Meet Alec Hess – Entrepreneur, brand marketing guru, and healthy energy pill evangelist

Today’s post I interview another fascinating entrepreneur as part of series I’ve started where I chat with business people and discuss the beginnings of their business, their backgrounds and the challenges they face.

This week it’s a pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague Alec Hess of Full Voice Media and PenancePill.com.

Alec is a young entrepreneur who before the age of 25 had already built several successful businesses including a college study note sharing website NotePig.com that I wish had been around when I was in school. It was at this period during his career that he saw the importance of a strong web presence online and how vital that is to a businesses success. He also realized he had an innate talent for developing fun and innovative brands on the internet. So with his father Mark (a veteran advertising and design guru) they founded Full Voice Media, a company that capitalizes on it’s unique strengths and experience in helping businesses maximize their online presence through effective marketing campaigns.

Alec’s newest venture PenancePill.com is equally as exciting and happens to be of great interest to me since I aspire to build and launch a product of my own. He’s not only managed to create a unique and healthy product but also build a business from the ground up using proven marketing techniques.  I sat down with Alec to chat about how he got started, his simple marketing strategy, and the importance of constant attention to customer satisfaction.

How do you describe your business PenancePill.com?

Penance Pill is a company that effectively sources out manufacturing and distribution to create affordable products

that people can and will want to use every day. The main business and core function of Penance Pill, Inc. is marketing – our job is to create awareness for and education about a new product. We didn’t try to reinvent the wheel or “come up with the next big thing” – instead, we simply tried to package and deliver highly in-demand results (namely improved health and increased energy levels) in a more affordable and easy-to-use way.

What exactly is a Penance Pill and what made you want to start the business?

Penance Pill is a healthy energy pill – we created it as a safer, more convenient, more affordable alternative to coffee, energy shots, and energy drinks.  Our formula is a combination of guarana, green tea extract, pomegranate, grape seed extract, acai berry, and vitamins B, C, and E, all of which were chosen for their abilities to improve health and energy levels.  By combining all of these ingredients into one pill, and pricing it affordably, we’re hoping that people can have access to a broader and healthier variety of antioxidants and vitamins than they otherwise would.  At the same time, we’re hoping to replace things such as coffee and traditional energy products which are full of artificial sweeteners, chemical additives, and unnecessary calories.

We started Penance Pill because we identified a need.

What is your background, and What did you do before PenancePill.com?

All of the founders of Penance Pill are entrepreneurs.  We have years of experience working on service-based projects, and this is our first physical product.  Because we come from service backgrounds, we know that creating a good product is all about satisfying the individual needs of customers and paying constant attention to their level of satisfaction.  Therefore, we started this product with the end in mind – we used extensive research, statistics, and market information in order to find out what people really wanted before ever developing a formula.

What did you need to put this website together?

The most important element in putting a website together is determining what your brand image and voice is going to be.  We already had skilled web developers on staff, so the technicalities of creating our website were never an issue.  Instead, we put our focus on creating a site that shared the personality and vision of our product itself – our site is simple yet vibrant, and it radiates the feeling of natural health.  That vision is reflected not just in the website, but in all parts of our promotional activities and operations.

What kind of role did your College education play in your entrepreneurial ventures, and what kind of doors did it open for you?

None.  The only education that mattered to us when it came to creating a business was our actual entrepreneurial experience.  Because we all ran successful businesses before we started Penance Pill, we knew, empirically, what does and doesn’t work, the importance of team building, and the essential quality of thinking ahead.

How did you raise money to start the business, or did you bootstrap it?

We bootstrapped it.  We focused our limited start-up funds on production/manufacturing and on low-cost, effective grassroots marketing.  We feel that Penance Pill sells itself – the task it slowly and steadily increasing our exposure.

What is your marketing strategy for PenancePill.com?

Get it into customers’ hands.  Everyone who has tried Penance Pill is already an evangelist, and so our task is to get people to adopt a new method of increasing energy that they’ve never heard of before.  That’s why we focus on two key marketing strategies:

1) Finding people who are looking for energy and health-related information online, and gaining awareness for our product by offering free and useful information and content on the subjects of health, energy, productivity, and general well-being.
2) Placing our product in the retail locations where people are already purchasing coffee and other energy products, and coupling this placement with location-based viral marketing strategies.

You just went live with PenancePill.com, where do you see the business headed in the next 6-12 months?

In the next year, we hope to see our product placed in hundreds of stores in major cities all around the country.  Each location will be coupled with a targeted viral campaign and powerful, community-based promotion and marketing teams.  Also to build awareness of the product through our online efforts, and to achieve a 10% product awareness in the United States by December 31st of 2011.

Wow. Some awesome insight from Alec. As important as the design or overall look and feel of brand is, nothing beats traditional grassroots marketing. Alec found a market that exists where people look for information about these types of healthy products, and through his website provides useful information about the health benefits and then offers them a product that caters to their interest. Great work and I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.