DreamTech are a holistic wellness brand focused on better sleep. Co-founded by covert biohacking enthusiast Bella Smith, their signature Moonbrew is a high-quality, functional adaptogen blend created to support recovery, improve micronutrient intake, and enhance the microbiome.
Building The Dream Brand
Tell us about your background and what led you to this industry?
I am weird. I was kind of obsessed with art and design when I was a teenager but didn’t really realise its importance; Went to art school after high school to study photography for a year, then panicked about the idea of being freelance and switched to journalism thinking I’d get myself a nice structured Job job. Was terrified to get stuck in an office though, so was thinking about being a war reporter, joined the Army Reserve in Fresher’s Week to assist with that, and by the time university was over I had a pilot application processing with the RAF… I realise none of this makes much linear sense. It took until 2020 for me to notice I had almost no organic interest in planes, engines, or aerodynamics, and hate experiencing jet lag. Which like, pilot life. Obviously.
So I left the RAF just as COVID was kicking off, and long story short trained and qualified as a bodyguard, which I still do now for personal cash flow because we’re not in a position to take any money out of DreamTech® just yet. I do normal Close Protection (bodyguard) tasks as well as Protective Surveillance (a special service for ultra high net worth people who want to pretend they’re normal, where teams of us follow the client around in a protective bubble without them ever noticing). I also do bits of Covert Surveillance, where we follow people around for extended periods, collecting information on their whereabouts, associates, and actions, without them knowing it. Sounds illegal, but isn’t as long as you don’t break any trespassing, data, or privacy laws. Requires a pretty specific skill set, and can be super fun with a good team.
This month I’m going to the Maldives to babysit the estranged wife of a Russian tech billionaire, for example. Sounds fancy but that kind of job is actually extremely dry. Long uneventful hours where the likelihood of something going seriously awry is tiny but the consequences are like, weapons-grade bad. Even staying in a thousand pound room in Claridge’s isn’t fun on four hours of sleep and an internal hum of perma-stress. When this industry was my main thing, I would get back from a task having been on a sleep schedule that would frankly be inadequate for a laptop, for like two weeks solid, and feel kind of unhinged. Smashed a plate against a wall in front of my cats once, kind of thing. Not good.
DreamTech® hatched after I became dependent on OTC sleeping pills – mainly during a task looking after and enforcing bail conditions for a foreign billionaire who was on house arrest in London while fighting an extradition case. 12 hour back-to-back night shifts locked in an apartment with said client for 14 days at a time all winter, lots of very strange and problematic elderly billionaire behaviour happening. Then also extramarital affairs and inter-nemesis drama amongst my colleagues, just major cabin fever and chaos really. Anyway I got pretty nasty withdrawal symptoms coming off the sleeping pills when I finally resigned; bad vertigo and migraines and zombie feelings. I started mixing up Reishi and Ashwagandha and other plant powders with cacao before bed to help my circadian rhythm normalise. It helped a lot but it got annoying doing that every day and I couldn’t find a prepackaged alternative without sweeteners and other crap. So I made one.
Do you have previous start-up experience?
In the Close Protection world, pretty much everyone who works at ‘grunt’ level like I do operates as a Private Limited Company that subcontracts to bigger companies who do the ultra high net worth client schmoozing and top-level task logistics. So in that sense, I have been a formal company before, but startup, especially in the buzzword sense, very much no. Never made a deck or had an investor call in my life, haha.
How did you concoct the formulation for Moonbrew?
My business partner Tom, who I first met in my back garden when I was 12, is an NHS GP and longevity freak. Peter Attia and David Sinclair are gods to Tom. He deep dived into the research on the biochemical aspects of sleep, different compounds and endocrine effects, and did kind of an informal literature review. This is how he found glycine for example, which I consider to be kind of a magical ingredient; Like, it’s a naturally occurring amino acid that functions as a neurotransmitter in the brain and increases serotonin, and has no calories or adverse effects, but tastes clean sweet, like sugar. What!
Once Tom had narrowed down the active ingredients, for our initial formula we just ordered a bunch of raw ingredients and started blending them in different ratios in his kitchen in Truro. We were testing every night, and I started having kid-level sleeps, like I was accessing another layer of depth to which I had never touched as an adult. My Whoop scores starting popping off; turbo recoveries. Then we started working with a manufacturer and went through several rounds of tweaks to fine tune the flavour, texture and potency.
How did you source the suppliers for your products?
