Hola, I’m Shan. I run Xandro Lab, a longevity science brand in Singapore. Every Sunday I write these notes, part building diary, part thinking out loud. Today is less about business and operations, more a journal of what’s been happening.
I took the longest break from writing, 8 weeks of no Sunday writing. That’s the longest since I started writing in March 2023. Writing religiously every Sunday has been a life goal. As I have been writing, I realise I am talking about the same things in different versions: problems with business, what we are doing in marketing (I have stopped doing this, should restart), and health/longevity topics.
Truth be told, I am down this year. It’s been a very tough year in business. I have had to let go of all my ambitions and hold the fort to prevent degrowth. The year started bad and only improved slightly. Now that we are in Q4, I am still not seeing signs of improvement. I may have taken calls that weren’t really great for business.
But anyways, today isn’t a deep dive. Today is a sharing session about what’s been happening. I will pick up certain items and deep-dive in the coming weeks. And yes, I would like to restart writing every Sunday. I feel guilty whenever I miss a Sunday.
Today, I will talk about
My marathon training journey
Ups and downs in business this year
Finding my better half
#1 Six Months to 42K
I have always wanted to run a marathon, but for most of my life it was a very distant dream. Almost an impossibility. The goal I had kept for myself was 5K, which I completed a few years ago. Last year, I started wanting to run slightly longer and would do a 15K maybe once every quarter. At the start of this year, when we started our run club, I began running 10K every week. Then it became, okay, if I can run 10K, why not 21K? I received a free ticket to a half marathon, signed up, found a coach and surprisingly managed to finish it.
That gave me the confidence to attempt 42K. I manage marathon training myself with the help of AI chatbots. I have been using ChatGPT and Claude, along with my training data, to understand what I should do every week.
Over the last six months, running has slowly become the core of my life. My schedule now depends on it. Mondays and Fridays are generally off. On Wednesday, I wake up between 5 and 5:30 for intervals. Saturday is the long run. What started as 90 minutes became two hours, and now I spend 3-4 hours running every Saturday. Surprisingly, I enjoy it.
It has also completely changed how I eat. I previously trained fasted and was almost scared of carbohydrates. Now I eat before long runs, consume plenty of protein and carbs, and actively take gels during training. Today, I can run 15, 20 or even 30 kilometres in the morning and still have a fairly normal day.
Running has also helped me through a difficult year in business. There are many things at work I cannot immediately fix or control. Having something physical to work towards has prevented me from over-obsessing about the numbers and losing my mind. As I became comfortable with longer distances, I also started believing that if I keep showing up and doing the right things, other parts of life can eventually improve too.
I have also had to adapt the training. The haze in Singapore has been bad, and after one of my longest outdoor runs, I came back with a blocked nose, a bad throat and took a week to feel normal. That finally pushed me to the treadmill. I used to wonder how anyone could run for hours while standing in the same place. This week, I did my intervals, 28K long run and recovery run indoors. I had 2.5 litres of water, two bottles of electrolytes and a toilet close by. The room was cool, I could start at 8 am, and surprisingly, it turned out to be more fun.
The marathon is now three weeks away. I still do not know what will happen after 35K, but for the first time, 42K no longer feels impossible.
#2 Holding the Fort
If you have followed my writing, you will realise I keep talking about the same thing over and over again: rebuilding. We started the year quite badly. We had messed up our inventory levels and our ability to fulfil orders, and the first priority was to fix that. It also meant that most of our cash was stuck, and there was very little left for anything else.
I had to cut costs everywhere. We let go of some team members, changed agencies, and changed the entire plan for 2026. I realised quite early that the slowdown would last longer than expected. But it also gave me time to rethink what the brand could become.
We brought in creative talent and spent 3-4 months rebranding Xandro. At the same time, I decided to change our entire backend and move to Shopify because the earlier platform was not built for scale. I believed we could still scale by the end of the year. Obviously, that is not happening, but the backend still needed to be fixed. We did the migration quite scrappily. Social media has stopped during this period (not a good place to be), but I felt I need to fix the fundamentals: the brand, the assets, the website and how we present ourselves.
The biggest crash was TikTok. It was our largest and most profitable platform, and competition crushed us there this year. I am still trying to understand how we come back. Shopee has sustained, which has allowed us to keep pushing, but it also has not grown as much as I had hoped. Losing one strong channel makes the business much more dependent on the remaining ones, and that is risky.
I also cancelled most of the planned product launches and limited them to products that could generate revenue or differentiate us significantly. We have worked on solving the caking problem in Protocol X, which quite a few users had noticed. We upgraded our highest-selling Magnesium Glycinate, but that also became a bigger mess than expected because consumers did not understand the technical language we used. So now I have to solve the naming and communication around that as well.
There have been some good changes. We are working with more high-quality UGC creators. I stopped spending on events and moved more of that money towards creators, including some bigger faces that I hope to associate with the brand. I had also wanted to work more closely with longevity clinics, and we are finally doing our first clinic collaboration later this month.
My biggest takeaway is that I failed badly on growth this year. Revenue has been far, far away from my expectations. But I have used this period of slower growth to rebuild the brand, reduce costs and fix some of the fundamentals. I do not see the year becoming easier immediately, but I am still working on solving it.
#3 Starting a New Chapter
This year has also brought a sweet change in my personal life. I felt I was finally in the right place, emotionally and financially, to build a life with a partner. That search brought me to my life partner.
It is quite surprising because I never really liked meeting people through my parents. Somehow it always felt strange to me. But in this case, right from the first conversation, it was amazing. There was thrill, there was energy, and the conversation felt very easy. I still remember that first call earlier this year. We met a few times after that, and needless to say, I realised this was it.
Much of this year has therefore gone into getting to know her, travelling together and spending time together. She was not based in Singapore, so there was a lot of travelling. There were also personal events to organise, including one in Singapore and another one still coming up. All of this has taken time and effort, and I have given that effort quite consciously.
Before this, my weekends were mostly about lying around, checking work messages, fixing some problems, attending a work event and then doing nothing. Life with a partner feels very different. Your time is no longer only your own. You have to make sure the other person is happy, taken care of and has enough of your time.
Even my everyday schedule has changed. I used to come home at 8, 8:30 or sometimes 9. Now I am usually home by 6:30. Even 6:45 feels late. Sometimes I leave the office at 5. I come home to food, and my house really feels like a home now. I am also talking much more with my family. Earlier it was mostly hi, hello and bye. Now it feels like they know much more about my life.
Almost everything is changing: when I go to the office, when I come home, how much work I do after office, what I do on weekends and the choices I make for the future. Some moments feel strange because it is so different from how I used to spend my time. But I do not mind it. It is a good change, and I am happy to make these changes with someone I like and love.
While many difficult things have been happening in business, this part of my life has remained strong and continued developing. It has kept me going. I want to enjoy it, make new memories and figure out how both of us can build a good life together.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!
The goal of today’s writing wasn’t really to share one specific message or do a deep dive into one topic. It was simply to get back to writing.
So many more things are happening. I have just been caught up in life. At some point, it became a very simple choice. Do I sit down and write, do I go for training, or do I go out and spend time with my partner? I chose to do the other things instead of writing.
I was in a very different place in life three and a half years ago. Writing and building brought me to where I am right now. As things change, I am also consciously learning, making an effort and trying to understand how everything should fit together.
Behind all the business, running and building a brand, I am still a normal human being trying to live a life. Trying to make a life, hopefully a decent and humble one.
I hope you enjoyed this write-up. I kept it very casual, and I am looking forward to continuing to write in the coming weeks.
Cheers,
Shan
Great one