The fun of a night out with friends lasts until you wake up the next morning with a hangover. This is true for most of us, but not for some folks in South Korea – because hangover cure drinks are popular there.
Now a former Facebook engineer who hails from that country is looking to take this drink to the United States. He quit his recent job at Tesla to venture in his own startup he calls the Morning Recovery, to offer his own version of the hangover cure drink which is so far FDA-compliant.
Photo via Morning Recovery’s Facebook Page
Sisun Lee got the idea of this drink when he came home to South Korea. He was 26 then. Lee spent some night with friends over drinks, one which is the hangover cure, only to discover the following morning that he felt like he did not drink the night before.
Upon going back to the United States, Lee told and shared about this drink to his co-workers when he was still at Facebook. After he purchases Korean ones online, everyone loved it. As expected.
“I tried to import them,” he said through Business Insider. But no company wanted to make Lee a distributor since he has no background in beverages or consumer goods whatsoever, which made him an unideal candidate to trust for business.
But Lee was persistent. He knew that the hangover cure drink will become a hit in the United States, so he thought of making the drink himself.
He has three years’ worth of nanotechnology/biotech engineering in his background anyway so he should have an idea. Lee majored in that field before he shifted to computer science.
Lee only needed to do more research, and that was when he found the work of Dr. Jing Liang. He is a researcher from UCLA with papers about herbal remedies for hangovers.
In Liang’s papers, Lee discovered that the singular herbal compound that is behind the hangover cure drinks is the dihydromyricetin or DHM, commonly found in the Oriental raisin tree and rattan tea. It was written that herbal trees from such trees have been used to cure hangover in Asia for hundreds of years.
He also learned that hangovers are caused when we drink more alcohol than our livers can handle, and a type of toxic builds up.
And whenever there is too much of that acid, it causes inflammation like a headache. Too much too fast can cause vomiting, he said, and the DHM helps the body removes this toxic acid.
While the Korean hangover drink served its purpose, Lee believes that it lacks the purity, quantity and other ingredients for it to really work. For this, he teamed up with Dr. Lian and other engineer friends to create their own formula.
Photo via Morning Recovery’s Facebook Page
To test the formula, it took him a two-week trip to Asia, straight nights of getting himself drunk, and an additional 15 pounds to his weight.
Eventually, he sought the help of other friends to try the drink. It came to a point to reach out to strangers to eliminate bias.
“We needed to give it to people who didn’t know us at all. But we couldn’t get enough strangers to say, ‘Yeah I’ll get drunk and take this really weird sketchy drink from you,” Lee said.
For this, he put up a Web page which tells about the science behind drink and shared it on Facebook. It got the attention of a VC in Toronto and decided to place the drink on Product Hunt, which is a platform to launch new products.
Needless to say that it got the attention it deserved.
“Overnight we became No. 2 on Product Hunt. We weren’t even a startup. We were just people doing this thing,” he said.
Lee converted the web page into a waitlist as the number of interested testers grew as many as 30,000 people. This is apart from those who flooded Lee with e-mails. But to interact with some of them, he started a private Facebook group which got 800 respondents.
This kind of overwhelming response from his little hobby got Lee to rethink his job at Tesla and focus on his startup. And so he did make the jump and quit.
Business with Morning Recovery starts July 5.
Source: Independent UK
