Lock in, because this is the story of a guy who made $200M selling white powder – no, not that kind of powder.
Troy Adashun founded Alpha Lion Supplements, a sports nutrition company that set out to expose unethical, underreported flaws in the supplement industry.
If you’ve ever had a dodgy pre-workout, you know what I’m talking about. That sh*t can make you feel really high, really fast.
Troy was in college when he took his first pre-workout, and within the hour, he was having a panic attack in class.
“I'm sitting in class. I had taken pre-workout, went to the gym an hour and a half before, and I had a panic attack,” he explains.
“I was just sitting there and had so much anxiety. I'm like, what the hell is in this sh*t?"
This is the story of a kid who grew from an aspiring NBA player to a successful entrepreneur running a multimillion-dollar empire.
And honestly? The dude is humble as f*ck.
The dream was the NBA, but life had other plans
Growing up, Troy’s sights were set on the basketball court.
And I mean, the guy was a promising prospect. He trained at the prestigious IMG Academy, rubbing elbows with future NBA stars.
Troy’s childhood dream was to make it to the NBA.
“I grew up wanting to be a pro basketball player,” he tells Austin.
“I went to a training academy for basketball called IMG. I have teammates in the NBA. I’ve been on the court at the same time in a high school game with five different NBA players at the same time.”
However, despite having the hustle and dedication, Troy’s pro basketball dreams never materialized.
And actually, Austin can relate, too.
“How hard was it for you to give up basketball? I gave up hockey,” he shares. “I never made it to the NHL.”
"It was devastating,” Troy replies. “I was really lost for a couple of years in my early twenties.
Probably one of the hardest things, if not the hardest thing, that I've ever gone through in my life.”
Troy has always identified as an athlete, but the realization he wasn’t going to be a basketball player was the push he needed to find a new path.
One he could still be passionate about: fitness.
“I kind of went to fitness, and I got really serious about working out when I was 20 and 21,” he explains.
“When I gave up basketball, I got pretty ripped pretty quick. It was easy because I was used to practicing basketball four hours a day.”
And so fitness kind of became Troy’s thing, and like a lot of guys, you could say he became borderline obsessive. Enter: supplementation.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a gym bro that isn’t using at least one kind of supplement. Most often, fitness fanatics will have a supplement stack: a little creatine here, some protein there, BCAAs, hydration, pre-workout, you name it.
And it’s big money. In the US alone, the supplement industry's market value is expected to reach $162.4 billion by 2033.
Troy’s idea for Alpha Lion wasn’t actually sparked by money (though, who would blame him if it were) – but instead by a desire to clean up what he could see was a pretty out-of-control industry.
ICYMI - the FDA regulates dietary supplements under a different set of regulations than those covering foods and drugs, meaning there’s a whole lot of room for error and loopholes.
One of those loopholes is that ingredients don’t even have to be clearly labeled.
“The supplement industry, I don't want to say it was shady, but it was kind of shady,” Troy explains, “and it was dominated by legacy brands that have been around for 20, 30 years.”
We told you earlier how he’d experienced his first panic attack after ingesting a pre-workout, and it was enough to know something was seriously up.
“I'll never forget it. I think it was my sophomore year. I had never experienced that before.”
It’s annoying when cliches ring true, but I guess they are cliches for a reason. Necessity truly is the mother of all invention.
“A lot of entrepreneurs start with a problem that they had themselves,” Austin says. “They deal with this issue, and they're like, I could solve this. Is that how you started Alpha Lion?”
“Myself and Jordan connected,” Troy explains, referring to his business partner.
“We just saw an incredible opportunity to shake up the industry with better branding, better formulas, and better products. We thought we could do it better than the competition, to be honest.”
So we learned how Alpha Lion was born – but now we needed to figure out how they grew that sh*t to be worth so much money.
The hustle of growing a startup from scratch
It was in 2017 when Troy and Jordan took the leap. They were tired of seeing people get duped by brands that didn’t care about their customers, just their bottom lines.
The boys were passionate about what they put into their bodies, and they wanted to create something clean, effective, and transparent.
