The Problem

I started DRNK with AED 300,000.

Depending on who you are, AED 300,000 sounds like a lot of money.

If you're buying a car, it is.

If you're trying to design, manufacture, inventory, photograph, market, trademark and launch a completely new physical product from scratch, it turns out to be approximately enough money to discover how expensive everything is.

Our first lesson cost us AED 50,000.

We were trying to make the Slim Steel bottle.

The idea seemed simple enough.

Water bottles were round.

Bags weren't.

So why the hell were we all carrying around cylindrical objects that bulged out of laptop bags, handbags and backpacks?

Make the bottle flat.

Obvious.

Except apparently making a flat stainless-steel bottle that didn't leak, didn't deform, didn't look like industrial plumbing and actually met our standards was significantly more complicated than the little drawing in my head suggested.

We started talking to factories in China.

This was our introduction to one of entrepreneurship's oldest traditions:

Sending money to people you absolutely should not be sending money to.

Samples.

Tooling.

Prototypes.

Promises.

Corrections.

More promises.

More money.

At one point approximately AED 50,000 of my original AED 300,000 had disappeared into a collection of factories that had produced almost everything except the bottle we were trying to make.

Some of them were incompetent.

Some were probably scams.

Some possessed the extraordinary manufacturing ability to make exactly what you hadn't asked for and then send you photographs of it as if you were supposed to be impressed.

Fifty thousand dirhams gone.

No product.

Fantastic start.

Eventually we found a factory we trusted.

More importantly, they could actually make the bottle properly.

So we did what every sensible first-time entrepreneur does after just losing a substantial chunk of his savings trying to manufacture a product.

We spent another AED 120,000 on inventory.

Now we had bottles.

Lots of bottles.

Which created a new problem.

Nobody knew they existed.

Normally, this is where you hire people.

You hire someone to build your website.

A photographer shoots the products.

A creative agency develops the campaign.

A digital agency runs your advertising.

Maybe somebody makes you a nice PowerPoint presentation where the words "brand ecosystem" appear seven times.

We couldn't afford any of that.

So I opened Shopify.

I had never built an e-commerce website before.

Which, looking back, is probably obvious from the first website.

But when you don't have money, lack of expertise becomes a surprisingly weak excuse.

You Google things.

You break things.

You fix them.

You watch tutorials made by nineteen-year-olds who somehow know infinitely more than you do.

Then, eventually, something resembling a website appears.

I took some photographs.

I wrote the copy.

I put the products online.

DRNK had a website.

It wasn't perfect.

But it existed.

And at that stage of the company, existence was a meaningful competitive advantage.

The one thing I did want to spend money on was video.

The entire idea behind the Slim bottle was visual.

You needed to see somebody put it inside a laptop bag.

You needed to see the difference between carrying a normal round bottle and something designed around the things people actually carry every day.

So we decided to make two proper films.

Models.

Director.

Production.

The works.

Well, the works if you had almost no money.

We booked the models ourselves.

We hired the director directly.

No agency.

That saved us the agency fees.

Unfortunately, locations also cost money.

We didn't have location money.

Dubai has lots of beautiful locations, though.

And technically, if you move quickly enough, some of them are free.

So we shot part of the campaign in a skate park and around the business centre at Dubai Hills.

Without permission.

It became less of a commercial production and more of a low-budget heist movie.

Get the shot.

Move.

Security.

Move again.

Get another shot.

Someone's coming.

Pack everything.

Go.

I don't remember anyone actually shouting "RUN," but that's broadly how I remember the day.

A few hours later, somehow, we had our footage.

AED 18,000.

Two videos.

Several models.

One director.

Zero location permits.

Not bad.

We were ready to launch.

There was now only one tiny problem.

Neither Mishal nor I knew how to sell anything online.

I knew what Meta was.

I knew what Google was.

I knew companies advertised on both.

This constituted approximately my entire digital marketing education.

Hiring an agency wasn't an option because—recurring theme here—we didn't have the money.

So I decided I would run the ads myself.

There is a wonderful confidence that comes from not knowing enough to understand how little you know.

I created campaigns.

Selected audiences.

Uploaded creative.

Moved budgets around.

Looked at numbers I barely understood.

Turned things off.

Turned them back on.

Changed things that probably shouldn't have been changed.

Left things running that almost certainly should have been stopped.

Essentially, I was giving Meta and Google money while enthusiastically pressing buttons.

And then something very strange happened.

People started buying bottles.

From day one.

One sale.

Then another.

Some days two.

Some days three.

Two or three bottles a day.

We were thrilled.

Seriously.

We would look at those orders and think:

This is working.

Someone we didn't know had seen something we created, taken out a credit card and given us money for it.

That is an extraordinary feeling the first time it happens.

People talk about revenue targets and conversion rates later.

At the beginning, every order feels personal.

Someone bought our bottle.

