NOBS 2024-2026 Update: From E-com to Target
Level 2- Value Investor
What We Learned Building NOBS from $1M to Target Shelves
Hi, hello, good morning! It’s been two years since I last wrote for Bull’s Substack. If you don’t remember me, I go by Fawn around these parts, and I’m one of the founders behind NOBS Toothpaste Tablets.
Back in October 2023, we were running a 7-figure toothpaste business while working full-time jobs. Calvin, Ilon, and I were operating entirely off of caffeine, delusion, and spite, working before our day jobs started and after they ended (...and during).
Ilon was still practicing dentistry full-time. Calvin was juggling raising two kids with running his companies and working his W2. I had two monitors set up so I could do NOBS work while on camera in meetings for my W2, all while walking on the treadmill at 3.7mpH because sitting still felt like wasting time.
We somehow convinced ourselves this was sustainable.
It wasn’t.
Fast forward to February 2026, and NOBS Toothpaste Tablets are sitting on Target shelves across America. Calvin and I quit our jobs. Ilon scaled back to practicing dentistry part-time. The business partner you didn’t know existed is now public. And we’ve got a peer-reviewed study proving our toothpaste works as well as Sensodyne.
So. What happened in the last few years?
A lot of wins. Some losses. And a masterclass in why you can’t build a real brand without making a damn good product.
Here’s the full story.
Part 1: The Team You Didn’t Know Existed
If you read our previous posts, you might have noticed something: I only ever talked about two founders. Me (as Fawn) and Ilon (as Gator).
Well. There’s actually a third person, and I like to call him the puppetmaster.
Meet Calvin.
Calvin is our CEO. He brings a decade of experience in business and digital strategy, and he’s been running the company alongside Ilon and me.
So why didn’t we mention him before?
He asked us not to.
Calvin valued his privacy and didn’t want his name attached to the brand publicly. Fair enough. We respected that.
But in 2024, things changed. We were dealing with a counterfeit crisis (more on that later), and our credibility was taking a hit. People needed to see that NOBS wasn’t just a couple of anonymous cartoon animals running a TikTok Shop.
We needed to show we were real people building a real company.
So, in the summer of 2025, Calvin and Ilon both decided to go public with their identities. Calvin is @CalvinandNOBS on Twitter. Ilon is @theNOBSdentist.
And me? I’m staying pseudonymous for now.
Here’s the thing: Ilon is a brilliant dentist with years of clinical experience. Calvin has a decade of expertise in business. They’re both established in their own right.
Plus, they’re both building other things that benefit from having personal brands - Ilon’s working on a longevity clinic and the Institute for Functional Dentistry, and Calvin’s got his own projects going.
Me? That’s it, I’m just me. No doctorate, no prior business experience. Doxxing myself wouldn’t lend credibility to NOBS, so it would just mean I’d have to give up my privacy for no real benefit.
So for now, you can just call me Fawn.
Part 2: TikTok, Huberman, and Going Viral
In October 2023, we got access to TikTok Shop.
TikTok was the wild west back then. Most brands hadn’t figured it out yet, and we saw an opportunity. We made a strategic bet to focus on TikTok instead of Meta, and it paid off like crazy.
Why?
TikTok’s native affiliate infrastructure.
We set up TikTok Shop, started posting content, and worked with affiliates. For a few months, we were growing steadily but nothing explosive. Then spring 2024 hit, and we took off.
A few affiliates started promoting NOBS hard, and we exploded on TikTok. Our kids’ toothpaste went out of stock a few times, but overall we were able to keep up with demand.
Then in March 2024, Andrew Huberman gave us an organic shoutout on his podcast.
Huberman has one of the biggest health and wellness podcasts in the world. When he mentions your product, people listen. The shoutout validated what we’d been saying all along: NOBS is a legitimate, science-backed toothpaste that actually works.
So where does TikTok stand today in February 2026?
It still works. But it’s harder.
Not only has the algorithm changed, but the affiliate network isn’t what it was in 2024, and you’re competing for the same set of eyeballs with 10x the amount of brands (and most of them have way bigger budgets than you do).
