From Bankrupt to $100k/Mo in 6 Months: How I'm Rebuilding My Old Business

My old brand that I sold back in 2017 for $16 million and then was bankrupt a couple years later and then I bought back for pennies on the dollar and then was doing almost no sales, is now back over $100,000 a month in sales. The last 30 days have been the first time that we've passed $100,000 per month in sales since I took the company back. Now, if you're new here, here's how he got to this point. In 2013, I started a company with my friend and business partner Matthew, and we were selling supplements on Amazon. Hey everybody. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran and.

What I'd like to do in this video is show you some results I've been getting from a new business that I started a little less than a year ago. I took my first sale in July of 2013. This is the month of March that you can see on your screen. This red line is the month of March per day. So days here, 124 units, 100 units. One dipped because we ran out of inventory for a short time to 63 units, all the way up to 135 units. So this is the month of March. So things are really, really growing and this is going to be a five million dollar business fairly soon.

We started it with $600 and we took that to a $16 million valuation four years later and we sold it to a private equity group. But we didn't get that full $16 million upfront. We had some money that was carried over in the deal and we also had some equity still on the table. When all was said and done, we got $10 million about to split between the two of us. However, a few years after we sold the company, the big private equity group that we thought was going to take the business to $50 million or $100 million, they bankrupted the business. We were having million dollar months in the last few months when we owned the company. And so it begs the question, why sell it? Sounds like a golden goose. Why? Well, that's a story for another day, but let's just say that this group probably should not have been trying to run E commerce businesses. However, I got the opportunity to buy the business back and I bought it back for pennies on the dollar. It was a scuffle out of the gate, but about seven or eight months ago, the team and I started changing what we put our focus into and now the business is back over $100,000 per month. So today I'm going to share with you what we did. I'm going to share with you the tests that we ran that worked, the ones that didn't work. I'm going to share with you the strategies that are working better today than they did 10 years ago. Now, I want to give full disclosure here. It's early. $100,000 business is milestone one in E commerce. Yes, we got a million dollar business, or at least we're pacing that. And I do think that we'll do $2 million plus over the next calendar year. But it's early, which means that I could do a video in a month saying that we lost one of our products or that we got some really bad reviews and now we're back down below that threshold and we got some catching up to do. But I want to add that we got to $100,000 per month despite the fact that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Amazon shut down more than one of our listings. One of our products had over 200 reviews removed overnight. One of our products got pulled from Amazon and we had to start the whole thing over. We received a fake patent claim, a fraudulent patent claim that almost sank our best selling product. And two service providers fired me for being difficult to work with. Can you imagine that? Me being difficult to work with? So despite all of these setbacks, we still got to $100,000 per month. And I am going to share with you how. Now, let me start by explaining the state of where the company was when we took the brand back over. For context, when we sold the company back in 2017, it was doing about $1 million per month in sales. About or about $10 million a year. As recently as a year or a year and a half ago, the business was doing $500,000 a year. That is a full 95% drop in sales. 90% plus of the sales were gone. Why? Because they weren't following a predictable playbook anymore. They weren't building relationships with their customers anymore. They weren't building an audience anymore. We found out that the Instagram followers were mostly fake. The email list that we inherited was dubbed the worst email list that an agency had ever seen. They ended up refunding our money and saying, sorry, we can't help you with this email list. The product line did not match what I wanted to bring to the world anymore. So there was six to 12 months of just keeping this thing on life support while we sold through old inventory. It was a total cluster and it took six to 12 months. And I realized that new starts or restarts are harder than New starts. I would way rather just have a fresh company than try to turn around a total show. But that's what this was. We had to turn around the product line, sell through the stuff that we didn't want anymore, launch new products, clean up all of the stuff that was going on before we could actually get to work on the vision itself. And that's when earlier in 2024, we brought on a brand manager to partner with me. And I would set the vision, he would hit the buttons, and we would collaborate on strategy. Shout out to you, Shane. Great work over the last six months. So let's put all of our attention into just