voice is a little like asking your accountant to write your campaign headlines. Technically qualified. Probably not the move.

And in the background, marketing is pulling in the opposite direction, trying to say something that actually cuts through, that sounds like a real brand, that gives a customer a reason to buy. Two teams, both doing their job, both pulling in opposite directions, with the founder stuck in the middle wondering why nothing ever gets over the line.

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What happens when compliance wins every argument

You end up with a brand that says nothing.

“Supports healthy function.” “May contribute to wellbeing.” “As part of a balanced diet.”

Technically safe. Commercially useless. Completely forgettable.

The irony is that the products that get neutered this way are often the ones with the most legitimate story to tell. Real ingredients. Real science. Real differentiation — all sanded down into language so cautious it’s indistinguishable from every other product on the shelf.

Founders feel paralysed. Marketing feels frustrated. And the brand drifts.

Not all channels are equal, and the best brands know it

Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: compliance isn’t one-size-fits-all, and the brands that are winning in this space understand that intuitively.

Your product packaging operates under the strictest constraints. That’s the hard no. What goes on the label has to be watertight, and there’s very little room to manoeuvre. Accept that and move on.

But your website, your blog, your podcast appearances, your digital ads, your social content? That’s a different conversation entirely. These are softer channels, and they operate differently.

They’re where you build a relationship with your audience over time. Where you can share your thinking, reference your advisers, talk about the research landscape, and let people draw their own conclusions.

Look at the brands that are genuinely cutting through right now. They are not the most conservative communicators in the room.

They’re bold.

They’re specific.

They talk about science like they understand it, because they do. They use every channel available to them to build a picture of credibility, and they understand that hard marketing and soft marketing are two different tools serving the same goal.

Taking reckless risks is still a bad idea. But being bold about your pilot data, putting your scientific advisers front and centre, writing seriously about the evidence behind your formulation, that’s not reckless.

That’s just good marketing. And it’s available to you right now, with whatever evidence base you already have.

The problem isn’t that the rules are too tight. It’s that most brands never learned to read the room.

The real problem isn’t compliance, it’s the absence of evidence

Here’s where the framing shifts.

The brands that don’t have this problem aren’t less compliant. They’re more confident. There’s a difference.

The best companies in this space have learned to dance in the grey — not into the black. They make claims that are bold, specific, and scientifically defensible. They invite scrutiny rather than avoid it. And the reason they can do that isn’t because they found a more permissive lawyer.

It’s because they have real data behind what they’re saying.

When you’ve run a well-designed study, when the effect size is real and the methodology holds up, when any independent scientist would look at it and nod — the compliance conversation changes completely. You’re not asking for permission to imply something. You’re asking how best to communicate something you can actually prove.

Compliant and commercially compelling stops being a contradiction. It becomes the only logical outcome.

What we do — and why we built it this way

At StudySetGo, we help brands run gold-standard research quickly on their hero products. Then we help communicate it in a way that’s truthful, compliant, and commercially interesting.

That’s not a compromise. That’s the only way to build a brand that lasts.

One of the most common objections I hear from founders considering research is exactly this:

“Even if we had the data, we still wouldn’t know what we could say with it.”

It’s a fair concern. So we’ve made a point of building relationships with partners who specialise in compliant health and wellness copywriting, people who understand both the regulatory landscape and what good marketing actually sounds like.

If having someone who could handle your copywriting and compliance in the same conversation would make the idea of commissioning research feel less daunting, get in touch and I’ll pass on the details.

Because the goal was never to do science for science’s sake. It was always to give you something you can actually use.

Not sure if research is right for you yet? Most founders aren't. The blocker is usually something specific, and once you name it, it's a lot easier to solve.

Take two minutes to complete the Research Readiness Check below. Tell me where you're stuck, and I'll come back to you personally with something useful. No pitch, no pressure.

Find my bottleneck →

StudySetGo sponsors and delivers remote clinical trials for supplement, nutrition, and health brands. If you’re ready to build a brand that is science-backed — let me know.

Best,
Nathan

Yes, published research changes the conversation with retailers, practitioners, and customers. A peer-reviewed paper featuring your product’s name is one of the most valuable assets a supplement brand can own.

The instinct is correct. The sequencing is the problem, and it can cost you.

I’ll walk you through what I believe to be an alternative way to sequence your research that will get you to the same published study, with the same peer-reviewed credibility, in at least half the time.