“I was always researching what ingredients actually would help me build muscle faster, recover faster, increase my workout intensity, my workout endurance, you know?” explains Troy.
“So I've always kind of been obsessed with just maximizing my own potential, and supplements with different ingredients are a great way to do that.”
But the dream for Alpha Lion went beyond protein and pre-workout.
Troy enjoyed making content; he was a people person, and he knew it could become a lifestyle brand – rather than simply a sports supplement company.
“So essentially, we started. I like to call it more of a fitness lifestyle company because we incorporate a lot of content and motivation,” he explains.
From the beginning, Troy was creating content around the brand’s journey, from lab sampling to behind-the-scenes peeks.
“I was documenting,” he tells Austin. “If you go on my YouTube channel from 2018, I had a series called ‘Creating the Perfect Pre-Workout’, and I just went to the lab. I was trying flavor samples, we just want to create the best pre-workout possible.”
But while Troy was covering the creative side, the brand image, and the content, Jordan was working on the numbers and making calculated moves.
“My business partner, Jordan, he's the CEO, he's so solid on the financial side of the business with the cash flow and financial forecasting with the operations, even the inventory planning,” says Troy.
Troy had always been the more creative one of the two, but creatives can often use a more numbers-oriented business partner to balance out the energy.
“I just think we have such a strong team. If you're a creative person and you want to actually build something, you better partner with someone who is a f*cking savage at operations, finance, and data.
Those two people need each other to build an empire.”
And that’s even more true when you’re building something from the ground up, with little to no capital and no backing behind you.
“We are 100% bootstrap. We never had investor money. It was just that my business partner is really good at running ads, and I had a YouTube presence that was formed around the start of the brand.”
They were hustling, that’s for sure. But it paid off. Big time.
By 2020, Alpha Lion was bringing in $45.7M in sales. And Troy and Jordan weren’t slowing down.
Keep it real, and keep it simple
Troy’s success has a lot to do with his authenticity. It sounds simple, but it’s actually rare.
He didn’t just want to sell a pre-workout. He wanted to build a community. He wanted people to trust that the products he was selling were legit.
That authenticity has resonated with people, especially Gen Z and millennials, who are tired of being lied to by brands that care more about cash than their customers.
But let’s be real – growing a business to $200M isn’t just about being a chill guy. You also need a serious strategy.
From social media to supplement stores nationwide
So, how do you scale a supplement company sorry, lifestyle brand* to a top contender in the fitness space?
Well, for starters, you’ve got to lean into your audience.
This is why when Troy and Jordan started out, they used social media to build a following. A real following.
They weren’t just slapping up ads. They were sharing their journey, their struggles, and their wins. It wasn’t about a “perfect brand” with a curated image. It was about being raw and real.
And that resonates.
Fast forward a few years, and Alpha Lion isn’t just an Instagram-famous supplement brand. It’s everywhere – literally.
“Everything starts online, all the other revenue streams are possible because we have online awareness,” Troy explains.
“Through ads, influencers, organic social media. And then there’s the retail side of things. So we're in every GNC, we're in every vitamin shop, and we're in thousands of mom-and-pop stores across the country.”
I mean, holy f*ck. Where do you even go from there?
Well, actually, it looks like this is only the beginning of Alpha Lion’s journey, considering what they have lined up next.
And maybe Troy is going to be pretty close to the NBA after all…
What’s next for this $200M empire?
With a name like Alpha Lion, you should know the boys dream big.
Troy celebrates every milestone in his business, and perhaps that’s part of what keeps him so motivated along the way. He has a watch for every major success, and it’s kind of a huge flex, ngl.
“When I have a big business milestone, I like to commemorate it with a watch,” he tells Austin, whose eyes are alight with awe.
“This is like the first legit watch I bought, the Hulk Rolex Submariner. This one was when we hit a hundred million in lifetime sales.”
“Wow. How much was that for you?” Austin asks, and I find myself wondering if this is a guy’s equivalent of showing off an engagement ring.
“Like 22,000 at the time,” Troy says. He continues, “This one right here is when we made the Inc. 5,000 fastest growing companies. Wimbledon de Digest, I like to call it the Roger Federer.”
