fbpx
Connect with us
Apply Now

Community

How Phillip Duong Disrupted the Food Industry and Now Helps Startups Scale to Sell

After successfully starting and scaling a 7-figure health-focused food brand that disrupted the food industry in three short years, Phillip Duong’s Company was acquired by Warpfy (Ycombinator S21) and he has now moved on to helping other startups realize their potential with Scaled Consulting. Phillip and his team offer tailored startup guidance on how to scale, maintain growth, and prepare for an exit. 

Phillip Duong’s Start

As a first-generation American, Phillip has always been close with his family. The family came from Vietnam as refugees, for that reason Philip got his start with very little means. He had always had an interest in health and wellness and desired to find ways for himself, his family and community to live healthier lives. He worked on his diet and discovered the excessive amount of carbs that were in the foods he consumed every day. 

This led Phillip to stumble upon Konjac noodles. These noodles contain zero calories and only a few carbs per serving, and they taste just like the real thing.   

Phillip made the switch and lost 50 pounds. He was so astounded and impressed that he wanted to build a company selling konjac foods that could help other Americans get healthy and lose weight too. So Phillip started Well Lean, a company that strictly focused on selling a perfected version of these noodles that were organic and infused with oat fiber to give them a better appearance and texture. He was extremely passionate about the business because he had directly experienced great health benefits and expanded the business into rice and pastas. 

Phillip bootstrapped the company from nothing. He built it from the ground up with money he had saved, credit cards and angel investors from the University of California San Diego.

His passion and drive to get the noodles on the market allowed him to quit his job as an electrical engineer and fully focus on growing the company after one year in business. After another year of exponential growth, Well Lean was acquired by Warpfy, a YCombinator Tech Startup, with a huge success. YCombinator has incubated majorly successful companies such as AirBNB, Dropbox, Twitch, and Coinbase to name a few. Now Phillip coaches other startups on the path to success and acquisition through his consulting business. 

Phillip Duong Today

While Phillip’s journey was very fast paced, he learned an enormous amount about what it takes to succeed and scale a business quickly. Following are some helpful tips Phillip gives the entrepreneurs he works with today.

Tip 1

“To be successful, you have to think and do fast. I tell my clients it’s important to try a lot of things like minimum viable products, then test and fail them fast. For the ones that do work, even a little bit, put your whole heart into it, which takes us into scalability. You want to take those working products and create a five-year growth plan that focuses on retention and development.  Find what sticks with customers and having an exit strategy will help guide you to what is truly valuable about your business. Having a clear vision is important, even if it changes a bit over time.”

Tip 2

“If you think you are looking to exit at some point, I would say, you want to start pivoting in ways that contribute to the overall value to your business and start thinking in the perspective of a buyer. Key metrics that are looked at in successful acquisitions are EBITDA, CAC, CLTV, and number of customers. Anything unique that could be of value to someone else’s company or portfolio is critically important.”

Tip 3

“A pretty common problem I see is that many entrepreneurs don’t know how to sell their business and how to find a buyer with an aligned company vision. Finding the right business broker to guide you to an aligned buyer is most important. At the end of the day, it’s your business and there needs to be an alignment of trust that the vision will be pursued.” 

Of course, Phillip has many more great ideas, pointers and ways to organize that will help entrepreneurs achieve their goals. To learn more about how to start a business or scale your company to exit, connect with Phillip on LinkedIn or scaledconsulting.co and start a chat today!

Continue Reading


Copyright © 2022 Disrupt ™ Magazine is a Minority Owned Privately Held Company - Disrupt ™ was founder by Puerto Rican serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Tony Delgado who is on a mission to transform Latin America using the power of education and entrepreneurship.

Disrupt ™ Magazine
151 Calle San Francisco
Suite 200
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 00901

Opinions expressed by Disrupt Contributors are their own. Disrupt Magazine invites voices from many diverse walks of life to share their perspectives on our contributor platform. We are big believers in freedom of speech and while we do enforce our community guidelines, we do not actively censor stories on our platform because we want to give our contributors the freedom to express their opinions. Articles are not commissioned by our editorial team, and opinions expressed by our community contributors do not reflect the opinions of Disrupt or its employees.
We are committed to fighting the spread of misinformation online so if you feel an article on our platform goes against our community guidelines or contains false information, we do encourage you to report it. We need your help to fight the spread of misinformation. For more information please visit our Contributor Guidelines available here.


Disrupt ™ is the voice of latino entrepreneurs around the world. We are part of a movement to increase diversity in the technology industry and we are focused on using entrepreneurship to grow new economies in underserved communities both here in Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America. We enable millennials to become what they want to become in life by learning new skills and leveraging the power of the digital economy. We are living proof that all you need to succeed in this new economy is a landing page and a dream. Disrupt tells the stories of the world top entrepreneurs, developers, creators, and digital marketers and help empower them to teach others the skills they used to grow their careers, chase their passions and create financial freedom for themselves, their families, and their lives, all while living out their true purpose. We recognize the fact that most young people are opting to skip college in exchange for entrepreneurship and real-life experience. Disrupt Magazine was designed to give the world a taste of that.