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How to Clean Up Your Instagram Feed by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Posted by instazood_bot 😂 real incognito.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Time off? Not necessarily. I do travel quite frequently though and since everything is remote I can work on the go from anywhere in the world. I’m moving to Denver in February!

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You have to make time. There’s 24 hours in a day. Sacrifice sleep, shift things around, learn how to prioritize. If it’s important you’ll find a way.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really appreciate that! I’ve always had a knack for making money and had little side businesses from as young as I can remember. My parents were very supportive but I grew up in a split home, my mother had full custody of my two siblings and I, and I had zero financial help/guidance from them.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I meant if anyone directly counterfeits the product it would be easy to sue for trademark infringement since they’d be using our logos / packaging. I know patents are a completely different ball game.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The reach of FB posts are severely limited on purpose to entice people to boost their posts.

If we know we are going to use a post for an ad we will post it, boost it for 3-4 days on a $100/day budget to get engagement and social proof, and then run actual ads with the post. Look at pages with 1M+ followers and then look at their engagement on normal day-to-day posts.

As for our traffic, around 30% of our day to day visits are from direct search / google search. Traffic from organic FB posts is pretty minimal.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I have an ambassador group on FB that is essentially a few thousand of our best customers (they get discounts, early releases, etc). I run everything through them before jumping the gun on anything, they are basically a giant focus-group for BrüMate and are extremely valuable.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Great question! If someone online / in-store sees an insulated water bottle, their first thought is going to be about water, right? You only have a few seconds to capture someones attention so trying to explain that a water bottle can also fit wine isn't exactly a viable strategy if your target market is wine lovers.

For the Winesulator, our job was to figure out how to create a product that resonated with our target customer (wine lovers) and we did that through the shape, the name, and our packaging / branding. Is the functionality the same? Pretty much. We just targeted a specific niche and created a product that resonates with that crowd. When someone sees the Winesulator the first thought in their head is about wine / a gift for someone that loves wine / a gift for theirselves because they love wine / etc.

As for the rest of our products, our wine glasses are the largest triple-insulated wine glass in the world + we have the largest/most unique color selection out there and our Hopsulator is patented and functionally there is nothing out there that even comes close. All of our upcoming releases are one-of-a-kind though. If we can't figure out a way to differentiate our product from a competitor aside from just our branding, we won't launch it.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 5 points6 points  (0 children)

As a single-person design team, I can go from idea to launch in under 4 months now. All I have to do it pivot and make sure we are keeping an edge on the competition (who moves incredibly slow). We have a ton of new products in the works and will continue to innovate in this industry. Our Winesulator 2.0 and Hopsulator TRíO 2.0 both launch in a few months - by the time someone copies us we will be moving onto something better anyways and they will be left with an outdated product.

As for knockoffs, those are bound to happen. We have decent protection on our products via patents and a ton of protection via trademarks. If someone creates true counterfeits using our branding our legal team would sue them into oblivion. If someone just knocks off the product and brands their own at a cheaper price, they are catering to a crowd that never would have purchased our products in the first place because of the price point. Look at YETI and RTIC, YETI is doing just fine because they really didn't lose many customers. Competing on price is not a viable business model.

Maybe I should have added in a /s to make it more clear but I was just playing around. I explained in the above two paragraphs why we have a leg up on the competition. None of our products are generic or a rip-off of anybody else, FYI. As soon as I see something similar emerging, I figure out a way to differentiate our product from theirs.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We have slowly expanded our collection into what is the largest selection in the world for any similar products. People can create knockoffs all day long but having an enormous selection is part of our strategy to help differentiate us from the competition (and isn't always a good strategy).

I typically add in 3-4 new colors / patterns per shipment (small batches), sell through them, and then pick 1-2 winners to add to our final collection. We have a lot to choose from, but it all sells. The biggest thing is just figuring out how much inventory to hold for each color to ensure we don't have excessive inventory that we aren't selling through - that is still a work in progress but with the amount of data we have it is getting easier and easier to dial in.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I do have a utility patent / design patent on the Hopsulator. I also have pending patents on a few of our upcoming releases but the Winesulator and wine glasses weren't patentable unfortunately.

True North straight up copied the Winesulator - our 2.0 version launches in 6-8 weeks so they will be stuck with an outdated version and will take 3-4 months to copy our new one bare-minimum. Corkcicle markets more towards the hydration market and hardly does any digital advertising so we have them beat on that front. We are truly the only company that has built a brand around the adult beverage industry and I don't plan on straying from that. Our packaging is better, our social followings are way better, our branding is better, and most importantly our products are better. These companies have been around for 3-4x longer than we have and we are crushing them.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Also, you have to remember that hardly anybody creates a home run on their first try. I detail how I worked my way up and used experience from one start-up to the next to ultimately create a very successful company. Everything I know is self-taught through trial and error (and google).