You can still win on TikTok, but you need to be more strategic now. What worked for us going from 0 to 1 in 2023 is not going to work for you in 2026. It’s not the gold rush it used to be.
Part 3: Quitting Our Jobs (And What We Did With All That Time)
By Q2 2024, the math was simple.
Calvin, Ilon, and I were all spending more time on NOBS than our actual jobs. We were making more money from the business than our salaries. Every hour we spent in meetings for our W2s was an hour we weren’t spending growing NOBS.
The opportunity cost was too great.
So Calvin and I quit. Ilon kept practicing dentistry full-time for a while longer, but eventually scaled back to part-time.
What We Actually Did With the Extra Time
SEO.
We built out our blog and invested time into link building to grow our domain authority.
Here’s how it works: imagine you have a friend who’s recommended restaurants to you for five years, and every single one has been good. When they make a new recommendation, you trust it immediately.
That’s how Google views websites with high domain authority. When trusted sites link to you, Google assumes you’re trustworthy too. That’s link juice!
In hindsight, we should have focused more on PR during this period. When the counterfeit crisis hit (again, more on that later), we were hurt by the fact that there was basically no information about NOBS on reputable websites or in magazines.
We didn’t have that third-party credibility when we needed it most.
TikTok
As I mentioned earlier, this is one of the most important things we ever did, and we got lucky with the timing. With outliers, there is always an element of luck.
When we got on TikTok Shop in October 2023, the platform was subsidizing sellers. TikTok would offer NOBS at a 50% discount to new customers and then make us whole on the backend.
It makes sense, right? They wanted brands to succeed in order to incentivize more brands to onboard eventually. Think Uber crushing everyone else with unsustainable low prices in the 2010s.
Plus affiliates could actually make money through the native infrastructure which was radical at the time (still is tbh but I think the rapid technological advancements are compressing time in a way we’re not biologically wired to understand so we’re becoming numb to innovation), so they had real incentive to promote products they believed in.
We focused on TikTok instead of Meta, and it paid off. Spring 2024 was when we really took off. Calvin had focused what little spend we had to offer at the time on reach campaigns, creating a sense of virality around NOBS on the platform that made creators want to hop on the trend. A few affiliates started promoting NOBS hard, and the platform’s native affiliate infrastructure did the rest.
But the ecosystem was also just better quality back then. Fewer brands competing for affiliates. The affiliates themselves were more loyal, actually posted when they received samples, and created authentic content instead of bottom-of-funnel spam.
By 2026, things have changed. The platform isn’t subsidizing sellers anymore (that ended in mid 2024). Because of dilution, affiliates can’t make the same money, so there’s less incentive. It’s a new era and one we’re still learning how to navigate.
Podcasts.
We sponsored a lot of health podcasts back then, including Dark Horse with Bret and Heather Weinstein (we actually started that in spring 2023). Dark Horse worked well. So did some others.
We don’t do as much with external podcast sponsorships anymore.
Our thesis: when something works, you run it into the ground until it stops working, then you pivot. We don’t make unnecessary pivots. If a channel is working, we keep doing it. When it stops working, we move on.
The Mistakes Other People Make
The biggest mistake we see people make is quitting their job before the company can actually sustain them.
Your W2 is the easiest money you’ll ever make. Plus you get health insurance, which matters even more if you have dependents.
Remember Bull’s formula: don’t quit your job until your company does 2x your salary in profit so you could survive a downturn if needed.
We waited longer than we had to. We reinvested everything and to this day we take very little out of the business.
Here’s why that matters: if you start pulling money out before the company can sustain you, you make decisions that prioritize short-term revenue. Those decisions kill your long-term brand equity.
You can’t make good decisions from a place of scarcity. As we know, lady luck favors those that don’t need her.
What Surprised Me
More time meant more opportunities to chase things that don’t actually matter.
We call this squirrel brain, and Calvin sends a squirrel emoji in the group chat when Ilon or I voice our latest ~bright idea~ of the week.
