Peptide Portal & Purgo Labs | Meeting Notes

Wed, 17 Jun 26

Max’s Origin Story (Purgo Labs)

• Started Dec 2025, bootstrapped from ~$15k
• Sourced peptides from Chinese vendor after noticing 10x price gap vs. recommended suppliers
• Built site himself (software engineering background, Cursor/AI)
  • WooCommerce is the de facto standard; nearly every processor and bank assumes it
• First organic order validated the model; launched Meta ads to scale
  • Hired one agency guy briefly, then took it back in-house
  • Scaled to ~$10k/month before pivoting to Google ads
• Cracked Google ads by studying transparency libraries of top competitors
  • Spent 3 weeks rewriting site copy word-by-word to pass Google’s crawler
  • Early GLP-3 ads returned ~10x ROAS; since pulled by Google
• Now spending ~$1,500/day across Google, Bing, and Snapchat (~$40k/month)
  • Top operators at $1.5-2M/month spend ~$180k/month on ads
  • ROAS drops as spend scales: larger audiences are less qualified

Payment Processing and Compliance

• Every processor treats peptides as high-risk: 10% reserve standard, arbitrary shutdowns
  • Lost $2k in card-to-crypto processor (Visa shutdown),$20k locked in Stripe until August
  • Square kicked him off with no warning, held funds ~90 days
• Stripe quietly updated T&Cs to allow “research only” peptides
  • Max can send the link; lives in their supported-businesses page
  • Stripe Express workaround exists but requires a contact with 3+ years of processing history
• PayPal currently primary, with masked backup site on a second domain
• Legitimate US processors require $250k/month minimum volume; come with age-gate requirements
  • Age gate blocks Google Shopping/product ads (search ads still viable)
  • Tradeoff: compliance vs. conversion rate
• GoDaddy shut down his domain with no notice; pivoted in 30 minutes
  • Had backup domain on an Icelandic .is registrar pre-purchased
  • Sent Twilio SMS + email blast from new domain same morning
• Affiliate marketing is a hard no: processors ban it, and it draws FDA scrutiny directly

Business Metrics and Operations

• Average order value ~$100; ~50% repeat customers currently (was ~30% at peak Google ads)
  • Repeat purchase frequency: mostly once or twice a month
• Fulfillment: him and his girlfriend, from home; would go in-house warehouse before outsourcing
• Custom-built backend: order flow, COA releases, stock management, full stats dashboard
  • Speed advantage over WooCommerce operators when crises hit
• Customer support volume is high; common issues:
  • “No instructions” complaints (instructions excluded by compliance necessity)
  • Cloudy peptides from improper reconstitution; handles with reshipping to avoid chargebacks
• Shipping: UPS only for poly mailers; FedEx was losing 50 packages/week
• Industry outlook is cautious: top operators building telehealth pivots, one major company shut down two weeks ago
  • FDA compounding allowance for 12 peptides expected in ~100 days; could reshape the market

Transcript

Them: What up? And Sean, we're back. Hey guys. How you doing?

Me: Good. How you doing? What time is it where you are, Sean?

Them: I'm on the East Coast, so 10:30.

Me: Nice.

Them: Yeah, not too early. For him, right? He's like an hour behind maybe. I got so confused whether he was in Scottsdale or Nebraska. And then I know Arizona can be not on daylight saving time. I'm pretty sure it's 8:30 right now in Arizona. Let me check. I grew up in Arizona and I should know that.

No, I know. But he's in Nebraska. He's mountain time, so it's definitely 8:30. Okay. Yeah, because it's 8:30 right now. He's in mountain time. I was like, this is just... Arizona is the best because it never changes. Yeah. They were just like, yeah, daylight saving sounds good, but it doesn't work. We're not gonna do that. They're like, just wake up, dude. Not saving any time for no farmers. We don't have farmers in Arizona. Farming cacti. We got cotton, citrus, cactus, cattle. There's one more C. I learned this in elementary school. There's like five C's, which is like Arizona's agricultural economy.

