“I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.” — Mark Watney, The Martian (2015)
I am in a group chat called Poop Journal. 15 guys, all north of forty, one rule: no photos. The rule exists because it had to.
What gets posted instead is the situation. The gate at Newark. The rental car outside Fresno with 40 minutes to the next stop and a decision to make.
It is the most active thread on my phone. It beats the Zyn Life chat (for another post). It beats the family chat, which Lisa has noted.
The chat is not really about digestion. It is about how much of an adult life organizes itself around one bodily function, and how fast everything else stops mattering when it stops.
Nobody schedules a day around fiber. Everybody schedules a day around the absence of it.
Read the thread long enough and a second thing shows up. Well-informed men discovering, one at a time, that the most effective weight-loss drugs we have come with a plumbing problem.
Nobody warned them. The marketing is all before and after. None of it is about the part in between.
Gallup has current use for weight loss tripling in two years, three percent of American adults to 11 percent. Among adults 50 to 64, KFF puts it at 22 percent.
One in five adults my age.
Nothing in consumer moves that fast.
And it landed on a country already losing at fiber. The average American eats about 16 grams a day against a recommendation of 25 for women and 38 for men. Roughly five percent of us clear the bar. Then the drug arrives, intake drops, and fiber often goes with it. Fiber rides in on volume, and volume is precisely what the drug reduces.
GLP-1s also slow gastric emptying, one of the reasons people feel fuller longer. Everything downstream can slow down too.
So we have a medication that can make fiber more necessary and less likely at the same time.
Then go look at the fiber aisle.
Metamucil was introduced in 1934. Benefiber is a powder in a canister beside the laxatives, packaging that says, without saying it, this is for old people with a problem. A multibillion-dollar category with no real idea in decades.
The culture moved. Teenagers on TikTok invented fibermaxxing. Gut health became a personality. The demand curve got 20 years younger and the shelf never noticed.
This is where it breaks.
This summer, a founder walked Krista, Lisa and me through his company. No name here. The round is not closed and I would like to own more of it.
It is a shelf-stable pouch. A day of fruits and vegetables, a serious dose of prebiotic fiber, twist open and drink in under ten seconds.
No scoop. No shaker. No water. No counter space.
I had been drinking it for weeks and told him I crave it. Everyone I hand one to says a version of the same sentence:
“I did not think it could taste like this.”
Then they ask where to get it. It is on Amazon.
The thesis is not the fiber.
The thesis is the format.
Grüns moved greens into a gummy satchel, and Unilever bought it in April for $1.2 billion. Zyn took nicotine out of the cigarette and put it under the lip, which is how that other group chat got its name. Ultra, another company we back, put focus in a pouch, no nicotine and no caffeine. Magna made magnesium something you drink.
Same molecules. New delivery. New category.
A powder demands a decision, a measurement, a rinse.
A pouch demands a pocket.
Which sounds cosmetic until you look at retention, where compliance products live and die.
So we looked.
Subscribers kept reordering, month after month, and the curve flattened right where supplement curves usually collapse. Once we saw the numbers the conversation stopped being about whether and turned into how much.
Then the obvious objection.
A pouch is not a patent.
AG1 is doing roughly $600 million and just walked into Target. Bloom sold to Nutrabolt, Huel to Danone. Any of them can find the same co-packer inside two production cycles.
Format buys a lead.
It does not buy a moat.
What is harder to copy is the founder.
He built a real audience from nothing in a year, on his own face, making fiber funny.
The top of his funnel is a content pillar he calls “fart maxxing.” That is on a slide, in a real deck, in a real fundraise.
The fastest way through a category built on embarrassment is a joke. You cannot buy that with a media budget.
It is a temperament.
We wrote the check.
We have been hunting a fiber answer for two years. Everything else was a powder with a newer logo.
The largest consumer categories are not built on aspiration. They are built on discomfort people will not discuss at dinner and will absolutely discuss at two in the morning.
Deodorant. Acne. Hair loss. Sleep.
Every one of them was a whisper before it was a business.
Fiber is next, arriving alongside tens of millions of Americans on a drug that makes the problem more acute.
They will not read a label. They will not measure a scoop.
Ten seconds. One hand. No water.
That is half the bet. The other half is a founder willing to be the punchline until the category is his.
We started the chat as a joke. It is now one of the first things I check in the morning.
Have you pooped today?
Sources:
Gallup, “In U.S., GLP-1 Usage Reaches New High”, fielded May 28 to June 5, 2026, 5,065 U.S. adults, margin of error plus or minus 1.5 points.
KFF Health Tracking Poll, fielded October 27 to November 2, 2025. Average fiber intake from USDA NHANES, FSRG Dietary Data Brief.
Daily recommendations from the Institute of Food Technologists.
The share of Americans meeting the recommendation from Quagliani and Felt-Gunderson, American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.
Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but here goes.
Poop isn’t a taboo subject. And until you told me you were on a men’s poop chat, I probably would have invested in anything you or Lisa invested in. Now I’m not so sure.
This post feels like it has an ulterior motive: manufacture a taboo so the product can position itself as the brave brand willing to break it.
I don’t want to hear about your sweaty balls or your poop any more than you want to hear about the smell of blood when a woman gets her period. Some bodily functions are perfectly normal. That doesn’t make talking about them endlessly interesting, culturally transgressive, or necessary.
No doubt this product, like AG1, could blow up. But let’s be clear: it won’t be because people suddenly make talking about shit de rigueur. It’ll be because someone built a good product and marketed the shit out of it.