CEO Corner: Momentous’ Jeff Byers on Democratizing High Performance
Momentous is one of the fastest-growing brands in wellness, offering supplements designed to bring NFL-quality performance to the masses
Supplement companies often get a bad rap, commonly accused of peddling needless and potentially unsafe products backed by questionable science, all at high mark-ups.
Momentous, an NSF-certified nutrition and supplement brand based in Park City, Utah, is out to change that perception by giving consumers access to high-quality products formulated by experts and designed with specific lifestyle and performance goals in mind.
Led by CEO Jeff Byers, a former NFL offensive lineman turned wellness executive who co-founded Amp Human, Momentous has become one of the industry’s smashing success stories, with revenue growth exceeding 1,000% since the company merged with Amp in 2021. Byers’ vision for Momentous is clear: to democratize high performance by bringing the same health and wellness tools he had access to as a pro athlete to everyday consumers.
The company’s product line includes staples like Omega-3s, whey protein and creatine monohydrate, but also more targeted supplements like sleep aids, cognitive and athletic performance boosters, and hormone optimizers. Specific collections are also available, including supplement packages curated by experts like Dr. Andrew Huberman.
Along with a booming direct-to-consumer business, Momentous has nearly 200 partnerships with pro and college sports teams in the U.S. and has secured $4.5 million worth of innovation contracts with the Department of Defense to focus on human performance for service members.
Byers spoke with Athletech News about his transition from NFL lineman to wellness CEO, what makes Momentous stand out from other supplement companies, and where he sees the health and wellness market heading over the coming years and decades.
Athletech News: Can you tell us about your background and what led you to create Amp Human?
Jeff Byers: As a former professional athlete, I was really passionate about optimization and performance. When I retired from the NFL, I noticed there was a huge black hole in this space. You go from having access to great practitioners, experts and thought leaders in the space, and being given really curated products geared towards your goals, to this big black hole as an average consumer. So I saw a gap (in the market) to bring together high-quality products with the right practitioners and experts.
After I decided I wasn’t going to stay in sports, I initially jumped into finance and realized it wasn’t for me, not by a long shot. I joined an early-stage biotech company because they had this technology we thought could be used in sports. That was kind of the genesis of what would become Amp Human and our product, PR Lotion. I thought, “What if we could roll that out to the consumer and build a leading high-performance company to fill this gap? ” So around five years ago, my co-founder Erica Good and I started Amp Human.
Around two years ago, we bought the Momentous brand and merged into the company. The idea was that nutrition and supplements are such a cornerstone to optimization and health, but there’s still this very big black hole. Our vision is to democratize high performance. We do that through products, knowledge and access.
ATN: What separates Momentous from run-of-the-mill supplement companies?
JB: Supplements to me have a weird connotation, so our goal is to build the “anti-supplement supplement company.” It’s not, “Here are 500 products, go figure out what’s right for you.” Or, “Here’s some cool Fruity Pebbles-flavored protein,” because that’s really where the (supplement) market sits today. We want to be your trusted partner in life optimization.
I believe experts in optimization and wellness don’t live inside businesses, I believe they’re out there doing incredible things at the university level, in pro and college sports, or at the Department of Defense. So if we really want to create a different company, let’s not do it how it’s always been done. Let’s use the external resources – experts and practitioners – and build products around them.
ATN: How do you put that brand philosophy into action?
JB: We have three core pillars that we think are really important. Number one is experts. We align with experts, people like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Andy Galpin, and we also have this incredible performance engineer board that’s made up of top practitioners in pro and college sports. So it’s this expert-driven approach where we work with the best and ideate with the best.
Number two is our endless commitment to product. It’s everything from how we think about sourcing to what products we have – and what products we don’t have – in our portfolio, to how we certify. There are very few (other) brands out there that certify their entire product line.
Our third pillar is customer experience. To me, this is getting people the right products at the right time. We recently released a new version of our website that allows people to navigate our products based on what we call need spaces – or pillars of optimization – which are Cognitive Function, Sleep, Athletic Performance and Foundational Health (Hormone Support has since been added).
ATN: Who is Momentous’ target customer?
JB: We’re an aspirational brand, which means we’re built for those who are seeking to make changes in their lives. Our customer is much more of a mindset customer. It’s that continuously curious consumer who is an optimizer. They could be on day one of their optimization journey, but they’re looking to make changes in their life long term. They care about quality, they’re curious about content and are knowledgeable. Those people range from 18-year-olds to 70-year-olds, from male to female, overweight to underweight, from CrossFiters to football players. It’s a pretty deep pool, so we tend to target people not based on demographics but based on psychographics and sociographics.
ATN: What kinds of work does Momentous do with sports teams and the U.S. government?
JB: We made a custom recovery product for one of the top NFL teams, although I’m not at liberty to say who. We worked with them to source, create and get the right ratios, and now we have a custom product that they use exclusively in their locker room as a competitive advantage. That’s been a really exciting product for us to build to flex some of our bespoke muscles. We’re working on seeing if we can launch it to the public sometime in the next year.
We’re also under contract with the Department of Defense. We’re developing what will hopefully become three novel products over the next two or three years that will be funded by the Department of Defense and clinically validated in top university settings, and then we’ll be able to sell those as well. One of them is a cognitive stimulant, another is around connective tissue health and then the last one will be around hydration.
ATN: Looking ahead, what areas of health and wellness are you most excited about?
JB: There are two main areas. I’m incredibly passionate about cognitive longevity because it touches me so closely as a former professional athlete and it touches the people I care about. As we age, the likelihood is that our mind is going to go before any else. I think the real goal of longevity will become, Can we make the brain survive long enough or be sharp enough as we all age? One of my most passionate stories is about creatine monohydrate. Most people think creatine is just for bodybuilders and meatheads. But taking creatine monohydrate is one of the most impactful things we can do for long-term brain health. That’s the education aspect we need to bring and the difference we want to make for consumers.
Number two is, there’s a lot of misinformation about female health. There’s not a ton of great clinical research around female health, so it just needs to be invested in and better understood across the board. Males and females are completely different, so I think there’s a great opportunity for us to help champion female performance and female longevity.