Wait, he said he can join via phone call. One second. I'm so confused. 8:30 Mountain.

Since we just talked to Max like two days ago, do you want to just maybe lead this one and ask kind of your questions?

Me: Yeah, yeah. My plan was to just get an understanding of where he started, what he said. I mean, you guys gave me the brief overview for sure, but it'd be nice hearing it. And then, I mean, I guess you guys took a lot of notes too?

Them: Yeah, we did. What's up, Max? Hey, Max.

Max: Hey, what's going on, boys?

Them: Not much, man. How are you doing?

Max: Not too bad. I'm just in the car, so it'll be on just the phone.

Them: All good. Yeah, I think we're all camera off anyway. But, dude, I appreciate you jumping on, and especially before your trip. We definitely want to move quickly here, so we appreciate that. So you met everyone except for Sean, who is on the call. Sean's going to be joining us, joining the team as kind of an investor and operator. So the intent of this call is really for him to kind of ask you some questions about how you started and get a better understanding of what it takes to get to where you are now. But yeah. Anything else? Sean, you want to go ahead and maybe quickly introduce yourself?

Sean: Yeah, sure. Thanks for taking the time, Max. I had first met Stan, Alton, and Edward on a call yesterday, and I've known Edward probably over a decade. We just got into peptides over the last 10 weeks and how they launched Peptide Portal, and that's been really fascinating. Then this idea came up and they showed me your information and your story. I was like, oh wow, it seems like he's really cracked the code. So it's exciting to be able to have that as an asset and have his advice.

Previously, my background is originally in crypto, so I got involved in early 2017. Did really well off Ethereum, Hyperliquid, and a couple of their tokens in the 2021 era. My brothers and I started an investment firm that invests mostly in deep tech, crypto, open market things like semis and commodities. This is more so like, I'm not investing out of the fund. I'm just investing personally, and this is just because I'm pretty passionate about peptides and then also just seems like a really cool market opportunity with how early it is. Edward and I were getting pretty stoked recently how honestly this space feels very much like early crypto to me, like early 2017, where everyone knows that there's a lot of opportunity and there's kind of like the sky's the limit with what we could be doing in terms of human health and biohacking.

Me: And thrift.

Sean: And what a lot of body optimization could look like a couple of years from now that we're just starting to scratch the surface on. But yeah, that's just pretty much a brief background of me. I was mostly curious to get a lot of your story from the beginning. You pretty much bootstrapped the project, from my understanding from Edward, with like 15K, right? And it was just maybe you and your partner or friend that started up. What was that like? That whole story, the beginning few months to where you are now.

Max: Yeah, for sure. So I guess I started it in December of 2025. And like I told them, I was just using a bunch of reta myself for a trip last year. I had just found some connections through TikTok, and I was buying the reta through this vendor, and it was like 10 times less, right? The company I was buying my reta from was recommended by a doctor. When I got the reta from the vendor from China, I was like, dude, they have to be doing this. They have to just be repackaging this, right?

So that's kind of when I was like, I think I'm gonna try to sell it. At that time there were a lot of people doing it, but not as prevalent as what's happening right now. So yeah, I just started. I want to say I bought maybe eight variants of peptides, maybe two variants of reta from this vendor. Once I got them, I just kind of threw together the website myself. My background is software engineering. Obviously, you know how easy it is to work with Cursor and AI these days.

So I kind of just built it from the ground up, not knowing what I was doing. If I were to look back at it as a non-coder, I see how hard it really is to get in and build a website, really, because you can only use WooCommerce. That's kind of what you'll find. Every single bank, every single app that you're gonna find in this space, they're all going to have commerce plugins. That's the first thing that they'll say. They kind of all just assume that you have a WooCommerce website.

So yeah, I just built that website from the ground up and kind of just launched it. I've always been scared to put myself out there as far as marketing on TikTok and stuff like that. I never wanted to show my face.

