We did around $21M last year with a team of 5 full time + outsourcing…. I thought I’d share our tech stack with you👇
Disclaimer - I’ve never taken a dime from a SAAS company lol
This Silly Tik Tok hit 20M views🤯
❌ No dancing
❌ No trend
❌ No sexualizing
✅ Genuine
✅ Passionate
In 5 days, we had 200K followers, $350K in sales, & everyone now knew us
I’ll post more on how we go viral!!
Every employee we’ve ever had has asked for equity
Yet they missed the first 2 years getting Frost Buddy to $20M while my brother & I paid ourselves nothing bc we physically couldn’t
Equity comes with risk & sometimes it seems overlooked after things get smoother
Influencer with 10k followers
- $4000 for 1 video
Me: How about 20% Tik Tok Shop Commission instead so it’s a win win
Them: No
Me: Ok next
I love tik tok shop!!
Went out to a bar last night w/ friends
Didn’t drink though
A guy asked me what I did for work
I told him “I sell cups”
He was not impressed & the convo ended shortly after
Update: got the vehicle
Told the guy I’d just pay everything up front
He proceeded to tell me that wouldn’t help my credit history
I proceeded to tell him I really did not care
But hey! First new car since 16. Kind of cool that Frost Buddy has come this far
This is why I love DTC Twitter
An extra $30K / month from a simple Aftersell recommendation
AND it’s all stale inventory 😩😍
I mean a 20% conversion come on!!!
HUGE HUGE news 🏒🔥
Frost Buddy is happy to announce partnership with the National Hockey League 🏒
Every NHL team will be coming soon!
Excited to watch this unfold this year
This ad has been crushing for us!
Why do Press Articles Work?
✅
#1
Thumbstoppers on social media
✅ Gives off “viral” appeal
✅ Sparks curiousity to click through
Steal it and try it
How the heck did business owners back in the day become millionaires without tweeting and posting their accomplishments and processes everyday? 🤯
Truly mind blowing
One of our top performing ads is this fake IG story style with quotes customers have told me in the Facebook group.
Sometimes the more organic the photo, the better too
Plus it took me 1 minute to create
@oliver__b1
Several reasons.
Everyone is different. Usually passion first. Lifelong friends. Free tuition. Connections. Olympic potential. Discipline & skills.
In my experience college sports was 10x better than having a multi million dollar biz
Hired a new head of ecom
My college buddy looked em up & asked if they went to college bc he didn’t see it
I said tbh I have no clue
Shows how important college is in this space
Tik Tok Shop Tip MegaThread👇 Bookmark this!
Day 1
My rep told me, if I have a video linked to shop get 2-3 sales,
I can email her the link & she will push it for me
1st thing I’d do is get some sales so you can get a rep. Their entire job is your growth
Tik Tok Shop had a conversion rate of 2.5% in December vs 0.3% in January
I’d argue it’s heavily due to the subsidy deals in Dec.
Next one is 2/6 - 2/9 so I’ll be tracking conversion changes in that period.
Best thing I’ve ever done for retail sales is create renders to show stores EXACTLY what it will & should look like
Work in progress but 2023 is looking much better bc of it!
I took one marketing class my senior year in college
Frost Buddy was already doing 7 figure months
Got a C- in the class
Professor told me we’d never make it in the market
You never know where the fire will come from
Entrepreneurship is:
when your Shopify theme randomly shits the bed & no one can buy from your store & you’re spending thousands on ads so you’re all of the sudden losing money without touching a single thing
Just got denied a car loan for $50K bc I have no “history” of loans & my “salary” isn’t high enough 😂
I showed them my tax return and they didn’t care lol
Truly amazing
In year 1, we did $10M on Shopify
Then we added Amazon
Then we added retail
Then we added corporate custom
Then we added Shopify custom
This will lead to $30M+
It was much easier diversifying where customers find us than getting Shopify to $30M
I spend $500K / mo. on meta ads
I make every video
I film with an iPhone
I’m not a great editor
We operate at. 2.8-3.2x “in platform”
You don’t have to spend thousands on creative to be effective
🔥🚀 Exciting News! 🚀🔥
📱 My Tik Tok Shop BACK IN ACTION! 🙌
Setting my sights on a $4-6M Tik Tok year - and you're invited on the journey! 🚀 Here's my playbook for success:
Just landed our own licenses for Bama, Illinois, Iowa State, Utah State, Kansas State 🙌
I love the licensing process bc there is a barrier to entry but once you nail it once, it’s rinse and repeat!!
To the moon we go
Got off DTC Twitter for awhile.
Been scrolling for about 10 minutes.
