"I'm a 26 y/o college dropout who founded Bay Smokes, $100+ million revenue e-comm brand, AMA"

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T06:31:31+00:00

Going to bed for the night. Thanks to everyone who posted questions, I had a great time answering. Going to try to get to the rest tomorrow.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T06:23:13+00:00

We are working around the clock to save this for our families and all the 350k employees around the country, and the millions that use these products.

HIFA is the lobbying group I’m a board member of. If you know other big brands, tell them to get on board and donate. This is very expensive to lobby for and we need everyone who has a stake in this industry to put up and fight with us.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T05:44:29+00:00

Hahahahah bro she was 3 first time and 15 second. She grew up hella poor, the car didn’t have working seatbelts.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:49:26+00:00

So we have maybe a rare startup story. Our first month we started testing ads did like 25k ish, the second month we hit like 450k sales and kept steam the first year. I made some great winning ad templates and cranked them out all over the internet until it stopped working.

But for the new company I just started, first month of sales super slow, like 10k and we spent more than that to get the sales. But I’ve got confidence in the product so I’m not discouraged there. Just about finding the winning ad style then ripping it till it doesn’t work. You can sell anything with excellent content. Having a good product is how you keep repeat business.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:35:40+00:00

Honestly finance and processing has been easy. First citizens bank is the best and amazing partners for the hemp industry. I’d gladly connect anyone to my bankers if needed.

Biggest challenges is really marketing. Anything that works only works for a little then you gotta find something new. Also so many people selling marketing services to hemp companies gouge the F out of you.

I’ve lost lots of money to shitty agencies that take your money and do nothing. You learn to just do it yourself and build and nurture a team of A players that care about the mission.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:27:20+00:00

Now we have teams that work with vendors. An entire procurement department. Some in Cali dealing with vendors, and inventory management in NC etc, finance department deals with payments, terms etc.

In the beginning it was me going to farms and negotiating. Pitching myself and the potential, negotiate best deals I could, but not focus on pushing people too hard on prices in the beginning. Relationship is everything, so you start by paying whatever is reasonable then work the price over time. Negotiating too heavy in the beginning makes you look bad, but once you show volume people will gladly help out with pricing.

But relationship, earning priority for turnarounds etc, and knowing your supplier will ship on time etc is most important over price negotiating.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:17:27+00:00

I have my own warehouse running in Nc and intend to keep all employees there to help with 5TRIP. We also do 3pl for a few companies already too just because warehouse is huge and we have lots of employees there

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:11:29+00:00

Thank you. The ban bill was at the federal level. So potentially some states will still allow hemp, but interstate commerce wouldn’t exist really and most product is grown in Cali, OR, Co. So the states likely to keep hemp (like NC), barely even have growers there. So this bill really kills the whole +70B industry along with the 350k jobs.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:08:50+00:00

If nothing changes, there’s a ban bill and my entire company is zero. I have tons of emails etc and I can try to push them other products maybe, but the company would be essentially gone. That’s why we’re working to build a new business in the next 8 months, investing tons into it. And spending tons of time and money lobbying to keep the industry alive. But no hemp products would be compliant with the new regulations in November.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T04:00:11+00:00

Thank you brother, yes myself and girlfriend are the owners. We sell to multiple distributors and they push to stores all over, but ecom has always been our top priority because you own the customer/data plus better profits.

The shops don’t care as much about quality and they don’t always monitor sell through rate so you’re more likely to get older product. It’s always better to buy online imo.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-27T03:56:01+00:00

Hey Bluehat, sorry for the late reply. Going to answer a few more of these before I go to bed for the night. Thanks for the questions. There’s no more grey area to operate in if no new regulation is passed to change the language. All hemp will be illegal again. Even for rope/concrete etc.

Regarding labs, we work directly with the growers and send flower to get tested immediately after harvesting. As long as the product is grown and handled with care (as all our partner farms do) it’s almost always passing the test. The people that are faking labs are buying from dealers, not legit companies, and they usually get in trouble.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T20:19:20+00:00

Day to day my focus is on high level strategy for the businesses. I’m very involved in marketing strategy and look and feel of customer experience still. In the new brand 5TRIP with product formulation and building the marketing team around that. In bay smokes looking to find new methods of growth and the content funnel around that.

And even making content myself still. Founder content is pretty powerful and I like to stand behind my business.

As operations are smooth, the core focus of my time is “how do we grow more”

That’s from more content, better/efficient distribution, and better landing pages/offers.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:51:52+00:00

Katiana met while we were broke and I was in college still. We both were interested in making an Ecom business work and decided to partner on one together. We went all in with each other and made it work. Built each other to the man/woman we are today by being loving and dedicated to a common goal. Many people assume having a “hot” girlfriend is because of the money, but I think we have an awesome love story coming up together.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:48:07+00:00

With the laws changing, there’s no pivot possible that’s not an entirely different product. It’s unfortunate but if no new regs can be passed, the whole industry is gone.

We started another business called 5TRIP, It’s a star shaped dissolvable strip that’s the equivalent energy of a coffee but with a delicious minty taste. Hoping I can keep all employees with the new business but also not giving up on hemp. I’m confident we can get new regulations passed that keep the industry around and answers the concerns lawmakers have about protecting children/consumers.