I think my first order that I ever got, at the time, I told them, I was doing heavy SEO, just a lot of AI blogs and stuff. You'll quickly find out that no, you can't do any of that. The space is highly, highly regulated. Every single word on my website is there for a reason. Every single thing is going to trigger a crawler of some sort. Every single bank that you talk with, they're crawling your website. Every contract you sign, they're going to be watching what you're doing.

So I had someone random buy off the site, and I was like, holy shit, this is gonna work. If you run an ad and you get two purchases, that's when you start really scaling something out. So yeah, I was like, okay, let's go all in on this.

I want to say I launched a few Meta ads myself, and that's kind of how I got rolling, just like a couple orders a day. I didn't know what I was doing. Then, of course, you quickly find out that even if your ads get approved, Meta eventually finds out, whether they're crawling your website or a manual review is triggered on your ad. They'll ban your account after two reviews.

At that point, I had hired one guy. I convinced him to do it for like a grand and a half for a month. He was running a few Meta ads. I kind of just looked at what he was launching online. He did all right for me, but I was like, I could just do this myself.

So then I made a new account, started scaling some ads, and built that up to around, I want to say, 10K a month. Then that's when I hired a... Well, I was aware that basically what I did is I was messaging everyone in the industry. If you go on TikTok right now, every two videos that I scroll down and see is a new peptide company. Some guy just like me and you literally throwing their name on the labels and starting a new company. It's insane how many there are.

I found the biggest guys and I just DM'd them questions, and I was talking to a few dudes in the industry. A lot of these dudes that are coaches, I was messaging them. I was getting help from a lot of those guys. I quickly found out that one of the guys that is doing like two mil a month was running a bunch of Google ads.

You can actually see on Google and Meta every outside company. Google and Meta have ad transparency libraries, so you can go into the libraries and see exactly what ads they're running, right? So I went on Google transparency libraries, saw a couple of these huge guys, some of them doing 20 million, and I just copied their ads.

The thing is, like I said, every single word on my website is there for a reason. That's because to run Google ads, they're crawling your website like every five minutes. So I think I spent a good three weeks, night and day, changing words on my website to get my ads approved for Google. As soon as I did, it was like magic. It was insane. Put a hundred dollars in on a GLP-3 reta ad and it'd kick out a thousand back of new customers.

Since then, that's really come down. Also, my ads are somehow, I don't know how, approved to run research-only GLP-3 ads. But recently they just disallowed the GLP-3 ads. Some people are still running them, and sometimes it'll get reapproved and then their crawler catches something and disapproves it. You have to get a manual review. They'll literally admit that it's allowed.

But I think I mentioned this yesterday. Every single day is a new challenge. My domain was shut off by GoDaddy because of peptides. Every payment processor, you're at risk of them just saying, hey, every single dollar in your reserve, because all of them are going to make you have like a 10% reserve for chargebacks because it's a high-risk industry. A lot of these people will buy your peptides, use them, obviously not for human use is what you're saying, but they don't give a shit. They'll just charge it back. They'll say it didn't work.

Them: Oh, damn.

Max: So you're dealing with a lot of stuff like that. Yesterday after our call, I get a message from PayPal, which is how I'm currently processing payments. I have backups on backups, but it's actually a mask that I'm running, which is on another website I made. They'll ping you for documents and your heart kind of stops. I've already been through three or four processors where they'll just say, oh, you're done. We're keeping your money for 180 days for chargebacks. There's literally nothing you can do unless you're signed up with a legitimate U.S. processor.

What that takes though is 250K a month in volume, usually minimum. Then you're onboarded for peptides so they're not necessarily gonna randomly shut you down, but they'll change the rules on you. The FDA will come out and issue 20 warning letters to some of the big guys, and they say, hey, you're selling bac water, right? Pretty much 90% of the FDA warning letters said you're selling bac water, you can't sell that. So then everyone went and changed bac water to reconstitution solution. It's like, okay, now how many more days until they say, hey, you just changed the name to reconstitution solution, you can't have that?

