Ryan Daniel Moran reviews Tough Mutt, a dog product business doing $40-50K monthly on Amazon and Walmart with barely any social following. To hit $1M annually, Nathan Colba should launch two more products and build an owned audience through user-generated content and targeted ads to dog owners, cutting acquisition costs and boosting repeat sales.
This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and examine where they could be making more money and where their best opportunities are. Today we're looking at Tough Mutt. This is a submission from the tribe. And Tough Mutt sells products for pets. Their website is toughmutt.net and they have most of their sales coming from Amazon.com owner's name is Nathan Colba. Hey Nathan, what's going on man? And they're also on Walmart.com and Jet.com so a couple things. Nathan, your branding is awesome. Love the logo. Your website is spot on. You've done a great job. I love the header at the top that tells a little bit about the story of Chester. I love that. Can I say humanizing the dogganizing approach to that. You see what I did there? Anyway, I'm not a funny person so I think your branding has been great. I think the overall personality of the brand is great. Your reviews are really solid. Now. Tough Mutt right now is doing between 40 and $50,000 a month in sales, which is a great start. The question is, we're kind of at this point where we've hit a moderate amount of success. What do we need to do now? So great, you've got to this point where you're profitable, you're selling a good amount of products. I am going to touch on what you said in your submission about your audience. Your audience is less than 2,000 people on your Facebook page. You're looking at only about 114 likes. So what do we do about this? Two things. One, we have figured out the process to take a product and to get it profitable, selling quickly and have a lot of solid reviews, we need to double down on that process. Since you're not at the million dollar mark, you need to be at about 81 some thousand dollars to be at that million dollar mark. Double down on what's got you to this point. That means releasing as many products as you can comfortably handle. Two more will probably give you the infusion that you need to be able to get at or near that million dollar mark. Everything changes when you're at that million dollar mark. You're open to more investment opportunities, you have more customers, you're taken more seriously as a brand, you have more profit margins so you can do more to advertise. So we need to sprint to that 80,000amonth. You're going to get there by releasing probably two more products. The second thing that we can do to both accelerate that process and start to set us up for larger and wider success is to start building that audience specifically on Facebook or an email list or both. So you are in a highly visual, highly emotional industry and that's pets. We all love ours, some of us a little bit too obsessively. So what that means is we can very easily get people talking and communicating around our brand by highlighting people's pets, showing the products in use, having a contest with our customers to send pictures of them actually using the product, and then sharing that on Instagram, sharing that on Facebook. That's viral gold. People love that stuff. They love to be participating in that process. So start engaging an audience. Your cost per audience member will be super low because you can target people who own golden retrievers, who own every type of dog, or just dog lovers. I would go more specific just to keep the cost down, but that amount of targeting is possible and the clicks are really cheap. So you can get a bunch of really high quality traffic that is exactly for your market. And we can get them rallying around a conversation, showing, doing contests and showing the products being used. This will get people talking about your brand and give you an audience to launch further products to, for you to do discounts and giveaways to and to also just increase the overall interest in your brand. If you do that, you'll solidify yourself against Amazon changes, you'll give yourself a pool of potential buyers to buy the next product and you will have more repeat customers and engaged people who find out about your products, which will get you closer and closer to that 80k mark and that million dollar business.