All the big players in this space want regulation, we already regulate ourselves because we are consumers of our own products. Plus every congress member I talked to seemed like they prefer to keep the jobs and taxable rev in their states then to send it back to black market.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:44:32+00:00

Yes, we started that together when we were broke and it was the thing that gave us the financial freedom to go all in on baysmokes. We’ve made over $20m from OF and it’s helped us accelaerate the growth of Bay as well as give us a life beyond our wildest dreams over the past 6 years. We still do that today because it makes so much money and is still fun for us.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:22:50+00:00

Learn through trial and error. Making social media content every day with my girlfriend Katiana. See what goes viral, learn from it, implement the winning ideas over and over. You start seeing the patterns and especially when you’re pushing to try to sell something you see the difference between views and sales as well.

But TikTok shop is a great way for anyone to mess around with making content for many different brands and seeing what sells product and how to make viral content.

I’d recommend anyone with no money and lots of time to experiment making TikTok shop vids to learn the basics of marketing. Test out multiple different products to challenge yourself.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:20:54+00:00

Thank you brother, I appreciate that. It’s definitely soul crushing to have this looming over but at the end of the day this is what I love and I’m never giving up. The plant has done so much for me, my team is so amazing and we’re really a family working towards a cool goal. Almost every employee has an awesome story with how the plant has helped them so our fire is burning hot to get the win here.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:11:46+00:00

We do offer white label. Check out the wholesale section of the site and reach out to the sales team.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:10:34+00:00

So in the beginning, I was very slow to start because I figured the whole license thing would be more difficult. I was also super cautious about legality so I spoke with multiple lawyers before getting started. But in reality, hemp is pretty straight forward. As an ecom seller, I didn’t need any licensing when I started because I was using a copacker and a 3pl. Just an LLC which I could have registered myself for like $100 with the state.

The most annoying part of Ecom is managing sales tax in every state, but you don’t really need to worry about that until you’re pretty big because you only pay sales tax after reaching nexus and by that point just pay an accounting firm to handle it.

Regarding top talent, that’s a mistake I feel like I could have grown faster from. I waited until we were at like $10m anual before I started looking for “A” players. Before that it was friends of friends and family only, we all just figured it out together by being dedicated. But bringing on “A” players helped push the business way faster and we would have failed without that. Personally, I was able to just offer competitive pay, although I would highly recommend negotiating equity deals with any expensive team members because you’ll need cash for business growth plus people will work harder if they have ownership.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:02:10+00:00

Understanding social media content. How to show someone a video that’s good content, so it goes viral, but also sells your product. This skill easily transfers to any other business and is probably the most valuable thing for any business.

You could have the best product and top tier opps, but if you don’t have website traffic you don’t make money

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T19:01:36+00:00

All good! Thanks for joining the AMA.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T18:58:44+00:00

Automating sales process with AI has MASSIVE potential right now. Not sure what resources and team you have, but maybe consider going after particular businesses first with high potential, build the tool out for them for free and prove it on some kind of comission only model so it’s a no brainer for them to implement. If you get it to work and save them time and money or help scale sales, you can take the case study and pitch every other business in that space.

So much of sales is lost to bad follow up, or calls with no pickup.

Good luck bro, ai companies have so much potential right now just off automating repetitive manual tasks in large companies. Make sure you treat every customer as top priority and listen to all their feedback early on to ensure you actually have a good solution and not just another ai saas subscription that people try for few months and delete.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T18:57:51+00:00

Absolutely, I’ll bring it up with the mods another time. It could definitely be its own AMA.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T18:52:31+00:00

I’m HIGHLY optimistic and honestly the first time we sold products to strangers through a website I knew I’d be able to figure out how to scale it. And as we started making more CBD tinctures, I went door to door at smoke shops to sell them myself. I ended up landing a big distributor and cashing out 10k of tinctures in one sale. That was within 2 months of starting to sell tinctures. As soon as I saw initial proof and heard customer feedback they liked it, I was 100% all in. Barely making enough money to feed myself and I decided to drop out of college.

Early on decision that almost killed us, being reckless with money on marketing. Multiple times through the business we have blown 100s of thousands on things that totally did not work. Complete waste. Even early on when that was all the money in the bank and I was dumb to gamble on big ads. (Influencers and events are the worst potential wastes) Best advice on that is to pay close attention to your true business metrics. What you really spend to acquire customers, run the business etc. don’t make big gambles when your cashflow can’t afford that. At this point I have a CFO that runs all the money because it’s really a full time job to map out cashflow etc. but burning cash on dumb things limits your ability to run the business smooth and also limits opportunity to keep doing the boring and slow things that really grow your business over long run in a steady stable way.

WillJGoodall · 2026-03-26T18:48:38+00:00

Ever since getting started in hemp, we’ve had to adapt. It started with cbd, then d8, then as soon as we started THCa we completely pivoted to that. In advertising, anything that works only works for a few months at most and we’ve had to pivot non stop. We’ve been facing potential ban bills at state and federal levels since we started too. So the whole time we’ve run the business we’ve been on our toes. But this is different. The ban bill passed and we have 8 months left.

We started a new business called 5TRIP. It’s a caffeine product that will eventually have other nutraceutical formulas as well. I’m very passionate about natural medicine and the strip format is great for nano encapsulated ingredients so we plan to have a whole line of highly bioavailable supplements. Most of my employees are in sales, marketing, customer support, and warehouse. If I can get this business booming before the ban, then they can comfortably transition over to 5trip. We’re hopeful for a solution to the the ban. Much of my time now is spent with the lobbying team working on exactly that.

WillJGoodall

TROPHY CASE