Every single processor is going to basically either shut you down because you have it on there or say you need to change this. All of a sudden your third best-selling product, the thing that everyone buys to even use your peptides, is gone.

Sean: It really sounds like a cat-and-mouse game with the payment processor. A little concerning too, right? I believe you had money locked up in one of them. Having to not depend on one particular one, I guess, do you have an LLC set up and a company bank account, or do you just usually hold it inside the payment processor until you can pay it out to your personal bank?

Max: No, you have to have the LLC, right? Because in order to even sign up for the processors, you have to fill in your EIN number, your business organization letter. They'll ask you for documents. So you need all that for sure, but they don't care.

Basically, all these contracts are like Stripe, PayPal, and all these companies. They're not actually native processors, right? They're just kind of a facilitator. So they kind of just own that money as part of the deal that you signed to use them. It's up to their discretion.

The first processor I ever used was this card-to-crypto one. I think I had only like 2K in there or something, and then Visa shut them down, which is kind of crazy because the card-to-crypto solutions are super rampant out there. Those are kind of like the safe route. They're all going to run 10% in fees minimum. So they have 2K of my money. I still never got that back.

I had to pivot quickly and make my site for like masked. I had Square. They kicked me off without any ask. They kept my money for I think like 90 days. I was on Stripe. They have 20K locked up right now until August for me. Even Stripe actually, weirdly enough, I could send you the link. They have silently updated their terms and conditions that say they will support research-only peptides, which just blows my mind.

Them: Actually, do you mind if I jump in on that one? That's very, very interesting to me because this has been one of the biggest concerns. Is that just in, did they make a notice to that? Do you know where you saw that information?

Max: I can send you the link. It's in their terms and conditions, or if you just go to their... There's a whole page on Stripe where it mentions businesses they support and don't support.

Them: Wow. Okay. That is very interesting. If you wouldn't mind sending me that, I would deeply, deeply appreciate it, Max.

Max: Yeah, I can send you that. But here's the thing. In the space, you've got all of these guys, right? Because there's so much money in processing. I almost want to just go get a job as one of these guys who's bringing it. You've got all these kids who are my age. They'll find all these research peptide guys, bring them on, and say, hey, we're going to bring you on at 8%, 10%. Then they keep like 5% a month of your volume for bringing you to the processor. Then these guys have 15 of those guys, and they're all doing 200K a month.

Them: That's crazy.

Max: So I got a guy that's doing that for Stripe, and they're taking on a lot of risk. They're doing this thing called Stripe Express. After I got banned on Stripe, I actually signed up to this guy to do it there, right after they had initially updated the wording on the website. I think I was running for three days before they shut me down again.

Basically, you have to have a contact in Stripe that you have shown processing for like three years for some other company. They'll talk to their managers. It's about who you know. That's the only guys that are running Stripe successfully long term.

So Stripe's pretty much cooked. They'll keep your money. It doesn't even matter if you're a plumber. If you go on Reddit, there's horror stories from Stripe. The whole game is finding the best processor and having two backups for that, and just being able to stay in compliance on the fly, being able to update your website as fast as possible.

Sean: Have you had any regulatory concerns with Peptide Sciences cracking down in March? And letters from the FDA or scares?

Max: Yeah, bro. We're living in a... It's not like... Everything that is on my website, it's just a balance between how consumer-oriented do you want to be, right? And how much risk do you want to take on? Because my website is extremely consumer-oriented, right? This is all supposed to be business to business, not to any like... It's supposed to be to a researcher.

You can have these independent researchers. You don't have to have a license to be a quote-unquote researcher. But the FDA could come in and say, you have guest checkout on your website. You're not verifying anything. That could be a warning letter right there.

