Thomas Straßburg is one of the Founders of Lebepur, the daily fruit and vegetable shake.
He was born in Berlin, Germany in 1977. After his Master in Business Administration at the Freie Universität Berlin, he first made some marketing experiences in a Japanese Company (Keyence). After that he and his friend Stefan Arndt founded the first company, a business for silent cooling solutions. In this context they started a project together with the University in which they are developing new composite materials based on carbon nanotubes and graphene. His latest idea is a healthy pure fruit and vegetable powder, which can be easily integrated in our daily life.
What are your working on right now?
Right now we are working on the improvement of the Lebepur-Formulas and preparing the launch of the next product of the Lebepur-Family.
3 trends that excite you?
First is the trend for more natural food products. The consumers have enough of fake industrial food products like for example a curry sauce, where the curry content reaches only 3%. Back to the basics is the keyword and today the consumer is much more informed about the ingredients and fake products, than 5 or 10 years ago. In Germany, we have a company called “foodwatch”, which is famous for working on the widening of false labeling in the food industry.
Number two is the trend in science to get a bigger evidence on which factors in our diet and lifestyle are important for a long and healthy life (look at the research about cenetarians). As good health is now as important to some consumers as having the biggest, newest or shiniest status symbols, growing numbers of consumers will expect health products and services to prevent misery if not improve their quality of life, rather than merely treating illnesses and ailments.
We would call the third important trend for us “local”. This trend encompasses new and enduring manufacturers and purveyors of the local. In a world that is seemingly ruled by globalization, mass production and “cheapest of the cheapest”, a growing number of consumers are seeking out the local, and thereby the authentic, the storied and the ecofriendly.
How do you bring your ideas to life?
We bring our nearly all of our ideas with the so called Faltin-Principle to the market. He was our professor for entrepreneurship and his principle says that even as a small company you should work with outsourced components. So we are working together with a lot of partners who are experts in there fields and help us to bring our ideas in the easiest and low risky way to the market. This process is also inspired by the ideas of Tim Ferriss and the Lean Startup-concept.
What inspires you?
We are inspired by a lot of things. Don’t lose the view for the small things in your life!
What is one mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?
The first web designer we have chosen and worked with was the father of a friend of us. We thought that this close background would bring trust and sincerity in our business relationship. But we had a lot of problems and at the end we saw each other at the court. So the thing we have learned was: never make business with your family and friends!
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Let me first say, that an idea for itself is nothing worth, the right execution is the key to success. One of our friends has breast cancer so she has the problem to decide, if she should drink milk products or not. There is a huge discussion in the breast cancer community about the topic that hormones which are in the milk could cause and support the growth of tumors. So in the pre-industrial time cows where milked till the third week when they became pregnant. Today, they are milked till the third week before birth. So all the hormones of the pregnancy like progesterone are now in the milk. But the cow must stand 100 days till the next impregnation. So during these 100 days, the content of hormones is lower. Market these 100 days-milk as progesterone free milk. It should be not that huge business but you can do something really good for an increasing group.
What is one book and one tool that helps you bring ideas to life?
Book: “Kopf schlägt Kapital” by Günter Faltin
Tool: Google scholar
Who would you love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?
Günter Faltin
Connect:
Lebepur on Facebook – http://on.fb.me/hITNWU
Lebepur on Twitter – http://twitter.com/lebepur
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.