Plus, you walk away with usable data and marketing assets before the study is even finished.

Make sure your team stays ahead. Share this free article on your Team’s channel:

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A few things I’ll cover:

1. A peer-reviewed paper is the right move, just not as the first one

2. The one question to answer before you commit to a multi-year research collaboration

3. How to publish your project in <18 months

4. What to tell your R&D lead

5. The bottom line

I. A peer-reviewed paper is the right move, just not as the first one.

You just raised funding. Your head of R&D has contacts at a university.
Everyone shakes hands. The intention is clear: get a peer-reviewed, published study as fast as possible.

Here’s what actually happens.

Contracts take three months. Legal on both sides, going back and forth on IP, publication rights, and deliverables. Then the researcher hires a PhD student to run the trial: advertising, interviewing, and onboarding. Another two months.

By month six, you start recruitment.
By month seven, you have a trial underway.
The projected time to first publication? Three to four years.

During those years, publication rights typically sit with the university, and the timeline for when and where results appear is largely outside your control.

The path was correct. The order of operations is what needs to be optimised.

II. The one question to answer before you commit to a multi-year research collaboration.

Before signing a multi-year university partnership, there’s one question worth answering: what’s the fastest way to find out if this product actually moves the needle?

A decentralised pilot trial can answer that question in months.

Remote. Participants complete the study from home. Randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, gold standard methodology, built for speed.

Within six months, you can complete:

• Setup

• Ethics approval

• Recruitment

• Intervention

• Analysis

At the end of it, you have an early signal on whether the product works. The pilot data becomes the foundation for the study that gets published. If the signal is strong, you move to the next stage with confidence.

You will know exactly how many participants you need, powered by a project that examines the outcome measures you care about in relation to your product’s effects.
You know which endpoints to prioritise.
You collaborate with academic researchers, and the process moves faster because the groundwork is already done.

The pilot just de-risked your entire investment.

Time until the full publication? Within 18 months of starting the pilot.

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III. Publish your study in 18 months.

If you decided on a full university trial, at the 18-month mark, data collection is likely still underway, which means no results to share yet, no marketing assets, and no evidence your team can put to work.

The founder or Head of R&D who ran the pilot first?

At the same 18-month mark, they have published a study.
A peer-reviewed paper with their product’s name on it.
Data visuals for ad creative and retail pitch decks.
Information that their marketing team has been using to communicate the research process.

Their marketing team:

• Announced the pilot trial when it started.

• Introduced their scientific advisor.

• Shared recruitment milestones.

The campaign began the day the pilot was announced, building public anticipation and credibility while the study is still underway.

By the time the publication landed, their audience was already invested.

IV. What to tell your R&D lead/founder.

Go to your R&D lead. Tell them you want published, peer-reviewed research on your product, but that you want to sequence it differently.

Start with a pilot, gather data, and test whether your product moves the needle.

If the pilot confirms the product works, the peer-reviewed paper becomes a very sensible, de-risked and high-value stage-two move. If the pilot shows the product didn’t perform as expected, you saved time and funding and a publication counting against your product.

Every step makes the next one faster. Less time spent. Less money invested.

Sequence it right, and you get to a published study in half the time at a fraction of the cost.

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The bottom line.

Pilot first. Full-scale study second. Same destination, half the timeline.
Every pound you spend on the bigger study is backed by data that says it’s worth it.

— Nathan

If this article was valuable to you, or it could be for your colleague, share it with them.

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P.S. We’re building what we believe will be the number one way for supplement and health brands to generate evidence around their products, gold standard science, designed to move at the speed a growing company needs.

We’re actively expanding the pilot programme and working on a solution that makes the transition from pilot data to a publication study even more seamless.

I’ll share more on that soon.

If you’re weighing up how to approach your first study, or you’ve already started down the university path and it’s moving slower than expected, book a conversation with me here, or just reply to this email, and we’ll take it from there.

Archive of my past articles: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GAvcKovk_cwSNPWIofyWzaSA5RycZC2U1h-xayVDDI/edit?usp=sharing

Then they drop a press release and hope sales follow.

That approach leaves massive revenue on the table.

The research process itself is one of the most powerful marketing assets.
Every step of it. From the first meeting with a scientist to the day your paper gets published. And almost nobody uses it.

I want to lay out exactly how I’d approach this. A month-by-month roadmap for turning your research journey into content that builds trust, drives attention, and generates revenue long before any results are in.