It's just a balance of how much are you willing to drop your conversion rate to acquire customers versus how safe do you want to be? I could get a U.S. processor literally tomorrow or today, but you know what they're going to require? They're going to have a gate on the website. That's what you'll run into a lot.

The second someone clicks your URL, you have to have a block pop up, ask them a few questions, their date of birth, and then they have to verify their email or phone number. You'll see a lot of the big sites have this. That's because they're running with a legit processor. But having that gate, first of all, you can't run Google ads because Google's got to be able to crawl your products, your product link. You can still run Google search ads, but you can't run product ads. There are ways you could maybe get around that, but it's just a matter of how much conversion rate are you willing to drop.

Me: Max, I have a quick question. How much of your purchases are repurchases? I know we talked a little bit about this, but you were playing with the subscription. Have you done any analysis on repurchase rates and average order value and the frequency of those purchases for people who are purchasing again? Have you looked into any of those numbers?

Max: Yeah. Like I said, I've been building out the website for seven months. My entire back-end system is pretty awesome, to say the least, because it's fully custom. My entire order flow, everything that's going on with the COAs, releasing stock numbers, I've fully built out myself. Fully custom to be dialed into my process. On my back-end admin panel, I've got just insane amounts of statistics for all of that.

My average order value is going to be around a hundred dollars. Depending on what ads I'm running, like when I was peak Google ads with GLP-3 running, I was around 30% of my return customers per day. Now it's around 50%, I would say. So that just varies.

Me: Do you know your repurchase rate and the average frequency of your purchases? Are people who do come back coming back once a month, twice a month, or once every two months? Do you know the percentage of those customers who purchase from you that are doing it again?

Max: I don't know the average amount. I would say most of them are going to be once a month. Of course, you have some guys that are purchasing a lot. You can kind of tell some guys are buying for other people. But mostly, I would say once a month, once or twice a month, for sure.

Sean: Awesome. Have you seen huge fluctuations in volume because of all these hiccups that you run into with the business? With Google ads working and then not working, and then same with the payment processors. I'm sure that has a huge effect on how you can stay steady with the amount of volume.

Max: That's why I think I have such a good advantage. When these things happen, I would say 90% of people in this business are working on WooCommerce, right? They don't have the ability at their fingertips to make the changes they'll need on the website when these things happen.

Let's say, for instance, GoDaddy. I had my domain on GoDaddy, and I knew this was going to happen, so I actually had already bought a backup domain on OrangeWebsite.com, which hosts Icelandic URLs. I knew that because one of the biggest guys in the game had his URL as .is. So I was like, okay, this has got to be safe.

One morning I wake up, it's like 9:30 a.m. I'm dealing with a bunch of other stuff, and I get an email like, oh, we have just shut down your domain. You no longer have this website on GoDaddy. What that meant was my customer service email was down, you're getting no emails, and my website's completely down.

I was able to pivot within like 30 minutes. I'd already switched everything over to the new domain, including my customer support email. I had Twilio hooked up, sent a text and email blast out via the new domain URLs. So being able to act that fast is what saves me in all these situations.

These people, like let's just say some 20-year-old kid is running a WooCommerce website. He's contacting three web developers. Whoever he hires takes three, four days. He's down for a week.

Me: I have one more question, actually. Thank you. You mentioned your email support. I just did some back-of-the-math in my head. I'm guessing you're doing something like 2,000, maybe 2,500 vials a month right now. Are you getting a shitload of emails about problems, or is it just a handful? How much time are you spending on customer support right now?

Max: Yeah, there are a lot of issues. No matter how good you are, these people are so stupid, man.

Me: What are they asking?

Max: They clicked six buttons when they checked out and they saw six things saying instructions can't be included. Then they'll say, hey, what the fuck? I just got my order that says no instructions. This is a white powder. How am I supposed to inject this? I get five of those a week minimum.

