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Melissa Snover: From the brink of bust to almost double revenue

  • Mar 25
  • 7 min read
Melissa Snover - Founder & CEO of Nourished and Remedy Health - sat down with us to share the unfiltered story of nearly going bust, the pay-off from ignoring investors' advice, and building a machine that nobody thought possible.

When we first filmed Melissa Snover for our documentary series Founders Changing The World, she was already the kind of founder who made you sit up straight. A serial entrepreneur who had raised the highest-ever seed round by a female founder at the time and had three successful exits.


This is her exhilarating story and the lessons for founders looking to scale with confidence and an important reminder that none of this ever comes easy.



From Startup to 500,000 Gummies a Day

Remedy Health launched in 2019 with a bold idea: 3D-printed, personalised nutrition gummies - 60 billion possible combinations, each product unique to the individual. The DTC model took off in the UK, US, and Japan. But by late 2022, the landscape shifted.


"The diminishment of cookies, the way tracking works - everything really changed," Melissa told our audience. "We realised that if we wanted to make personalised health accessible to everyone, we were never going to do it by selling one box at a time."


The pivot to B2B and retail was obvious in theory but the execution was anything but. The existing technology simply wasn't built for mass scale. So Melissa and her tech team did what most founders would consider unthinkable: they built an entirely new machine from scratch.


The NVR - the world's first high-speed personalisation line - took a year to build with 352 depositing nozzles, producing around 500,000 seven-layer personalised gummies a day. Every machine in the factory, from CNC machines the size of a car to the metal-printing 3D printers, is built entirely in-house.

"There was no company we could call and say, 'You did this before, can you help?' We had no idea. Honestly, no idea."


Today, that technology has unlocked 35,000 points of distribution across 11 countries, and global partnerships with Bosch & Lomb, Neutrogena USA, Suntory, and Gatorade.



The Three Months That Nearly Broke Everything

There are significant bumps in the road for every founder. Melissa shared that there was a three-month window during the NVR build where she genuinely thought she would have to call in the administrators.


"We were producing so much waste. Nothing was working. I was playing psychologist to my tech and R&D team to keep them positive. Going home and crying. I thought we were going to have to call administrators because you can't go and raise money when you're doing that. There was no positive story to tell."

The team was 45 people when they started. They scaled to 190. Then, once the technology matured and automation kicked in, back down to 60. The cost of not knowing was enormous, but it was also unavoidable.


When you're doing something that's genuinely never been done before, there is no system to put in place first. The only way is through.




Fail Fridays: Rewiring a Team's Relationship With Failure

One of the most actionable things Melissa shared was how she tackled the psychological battle of building in the unknown. Her solution: institutionalise failure.


"Society does a horrible job teaching children that failure is something to be ashamed of. But in R&D, failure is an extremely important part of the process."


So she introduced Fail Fridays - a weekly ritual where team members had to stand up and present their biggest failure of the week, what it cost, and what it taught. The worst failure won a prize: Amazon vouchers, champagne etc.


"Every time one of the options we were exploring failed, I tried to get the team to celebrate it because now we can cross that route off completely. We are narrowing down on the solution set that will get us to the end."

The team now approaches new problems with a confidence that simply can't be taught. "They have gained a humongous amount of inner confidence in themselves and the team around them that they can overcome what feel like insurmountable issues."



The Investor Battle Few Talk About

Here's something founders rarely admit: sometimes your investors are wrong, and you have to push back.


Melissa's Series A was led by PepsiCo. Her syndicate included Archer Daniels Midland and a fund with £3 billion under management. These were not unsophisticated investors.


And they all told her the pivot away from DTC was a mistake.


"I had to stick to my guns and have a ton of annoying conversations to reiterate why my decision was correct."

She paused, then added: "They all agree with me now."


The lesson isn't that investors are always wrong. It's that founders who have skin in the game and deep operational knowledge sometimes see around corners their investors can't. Back yourself - respectfully, persistently, with evidence.



Getting Obsessed with EBITDA

When it came to reaching profitability, Melissa didn't chase top-line revenue. She went after EBITDA, and got everyone in the company to do the same.


Every single employee who passes probation at Remedy Health receives EMI shares. From the most senior executive to the dishwasher who has, in Melissa's words, "been there a long time and has quite a lot."


"It changes the conversation from 'I need you to' to 'we need to'."

Twice a year, she addresses her entire team like an investor meeting - presenting the numbers in plain language, showing them what EBITDA multiples look like versus revenue multiples, and connecting the dots between their daily work and their personal financial outcome.