Calvin taught us from the beginning (military background) that NOBS was never going to become a bloated organization. Everything at the company is managed by one of the three of us.
Division of labor, minimal redundancy.
When we were all working full-time W2s, we couldn’t focus on anything that didn’t directly drive the business. In some ways, we need to get back to that level of hyperfocus.
The Burnout Reality
So yes - productivity went up initially because we had more hours and more bandwidth. And it lasted for a while.
But right now, in March 2026, I think I’m experiencing true burnout for the first time.
After unexpectedly losing a few loved ones in rapid succession over the last six months, I didn’t realize I might be experiencing “depression”. Quotes because this is not diagnosable, the word doesn’t feel quite right, and it is temporary.
Mostly I think grieving manifests differently for high functioning individuals.
As I joked to Calvin a few nights ago, I’m too neurotic to develop a vice to blow off steam. I still get out of bed every morning, get my work done, exercise, socialize. I look functional.
But my body started breaking down.
I was nearly immobilized on New Year’s Eve from back spasms. My eyes stopped producing lubrication for a few weeks, I couldn’t put my contacts in. I should’ve got treated for a knee injury a year ago, now walking hurts. My memory is deteriorating. It takes me a minute to get a sentence out sometimes. Words are constantly on the tip of my tongue.
After three trusted friends (totally separate instances by the way, they don’t know each other) sat me down and told me they were worried about me within 10 days of each other, I realized what was happening.
So here’s what I’ve learned:
High-functioning people probably don’t realize they’re burning out until their body and brain start sending signals that are impossible to ignore.
The irony is that taking care of your physical and mental health actually is productive. My productivity is dropping now because my brain isn’t working anymore.
Can’t say I really regret it though. All of this is solvable, and how else are you supposed to find your limits?
So When Should You Actually Quit?
We can’t answer that for you. Ask yourself: can your company withstand a serious drawback in revenue? Would you actually be generating more revenue if you had more time and bandwidth, or do you just hate having a job?
Calvin, Ilon, and I knew it was time because the opportunity cost was too great not to quit. If that’s not the case for you, why quit? This isn’t meant to be rhetorical, it’s a question you should ask yourself.
Part 4: The Counterfeit Crisis
The counterfeiting really started in 2024, maybe late 2023. By mid to late 2024, it was out of control.
NOBS has been counterfeited over 5,000 times.
These are guys mostly operating out of China. They’re like a Hydra. You cut down one listing, they spin up another. Or they run up a fake listing, get tons of reviews, then swap everything out for fake pictures of NOBS.
People buy from those listings because they undercut our price. I don’t know why people think you can get a nano hydroxyapatite toothpaste for $4, but they do. They buy it thinking they’re buying from us. They get something terrible, think it’s NOBS, and lord knows what these counterfeits are actually putting in there.
The Business Impact
We were losing a ton of money every month and not just from actual sales.
We had to pull back our ad spend because any money Calvin put toward ads would just drive people to buy counterfeits. People would see the fakes were cheaper than actual NOBS, not realizing there’s a reason they were cheaper.
And because we weren’t spending as much money on ads, we didn’t have as much money coming in. Vicious cycle.
What We Did About It
We did a ton of DMCA takedowns. IPCC through TikTok. Ilon hired a firm to handle counterfeits for us.
All of this in tandem, and we still have counterfeits popping up every now and again. It’s just not nearly as bad as it was.
A large part of that is because we have our IP locked down now.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last three and a half years, it’s that you need good counsel and you need to get your intellectual property locked down ASAP.
How Calvin and Ilon Going Public Helped
Calvin, as the CEO, is able to talk to creators and affiliates on TikTok. They trust him, he knows what he’s talking about.
Ilon, as the dentist behind the brand, is able to help dispel rumors about nano hydroxyapatite and why it’s safe.
Customers trust us more now.
Customer Communication
We did a few things well to combat this issue by directly talking to customers.