getting life, moving into this business again. And that's what we did in June of this past year. We took the assets that we had and we put it all into the product that we believed was the highest quality product that had the highest potential for really happy customers. Now, remember, our email list that we inherited from this old owner had not been emailed in two years. And I didn't even know if the customers knew who we were anymore. All of the emails would go to spam, all of them. But still some people opened them. So I finally said, all right, if I can get a few hundred people to pay attention to these emails, even if they're going to spam, if somebody is going in there and opening these emails in spam, then maybe that customer still knows who we are and wants to work with us. They still want to be a customer. They still remember us. So we, we just sent out as many emails as possible to see who would open. And then we tried to engage those customers. And then we took the people who opened the emails and we put them into a fresh list and treated them like VIPs and we sent them offers and we tried to reestablish credibility and a relationship with them. Because I knew that if. If I had even a small group of people that cared about this brand again and wanted to buy our products, that would be enough to at least get the ball moving on one of these products. So that's when we put all of our attention into promoting that one product in the line that we believed was of the highest quality. That was in June of 2024. And at that time, the sales were under $40,000 a month. And by the time we had finished promoting that product and relaunching it, sales of the brand were closer to $50,000 a month. That's a nice bump. But then we got a patent claim. If you're not in the supplement world, you might not know how this works, but there are basically patent trolls that go around and claim that you are in violation of a patent and then they threaten a lawsuit and then they try to settle with you and it can be really scary. Thankfully, I had dealt with this exact patent troll, this person claiming that we were in violation of a patent back when we ran the company the first time. And I knew that we were not in violation of this patent. And so we fought it and we fought it and we fought it. It took months. During that time, the product was down on Amazon. So the thing that we were putting all this attention into was we couldn't drive more traffic to because Amazon was reviewing the patent violation. So we're starting over again. Thankfully, we were launching a second product at that time. We were ready to put attention into launching another product and the inventory hit and we put everything into that launch. I wrote more than a dozen emails personally, more than a dozen launch emails, hitting this launch really hard. And that launch really took off within a few weeks. That single product was doing about $1,000 a day in sales. That's a really good start after a launch until that product failed a test and got pulled. Basically what happened here is that there was a miscommunication on the formulation and as a result, one of the ingredients in this product had too many extracts in it. And Amazon caught the mistake before we did. And they said, you can't sell that. It's marked wrong. You got to pull this product and you got to start over. And we just kept getting hit in the nuts. We just kept getting kicked around over and over again, from agencies to products being pulled, to patent claims to failed testing. I'm almost ready to give up. I'm like, are you kidding? Is it is. There's just. Nothing is going in our favor. But there were two saving graces that kept some optimism at this time. The, the first one was that one of the products that we had inherited from the previous owner had always done fairly well. There was one product that did a reasonable amount of sales with a decent amount of profit. And as we promoted these other products, the sales of that product started to climb. And we also tested some images that made the conversion rate go up and our pay per click traffic was converting at a reasonable rate and people were adding it to subscribe and Save. So we started doing more aggressive promotions for the subscribe and Save and that product started to do a healthy amount of sales. So that was a saving grace. Number one, we had a little bit of momentum on that product. The second saving grace was even though we had two launches that ultimately resulted in products getting pulled, we proved that we had an audience here. The email list was not dead, the customer list was not totally tuned out. We had something to work with. We had two products launched that we got to 25 sales a day. They just both got pulled. So we knew that if we get these products back in stock or if we launch additional products, we have a pipeline, we have a distribution route to get these products to 25 sales a day, which is about $1,000 a day in sales. So we would need three of them, maybe four, to have a million dollar business. So after several months of fighting this patent claim, we finally won the dispute, got the product listed again, and we relaunched it to the list and we launched it hard. We put all of our attention into promoting this product and it very quickly popped to about 25 sales a day. And thank goodness we created a great frickin product. We went back to the drawing board and said, can we.

