How Gym Concoction’s In-Person Sampling and Evidence-Based Formula Built Real Customer Trust
Jarman Gosai, founder of Gym Concoction, created a unique pre-workout sachet combining seven well-researched ingredients and real Australian fruit powder. In this interview, he shares why walking away from digital-only strategies toward face-to-face sampling transformed growth and revealed unexpected customer segments.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Gym Concoction grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Jarman Gosai: I started making my own pre-workout in my kitchen because the product I wanted to take didn’t exist. I’d gone through the published research on exercise performance ingredients and made a list of the ones with the strongest evidence behind them. No product on the Australian market contained all of them. So I bought the raw ingredients, put on a rebreather for PPE, and started weighing them out on a kitchen scale every morning before the gym.
The formula contains seven active ingredients, each selected for a specific reason. Creatine is the most researched performance ingredient in existence, with over 500 peer-reviewed studies supporting its effects on strength, power, and cognitive function. Citrulline malate increases blood flow and oxygen delivery to working muscles, reducing fatigue and improving endurance. Beta-alanine buffers acid buildup during high-intensity effort, letting you push through the point where your muscles would normally give out. Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR) supports fat metabolism and brain function. It costs about ten times more than caffeine per serve, you can’t feel it working the way you feel a caffeine hit, but the research supports it so it stays. L-Tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine and noradrenaline that maintains cognitive performance under stress, including sleep deprivation. L-Theanine promotes calm focus without sedation, and a 2019 systematic review of nine randomised controlled trials found it reduces stress and anxiety at the dose we use. Inositol supports cellular signalling and mood regulation during physical stress.
On top of all that, every sachet contains real Australian-grown fruit powder sourced from local farms for flavour and colour. No artificial flavours, no artificial colours. We use monk fruit as a sweetener. To my knowledge, nobody else in the Australian supplement market is doing this. Most brands use synthetic flavouring and call it a day. We wanted the product to taste like real food because that’s what it’s made from.
We sell in single-serve travel sachets rather than the big tubs that dominate the category. It’s a format built for people who want to throw one in their gym bag or keep a few in their desk drawer.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Jarman Gosai: The biggest pivot was renaming the product from “Workout Formula” to “Energy Formula.” I’d built the brand around gym-goers, but I started handing sachets out at corporate office foyers and train stations in Melbourne’s CBD and discovered that a huge chunk of our customers weren’t gym people at all. They were fifty-something executives pairing it with their morning coffee as an energy boost. The “workout” label was actively turning them away. Rebranding to “energy” opened up a customer segment I didn’t know existed and changed our entire go-to-market approach.
What I didn’t expect was the next demographic to find us: shift workers. Ambulance drivers and paramedics doing overnight rotations, security guards pulling 12-hour stints, truck drivers on long hauls. These are people who need sustained energy and mental clarity but don’t want to rely on caffeine and sugar to get through a shift. The fact that our formula is stimulant-free but still effective for alertness and focus turned out to be exactly what they were looking for. Between the gym crowd, the corporate execs, and the shift workers, we’ve ended up serving three very different audiences with the same product, which told me the formulation was right even if my original positioning was too narrow.
The second turning point was committing to in-person sampling as our primary acquisition channel. Every instinct said to focus on digital (I’m a data scientist, it’s what I know), but standing at Melbourne Central at 8:30am handing out sachets converts better than any ad I’ve run. That taught me something I wouldn’t have learned from a dashboard.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Jarman Gosai: Direct-to-consumer via our website is our primary channel. But the way we drive that revenue is unusual for ecommerce: in-person sampling. We hand out sachets at university campuses, gyms, corporate office foyers, and train stations. People try it, scan the QR code, and order online. The physical interaction creates a level of trust and memorability that a Facebook ad can’t replicate.
SEO is our second channel and it’s where my data science background pays off. We’re building topical authority clusters around our ingredient categories rather than chasing individual keywords. We’re also leaning into influencer marketing, specifically fitness creators who do ingredient breakdowns on TikTok and Instagram. That audience is exactly who we’re built for: people who read the back of the packet before they buy.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Jarman Gosai: We’re actively building for AI-assisted search, which we think of as Answer Engine Optimisation rather than traditional SEO. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “what’s the best evidence-based pre-workout in Australia,” we want to be the answer. That means structuring our content so it’s easily parsed by LLMs: clear claims, cited sources, ingredient-level detail, direct answers to specific questions.
On the Google side, we’re focused on E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trust) and topical authority. We’d rather publish five deeply researched articles that establish us as the definitive source on a topic than fifty thin posts chasing keywords. Google’s Helpful Content System actively penalises the latter approach and most small supplement brands haven’t caught up to that yet.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Jarman Gosai: The most effective thing we do doesn’t scale in the traditional ecommerce sense, but it works. We go to where our customers are and we talk to them. Not through a survey or an email flow. In person. We’ve gone to universities during orientation week. We’ve gone to the Tan, which is one of Melbourne’s most popular running tracks along the Yarra, on early Saturday mornings and spoken to runners directly. We’ve set up at Albert Park Lake and had conversations with people mid-cooldown.
Those conversations changed the product. People told us what mattered to them, what they liked, what didn’t work, and we took that feedback and overhauled the sachet design and the flavour profile. When someone sees the updated packaging and recognises that their feedback shaped it, that’s not a customer anymore. That’s an advocate. They tell their training partners, they post about it, they come back. The product itself does most of the retention work because when something genuinely works, people reorder without being asked. But the relationship that turns a buyer into an advocate starts with a face-to-face conversation, not a discount code.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Jarman Gosai: Double down on: getting out from behind your laptop and going to where your customers physically are. Hand them your product. Talk to them. Watch their face when they try it. The insights you get from 50 in-person conversations are worth more than 5,000 website sessions. Also double down on building an email list from day one, even before your website is perfect. We use Klaviyo and capture emails at every sampling event.
Stop doing entirely: obsessing over your website design and SEO before you have customers. I see founders spend months perfecting their Shopify theme and writing blog posts that nobody reads because they have zero traffic and zero reviews. The website doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to exist. Go build the demand first and refine the site once real people are actually using it.
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