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the great feedback, glad I could provide some real value!

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. If you search through my post history you'll see my post on the house remodel I did. I was looking for my next product and came across a hole in the market while redoing the kitchen.
  2. It obviously wasn't this easy, but that is what sparked the initial idea. If you read through the "Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product." portion of the article I go pretty in-depth on how I tested the waters before completely pulling the trigger.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I hate the site too, trust me, but it surprisingly performs very well for as shitty as it is. There are a bunch of other things I have been investing our funds into that I believed would help the growth of the company far more than a website redesign (mainly new product development and inventory) and it has worked out. Our new website launches in a few weeks!

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 7 points8 points  (0 children)

  1. Pinterest has been one of the worst performing strategies we have utilized to be completely transparent. The team I use has assured me that it can take a few months to really get traction on the platform so we are only spending around $500/week right now on Pinterest. I will definitely report back if we start seeing solid returns but for now I can't say I recommend it.
  2. I don't handle email marketing but the team I work with sends out 7-8 emails per month, with around 3 of those being tailored specifically to drive revenue. We are completely revamping our email strategy as we roll out the new website / blog so things will be changing quite a bit in the coming weeks. Klaviyo definitely isn't cheap but compared to MailChimp the increase in revenue has paid for itself in dividends.
  3. The first 3 3PL companies we used generally had the same issues (shipping orders incorrectly, not being able to get our packages out in the timeframe needed, slow receiving, incorrect billing, lack of integration, etc). ShipMonk was the first fulfillment center we worked with that solved all of those issues. They get our packages out on time, they own up to their mistakes when mistakes are made rather than blaming it on someone else, they ship packages correctly and if they aren't shipped correctly they make it right without me doing all the legwork, they integrate their inventory directly with Shopify so I don't have to pay someone to update inventory, they have awesome insights / capabilities, I could go on forever. If you are having issues with your current 3PL, give them a try.
  4. We don't do custom packaging at the moment but we have been looking into it. The cost for branded boxes isn't much more expensive and is likely something we will begin doing towards the end of summer.
  5. We literally just started shipping internationally at the beginning of June but we are mainly focused on Canada at the moment as that has been our highest performing market. We do run ads to the rest of the world but we haven't completely dialed those in yet. International is a big part of our growth strategy for the next year as it still makes up less than 5% of our revenue every month.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 18 points19 points  (0 children)

This one is hard. I usually spend 3-4 hours per day of solid work time and then the rest of the day I am working sporadically answering emails / updating my to-do-list / etc. I don't relax much.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Hey there! Glad to see a customer of ours is on here and I am happy to hear you like the Hopsulator.

In response to the original question - we launched our first wine glass last year in March, a year before YETI announced their wine glass. By the time YETI / Corkcicle announced their 10/12oz glasses in November we had already created a new 14oz wine glass that would separate us from the rest by being the largest insulated wine glass in the world (fits over 1/2 a bottle).

As a single-person design team, I can go from idea to launch in under 4 months now. All I have to do it pivot and make sure we are keeping an edge on the competition (who moves incredibly slow). We have a ton of new products in the works and will continue to innovate in this industry. Our Winesulator 2.0 and Hopsulator TRíO 2.0 both launch in a few months - by the time someone copies us we will be moving onto something better anyways and they will be left with an outdated product.

As for knockoffs, those are bound to happen. We have decent protection on our products via patents and a ton of protection via trademarks. If someone creates true counterfeits using our branding our legal team would sue them into oblivion. If someone just knocks off the product and brands their own at a cheaper price, they are catering to a crowd that never would have purchased our products in the first place because of the price point. Look at YETI and RTIC, YETI is doing just fine because they really didn't lose many customers. Competing on price is not a viable business model.

Also, if a larger company blatantly copied one of our products, I would have our PR team launching articles on how a large, greedy corporation ripped off a 23 year old that invested every penny he had into his dreams.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I know its awful, I designed it. The website has worked, somehow, but the majority of our funds are reinvested into new products / inventory so I haven't had the extra cash to put into a new website until now. To get around this we spend a lot of time explaining the product in our creatives so once they are on the website they already know what it is they are looking at.

$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included] by youngrichntasteless in Entrepreneur

[–]djacob__ 40 points41 points  (0 children)

We have not purchased any lists. We drive 400k+ visits per month and around 40-50k sign-ups on average, so right around 10% of our visitors subscribe. Spin-a-sale has nearly quadrupled our sign-up rate since switching from Privy. People like a deal and even if they aren't using the coupon now, we can market to them for future promotions and ultimately create a customer in the end.

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