Calvin, as the CEO, is able to talk to creators and affiliates through his personal TikTok account. They trust him because it’s obvious he knows what he’s talking about.
I started making a lot of videos on TikTok, voicing over B-roll as I prefer to be faceless, directly responding to customer questions almost like a quote tweet. Those performed organically and converted well, so Calvin put ad spend behind them which amplified the message.
We also put emphasis on our customer service team. We don’t use AI agents for customer service, everything has a personal touch.
Ilon has this customer service stuff on lock. That’s his baby. He’s almost as proud of the fact that if you email us, you get a response in less than 24 hours as he is of the actual NOBS formula. Usually it’s in less than a couple of hours, every day of the week.
Still Happening
This is still happening in 2026, but not nearly as bad as it was before.
The most frustrating part? There is very little protection given to American sellers on American soil. The fact that counterfeits can come in internationally and we’re not protected as a small business is tough to swallow.
Part 5: Building Real Credibility
In the first six months of 2025, I put NOBS in the hands of over 3,000 dental professionals by running the dental conference circuit with Don’t Die and ShopTalk thrown in. Ilon and Calvin joined me for a few of these too.
My role is simple: I’m bubbly, quick-witted, and tough to rattle so it turns out I’m a great salesperson (didn’t know it until I started doing this). In a fun way, I educate dental professionals on the evolving science behind nano hydroxyapatite and NOBS. These conversations are important because they inspire trust.
This matters for us in particular because a lot of dentists and hygienists show up and say something like: “My patient asked me about this. They said they found it on TikTok, so I told them not to use it.”
And I get to respond: “Oh hi, NOBS are dentist-formulated, and we have actual peer-reviewed evidence backing it up. Here’s a copy of the study showing NOBS is as effective as Sensodyne!”
What I Learned About Medical Professionals
Here’s the thing about medical professionals: they really don’t keep up with emerging science.
Nano hydroxyapatite has been around since the 1980s. There’s tons of evidence, specifically in the last 15 years, about how great it is for your teeth including remineralization, enamel protection, and sensitivity relief.
It’s equally as effective as fluoride with a better safety profile.
A lot of people just don’t know this.
So you have to be there, in person, willing to talk to them about it and instill confidence (which I am because I love people and it turns out that that is actually not common).
But if it’s so important, why did I stop?
If you run the circuit for a while, you’ll end up seeing the same people, so the ROI diminishes each bout. Glad I did it, but it’s a low ROI activity now. We have bigger fish to fry!
The Peer-Reviewed Study
In May 2025, a peer-reviewed study was published showing what we already knew: NOBS works.
The study showed that NOBS at 5% nano hydroxyapatite is equally as effective as Sensodyne.
Without. Any. Fluoride.
This is huge.
A lot of people don’t believe that there’s actual evidence behind nano hydroxyapatite being effective. But there is. Nano hydroxyapatite is extremely safe. It dissolves rapidly in gastric acid. Your body already makes it. It’s a biocompatible alternative to fluoride, and it’s really good for sensitivity.
We also had Indiana University test the RDA of NOBS. RDA stands for Relative Dental Abrasivity, which measures how abrasive a toothpaste is on your enamel.
NOBS came back at 21.3.
For context, your average drugstore toothpaste probably has an RDA closer to 150 or 200, and brushing your teeth with just water and a soft-bristled toothbrush has an RDA of 4.
Side note:
A lot of people think charcoal toothpaste or eggshell toothpaste is good for your teeth. It’s not. They’re extremely abrasive ingredients and can damage your enamel over time.
That was one of the first things Ilon and I talked about when we were formulating NOBS. He said under no circumstances could NOBS have eggshell or charcoal in it because they’re both too abrasive. And NOBS couldn’t contain bentonite clay because most sources of bentonite clay are heavily contaminated with lead.
Every now and again, I’ll take a dental question like that in front of Ilon before he can respond, then look at him like this:
And we’ll dissolve into a fit of giggles, because . . . how in the world did we even get here?
Building a Real Brand
Here’s the thing: NOBS is a really good product.
