We Surveyed 337 Dads Before Building Anything

Between 2 and 7 February 2026, 337 people completed our survey. 308 were fathers. 26 were partners of fathers. 3 were close friends. The survey was distributed through online parenting communities and organic sharing. No brand was mentioned. No product was pitched. Respondents had no idea who was behind the questions. We wanted honest data, not confirmation bias.

This is the story of why we started with research, what we found, and how it shaped every decision that followed.

Why we started with a survey, not a product

The supplement industry typically works in reverse. You formulate a product based on trends and intuition, then find the marketing angle that sells it. The research, if it exists at all, comes after, and it’s designed to validate decisions already made, not to inform them.

We wanted to do this differently. Not because we’re more virtuous than other brands, but because we were building something that didn’t exist yet. There was no “dad supplement” category to copy from. If we were going to design something for fathers specifically, we needed to understand their reality specifically, not just project our assumptions onto them.

So we built a survey. Three paths: one for fathers (13 questions covering demographics, energy, symptoms, and supplement experience), one for partners (6 questions validating what they observe), and one for close friends. Every question was designed to test a specific hypothesis about what fathers actually need.

We set clear thresholds before collecting a single response. If the data hadn’t supported the product concept, we would have changed course or stopped entirely. That’s what separates research from a vanity exercise.

What the data told us

The findings validated the core premise: fathers are depleted at scale, and existing solutions aren’t working.

The majority of hypotheses passed their thresholds. The ones that didn’t were equally valuable because they reshaped our approach. You can explore the full findings, methodology, and data tables in The State of Dad Depletion, our complete research report.

What depletion actually looks like

69% of fathers rated their energy at “getting by” or worse on a 5-point scale. Only 3.6% described themselves as fully charged. The vast majority clustered around “getting by,” functional but diminished. This isn’t acute crisis. It’s chronic, normalised, low-grade depletion.

When we looked at symptoms, the picture deepened. 54% reported poor or broken sleep. 50% reported irritability or short temper. 42% experienced afternoon energy crashes. 36% described brain fog or poor concentration. The average father reported 2.6 overlapping symptoms.

This multi-symptom profile was critical for the formulation. A single-ingredient supplement would address one pathway while leaving others unsupported. The data told us fathers need a system, not a single ingredient. Multiple symptoms require multiple mechanisms of action.

The partner gap that changed our thinking

We included partner responses expecting them to roughly confirm father self-reports. They didn’t. They exceeded them, significantly.

Across nearly every symptom category, partners observed depletion at higher rates than fathers reported it themselves. The gap was largest for afternoon energy crashes and irritability, where partners consistently saw 15-20 percentage points more impact than fathers acknowledged.

The implication is significant: fathers are systematically underreporting their own depletion. Whether through stoicism, normalisation, or the simple inability to assess your own state accurately when you’re chronically depleted, the people closest to them see a more impacted version than fathers themselves acknowledge.

This finding shaped how we communicate. Dads won’t necessarily self-identify with the problem if you describe it in clinical terms. They’ve normalised it. It’s why phrases from the survey itself, like “running on low battery mode,” resonate more than clinical language about cortisol dysregulation. Recognition matters more than diagnosis.

What previous supplement experience told us

Over half of fathers had tried supplements before. That’s the good news: the category isn’t foreign to them. The revealing data was in what happened next.

Among those who’d tried supplements and stopped, the reasons clustered around three themes: couldn’t tell if they were working, too complicated to maintain, and too expensive for uncertain benefit. The most telling segment were fathers who believed supplements had actually made a difference but quit anyway, pointing to friction in habit formation rather than problems with the product itself.

This told us three things about the product:

First, simplicity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a requirement. Two capsules morning, two capsules evening. No complicated stacking. No twelve-bottle regime. These are men with zero spare bandwidth for complexity.

Second, evidence matters more than marketing. Fathers ranked “evidence of efficacy” as their most important purchase factor, followed by transparency. These aren’t impulse buyers. They want to see the science, check the doses, and make an informed decision.