Realized 99% of the content is pointless, clickbait, engagement craving shit that doesn’t really help at all in building
Just do stuff & you’ll learn
Started batch making Linkedin posts this year
Sat down Sunday to knock out the week
Impressions are wayyy up just purely by taking extra time to put real thought into value I can give
Same is gonna go for X
Just landed a massive deal to end the week that probably wouldn’t have happened without Linkedin
As someone that almost stopped posting bc I couldn’t find the value for a DTC business, we’ve found a huge opp in corporate + licensing collabs
As for X, still searching
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Frost Buddy
The difference between a $20M / year product & a $200k / year product is…
The idea. The work is identical
In an interview I told a guy we were at $20-$30M ARR without thinking much about it
He couldn’t believe it
I feel like as you grow, you don’t realize what you’ve accomplished when you always have your head down
It was nice to step back for a second and see it
My Tik Tok this weekend is at 2.4M views
This is past 7 days on Tik Tok Shop
Only showing this bc I know TT Shop is so new & no one has any clue. Most of this is from that 1 video tbh
The bigger win imo is the ability to push that video with shop ads + paid media elsewhere
Year Over Year Up 80% So Far!
Omni-channel is a huge help for us
Our meta is still crushing tbh & I truly give credit to my media buyer (happy to connect), but also we are producing a shit ton of creative every week
DTC is shiny, but it’s just a piece of business
Hopped on a meeting with Wonderment today
It took 5 minutes, they showed me the setup, the value, why I need it
I told them let’s do it & hopped off
That’s bc it’s a great product & it’s solving a problem of mine
One of the best decisions we’ve made - in house fulfillment
The amount of control & savings so far within a short period is more than we’d even accounted for
If I could go back, we’d probably start it that way
Tik Tok Shop doesn’t always crush 😂
One thing I’ve learned is you can send product to 1k affiliates & you’ll get maybe 20 posting consistent
I’m still failing to see how it will scale, but I’m sticking with it
One thing about being early is trial and error. Stick with it!
Inventory is just like the stock market 💰
When your product is hot, you’re like I should’ve bought more
When the product sucks, you’re like dang I shouldn’t have bought that many
You never will get it right
Take your wins & don’t be greedy
Cut your losses quickly
This saved us hundreds of thousands this year
Having a team on the ground overseas doing extra inspection on top of our supplier
We get probably 100-200 photos every shipment of
- defects found
- color screw ups
- labels offcentered
- boxes ripped
Been a game changer
I found people using the Frost Buddy wrong at a tailgate yesterday
Went over and showed them how
Introduced myself after!
Guy goes “you must be a f***in millionaire, this is genius”
I went on to tell him
I’m actually a billionaire
This was an entire days worth of orders 3 years ago
My bro was shipping out of his State Farm office
Now we probably ship this many every 15 minutes or so
A nice reminder to anyone that’s starting out
You have to hit 10 orders before 100
100 before 1000
Keep at it
The Masters sells $70M of merch in 1 week every year
Next year, our Masters Frost Buddy will be there 🔥 I’ll be even more excited for this week at that time!
We will see if y’all’s mystery box idea works
Midjourney knocked this out in 45 seconds!
Prompt: mystery box, 3D render, black, white question marks, shadow under, white background, high quality
Met with Bucees yesterday about retail 2023
The buyer pretty much sold me on Frost Buddy
Plus he’d already seen his sample bc he was in my Facebook Group
Content drives the entire machine in todays DTC
✅ Organic - Ads - Community
Start today & don’t stop
Dear Sales People,
If you insult a part of my business, then tell me you have the solution, you still aren’t getting the business bc I now don’t like you
Has a cold insult ever worked?
Tik Tok Shop Update🚨
- 20 affiliates in week 1 that requested
- Doing roughly $1500-2000 / day
- View count of Frost Buddy is 🚀
- Seeing good affiliate results already
- Learning the system everyday
- No drop in site / amazon rev
This is a product photo from 2 years ago
I’m not joking, I used styrofoam as backdrops😂
Just goes to show you, if you truly stay at something, you have no choice but to improve
& you don’t have to be smart, clearly
This is Brock in college at midnight making “Fit Dough”
It was a healthy, edible, protein cookie dough
I can’t even tell you how many packs I made
It didn’t work out, no one saw this one, but it’s proof that if you keep trying, something sticks
Frost Buddy is having our highest in platform Meta ROAS in 3 years this month
Absolutely crazy! What’s the secret?
Not much. A shit ton of creative testing, amazing products, new releases
Creative volume is so important at scale
I turned people returning false products to our warehouse into a 500k video
One comment said “The first thought you had was to turn this into marketing?”
Yes, that’s exactly it. Every piece of a business can be great content
You just have to test it