We worked with a specialist nutraceuticals sourcing company who have relationships with quality suppliers all over the world. They ran with our brief to find the most potent, cleanest options for each of the ingredients we planned to include.
What are some of the difficulties you are currently encountering with getting MoonBrew 100% certified organic?
Simple haha. We’re bootstrapped and don’t have enough money to pay for the certification. It’s more than a grand just to start the application to get the little badge. We’ll pursue certification when we have more working capital. On our next production run we’ll be including more organic ingredients for sure, and we’re currently nearly 80% organic by mass. At the time of our first production run there was a global supply shortage of organic MCT oil powder, but we had to get moving because there was no clear timescale for how long it might last.
Restorative Business Growth
How was the fundraising process for you?
We haven’t done that. We both saved money over the years knowing we would want to do our own thing when the right idea came through. Maybe we should raise. We’d be especially open to angels but we’re very much not in that loop. We’re nowhere near London, both went to state schools and non- fancy universities, all our friends and family are just pretty normal. We have not yet considered trading surfing-time for schmoozing-time, which again, probably we should. I fantasise about asking my CP clients haha, but that’s about as professional as asking the client for a sip of their coffee or something.
What is your business model?
At this point we hold our stock in Truro, Tom handles fulfilment for all wholesale and DTC orders. Obviously a 3PL is on the horizon but almost everything about the business so far has been a DIY situation (I’ve done all the branding, website, copy, design, product dev, accounting, admin, sales, ads, etc) so we’re probably still in that somewhat rate-limiting but lean mindset of We Can and Should Do Everything until certain operational functions become actually impossible.
What are your overall goals for growth and expansion, and why?
The margins are tighter, but we’re pretty focused on expanding wholesale rather than doing the standard DTC play. We don’t like the idea of constantly shovelling creative energy and serious money into the social media content furnace in order to do business. It’s a bottomless pit for energy and resource, you know? Tom and I are both taking great pains to minimise our screen time and social media dopamine dependence because we want to experience our Real Lives with as much clarity and presence as possible, so it would feel a bit ironic building a business on a model that relies heavily on paying Meta for eyeball monopolisation.
It’s like, are we entrepreneurs all just laying down and accepting that you have to pay a constantly fluctuating, opaque, and pretty fucking expensive tax to Zuck’s oversight-less attentional empire now, in order to sell things to consumers? That seems like a pretty flawed model, which funnels wealth across the Atlantic in a concerningly narrow way. I don’t especially mind the idea of CompSci nerds building wealth that will still benefit their offspring in a thousand years time but I don’t really want to pay to build an even more powerful international doomscrolling machine. The whole thing feels kind of neo-feudal. Maybe I’m dreaming, but I’d rather people found MoonBrew™ in their local health food shop or supermarket, not that supermarkets are a paragon of business ethics or anything; But for national distribution we’d probably need to demonstrate big DTC traction.
Foundational Power Naps
What motivates you?
My personal worldview is that we are just animals on a rock trying to stay alive and pass on genetic material. None of us chose to be here and we don’t really have any control over the macro-circumstances of our lives or the grand scheme of humanity, but we have a massive amount of agency when it comes to the micro – the day to day. Like we can make eye contact and properly beam at a stranger who was presenting as stern and cold, and make their unseen anxiety or stress a million times better for a little while. Without even knowing it, and without any real effort. And then maybe two minutes later they’ll be nicer and more present with the barista they order from, who in turn will feel less like a cog in a machine and more like someone who people like to be around.
So anyway it’s pretty woo woo and idealistic maybe, but I think we owe it to the beings around us to spread nice feelings whenever we can, and just try really hard to be good at something, in some area of our life, that makes us glow from the inside or is constructive in some small way in terms of its impact on other beings. I think about emotional contagion a tonne, and how we should each try to handle our own contagion responsibly. And I really truly believe that sleeping just 15-20% better meaningfully benefits hormones, mood, ability to make good decisions, and the way we interact and show up for others. I mean I’ve lived it.
The end-game motivation for me is simple though – freedom. I’ve observed billionaires living their lives and making it look pretty dang miserable, and I’ve observed myself getting de-sensitised to very fucking fancy surroundings. I’ve also done job roles that people find superficially ‘Cool’, and it didn’t like, do anything for me or to me. Like I never woke up in the morning and thought ‘wow, I’m a pilot’ or ‘wow, I’m a bodyguard… what a woman I am.’ That stuff is all just packaging. Same me, feeling not too dissimilar to how I felt when I was 14, just different outfit and email signature. So I’m not existing under the illusion that having more money, status, titles, or belongings would impact my inner life in a meaningful way.