I’m calling this The Research Content Roadmap. And it works whether you’re running a pilot study or a full clinical trial.

1. Start by announcing the commitment

Before a single participant is enrolled, before you’ve finalized a protocol, there’s a moment worth capturing. The decision itself.

You’ve decided to invest in research. You’ve decided to put your product to the test. That decision alone is a story.

Most companies in your space haven’t made it. Most are still relying on ingredient-level claims borrowed from someone else’s research on someone else’s formulation. You’re doing something different, and you should say so.

The announcement can be simple. A founder post on LinkedIn. A short note in your newsletter. Something like: “We’re investing in independent research on our product. Here’s why.” Then explain the thinking behind it. What question are you trying to answer? Why does it matter? Why now?

You’re not claiming results. You’re signalling direction. And that signal is worth more than you think, because it tells your audience: we take this seriously enough to put money behind it.

Key Point: The decision to pursue becoming more scientifically aligned is itself a marketing event. You don’t need results to start building credibility. You need commitment and the willingness to talk about it.

2. Introduce your scientist publicly

This is the step everyone skips. And I think it’s one of the most valuable pieces of content you’ll ever create.

You’ve partnered with a scientist, a researcher, an advisor. Someone with deep expertise in your product’s category. Someone whose career is built on understanding the science behind what you sell.

Feature them.

A short video. A written Q&A. A LinkedIn post where you introduce them by name, explain their background, and let them talk about what excites them about the project. Let them explain what you’re going to measure and why it matters. In their own words. With their own authority.

When Ritual launched clinical trials on their multivitamins, they didn’t hide the researchers behind the data. The scientists became part of the story. Their names showed up on the website. Their expertise became visible.

Here’s why this works. People trust scientists. When your audience sees a credentialed researcher willing to attach their name to your product and your study, trust transfers instantly. You can’t buy that kind of credibility with ad spend, and it lasts far longer than any influencer campaign.

3. Document the study design (and explain it in plain English)

Once your protocol is set, you’ve got another content moment.

Explain what you’re testing. Explain how. Tell your audience: “We’re running a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial with 60 participants over 12 weeks, measuring X and Y.” Then translate that into language a normal person would understand.

Why double-blind? Because neither the participants nor the researchers know who’s getting the real product. That removes bias. Why placebo-controlled? Because you need a comparison group to know if what you’re seeing is actually caused by your product and not just by the placebo effect.

This kind of content does two things simultaneously.

It educates your audience about how real science works. And it positions your brand as one that plays by the rules. You’re showing the methodology, which is something most supplement companies wouldn’t because they don’t have any methodology to show.

Practical Tip: Create a simple infographic or carousel breaking down your study design. Title it something like “How We’re Testing Our Product (and Why It Matters).” Post it on LinkedIn, embed it in your newsletter, add it to a dedicated science page on your site. One piece of content, three placements, and it works for months.

4. Share milestones and progress updates

Recruitment is one of those parts of research that nobody talks about publicly. But it’s fascinating to people who are paying attention.

“We’ve enrolled our first 10 participants.” “Enrollment is now 50% complete.” “We’ve reached our full sample size.”

Each of these is a post. And once your study is running, you have a built-in reason to post every single month. The updates don’t need to be complicated — strong retention numbers, baseline assessments complete, halfway point reached. You’re not revealing results. You’re sharing the journey.

Let your scientist do some of these. A 60-second video from your lead researcher saying “we’ve just completed the midpoint assessments and everything is running smoothly” carries a weight no marketing team could replicate. It humanises the science and makes the process feel real.

By the time you have results, your audience doesn’t need context. They’ve been along for the ride.

5. Turn results day into a campaign, not a single post

Here’s where most brands finally wake up to marketing their research. The results come back, and they make one post about it.

One.

After months of work and significant investment, they compress the entire story into a single announcement and hope it lands.

Don’t do that.

Results day should be the beginning of a campaign. You should already have your audience primed because they’ve been following the journey. Now you deliver the payoff they’ve been waiting for.

Week one: the announcement. What you found, what it means, how it changes the conversation around your product. Week two: the scientist explains the results. A video, an interview, a detailed blog post where your research lead walks through the data. Week three: the consumer translation. What does this mean for the person actually taking the product? Break it down into the three or four things they care about most. Week four: the press push. Send your results to journalists, podcast hosts, industry publications. You have something real to share. Let them cover it.

