End Of Service: AquaBiomics Is Closing

Seven years ago we started AquaBiomics, the first DNA testing company serving the aquarium and aquaculture industry. Today we’re announcing that we’re closing the business at the end of the summer.

What Does This Mean For You?

What Happened?

I started this business because I believed our service filled an important need in the hobby and industry. I’m sincerely grateful to all our clients who have shared our vision and supported us over the years. And I’m sorry to have to go.

Out of respect and gratitude for our supporters over the years, I’m writing to explain the reasons for this decision. There’s no big reveal here, no big story. The reason is kind of boring: it comes down to scaling.

When we started this business we intentionally priced our service as low as we possibly could, to make it as widely accessible as possible. This gave us extremely thin margins (25 to 30%, depending how you juggle the numbers).

On paper those margins work when the scale is large enough. In practice those margins have meant that I’ve spent seven years working full time for approximately minimum wage.

This doesn’t mean the business failed – in fact we grew quickly at first, and since then have consistently achieved 10 to 14% annual growth. Given another decade this would give me a livable salary. But that’s an awfully long time to ask my family to live on this income level.

My scaling plan relied on distribution, but it turned out that this required much higher margins. (You always hear margins are low in this industry right up until you try to get a distribution deal). Honestly, even at wholesale prices that gave away essentially all of our margin, we struggled to set up distribution. This realization changed my perspective.

Without distribution, we cannot scale as quickly as I needed us to scale, so I made the hard decision to close. I’m not willing to put my family through a decade of slow, linear growth while all our costs just keep going up.

I’ve decided to return to teaching, and just signed the contract for a new faculty position. With that, I’m announcing today that we’ll be closing AquaBiomics.

A few critics may insist they know the “real reason”, and may opine loudly on forums and social media about it. So I wanted to share the actual reason for this decision with you here. Some have criticized turnaround times, customer service, website design. And I’ll acknowledge there is plenty of room for improvement. But in spite of any of these issues, we were successfully testing samples and diagnosing tanks and growing over 10% every year.

The reason we’re closing isn’t any of this – it’s the numbers. I built my service with a low profit margin, distribution in this industry requires much higher margins, and without distribution we can’t grow fast enough to keep me paying my bills. We’ve been contemplating this for some time. This is a difficult but deliberate decision.

I’m extremely grateful to our supporters and clients over the years. Thanks to your experiments and your support, together we’ve learned a lot about the microbial ecology of reef tanks, and I wish we could continue these efforts. I’d love to see the state of our knowledge in 5 or 10 years if we could keep going. But it’s simply not financially possible for me to continue. I gave it many years of full time effort – I don’t think I’ll lose much sleep feeling like I gave up too soon. I hope you understand.

And again, sincerely – thank you for your patience and support over the years. It’s been a privilege exploring new frontiers in aquarium science with you.

-Eli Meyer
AquaBiomics LLC