How Supliful hit $179K MRR: the ex-VC who productized supplements

Martins Lasmanis had the career most founders dream about from the other side of the table. As a VC, he invested in more than 80 pre-seed companies. Then he did what few investors do: he left to build.

His first company was Grafomap, a bootstrapped e-commerce brand selling personalized map posters to the US market. It worked — $1.5 million in revenue, built with his childhood friend Rihards Piks. In 2020, they sold it. But Grafomap taught Lasmanis a lesson that would define his next company: the product was the problem. People loved the posters. They just never bought a second one. How many map posters does anyone want on their wall? One.

That single insight — that the business model matters more than the marketing — is the entire origin of Supliful. Lasmanis and Piks started asking: what product do people buy over and over again, that we could sell the way we sold posters?

The partnership matters. Lasmanis built Grafomap with Rihards Piks, his childhood friend, and the two carried the working relationship into Supliful. Co-founder pairs with deep personal trust can move faster on hard decisions — like killing a $1.5M business's model to bet on a new one — because the trust was banked long before the company existed.

The answer was supplements — plus coffee, skincare, and pet products. Consumables are the inverse of map posters: if customers love them, they reorder every month, forever. And Lasmanis already knew the dropshipping model intimately from running Grafomap on someone else's fulfillment service. He liked how dropshipping democratized e-commerce. He just wanted it applied to an industry where repeat purchases make the unit economics sing.

Supliful launched in late 2021 with a simple proposition: creators — fitness trainers, athletes, nutrition influencers — can launch their own supplement line in hours, without touching inventory, labels, or logistics. Supliful handles sourcing, stocking, printing labels, and shipping. The brand holder focuses on marketing and audience.

The timing was right. The creator economy was minting fitness and wellness influencers with loyal audiences and no product to sell them. Supliful gave them a brand in a box. One beauty brand launched a single Supliful product and generated $2 million in a single quarter.

The operational reality is harder than the pitch. Supliful runs fulfillment across multiple locations, manages a 51-person team spread over three continents, and maintains quality control on 180+ white-label products manufactured in the US. The moat isn't the idea — it's the unglamorous infrastructure of warehousing, labeling, and shipping that takes years to build and can't be copied from a landing page.

What makes Lasmanis unusual among CPG founders is his radical transparency. Every month, he publishes detailed company metrics on X: gross merchandise value, net revenue, monthly active merchants, items shipped, team size. In October 2025, the thread reported $11.05M in trailing-twelve-month net revenue, 1.3M packages shipped, 1,603 monthly active merchants, and a 51-person team across three continents.

This isn't vanity posting — it's a growth channel. Merchants choosing a fulfillment partner are making a bet on who's still standing in two years. Public metrics are the strongest possible signal. Lasmanis has also written candidly for Entrepreneur about how brutal honesty saved the business from going under twice, and why he shares startup data publicly.

The transparency compounds. Four years in: $44M+ generated for brands, $22M+ in Supliful's own revenue, and the largest white-label catalog in the space at 180+ products.

The transparency extends to failures. Lasmanis has written about brutal honesty saving the company from going under twice — sharing not just wins but near-death moments with his team and audience. In an industry full of guru-style success theater, admitting the business almost died is a differentiated trust signal. Merchants betting their brand on a fulfillment partner want to know the operator survives crises, not just celebrates quarters.

Supliful's ambition goes beyond fulfillment. Lasmanis describes it as building the operating system for the consumables industry — helping brands go from idea to shelf in record time. Recent priorities include AI-driven onboarding to speed up time-to-first-sale, a Supliful Academy teaching funnel-based launches, and integrations with platforms like ClickFunnels.

The strategy is clear: own more of the brand-building stack, and the merchants' growth becomes Supliful's growth. Every new merchant is a new revenue stream with near-zero marginal acquisition cost once the platform flywheel spins.

From selling posters that nobody reordered to powering 1,603 brands that customers can't stop reordering — Lasmanis built the company his first company's biggest weakness demanded.

Education is becoming a second engine. Supliful Academy, built with Marketing Counts, teaches funnel-based brand launches — which does double duty as merchant acquisition. Every student who learns to launch on Supliful's curriculum becomes a potential merchant. It's the classic platform playbook: teach the skill, own the infrastructure the skill runs on.