That’s a full month of content from a single data set. And the content is evergreen. A blog post about your study results is still working for you two years later. A video of your lead researcher explaining the methodology still builds trust long after you’ve published.

The mistake I keep seeing

Two kinds of brands keep showing up in my conversations.

The first group waits for results before saying anything. They run the study in silence. They treat it like a secret project. And when results come out, nobody cares because nobody was following the story. They’ve skipped six months of free marketing and now they’re starting from zero, trying to build context retroactively for a story their audience never heard the beginning of.

The second group announces the study once and then goes quiet. A single “exciting news!” post at the beginning, then radio silence until publication. The gap is too long. Attention doesn’t survive months of nothing. By the time they resurface with results, the audience has moved on.

Both groups are leaving revenue on the table. The brands that win are the ones that treat research as a twelve-month content strategy and commit to showing the work at every stage.

The bottom line

If you’re going to invest in research, invest in telling the story of that research.

The playbook is simple. Announce the commitment. Feature the scientist. Explain the methodology. Share the milestones. Turn results into a month-long campaign. And let the research write your content calendar for you.

Science x Marketing = Revenue

The brands that document the journey publicly, from day one, are the ones that arrive at publication day with an audience already sold on what they’ve built.

More soon.

— Nathan

P.S.

Throughout this letter, I described a twelve-month content roadmap built around your research. Every step of it, from announcing the commitment to campaigning around results, requires one thing at the foundation: actually doing the research.

We don’t just facilitate your study. We help you build the marketing around it. Content calendars, compliant messaging, the strategy for how to talk about your company doing research across the year, and how to turn all of it into revenue. Scientific credibility in your brand as an entire service.

After hearing from many founders that they wanted help with the marketing side of research (how to leverage the science, how to talk about it compliantly, how to make sure it actually moves the needle on sales) we started building this into everything we do.

If you want to talk about how this could work for your brand, you can book a no-obligation call here.

Or send me an email here saying “Roadmap” or your current biggest challenge, and I’ll share how we can support your specific situation.

Research alone isn’t what separates them.

It’s research multiplied by how well you leverage it.

The formula is simple: Science × Marketing = Revenue. The degree to which you capitalise on your research is the degree to which it pays you back. We’ve seen this play out across the brands we work with, and it’s become a primary focus for us, because we know how many founders are navigating these waters without a clear map.

So why does it make sense to become a scientifically aligned brand?

The short answer: scientifically aligned brands sell more.

Here’s why.

In this issue:

1. Consumer trust — built on evidence your marketing can actually stand behind

2. Researchers become your most credible advocates

3. B2B sales get stronger — because practitioners start recommending you

4. Researcher-authored content that never ages

5. New channels, new partners, new distribution

1. Consumer trust — built on evidence your marketing can actually stand behind

Your brand story gets built on evidence.

When your marketing is rooted in research you’ve actually done, the message lands differently. You’re showing people the work instead of asking them to take your word for it.

Your content starts to educate instead of sell.

And this isn’t just for your website or ads. Being scientifically aligned gives you something credible to talk about on social — the process of generating evidence, the findings, the people behind it. That’s content that builds trust, not just clicks.

2. Researchers become your most credible advocates

People trust scientists.

With their consent, your research team can go far beyond the study itself. They join health and science podcasts. They get quoted in articles. They do interviews. When a scientist talks about your product, trust comes naturally.

Having a scientific advisor or researcher associated with your brand changes the entire conversation. It signals that you’re serious — and it gives journalists, investors, and partners a reason to pay attention.

Practical tip: time your press releases around study milestones. Enrollment. First results. Peer review. Publication. Don’t wait for the product launch. Each milestone is a marketing moment. Most brands only use one.

3. B2B sales get stronger — because practitioners start recommending you

It’s not just customers who respond to research. Practitioners do too.

When a sports scientist, dietitian, or clinician sees that your product is backed by evidence you’ve generated yourself, they look closer. They can read the methodology. They can evaluate the results. And that gives them the confidence to recommend it.

When a practitioner recommends a product, that’s a whole new sales channel. You didn’t have to pitch them. You didn’t have to convince them. The research did that for you.

4. Researcher-authored content that never ages

Research produces something else too. Content.

White papers. Science explainers. Researcher-authored blogs. A dedicated science section on your site. Every piece of it is built on findings, and because it’s rooted in truth, it never ages badly. Data is data. You can always lean on it.