Completely rebrand this? Can we create new packaging? Can we split test different images? Let's split test different copy. Let's just put everything into restarting this, kicking it off from scratch, trying it all over again. Because I knew from previous experience that if you can get a really great product to be a leader in the industry, people will stick with it for a very long time. So I was not afraid of going back to the grind and getting it to 10, 15, then 25 sales a day. We got there quickly and it stayed around that point because people wanted to come back and, and buy it again and again. So now we had two products doing 25 sales a day or about $1,000 a day. And it was then time to launch product number three. We launched product number three and that thing was a screamer. I mean, it just came right out of the gate at 15, 20, then 25 sales a day. Within a month it was doing about 30 sales a day, more than $1,000 a day in sales. And we were pacing about $3,000 a day in sales, give or take. That was 45 days ago. So before that launch, the brand was doing between 50 and 60 thousand dollars per month in sales. We launch this new product, it's doing $1,000 a day in sales. So we jump up to 75 to $85,000 a day. A day, I wish. $85,000 a month in sales, give or take. Now we have just been improving those listings, adding reviews, and there's still bumps and bruises along the way. We still don't have one of our products back that needed to be reformulated. We still have not done any of the influencer marketing that I want to do. Our packaging still needs a bunch of improvements, but the plan still works. The simple plan of launching good products and getting reviews and split testing the copy and the images and being aggressive with pay per click and getting people onto auto ship, these were all basic parts of the strategy that as soon as we were cleared of the old story, as soon as we were cleared of the old inventory, we could put all of our attention to into driving those launches and those new products. And it was three months. Three months. We went from 40 or $50,000 a month to having our first $100,000 a month. And that was simply because we found the distribution pipeline that could change, it could go down, it could go up. But based on this trajectory and what I've seen in this type of business, it's perfectly in the realm of possibility for us to double again over the next four to six months and have a low seven figure two and a half to $3 million next year. That would be a really good, it would be a really good follow up year to this one. So what were the things that we did in order to drive that growth? The most important thing was the fact that we put our attention into breathing life back into the customer list. The, the customer list was neglected. It was dead. All the emails went to spam. But I knew that if we just had a few hundred people, that would be enough to at least kick off a round of sales for any product that we release. You don't need that many people in order to have a really good product launch. This is why people in the 1% have $25,000 launches with very small email lists and almost no social media following. It's because you don't need that many people. So I, I guess led by example here and said give me the list. If I can resuscitate a few hundred people that care, that would be enough. And that's exactly what happened. We didn't have any launch that was blown out of the water, but it was enough momentum to get a product to $10,000 in sales in its first month and then 100 reviews and then some of those people would add to subscribe and save on Amazon and then that was enough reviews for us to drive pay per click traffic. And that got the ball rolling. So the most important piece is the fact that we breathe life back into the email list. I would say the second thing that we did was we put emphasis into getting people onto auto ship and we started split testing different things on the listing to improve the conversion rate. Some people will just throw up their Amazon listing and then walk away and that's a huge missed opportunity. I am surprised at how little thought people put into optimizing things. The third thing was putting a lot of focus into product quality. Now our packaging, not the best, at least out of the gate, we've fixed that 80%. But the product quality itself I would put up against anybody in the space. So I knew that I could be aggressive getting the product into people's hands because they were likely to come back and buy more. They were likely to leave positive reviews. If our marketing was on point and if the customer service was really strong, the product had enough quality to bring people back. And then we milk every piece of positive feedback, every review, turn it into a social media post, use it as a reason to email the list. Just stoking the fire of that small audience to come back and support you and celebrate all the feedback that you're getting. That was an important step forward for us. Once we had three products doing reasonably well, we were pacing $3,000 a day and we're now pacing on average about $4,000 a day. So for the last 30 days we're sitting right at $100,000 in a month and the trajectory is up again. We still have another product coming back because we've reformulated it and I think we'll be at about $150,000 a month, maybe even $200,000 a month over the next couple of months. Throughout this process I have learned a few really important lessons. The first is that having a compelling medium to long term vision is not just a fluffy feel good story. It is vital to a brand and a business working out. If I had just been trying to sell some products on Amazon, I would have quit or I never would have purchased the business. I would have never tried to bring it back to life. I did not go back into this business until I knew what the first four products were going to be. And I could envision the product suite being the perfect stack for our target customer. And I could imagine what the branding would look like even though we didn't get it done in time. And it's still being reworked and relaunched under the the. The premium brand that it will eventually be. But had I not known what it was going to look like, I wouldn't know what we were building or what our guiding light was going to be. And I never would have got back into the business, but I knew who I wanted to serve, what the products were going to be, and I believe in every single thing that the company does, product and marketing wise. My secret weapon in this business is the fact that I don't need the cash flow from this business to pay for my life. It's a serious advantage to be able to think about driving growth instead of maximizing cash flow. I am willing to spend enough pay per click advertising to be break even or even a small loss. Why? Because I know some percentage of those people are going to get on auto ship. Some percentage of those people are going to become raving fans and leave reviews. Some of those people are going to come back and buy other products. And the net margin on the business has been very healthy. I actually set a budget of being willing to lose $100,000 to make this business work over the course of a year. It's actually.

