Today we’d like to introduce you to Shane Heath.
Hi Shane, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I used to love coffee, the smell, the ritual, and its association with productivity was a hard knot to untie. I studied design in college and, upon graduating college, co-founded a tech company with some friends in 2011. Though the company was unsuccessful financially, I took the experience and joined various tech companies in Silicon Valley. By 2014, I was leading the design team for an early stage tech startup in Palo Alto, living in San Francisco, training jiu jitsu, painting, rock climbing. I’ve always lived an active and healthy life and I bought into the dream that coffee would help me do more and do it faster.
Spending hours in front of a canvas as a fine artist, I am, by nature, self-aware (sometimes to a fault.) A jittery hand and an anxious mind don’t lead to flow state. Combine that with the general anxiety and depression I have dealt with most of my adult life and I found myself in a strange place with coffee. Years of working in startup environments led to a caffeine addiction. A few years of this dependency led me to forget how it felt to be myself. I didn’t want to drink coffee, but I felt like I needed it. This morning ritual that everyone drank to ‘get shit done’ was making me feel like shit.
I began to realize that what I really liked about coffee had more to do with the ritual than the beverage. I began to wonder my morning ritual could if it could be a vessel for more than caffeine. I explored various herbs, types of coffee and it was either too much or too bland. In 2015 I got invited to do an artist-in-residence in Goa India and took a leave of absence from work and left North America for the first time in my life. Living in India for six months, I fell in love with masala chai. With a dynamic flavor profile, less caffeine, more benefits and a cultural context built around it, it was easy for me to forget about the one dimensional nature of coffee. Traveling gives you perspective, allowing you to cross pollinate ways of being that suits the real you, not who your parents, teacher, friend or culture tell you to be.
I took this approach to my morning beverage, researching and adding in compounds that had a benefit profile that matched my lifestyle. Lion’s mane for focus, chaga and reishi for immune support, cordyceps for physical performance, turmeric for anti-inflammation, cinnamon to help with glucose response and some cacao for mood energy and to round out the flavor profile.
With no business intentions, I would add all these powders to my mug every morning and go about my day. I felt amazing. Focused but not anxious. Energetic but not jittery. I felt more endurance and less sore and was sleeping again. I’d take this drink with me to music festivals, the office, the gym and people would ask me “what the fuck are you drinking?” I’d tell them, “It’s mud.”
It became obvious to me that despite 90% of the population drinking caffeine daily, most people wanted to drink less, give up the afternoon cup or quit all together. In May of 2018, after a night out enhanced by a small amount of psilocybin, I woke up with this overwhelming vision and energy to share this drink with the world. I grabbed my laptop, designed a brand, packaging, and put up a website. It felt fluid because I was tapping into everything I’d learned thus far in life. As though my interests in health, and wellness, my pursuits in art and design, and my experience starting two other companies all were preparing me for this one. I posted a few stock photos to Instagram saying, ‘I wasn’t mad at coffee, just disappointed. So, I made something better.’ Orders started coming in.
In my kitchen and art studio, I began figuring out how to make the product at scale. Three months later and I had friends coming over to fulfill orders while I went to work. This cycle continued until six months from launch. I was selling over six figures in monthly revenue, had amazing testimonials and growth that was nearly impossible to keep up with. Paul DeJoe, a former CEO and Co-founder I worked with wrote his first angel check telling me to ‘quit my job tomorrow.’ I left, brought Paul on as co-founder and COO and together we’ve been building this company ever since.
I created this drink for myself. It was my own exploration of finding the ingredients I believed in to solve my need. I called it MUD\WTR and I’m grateful to be sharing it with you.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It’s all relative, I guess. When you find something that is authentic and aligns with your purpose, it can make something that would be impossibly hard for someone else enjoyable for you. I think that is the secret sauce of being successful at something: finding play in something that other people label as work. I equate it to swimming downstream in a sense. I work my ass off, deal with crippling stress, am making tough decisions, periodically feel lost, lonely, scared, and unworthy… But there always is this feeling of wind in my sails. That wind is partly due to the tools, rituals, and practices that I am disciplined about maintaining to help me handle the personal evolution needed to meet the challenges ahead. That wind is also due to having an amazing team, family, and mentors that I can lean on to bring about new perspective. In the long term, being passionate about optimizing my mental, physical and spiritual self and hiring others who are better at me at what they do allows me to maintain composure and ride the peaks and troughs of starting a business.
All this is to say that I agree with Ben Horowitz when he says the toughest skill for a CEO is managing one’s own psychology. We had trouble finding a co-packer that could fit our specifications in packaging and a supplier that could fit our specifications in ingredient quality and volume. This has led to challenging times early on where I was going to a commercial kitchen until early hours in the morning to mix products for the coming week. I’ve had to let people go that I love. I’ve had to grasp, manage, and execute on unrealistic project demands for months at a time that span design, engineering, copywriting, content creation, and typical CEO shit. But, at the end of the day what this really comes down to is managing my mind and investing in the tools to strengthen and grow my capacity and being militant about finding time to decompress, recover, and zoom out and think years ahead.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Outside of MUD\WTR, one of my main passions is painting. I create large scale portraits that combine realism, street art, and expressionism to create large scale portraits that capture individuals and moments in time. I juxtapose finely rendered features with expressive strokes, patterns, and symbols gives each piece a dynamic feel that reveals details as you vary your distance from the piece. I’m known for my use of color, texture and unique compositions and combine an array of mediums including aerosol, charcoal, pastel, acrylics, and house paints in my works.
I’m most proud of a new series I’ve only recently started called VOICES. VOICES is an auditory, visual, and artistic exploration of culture’s nooks and crannies. I sit down with homeless people, record their story like a podcast and take their photo. I then paint their portrait, film the process and overlay the audio of their story on top of the video of their portrait coming to life. Giving a voice to the unheard is something that inspires me deeply. I think the homeless community can teach us a lot about the flaws in modern civilization that result in loneliness, poor family dynamics, scarcity, substance abuse, and mental health issue.
I think running my own business gives me the freedom to not make art for money. I honestly create what feels most important to me. Sometimes that can be a portrait of a homeless person, others, an abstract combination of colors I was compelled to express. Either way, I feel free to create what resonates with me most and am grateful to be making art from this place.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I think a lot of people who know me may see me as this creative artist. I think what a lot of people don’t know is that I really thrive with process and discipline. It’s something I champion at my company because it allows me to increase efficiencies which allows me to spend more time thinking creatively and more importantly, more time creating. I’m big on morning rituals, I meditate when I wake up and when I go to bed. I fast every Wednesday. I’m a religious user of Notion to organize my thoughts and document processes. I’m a fan of asana to manage tasks. I spend hours at the beginning of the year planning my life in a very similar way that I plan the mission, vision, values, and goals of my company.
Pricing:
- 30-servings come at $40 per delivery
- We have an annual plan where you pay $360 upfront and we send 90-servings every 90-days for a year
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mudwtr.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/somanypossibilities, instagram.com/drinkmudwtr
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drinkmudwtr?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/mudwtr
