Mike Lee (boxer)

Lee is a native of Wheaton, Illinois, and attended Benet Academy in Lisle, where he played linebacker on the football team as a senior.⁠[1]

He earned a finance degree from the University of Notre Dame with a 3.80 GPA and won three 178-pound titles in the Bengal Bouts charity boxing tournament there.⁠[1]

Lee made his professional debut in May 2010 at Chicago’s UIC Pavilion. By July 2019 he was 21-0 with 11 knockouts and had held two junior light heavyweight belts.⁠[1]

He later recalled that he boxed professionally for ten years and fought at Madison Square Garden and on HBO.⁠[2]

In 2018 Lee and his sister Angie Lee founded Soul, an online CBD wellness company. Soul says it was born in Los Angeles, with the siblings packing orders themselves and their mother’s guest room serving as the first “warehouse.”⁠[2][3]

Lee challenged IBF super middleweight champion Caleb Plant at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, was knocked down three times and was stopped at 1:29 of the third round, his first professional loss. It was Plant’s first title defense.⁠[4]

In 2022 Lee and Angie Lee moved to Austin, Texas, and Soul made new hires that year.⁠[3]

He recalled that early on the company could not obtain a credit card merchant account and that Facebook and Google would not run its ads; it spent nothing on ads for its first two-plus years, growing through community, branding and an affiliate program.⁠[2]

In the interview he said Soul had just opened a physical retail store in Austin; the company had hired operators to run the business and spent about a quarter of its marketing budget on Facebook and a quarter on affiliates. Because of regulatory limits, Soul relied on education-based marketing, and affiliates could praise CBD but could not mention Soul or show its bottles.⁠[2]

He was interviewed on the street in Austin, Texas, by Hard Knocks Business in a video titled “$20 MILLION Hemp Entrepreneur,” whose description mentions his CBD brand @getsoul and his former pro boxing career. In the video he said he and his sister had bootstrapped the hemp-derived THC and CBD wellness company in a spare bedroom about seven years earlier and that it was on pace for about $20 million in revenue that year.⁠[5]

He said the initial investment was about $60,000, mostly inventory. He said the company faced a possible federal hemp ban and that Soul competed through branding and an R&D team that includes doctors.⁠[5]

Starting today, one can launch cheaply by using overseas web developers and AI tools such as Claude (video at 00:39).⁠[5]

Entrepreneurial success depends on getting back up each time you are knocked down; after ten rejections, the eleventh may be a yes (video at 01:01).⁠[5]

No amount of branding can save a bad product (video at 01:21).⁠[5]

Recurring revenue and subscriptions require a product customers are willing to take every day (video at 01:29).⁠[5]

Soul: Official website: https://getsoul.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]