Consistently profitable. I want to be more aggressive than what we're being right now because I don't need the money from this business. When I look at my most successful students, they for the most part have other forms of income or they have security while they're waiting for their business to hit a certain point. Now, over time they lived on the cash flows, but while they were growing the business to the first million, all of that money stays in the business. It compounds until you're at at least 60 to 80 thousand dollars a month. If you're in scarcity mode trying to extract from the business, it's kind of like having a baby that is two years old and you're like, why haven't you gone to work yet? Why aren't you bringing home food for the family? It's two it need, it needs your energy more than it can provide. That's what a business is in the early stages while you're ramping up. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs fail not because their business wasn't a good idea, not because their product wasn't good, not because they're a bad entrepreneur, but because they're so in a hurry to take money out of the business that the business doesn't have the resources to be able to hit that point of profitability where they could pay themselves. My partner and I the first time did not pay ourselves in this business until it was doing at least $100,000 a month. He had a full time job and I had copywriting clients. That's how I was paying for my life. And this time around, I have other businesses which are also distractions I also have children now, so my life is more expensive. But I pay for my life in ways that are not related to this business. And I let all, all of the profit roll back into the business to do more promotions and more product launches and product rebranding and upgrading our packaging. That's where the money is best spent. And I don't care if I take money from this business until it's an eight figure business again and then we can have another massive exit or we could just hold on to a really great business for a really long time. So if you are starting a business to make money, you can get there, but not in the short term. The business needs more resources than you do and I see a lot of entrepreneurs try to starve the business to pay themselves and that gets them into a lot of trouble. The third lesson is that there is no replacement for a responsive audience. Even though our list was declared dead dead, it was declared the worst email list of all time. It hadn't been emailed in over two years. We were still able to warm up a small but responsive group of people that wanted to buy our products. This is why when I'm working with an entrepreneur or I'm advising someone, we often are going back to the basics of audience building. Do you have 100 people on an email list? Do you have 100 people who will leave a review for a product? That's the beginning of being independent of Amazon. It's the beginning of being able to launch on other platforms or have predictable product launches. I do not understand how entrepreneurs get into this game without thinking about audience building. I have no idea how they do it.

Maybe it's just the only way that I know how to build businesses. But the our audience, as small as it was, carried the launch of those products and it resulted in us getting reviews and getting feedback and pushing the momentum to Amazon, which rewarded us in the form of free traffic because we were sending traffic to them. There's no replacing a responsive audience, even if that audience is really small. The fourth thing that I learned is that you can only do a few things well at a time, but that's all that you need. One thing going well can pay for nine things not going well. But it's often difficult to find what is going to work really well when you're scattered amongst nine different ideas. To this day, our website sucks. Our social media isn't very good. We haven't launched that podcast that I really want to launch that's branded to the company. I haven't even finished the book that I wanted to write when I started this project. Ooh yeah, that one's taken me way too long. TikTok hasn't worked out for us. I don't even think we're listed on Walmart.com I haven't finished that backend telehealth offer that I wanted to have alongside this business once it launched. I haven't taken up the relationships that I have on the table for influencers that I wanted to work with. None of that has happened and these are all things that I thought were going to be very important to the success of the brand. Almost nothing that we've tried has worked and yet it's a million dollar business again and we're just getting started. Why? Because one thing did work and it was warming up the audience, launching products to them and getting re established on Amazon. And now we have the Runway, the profitability and the momentum to be able to invest into these other things that will amplify the brand and the authority and the buy in from the customer base. Now we can focus on one or two of those things, but up until now they've just been distractions from the main thing which is getting a core group of products to consistent sales so that it's a hundred thousand dollar a month business again. And finally, the fifth lesson that I learned is that the actual playbook hasn't changed much in 10 years. The thing that got us back to $100,000 a month ended up being the exact same playbook that got us there 10 years ago. In fact, it's the same business, it's the same or similar product line. It's a slightly different person, but it's still men on a fitness journey. I'm still the person. 