5. New channels, new partners, new distribution

Research changes how people see your company.

You present at conferences with something worth presenting. You walk into investor meetings with published evidence. When a potential partner looks you up, they find studies with your name on them.

You’re not explaining who you are. They already know. Partnerships come faster. Retailers take you more seriously. Distributors want to talk.

The bottom line.

Customers aren’t just getting curious, they’re demanding evidence.

They’re reading labels. They’re asking what’s in the product, why it works, and who tested it. And if you can’t answer those questions with evidence you’ve generated yourself, you’re going to find it increasingly brutal competing against brands that can.

The supplement and biotech brands that will lead this space won’t be the ones with the best marketing. They’ll be the ones that paired great marketing with great science, and started doing it early.

The advantage compounds. The brands building it now will be the ones people trust later.

TLDR.

Scientifically aligned brands sell more.

Their marketing is rooted in evidence, researchers advocate for them credibly, practitioners recommend them unprompted, their content never ages, and research opens doors that cold outreach can’t.

Science × marketing = revenue.

The brands investing in both now are building an advantage that doesn’t erode.

More soon.

— Nathan & Thomas

Learn More

P.S. At StudySetGo, we’re building what we believe will be the number one way for health brands to accumulate evidence around their products, gold standard science, backed by researchers from academia with strong publication records.

If you want to generate evidence that actually holds up, that’s what we do.

We’re also actively looking to work with people who sit at the intersection of compliance and marketing, those rare individuals who understand both what you can say and how to say it effectively. More on this at a later date.

And if you’re ready to start generating your own evidence, book a no-obligation call or just reply with your biggest challenge and we’ll take it from there.

So here’s the playbook. If I were launching a nutritional supplement brand tomorrow and wanted to build the strongest possible scientific foundation, this is exactly what I’d do step by step.

1. Start with a differentiated and efficacious product

2. Get a scientist in your corner

3. Run a quick pilot trial — not for publication

4. Use the pilot data to plan a proper trial

5. Document everything and market the journey

6. Leverage the results for everything they’re worth

7. Build the evidence base

• The two mistakes I see every week brands stuck, and why the second group is often worse off than the first.

• The bottom line

Step 1: Start with a differentiated and efficacious product

This sounds obvious. It isn’t.

The supplement market is saturated with me-too formulations using the same ingredients at the same doses.

You need a product that is genuinely distinct. A novel formulation, a unique delivery mechanism, a proprietary ingredient, even a combination that hasn’t been tested before.

More importantly, it needs to actually work. Not just “I feel better” anecdotal feedback, but measurable improvements in biomarkers, performance, or health outcomes.

No study design in the world will save a product that doesn’t do anything.

But how can you confidently know if your product works?

Step 2: Get a scientist in your corner

Ideally, before you run a single study, find an academic expert who is willing to align themselves with your brand, as a consultant, advisor, or both.

This matters for several reasons.

• First, credibility. A respected researcher publicly associated with your company sends a signal that your product has been scrutinised by someone who knows what they’re looking at. It tells consumers, retailers, and investors that this isn’t just marketing — there’s substance behind it.

• Second, scientists are selective. Good researchers won’t put their name behind a product they don’t believe in. Their reputation is their currency. If a credible academic agrees to work with you, that itself is a form of validation.

• Third, this person becomes your guide. They’ll shape your research strategy, help you choose the right outcome measures, connect you with the right labs and institutions, and keep you from making expensive mistakes.

Put them on your website. Reference them in your pitch deck. Feature them in your content. Their involvement is one of the most underrated assets a supplement brand can have.

Practical tip: How to find a scientist.

You can do this yourself via ResearchGate or Google Scholar. Though it can be hard to know which researchers are actually open to commercial collaboration. Alternatively, StudySetGo Connect gives you access to a vetted network of experts who are on the platform specifically for this purpose.

Step 3: Run a quick pilot trial — not for publication

Here’s where most brands go wrong: they try to run their first study as a full-scale, publication-ready randomised controlled trial. That’s a six-figure and multi-year commitment before you have any real data on whether your product does what you think it does.

It’s a substantial risk with not much potential upside.

When you work with Universities you will almost always sign off rights to publication.

If your supplement isn't statistically significant compared to the placebo… that’s going to be put out in the world for your customers to read… sales get increasingly challenging if this happens.

