Everyday Dose Founder Jack Savage on the "Caffeine Gene" That Affects 50% of Us, Building 400K Subscribers From His Dad's Garage, and Why Friendships Are Earned

Jack Savage, Founder & CEO of Everyday Dose, built a 400,000-subscriber functional coffee brand from his dad's garage—but not before spending years as "the dumb kid" who needed extra time on tests, wore a suit on planes hoping to meet someone important, and cycled through ADHD medications that left him with facial tics and shame.

In this conversation, Jack opens up about the scarcity mindset he inherited from watching his father's business collapse, the $500K investment deal that fell through at the last second (leaving him in tears), and why discovering he had the CYP1A2 gene—which makes 50% of us caffeine-sensitive—changed everything about how he formulated Everyday Dose.

He also gets real about the unglamorous parts of scaling: living in his dad's garage at 33, battling a massive counterfeit crisis that cost the company customers and reputation, getting rejected by VCs who made him question his worth, and learning that friendships (even in business) have to be earned, not assumed.

Through it all, Jack kept returning to one framework: Dharma. Are you good at it? Are you passionate about it? Are you making an impact? Does it make you money? This conversation is about finding that alignment—and what happens when you finally do.

Key Takeaways & Topics

• Jack’s early experiences with ADHD, shame, and overcompensating through ambition
• Why taste and clinical dosing became Everyday Dose’s differentiator
• Building supply chain and formulation knowledge from scratch
• Moving into his dad’s garage and bootstrapping the first version of the brand
• VC rejection, self-worth, and learning to scale without outside validation
• The emotional toll and operational cost of battling large-scale counterfeit products
• How Jack defines dharma and why alignment is a founder’s most reliable compass
• Retention as a strategy: treating existing customers better than new ones
• Why "you can do anything, but you can't do everything"
• His weekly retro practice with 35 team members: what's going well, what's not, what needs to change
• The hidden gene that affects 50% of us and why Jack built a coffee specifically for slow caffeine metabolizers

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Hosted by Megan Bruneau: therapist, executive coach, speaker, Forbes contributor, and host of The Failure Factor. For more info, visit https://meganbruneau.com  

Everyday Dose on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydaydose 
Everyday Dose: https://www.everydaydose.com

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Megan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-j-bruneau-m-a-rcc 

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