10 years ago I wanted to be a big rip buff dude in the gym. Now I want to be a fit dad. So the the person is the same, the product line is the same, the branding is mostly the same. Why did that work so well the first time and then go bankrupt and now it's working again. Was it timing? Was it being early while we're not early anymore, Was it the super secret strategy? Was it funding? Well, the private equity group was way better funded than we were. It was simply being focused on the very simple strategy of launching products, getting reviews, building good customer relationships, having high converting listings. And when we sold the company, the new owners got away from that. They started doing magazine ads and trying to get into Costco. What? Why? Not the right time, not the right strategy for this brand. Now that we've taken it back over, going back to the basics of launching to a small audience, getting it back up and moving again. And now we can complicate it if we want. We often get so distracted with the shiny object of what everybody else is doing. Guess what? Same playbook, Same strategy from 10 years ago is what is taking us back to a million dollar business. And we did it. We really did it in like five months. There was a lot of time clearing out old inventory and old products and warming up the customer list. But once that was done, we, we've had consistent growth month over month until the 100k point. Looking forward, we still got products that we want to launch, that we want to bring to life. And we still need to get better at some basics. Like we need to get better at review strategies. We still have some design and branding and packaging things that I'm not fully happy with. Currently we're aggressively testing copy and images to improve our conversion rate. And we're still working to warm up the email list even more. But honestly, our focus needs to be doing the things that we're doing right now, but better, not adding more strategies to the plate. We don't need to go launch on Walmart. We don't need to get onto TikTok shop and crush it. There's we can do those things, but it's easier to double a business that's already working in a very specific lane. It will be much easier to double the business from $100,000 a month to $200,000 a month. Just doubling down on what's working, doing a better job at that than pursuing all of these other avenues. Those other avenues are good ideas, but it's easier and more straightforward to just get better at what's currently working. We still have a long way to go, but it feels really good to get the first hundred thousand dollar a month out of the way. I remember having this feeling the first time. Wow. I actually just had this really weird flashback. I remember when we hit $100,000 a month the first time and this is weird. I'm. I swear I'm not making this up. And I just realized this. I was sitting right here. The way weird way that life worked. I ended up moving back into the same apartment that I lived in when I grew the business. The first time I was recording a podcast where I realized that we were at a hundred thousand dollars a month and I it felt different to be at $100,000 a month. It felt different to say it's a million dollar business and it feels different this time to say it's at $100,000 a month. It it still doesn't feel like a company. It still doesn't feel like this mature business. It feels like a small brand that's showing signs of life. We've got a long way to go, but I'm really happy with the progress that we've made. I will keep you posted on the ups and downs of of this brand. I'll continue to share what's working and what's not working. And if you want to see our resources and the playbook that we follow, you can get it for free over at capitalism.com playbook. Cool realization is that the brands that I have a majority stake in now, reasonably I can see next year we'll probably do about $5 million in top line. There's three different brands in that portfolio that I own a majority stake in that will probably do five plus million next year. I also have a portfolio of brands I've invested in as a minority investor and a few of those are doing really well. So it feels like this really fun point where the portfolio is popping again and that's a good feeling. And in the next year the focus will be on partnering, buying or investing in a few core brands from the community that I mentor and bringing a couple of those into the portfolio so that we can partner them all up and have a really big exit in the future. We'll be looking to partner with or add to the portfolio 10 or so brands over the next few years so that we can take all of the resources in this portfolio and lead them towards a roll up strategy and have a really massive exit that excites me. So if you want to see how we do that, you can go over to capitalism.com playbook. Thank you for watching and following along on the journey. I will keep you posted and if you want to see all of the updates, make sure you're subscribed to the channel. I'd love to see your thoughts in the comments or you can email me@ryanapitalism.com and I'll see you guys on the next episode. Take care.