~ Joseph Pack

ABOUT ME

This is the one opportunity on this site to talk about myself without trying to be useful.

The short version

THE STORY VERSION:

I founded the marketing agency Nativve in 2012 at the age of 21. At first, we took any clients who’d have us — power tool brands, wood flooring specialist, cafés. But we quickly focused on outdoor and lifestyle brands. The North Face, Patagonia, adidas, and more became our clients.

We had a unique (at the time) specialism of being ahead of 99% of marketers using social media advertising (mostly Facebook) and creating collaborative marketing campaigns between the brands and their retailers — driving measurable sales in store. With this uniqueness, and a way to prove our efforts, we grew quickly. Due to the nature of our work, often working in collaboration with in-house creative teams, we were able to run very lean, making a huge profit per headcount.

By 2015 we’d attracted the attention of a group of researchers working within the NHS and Imperial College London. They were struggling to attract enough participants to their clinical trials and had heard that our advertising approach might help. So we created a new company, Health Research UK (now Nativve Research) to help research teams find eligible participants — this experience working with clinical research teams, although I didn’t know it at the time, would have a profound impact when I came to found drugfreeadhd.org in 2021.

I was now 26. Owned a couple of exciting growing companies. Travelling across Europe. Sitting at the table with entrepreneurs and execs twice my age and being taken seriously. Everything seemed great. Until the 11th August 2016, when I woke up in hospital after suffering 5 major seizures from sleep deprivation as a result of a caffeine addiction (10 cups a day, every day).

Turns out I’d overdone it — burning the candle at both ends. 26 years old, living under the false pretence that I was bulletproof. I turned inwards, to meditation and philosophy (namely stoicism, devouring the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Upon self-reflection I noticed something unusual about the way I’d conducted myself both in education and in business. I was frantic, messy, and disorganised, and yet creative, brilliant, and ultra-confident when speaking in public.

I visited a therapist later that year to discover, rather unsurprisingly in retrospect, that I have ADHD. But, of course, as a self-starter who up until that point had never had a normal job (or boss) had created his own path — building a company that ‘worked’ around me.

Or did it?

Had I created the monster that put me in hospital? In the end, I couldn’t fix it so in late 2017 I sold all of my shares in the businesses and went travelling.

South East Asia the destination. Surfing, meditation, healthy food on the menu.

But within 3 months I got itchy feet. Humans weren’t put on this earth to doss off all day. We’re meant to work. I booked myself into a co-working house (a place where entrepreneurs hang out all day and night working on new ideas). There I met 3 Danish entrepreneurs working on a very early prototype of an innovative Fintech product. They had the technical and financial capabilities. But lacked a marketer. Within a month I’d joined the startup, owned a chunk of the company, and was ready to help them blast off. Next came conferences in Malaysia, Australia, and Singapore — on a mission to sell our software to the world.

For the next few years we raised millions, attracted customers (mostly in Denmark, Holland, and Germany), and looked set to challenge the invoice financing companies we set out to compete with. But it wasn’t to be. Mental health struggles within the company, internal power struggles, and extremely difficult investors made life hell. So, retaining my chunk of the company, I quit in the summer of 2021 to join The Tech Dept as a consultant. They hired me to build their startup offering. Over two years we built solid partnerships with many startup accelerators (Virgin Startups, Barclays Eagle Labs, Frog Capital, Plexus, and more). They now help dozens of startups build software that actually works the way it’s supposed to.

At the same time as working with The Tech Dept, I founded drugfreeadhd.org — at first, a newsletter to share my ongoing research and efforts to manage ADHD without medication. This quickly grew into a coaching, speaking, and training company — with podcast appearances, millions of social media views, a story in the Daily Mail.

Naturally, I now have specialist knowledge and expertise working within Fintech and Health Tech — mostly on marketing and product positioning. Alongside consulting for RE-Systems, a software company specialising in AirRail ticketing. A project I’m running in partnership with them and Luton DART has seen organic search traffic grow 486% since late 2024.