"We had every area of the business looking at what are the positive and negative contributors to EBITDA in my role. Every week they were targeted on trying to positively contribute. That focus last year meant not only did we hit EBITDA positivity, we also nearly doubled our revenue."



Cutting PPC: The Scary Decision That Saved Six Figures a Month

Eighteen months ago, Melissa stopped all PPC marketing. Completely.


"I was scared to death. I thought the whole thing would fall down."


It didn't. Customer numbers dropped roughly 10%. That was it. Loyal customers kept buying. New customers kept finding them via PR, word of mouth, and ambient brand-building like out-of-home advertising.


They went on to save a six-figure sum. Per month.


Her view on where discovery is heading:


"AI recommendations are going to be the way people find products going forward. Everyone needs to take that on board."

If your entire growth model rests on Google and Meta, that's a vulnerability worth examining.



Building a Team of 'Happy Hustlers'

On hiring, Melissa was direct: the biggest mistake she made during the scale-up phase was hiring highly experienced operators who had zero hustle.


"I was like, yes, we can afford this person. It was a car crash."


What she looks for now is the intersection of genuine seniority - people who can operate in high-level conversations with global retailers and corporate partners - and someone who still understands, enjoys, and can do the nitty gritty.


"Those people are super hard to find. But when you find them, they can do anything."


Her term for them: happy hustlers. Self-reliant, resilient, resourceful, and genuinely energised by variety and pace.


On team culture, she was equally clear:


"We are not a family. We are a team. We are a performance team. And we are here to win."

That doesn't mean burning people out. Melissa's team all take their full holiday. If they work a weekend for a trade show in LA, they get those days back. There’s mutual respect and trust.


"Hustle means: don't sit around playing TikTok and mess with your colleagues' focus. Let's get it done. Let's be excited about achieving things."


And when people aren't the right fit? They go - quickly and honestly. Not cruelly, but without delay. "It's also horrible to the person staying in a business they can't keep up with. They'd be better suited elsewhere."



Fundraising: What Melissa Wishes She'd Known

On seed rounds: Your seed is the hardest round. You're asking people to buy a dream. Melissa had three exits behind her and a portfolio of patents, and she still describes it as "a big ask." Don't expect it to be easy just because you have credentials.


On the pitch itself: "Never show how desperate you are. Allude to the fact that there are lots of other people wanting this deal, and I need you to make a decision quickly. It would be a real shame if you missed out." FOMO is real, even among sophisticated investors.


On building your syndicate: Keep it diversified by type, not just sector. Angels can write a cheque in an emergency without an investment committee. Institutional investors can't. Having a small base of angels and family offices who are truly bought in has saved Melissa more than once.


On concentration of control: Melissa has raised over £20 million. No single investor holds more than 6%. "None of them has the voting power to push the business in one direction or another. The business, my management team, and I still have the majority."


On resources: She recommended two books without prompting:



Read them yourself. Don't outsource your understanding of term sheets to your lawyer alone.



The Operational Backbone: Build It Yourself

When Melissa looked at enterprise ERP systems to manage the business's growth, she walked away from all of them.


"SAP and Oracle NetSuite are set up to run businesses that have been doing the same thing for a long time. That is just not suitable for a scale-up."


Instead, the team - half of whom have been taught to code - built a bespoke intelligence platform from scratch. It tracks every gummy through every stage of production, integrates HR and accounting, monitors purchase orders and supply chain traceability, and sends real-time alerts.


"I have my dashboard on my phone. My team gets alerts when certain things need to happen. I know down to the minute the COGs and the productivity of everything."


It took time to build, but it was built for exactly how the business operates, not how a 1990s ERP system assumes a business operates.



The Moment It All Made Sense

We'll leave you with the image Melissa left us with.


It's 4am. She and her team are on the factory floor. They're screwing nuts and bolts, changing configurations on a machine that has eaten months of time, money, and emotional energy. A machine that many people, including the world's biggest manufacturers, said couldn't be built.


They turn it on and it works.


"That was not it working perfectly from then on. But it worked. And our team did not stop, including me, until we made it work."


That's the story. Not the 35,000 distribution points or the global partnerships or the EBITDA turnaround, though all of that followed. The story is the 4am moment. The refusal to call it quits when there was nothing positive to say and no clean narrative for investors.


The only difference between the people who win and lose, Melissa told us, is the people who give up.


She hasn't given up yet.



A full recording of our Founder Spotlight with Melissa Snover will be available soon.


Check out more of our upcoming events.

 
 
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