Then someone else bought one.

Holy shit.

We have a business.

Looking back now, I can see how spectacularly inefficient the advertising probably was.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Our customer acquisition costs were probably terrible.

Campaign structure?

Don't ask.

Attribution?

I was still trying to figure out which button did what.

But the orders kept arriving.

Two bottles.

Three bottles.

Another one.

And we told ourselves this was a great start.

In hindsight, those early sales might have been one of the greatest blessings we ever received.

Not because they made us money.

Because they gave us just enough confidence to keep going.

Had we understood how difficult this business was actually going to become, we might have behaved more responsibly.

And responsible people rarely do interesting things.

Our next problem arrived in the form of six letters:

USPTO.

We had applied to trademark DRNK in the UAE and the United States.

The UAE registration went through.

DRNK was ours.

Then the United States refused the application.

Apparently, somewhere in America, there was a coffee business using DRNK.

We had never heard of them.

They had never heard of us.

They sold coffee.

We sold water bottles.

None of this mattered particularly much to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

What mattered to me was something slightly more immediate.

We were sitting on thousands of bottles.

Every single one of them had:

DRNK

written on it.

Changing the company name wasn't a branding exercise anymore.

It wasn't:

"What do you think of this new logo?"

It was potentially thousands of pieces of inventory becoming extremely attractive scrap metal.

We needed a trademark lawyer.

Not just any lawyer.

I wanted someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

The quote was USD 10,000.

About AED 37,000.

We did not have AED 37,000 sitting in the company bank account waiting for an interesting legal emergency.

So I looked around at what I owned.

And there was my BMW X5.

V8.

Twin turbo.

I loved that car.

This is normally the point in an entrepreneurial story where the founder says something inspirational like:

"I realised possessions didn't matter anymore."

That's not what happened.

Possessions mattered.

I liked my BMW.

Quite a lot, actually.

But I liked the idea of several thousand bottles not becoming useless more.

So I sold it.

Car gone.

Lawyer paid.

We fought the refusal.

And won.

The USPTO registered DRNK.

I had never been so happy to own a word with two missing vowels.

The company survived.

Again.

For a while.

About six months later, another uncomfortable truth became impossible to ignore.

I couldn't keep running the advertising.

Not properly.

I still had a full-time job.

I needed the full-time job because full-time jobs perform this wonderfully old-fashioned function where they pay you a salary every month.

And we had children.

Children, I had discovered, are remarkably uninterested in startup cash flow.

They continue needing food.

School.

Clothes.

Stuff.

Constantly.

It's almost as if they have absolutely no respect for the entrepreneurial journey.

DRNK needed proper marketing.

We needed an agency.

And, once again:

We couldn't afford one.

I didn't have another BMW sitting around.

Then Mishal came to me with a solution.

She would sell some of her wedding jewellery.

I looked at her.

"Are you mad?"

She looked at me.

"Do you have another plan?"

I did not have another plan.

This is one of the things about building DRNK with Mishal that is difficult to explain from the outside.

People see the finished photographs.

The products.

The website.

The Shark Tank episode.

They see two founders standing next to something that looks, hopefully, like a functioning company.

They don't see conversations like that.

They don't see your wife suggesting that she sell jewellery from your wedding because the Facebook ads need professional help.

There is no startup handbook for that moment.

No MBA case study.

No motivational LinkedIn post quite captures it.

Do you have another plan?

No.

So we sold the jewellery.

And hired the agency.

That decision hurt more than selling the BMW.

A car is a car.

You can buy another one.

Wedding jewellery carries memories.

Meaning.

History.

Watching Mishal put that on the table because we believed this ridiculous little company could become something—

that stayed with me.

The strange thing is that while all this was happening, DRNK kept moving forward.

Not dramatically.

There was no overnight explosion.

No giant funding round.

No celebrity posting the bottle and instantly making us famous.

Just tiny bits of progress.

Orders.

Customers.

New ideas.

Mistakes.

Bills.

More orders.

Another problem.

Solve that problem.

Then discover the next one waiting immediately behind it.

This, I eventually learned, is what building a company mostly looks like.

Less Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.

More:

Fuck. How are we going to pay for this?

And somehow finding a way.

Then one day, completely out of nowhere, I received a message.

It was from somebody calling themselves Different Productions.

They said they were producing Shark Tank Dubai.

They said they had seen DRNK.

They loved the brand.

And they wanted to know whether we might be interested in appearing on the show.

I showed Mishal.

"This is obviously a scam," I said.

Because by this point I'd dealt with factories in China, random suppliers, people offering marketing services, people promising distribution, people promising investment and approximately fourteen million people on the internet who apparently wanted to improve our SEO.

I had developed instincts.

Or at least I thought I had.

Nobody from Shark Tank randomly messages you.

Surely.

So I deleted it.

And carried on with my day.