Third, the supplement industry has already lost their trust. They’ve been burned by proprietary blends, token doses, and products that didn’t deliver. Our transparency, publishing every dose, acknowledging what’s clinical and what’s supportive, isn’t just a brand value. It’s a direct response to what fathers told us they need.

When we gave them a blank page

The most important question in the survey wasn’t multiple choice. It was open-ended: “What’s the hardest thing about being a dad that nobody really talks about?”

97 fathers, over half the sample, chose to write something. No prompting. No incentive. Just a blank text field and the rare invitation to be honest.

The responses clustered into eight themes that emerged organically from the data: carrying the burden in silence, putting on a brave face, the constant feeling of not doing enough, guilt about self-care, time that belongs to everyone else, provider pressure, loneliness despite being surrounded by people, and identity loss.

These themes didn’t just inform our messaging. They informed the product itself. When fathers describe “running on low battery mode but trying to give fast-charge energy,” they’re describing a specific physiological state: cortisol dysregulation combined with neurotransmitter depletion combined with inadequate sleep recovery. When they describe “the constant feeling that you are not doing enough,” they’re describing the cognitive consequence of decision fatigue and depleted executive function.

The qualitative data gave us the language. The quantitative data gave us the targets. Together, they built the brief for a formulation that addresses what fathers actually experience, not what a supplement company assumes they need.

What the data built

Every significant product decision traces back to survey findings:

Two-formula system (AM + PM) because the symptom data showed energy and sleep as co-occurring problems requiring different mechanisms at different times of day.

Multi-ingredient approach because the average father reports 2.6 overlapping symptoms, not a single issue that a single ingredient can fix.

Therapeutic doses throughout because evidence of efficacy was the number one purchase driver, and underdosing is the most common reason supplements don’t work.

Bioavailable forms throughout because transparency was the number two purchase driver, and using cheap forms while claiming premium quality is the opposite of transparent.

Four capsules per day (two AM, two PM) because the data showed that complexity kills adherence. Any more than this and compliance drops.

Full dose transparency on the label because this audience has been burned by proprietary blends before. They want to see the numbers. All of them.

What we acknowledge

We’re transparent about the product, so we should be transparent about the research too.

337 responses is a solid sample, but it’s not a nationally representative study. The margin of error is approximately plus or minus 5.6% at 95% confidence. The respondents self-selected through online communities, which introduces potential bias. These are engaged, English-speaking fathers who chose to complete a survey about health.

The partner subsample (n=26) is directionally useful but too small for statistical certainty. The consistency of the self-report gap across five of six symptom categories suggests a real phenomenon, but it needs a larger study to confirm.

The open-text responses are qualitatively rich but inherently unstructured. The eight themes we identified are our interpretation of the clustering patterns. Other researchers might categorise differently.

None of this invalidates the findings. It contextualises them. And context is what separates honest research from marketing dressed up as science.

Why this matters beyond the product

The most significant finding of the survey isn’t about supplements. It’s about the state of fatherhood itself.

92% of fathers reported at least one symptom of depletion. Over half chose to write openly about struggles they feel they can’t talk about. Partners consistently see more impact than fathers admit to. And the prevailing response to all of this, from society at large, is silence.

We built Good Dad because the data told us fathers need specific nutritional support that doesn’t currently exist. But the survey revealed something bigger: fathers need to be asked how they’re doing. Not in the casual “alright, mate?” way that expects “yeah, fine” in return. Actually asked, with space to actually answer.

337 people gave us their time, their honesty, and their data. The product is one way we’re using it. Publishing the research is another. Both are attempts to close the same gap: between what fathers are experiencing and what anyone is doing about it.

We started with a survey because we didn’t want to assume. What we found was bigger than a business case. It was a pattern of depletion that nobody is tracking, nobody is measuring, and nobody is addressing at scale.

We’re starting with supplements. But the conversation needs to be much wider than that.