We have peer-reviewed evidence, and Ilon’s a genius dentist (I’m not just saying that because he’s going to read this draft before it goes out).
We built NOBS from the beginning specifically to appeal to the alternative health crowd because we knew that was coming to mainstream America.
Everything that starts on Twitter eventually reaches everybody else later. All these health trends (seed oils, no fluoride, plastic-free etc.) gain traction early on Twitter.
If you use NOBS today, you’re an early adopter.
We’re already seeing this with RFK putting a spotlight on the dubious safety profile of fluoride.
At the end of the day, the real money isn’t in quick flips or viral moments. The greatest value is in building a brand people love around products people actually want to keep using.
If you want to make money quickly, go learn affiliate. We always joke that affiliates make more money than us because it’s true. We also joke that we get paid in credit card points instead of cash (s/o Calvin’s maniacal ad spend).
E-commerce is tough, and it works best if your product is legitimately good.
Part 6: The Rebrand
At some point in 2025, we made a decision: we were rebranding from biöm to NOBS.
The reason was simple. Everyone called it NOBS anyway. Nobody said “I use biöm toothpaste tablets.” They said “I use NOBS.”
So we leaned into it.
We updated the packaging, refreshed the branding, and phased out the old biöm name as inventory turned over. October 15th, 2025, the rebrand went live.
We were really stressed about the launch. We had a whole plan. Email campaigns. Social announcements. Messaging strategy. The works.
We launched it and... really nobody cared.
Customers just kept buying NOBS like they always had. The name on the jar changed. Life went on.
Here’s what did matter: the counterfeit crisis trained customers to verify authenticity by looking for the biöm branding and certain packaging details to make sure they weren’t getting a fake.
Now we have new packaging, and some customers think it’s counterfeit.
That’s a whole other problem, but it’s fine.
Part 7: The Sample Tubes
Getting Into Dental Offices
By fall 2025, we had developed something we’d been thinking about for a while: sample tubes. Chapstick-sized tubes with 6 tablets in each one.
The glass jars are great, but they’re heavy so they’re tough to ship en masse. Sample tubes don’t break, they’re lightweight, and they’re much easier if we’re sending out 500 at a time. More importantly, they’re perfect for dental offices to hand out in goodie bags.
This was something dental offices had been asking us for. A lot of dentists want a fluoride-free toothpaste they can give to patients, and a lot of patients were already asking for NOBS specifically at their appointments. So dentists were basically just waiting for us to give them a way to do this.
Lift off was pretty simple. Ilon has about 90,000 followers on Twitter, and a lot of them are dentists or know of dentists that would be interested. He tweeted about our free dental samples program to kick things off. We also use a platform called Free Dental Samples where we direct dental professionals through social media.
The first couple packs are free. Eventually offices will have to pay for them at cost because while we’re not looking to make money off this, we can’t be bleeding money either.
We also wholesale full jars to verified dental offices, but we’re very careful about who we work with. The counterfeit crisis taught us to be cautious about resellers.
Brand Activations
Beyond dental offices, we’re doing a lot of sampling and seeding at events. Pilates events, wellness events, bachelorette parties, etc. I can sponsor anything and get NOBS in front of people, and then people are tagging us all over Instagram and social media, so it’s all about exposure.
Here’s the thing: in 2026, if you want to be a real brand, you have to be omnichannel. You have to be in retail, you have to be online, and you need to be getting your product into customers’ hands physically
(I am NOT saying you should be doing that to start. We’re talking about scale.)
This matters more now than it did a few years ago because a lot of people don’t trust what’s happening on the internet. The counterfeit crisis on TikTok Shop scared people away from buying anything on that platform. Half the population will only buy on Amazon if it has the Prime badge because that’s a signal of trust.
Brand activations are the same thing. You’re just signaling trust in a different way.
