The honest story behind Lummino

I spent over nine years building businesses as an entrepreneur and eventually ended up broke and burnt out. I stepped back, took a finance job and kept one day a week free to build something on the side.

Around the same time, I started getting fit again and someone suggested creatine. I read up on it and thought: this stuff is incredible.

Then I actually drank it.

It was awful.

I’d been a Waterdrop addict for years because it made drinking water something I genuinely looked forward to. So I dropped one into my creatine.

Better. Still wrong.

But it sparked the idea: what if taking creatine could feel more like drinking something you actually enjoy?

I called Emma, a food-and-supplement specialist I’d worked with before. She corrected several of my confidently wrong theories and helped me get the formulation right.

Then I took it back to my kitchen table and spent the next couple of months mixing batch after batch myself.

Eventually, I got to something I loved.

This is what happens when your side project takes over the living room. And yes, that is a ridiculous number of empty cardboard boxes in the background. I believe in recycling — just, apparently, on a slightly postponed schedule.

Then people at the gym started asking what I was drinking. I gave out a few samples. They liked it. Then they came back asking for more.

The funny part is, I still didn’t see the business.

Until one guy tried it and said:

“If you were smart, you’d make a business out of this.”

I’d spent months searching for my next idea while literally drinking it every day.

So I stopped looking.

That became Lummino: creatine I actually want to take every day.

— Reginald