Instead, you run a small, fast pilot study with a commercial research organisation. The goal isn’t publication, it’s information. You want to answer one question: Does this product produce a measurable effect?

Measure several different outcome variables — your primary target, but also a few secondary measures to see where the strongest effects appear. Your scientific advisor will help you decide what to measure and how to measure it.

Run the trial quickly. Months, not years. You’re trying to see directional signals that tell you whether a larger investment is worth making. Every month that goes by without this data, you’re flying blind.

This is your low-risk bet. If the pilot shows nothing, you’ve saved yourself from spending six figures on a full trial that would have shown nothing either. If it shows promising trends, you now have data to plan your next move with confidence.

Key Point: Why is speed so important?

Every month that goes by that you don’t have this evidence, you’re leaving money on the table. Your competitors are doing the same… It’s better to be first.

Step 4: Use the pilot data to plan a proper trial

The pilot is done. You’ve got data. Now you know which outcome measures showed the strongest effects, what the approximate effect size is, and how variable the responses were across participants.

This information is invaluable. It lets you do something most brands can’t: design a properly powered study.

Using the pilot data, you and your research team calculate the exact number of participants needed to detect a statistically significant effect. You choose the outcome measures where you saw the strongest signals. You refine the protocol based on what you learned from the first round.

Critically, you run this study in your product’s target demographic. Your actual customer. If your supplement is designed for active adults over 40, you recruit active adults over 40. This makes the results directly relevant to your marketing and your audience.

This is the study you design for publication. Larger sample size. Rigorous methodology. Pre-registered protocol. The kind of evidence that shines under peer review.

And because you already ran the pilot, you’re not gambling. You have a strong reason to believe the results will be positive, because you’ve already seen the directional data. You’re placing a bet with the odds significantly in your favour.

Practical Tip: Listen to the scientist

Great design studies should be at the intersection of what you want to highlight in your marketing and what the scientist considers most scientifically interesting. Be clear on what you want from it and by when, but also listen to them when they suggest ideas… who knows? Your product might be the one that leads to a scientific breakthrough?

Step 5: Document everything and market the journey

While you’re running the trial for publication, talk about it. Publicly.

Post about the fact that you’re conducting research. The researcher that you’re working with. You don’t need to reveal results prematurely. The process itself is the story.

Most supplement brands try to make claims. You’re showing the work. That distinction matters to consumers who are increasingly sceptical of health marketing.

This is also where your scientific advisor earns their weight in gold. Feature them in your content. Let them explain what you’re measuring and why. Have them speak to why this research matters. Their credibility becomes your credibility.

By the time you have results, your audience already knows the study happened. They’ve been following the journey. The results aren’t a surprise announcement; they’re the payoff of a story they’ve been watching unfold.

Step 6: Leverage the results for everything they’re worth

The study is done. The results are (hopefully) significant. The paper is published. Now you extract maximum value from that investment.

Go on podcasts. Present at industry conferences. Write about it on social media, not once, but repeatedly, from different angles. The methodology. The key findings. What it means for consumers. What questions does it open up for future research?

Put a claims-compliant version on your website. Work with a regulatory advisor to ensure the language stays within the boundaries of what you can legally say — but make sure the evidence is front and centre for anyone who wants to see it.

Use it in your investor materials. Use it in retail buyer meetings. Use it in PR. A published clinical trial on your specific product is a competitive moat that most of your competitors simply don’t have. Make sure everyone knows about it.

Key Point: You have to make the most of it.
If you’re spending considerable funds on research and you’re not making it a key part of your content you’re leaving money on the table.

Step 7: Build the evidence base

One study is good. Two is better. Three starts to look like a pattern.

You’re now a scientifically aligned brand.

Each study you run generates data that informs the next one. You learn more about your product’s mechanism. You identify new outcome measures to explore. You build relationships with researchers who become long-term collaborators.

Your customers love you for it.

Over time, you go from “we have a study” to “we have an evidence base.” That’s a fundamentally different conversation with retailers, regulators, investors, and consumers. You’re no longer a supplement brand that did a study once. You’re a research-driven company that continuously validates its products.

These compounds. Each new publication makes the next one easier to run, easier to fund, and more impactful when it lands.

The two mistakes I see every week

In my conversations with supplement founders, heads of R&D and CEOs, the same two patterns keep coming up.