The other reason this works for us is that NOBS is an unusual product. Toothpaste tablets aren’t normal yet. If you’ve never heard of toothpaste tablets or you’ve never heard of NOBS, you’re not going to understand what you’re getting in your goodie bag at some event. But if you already have some level of brand awareness, and now you’re like “I finally get to try this product I’ve always wanted to try,” you’re way more likely to get hooked.
And once people try it, this phenomenon happens where it’s like when you learn a new word and all of a sudden you see that word everywhere. Same thing with NOBS. Once you try it, you start noticing it.
The goal is to push about 100,000 sample tubes per month in sampling right now. I know NOBS is amazing, so we just have to get people to try it one time.
Part 8: The Target Launch
Target was always the goal. NOBS is a premium toothpaste, so we needed a premium retailer that matched our demographic.
In August, we flew out to Minneapolis to pitch them in person at their HQ. They rejected us but later came back and asked us to come into their beauty minis section.
Now we’re in about 917 stores across the country.
The Retail Learning Curve
Here’s what you don’t realize about retail until you’re in the thick of itl: it’s unbelievably slow.
Retailers generally do resets twice a year. If you’re not already in conversations with them, you’re looking at 2027 before you’d even hit shelves. The timeline is brutal.
Then there’s all the stuff you’d never know if you only have e-commerce experience. Net 60 payment terms, which means you’re waiting two months to get paid. Slotting fees just to get shelf space. Sometimes you’re on consignment, which ties up all your inventory and cash.
The whole thing made me appreciate DTC even more. We started with ecom, built up brand awareness, and learned how to actually sell the product before we ever touched retail. That turned out to be a massive advantage.
Because NOBS is the #1 toothpaste on TikTok, Target is not only buying our product but they’re also buying our ability to drive traffic to their stores.
Launch Day Reality
We officially went live on February 22nd. You can find your nearest store here.
I went to 4 stores in my city that day and . . . NOBS was only actually on the shelves in one of them, lol.
In the other 3 stores, nobody knew where it was. At one store, an employee was eventually able to find our inventory “in the back” and handed me a jar to look at, then told me I couldn’t actually buy it because they weren’t putting it out for a few more days.
Retail moves like molasses. You get spoiled by DTC where you can ship something the next day and then you hit retail and realize nothing happens fast.
The Packaging Strategy
We had already redesigned the packaging for the rebrand, but we knew retail was coming. That was part of the broader strategy.
The new jar says “toothpaste tablets” and “without the BS” right on the front. We needed people to understand what they were looking at on the shelf, especially if they’d never heard of toothpaste tablets before.
It’s only been a couple weeks, but early data shows we’re beating projections. Not by a crazy amount, but we’re doing better than what we were told would be good performance.
Finally, What’s Next?
It’s been less than 3.5 years since we started NOBS, and we’re bullish on 2026.
We spent the last few years focusing on TikTok. Now we’re shifting more focus to Meta to expand our awareness there. The big priority is Target; we need to crush it in these 917 stores so they pick us up again and hopefully bring in our kids toothpaste and floss too.
Outside of NOBS, Ilon, Calvin, and TJ (founder of Outty) launched a health show called Down to Health. It’s Twitter-first, meaning episodes launch directly on the platform. NOBS sponsors it. They bring on interesting people to talk about health topics and generally just have a good time. You should check it out.
Ilon’s also building a longevity clinic and lecturing for the Institute for Functional Dentistry, but I’ll let him share more about those when he’s ready.
If I could go back and tell myself three things, it would be: get excellent legal counsel, choose excellent partners, and learn to build resilient systems as you scale..
We’ve made a lot of mistakes. We’ve also done a lot of things right. The product is amazing, the team is strong, and somehow, it still feels like we’re just getting started.
All my love,
Bonus - Gator/Fawn
As a note NOBS/Gator/Fawn/Calvin are going to give away 10 lifetime subscriptions to this Substack. If you follow their X account you’ll see them post the contest!
The general idea is: ”Competition will be creating a image/video to promote NOBS being in target nationwide. Real footage preferred.”
Easy enough and enjoy the week!
For more exciting content like this be sure to join our Substack!
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.
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