A lot of times, some people only sell Hospira bac water. If you sell the cheaper Chinese bac water, sometimes a lot of the growth hormone peptides like AOD, tesamorelin... I have it as a requirement now to sell acidic acid. But here and there, you'll get people whose peptides go cloudy. There's really no way around it. It'll just happen. There are so many things it can be, like they took the water out of the fridge too fast and it didn't mix properly.

So you're doing a lot of reships for those kinds of issues. You don't want to piss these people off, so you just reship it. You don't want chargebacks. Chargebacks will shut you down.

Sean: Awesome. Thank you, man.

Max: Here's some game, though. Do not use anything other than UPS. This will save you. Unless you're shipping in actual boxes. If you're using poly mailers, don't use anything but UPS. There was a time when FedEx was losing 50 packages of ours a week.

Them: Jeez. Yeah, that's helpful. You want to have good shipment lost mail.

Me: Do you think you'll ever outsource your fulfillment, your packaging? Now it's just you and your girlfriend doing it from home, but do you think you'll get to a point where you outsource it?

Max: If I do, it'll be in-house, I think. I would just get a warehouse and hire someone to do it. I don't think I would outsource it, and there are people that are doing it. But like I said, this is getting so competitive. Who knows what'll happen in 100 days when the FDA allows the compounding of those 12 peptides. I think it'll get more popular, but this industry day by day is really disappearing.

I have all the guys that I'm talking to on a daily basis that are doing crazy volume. One guy I know is doing like 200K a day. They're all trying to build other things right now. They're trying to build telehealth companies. That's why you're seeing a lot of these big guys, they've made enough money and they just get out. One of the biggest companies, I don't know, two weeks ago just shut down. I'm sure it's just because they're like, hey, we made millions of dollars. We don't want to lose it. FDA's got their eyes on us. We're out.

Them: Yeah. I mean, once you get that big, that makes sense. Cool. Well, I know we're like seven minutes over. Sean, Alton, Stan, do you guys have any other questions so far? This has been super helpful on my end. Definitely, thanks for taking the time to introduce and also explain your story. It's a really amazing asset to have, especially with where we're at and just the state of the industry right now.

Max: For sure. I'll say this. This is my number one best piece of advice. Don't be scared to spend the money on a marketing agency. It's a lot of fucking money, but it's worth it. And these things, like I said, when the ads are working, they fucking work.

Sean: Do you have an estimate of spend on that?

Max: Right now, I'm spending probably $1,500 a day.

Sean: Okay. Wow.

Max: Across a few platforms. Running Bing ads, running Google ads. I just got approved on Snapchat ads.

Sean: So you're doing $40,000 a month in advertising?

Max: Yeah. But the guy that's doing $1.5 million,$2 million a month is spending $180K a month on advertising. So I'm trying to get there.

Sean: That makes sense. I mean, that's just sales and marketing cost. Okay. Thank you again.

Me: So are you seeing just a direct correlation on ad spend? You've kind of figured out the machine where it's like increase ad spend, make more money type of deal right now?

Max: No. It's just like any other industry, right? When you spend more money on ads, the ad platform is going to outreach and try to find more people to serve, but they're not as qualified buyers.

Me: Right.

Max: The quality comes less and your ROAS drops the more you spend.

Me: Have you dipped your toes into affiliate at all? Like affiliate marketing?

Max: No. You could go organic and do the affiliate stuff, and that works amazingly for people that have followings in fitness and stuff too. But that's a huge no-no in every single processor. They'll say absolutely no affiliate marketing.

Me: Oh, really?

Max: Yeah. That just puts a big target with the FDA. They're really looking at that because they'll go look at your social media, everything that you're posting. They'll look you up on TikTok and say you've got 50 affiliates saying to use your product for human use.

Alright, boys. I do have to run, but obviously, I'm here. Text me anytime if you guys want to open another call sometime next week, whatever you guys want.

Them: We really appreciate it, Max. Enjoy. Have a blast. We'll be in touch.

Max: Alright, boys. Talk later. Bye.

Them: Alright. See you, Max. Thanks.