The first group says research is too expensive, so they do nothing. Zero evidence. Ingredient-level claims. They hope nobody asks questions. Until recently, this was probably true…

The second group is almost worse off.

They’ve been talked into a full-scale gold-standard randomised controlled trial as their first study — six figures, three years — with no prior evidence that their product actually works. The researchers will publish the results regardless of the outcome. If your product doesn’t perform, you haven’t just wasted six figures. You’ve funded published evidence that your product doesn’t work, attached to your brand, forever.

Both groups are missing Step 3. A small, fast pilot that tells you whether the bigger investment is worth making before you commit to one.

Don’t run a full trial without knowing what you’re getting into.

The bottom line

The vast majority of supplement brands have zero clinical evidence on their specific products. They rely on ingredient-level research done by someone else, on someone else’s formulation, in someone else’s population.

The ones that invest in their own research, strategically, starting small and building up, create an advantage that is extremely difficult to replicate. It takes time, it takes commitment, and it takes a willingness to let the data speak for itself.

But the brands that do it?

They’re the ones that win the shelf space, close the retail deals, survive the ad platform crackdowns, and build genuine consumer trust.

The playbook isn’t complicated. Start with a product worth studying, get a scientist on your side, test small, test fast, then scale up with confidence.

That’s how you build a science-backed brand.

P.S.

At StudySetGo, our mission is to accelerate health research.

We do this by:

1. Connecting health-focused brands with relevant, vetted, leading scientists in <1 week

2. Dramatically accelerating participant recruitment for research trials (The #1 bottleneck in human research).

Now, after hearing feedback from many founders and CEOs about the slow timelines and bloated costs associated with research (not to mention the contracting timelines and IP issues)…

We’re launching StudySetGo Pilots as a streamlined, accelerated, commercial-friendly mechanism for running pilot studies.

Why are these trials different?

We’re remote-first, allowing us to run trials that are:

1. Lean

2. Low risk

3. Rapid

Because we conduct research from people’s homes, our overheads are considerably lower than you would normally see with traditional CROs, and lab space is no longer a rate-limiting step.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about how we can support you in your specific situation, you can book a no-obligation call here.

Or send me an email here saying “Pilot” or your current biggest challenge, and I’ll be happy to share more about how we can support.

My Email

You applied for a grant and waited six months to hear back. You spent weeks chasing participants who never replied.

If you’re on the industry side, you know a different version of the same problem.

You need credible data to back a product. Data that proves your product has been independently tested and validated. And you need it faster than the current system allows. But finding the right scientific collaborator takes months.

Two sides of the same broken system.

That gap between what research could be and what it actually looks like today is why this newsletter exists.

My name is Nathan and before I founded StudySetGo I’ve sat on both sides of the research table. I’ve had 26 muscle samples taken from my own legs. I’ve given hundreds of blood samples, and I’ve seen how much time researchers spend doing work they were never trained for, instead of the science that truly matters.

Whilst doing my PhD researching the effects of diet and exercise on muscle health in older adults, I felt how dysfunctional the system was firsthand. That frustration became the foundation for building StudySetGo.

A place where researchers meet industry, and science can move at the speed it should.

So why this newsletter, and why should you keep reading?

Twice a month, I’ll send you practical insights you can use along with ideas that challenge how things are currently done. Whether you’re trying to launch a study faster or find the right research partner to validate your product, you’ll find value.

A taste of what’s coming.

What researchers and those in industry need right now is closer than most people realise.

Researchers want funding, collaboration, and recognition for their expertise. Companies want credible science and the right people to execute it. This newsletter lives at that intersection.

For researchers, we’ll start with a topic that’s rarely talked about openly: funding.

Specifically, how your existing expertise in study design, methodology review, and data validation can turn into paid consulting and advisory work with industry. We’ll also get into topics of faster recruitment, less unnecessary admin, and better study management strategies.

For those on the industry side: we’ll talk about how to find the right scientific collaborator without months of cold outreach, and how to build partnerships that produce data you can confidently take to market.

Done right, investing in research can be one of the highest-ROI decisions a health company can make.

The main question

How do we make the whole system more efficient without cutting corners on the science, in a way that works for everyone in it? That’s the question this newsletter will keep coming back to.

Whether you’re an industry partner who needs credible science that works commercially, or a researcher who feels blocked by the way funding and collaboration currently works, the goal is the same.

Better science, done faster.

If you share it, I believe you’ll find something worth staying for.

More soon.

— Nathan