There are more, but I don’t have the time to detail them (also, I’m jealous). But one thing is pretty evident: Troy isn’t just smart, he’s got style. And it translates into his products, from the names to the branding.
Take Superhuman, his infamous pre-workout (inspired by the college classroom fiasco, if you recall).
Now, Superhuman is potentially expanding into its own brand. Yeah, okay.
“So right now, there's a big talk internally about Superhuman kind of becoming its own entity, its own thing, right?”
Troy goes on to reveal Superhuman is literally the #2 pre-workout in America – both in terms of volume and units sold on Amazon last year. CRAZY.
But even crazier? It’s actually brought Troy closer to the NBA, something pretty healing for a dude who gave up all dreams of playing professional basketball.
“I think one of the things that I'm most excited about with superhuman, we want to associate superhuman with the NBA, NFL, and MLB,” he tells Austin, and the childlike wonder in his eyes reminds me of how we should all feel about our dreams, no matter how old we get.
“So we're actually already in some preliminary talks about maybe being the official energy drink partner of a big NFL team or an NBA team. So that's awesome.”
Going from a small team to a full-size operation
While Jordan and Troy pulled some serious hard yards on their own for Alpha Lion, their success probably wouldn’t be as impressive as it stands now without expanding, delegating, and growing their team.
For a crazy creative like Troy (mood), this meant having the legal precautions in place to make sure trademarking and intellectual property remain steadfast.
For example, for 30 months in a row, Alpha Lion released a different flavor of pre-workout, each with an ‘inspired’ wordplay and graphic.
“Every single month, we dropped a new limited edition flavor and branding,” Troy says as he shows Austin his wall of empty containers.
“We don't do it anymore. But we had Breaking Bad. This is Alien. We did a Nintendo-themed one.”
“What does that look like from a trademark standpoint?” Austin asks, and I’m dying to know, too.
“Obviously, we have a legal team, and we're a lot more buttoned up now than we were when we were a startup,” Troy laughs.
“It's all a process. So, our brand director and I will brainstorm and come up with names and ideas, but it always has to go to operations and legal.
So, we might have these wacky ideas, but then they run it through the trademark process. The biggest difference is now we have a chief operations officer, and we have a lawyer.”
As Austin points out, a lot of people who want to get into entrepreneurship or e-commerce businesses don't understand how many headaches there are behind the scenes.
“Dealing with that kind of stuff. Having a team now, does that slow you down, though?” Austin asks genuinely.
“Because I think what's cool about startups and what's cool about being maybe even a solo entrepreneur at the start is you can just fire. You just have time and speed.”
“I think from a product development standpoint, it can slow you down a little bit,” Troy admits.
“We used to just have an idea it would be on the market in six, eight weeks.
Now we have to get the retention department involved, get the acquisition department involved, get the marketing department involved.”
But I guess that’s the trade-off when you go from selling a couple thousand units to making millions of dollars per product drop.
So, are you ready to become Superhuman?
F*ck, I mean, after that? I sure am.
Troy’s journey from ditching his basketball dreams to building a multimillion-dollar empire isn’t really about fitness so much as it is about unlocking the ultimate version of yourself.
But how on earth do you like, even do that? I feel you. Truth is, you need a coach.
Today, Troy’s not just running a successful business or collecting expensive, rare timepieces.
He's running a community of like-minded individuals who are all about leveling up in every area of their lives.
We’re talking about the Superhuman Inner Circle – a private community and mentorship for those serious about performance, growth, and optimizing every part of their mind, body, and business.
Inside the Inner Circle, Troy shares daily protocols, tools, and experiments he personally uses to become the best version of himself.
This isn’t a community focussed on just fitness or business. It’s way more. The Superhuman Inner Circle is about creating the whole package. Money. Freedom. Happiness. Success. Health.
Maybe you’re looking to build a brand from scratch, maybe you want to manage your time better, or maybe you’re ready to unlock peak performance. Whichever, Troy’s got you covered.
Check out Troy's Superhuman Inner Circle.
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