Vegas, Target, and a Gummy That Looks Like a Condom | Kevin Mai, UNDO

Pre-alcohol supplements have existed for over a decade. Walk into any 7-Eleven in Tokyo or Seoul and you'll find racks of them. Nobody in Asia needs convincing.

So why does nobody at your fantasy football draft take one?

Kevin Mai's answer is that the category solved the problem and then packaged it wrong. Vials, shots, and jars of pills make you the buzzkill at the party. UNDO built a gummy in a foil pouch that looks like a condom, ran with "practice safe drinking," and turned the product itself into the conversation.

Kevin is a co-founder of UNDO, which just closed a $1 million seed round and launched in nearly 900 Target stores.

In this conversation:

Why DHM works and why that was never the bottleneck. The category had a real solution and a real pain point for ten years, and adoption still didn't happen.

The party mechanics. Kevin walks through what actually happens when you bring UNDO to a party: the first question, the education, the wrappers on the table, the friend who shows up late with FOMO, and the group chat the next morning. Ten customers in one night.

Why the payoff loop is unusual. Most supplements ask you to trust the process for a month. You find out if UNDO worked in about ten hours. There's no placebo to hide behind.

Vegas as a proving ground. UNDO launched at Encore Beach Club, sampled 5,000 people, then got into Wynn, then MGM. A six-month test across MGM's properties ended in six weeks.

Retail before DTC. Kevin spent 15 years in performance marketing and built a product made to go viral on social, then accidentally went retail-first through 150 Nashville convenience stores. He explains why distribution in contextual environments worked as marketing.

Saying yes to Target turned a bootstrapped company into a venture-backed one overnight. The round was 70% subscribed almost immediately, and the main criteria for the rest wasn't strategic value. It was whether the investor would bring the product to a party.

Plus: what he'd say to skeptics, and how three co-founders who didn't know each other ended up building this together.

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