Money is a tool that unlocks freedom and time though, like if you don’t have to consider finances as a major factor in decision making, and don’t have to do your own laundry, cooking, things like that. Time is the only non-renewable resource we have. You can build back lost / stolen / damaged money, health, relationships, faded skills. But every day you’re running out of hours left on earth. I know that’s kind of stating the obvious but we don’t think about it enough. Especially when we’re doomscrolling.
I also believe providing employment for other people in a company with a solid culture and being a good, kind, energising boss is a meaningful thing to do. The human species has colonised the entire planet through the sheer force of will to work in teams and create new things. For now, we are forced to trade time for money to some degree, and having a bad boss or a bad team adversely impacts your life in a way that is hard to overstate. So if I could build something that could support and train veterans, and give them non-miserable jobs, and be their boss and try my very hardest to protect them from toxicity, frustration, and financial instability, I think that would feel important.
What’s been your biggest lesson, fear, or failure?
My most useful lessons actually came from various bits of basic military and aircrew survival training. It completely rewired my sense of what I’m capable of. Before that I basically thought I was fundamentally very lazy but good at tests, because I could never concentrate in school and just crammed like a freak for exams. But the whole David Goggins thing of when you’re convinced you’re done, you’re only like 40% done – it’s truly true.
I was like oh, if the alternative is quitting, you will lose literally all the skin on your heels and keep on speed-marching until your boots are soaked with blood. You will carry half your body weight on your back and survive on little icy blinks of sleep on a roll-mat on the floor of a bleak forest in February, for days; No phone or connection to the outside world, no running water, no privacy, no comfort beyond a wooly hat and a portable stove that releases formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide when you burn it. You can exist without food or a tent for a week, you can build a shelter from damp sticks and eat live worms if that’s expected of you. You can do hard things. You’re a hard person. I don’t think there’s anything else I could’ve done that would’ve imprinted that into my bones as deeply as the military did.
Do you have a mentor or people you ask for advice?
Not really. I need that.
What is your opinion of the emerging psychedelic plant medicine space (cannabis / psilocybin)?
So important that it continues to emerge. I own Paul Stamets’ books, put it that way. But I do have a close connection to someone who probably had wiring that predisposed them to experiencing periods of psychosis and other long-term adverse consequences seemingly connected to weed and hallucinogen-use. So I hope we can get to a point where we have greater certainty on who should and shouldn’t explore it. Frustrating though; we know that the harm profile for alcohol is like universally bad for everyone, and yet you can buy it in every corner shop like it’s some kind of basic essential for daily life.
What does spirituality mean to you?
I basically became a self-taught secular buddhist when I was 16 when I chanced across a book about Buddha in a hotel room. Now I believe in god in the general, universal sense, not the floating man who has arbitrary preferences on who people should bone and what type of headgear women should cover their hair with God. A lot of my thinking is influenced by Buddhist philosophy combined with evolutionary psychology.
Unrelated, but I think there is so much happening on earth and between beings that can’t be explained or measured by science. If you think about our understanding of human biology 100 years ago, it’s laughable. But today we think we understand pretty much how the universe works, based on maths? That’s so pompous to me, not to shit on maths. 100 years is an infinitesimal little sneeze in the grand scheme of homo sapiens. Think of all the types of energy and particles and microbiology we had no clue about in the 1800s. There’s no doubt in my mind that more dimensions exist. But I don’t get too hung up on that stuff, right now we only know what we know and that’s cool too.
If time and money were no object, what would be on your to-do and to-see list?
I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of the world with my job so I don’t have wild burning travel desires. But I would like to go to Texas and Tennessee, especially Austin and Nashville, and canoe-camp down a very long river – I have a friend who used to look after Robbie Williams, he paddled the entire 2000 miles of the Yukon River. I solo cycled from my parent’s house in Dorset all the way down the west coast of France when I was about 22, before my phone had google maps or data roaming, so I know that kind of self-propelled speed is great for really feeling an environment. Also I love Japan – so maybe I’d motorcycle across Japan with someone rugged who could fix a motorbike, because I have no desire to learn myself. I would also want to build a multilayered wooden house on a hill in Uluwatu, Bali, and adopt all the cats or kids on the island that need care, and systemise that in a way that could continue after I die.
