Buc-ee's Viral Marketing Stunt

Three and a half years ago, I walked into a gas station called Buc EE's. These guys have over 120 gas pumps. They're all over Texas, and they are a cult phenomenon. I walked out with $3,000 worth of snacks and an unofficial partnership to sell all of their products online. I want to tell you the full story with all the details, the margins, the partnership, how it works, how it worked, how it looks today. And then at the end, I'm going to tell you how you can create opportunities like these for yourself. First of all, three and a half years ago, I was running a company called Sendeats with my cousin Kirk. Sendeats was an e commerce fulfillment brand where e commerce companies that shipped food products would send all their stuff to us and we would manage all of the logistics. It was tough. It was a tough business. It was low margin. At the same time, I took my cousin Kirk to Buc ecky's for the first time and he was in awe. There's Nothing like Buc EE's, all right? Once you've been, you're a changed person forever. And on the way home, we were talking about, man, how much must these guys do online? These guys must do hundreds of millions a year online. We pulled up their website and there was no shop button. We couldn't believe it. There was no way to buy their products online. Now, keep in mind, Buc EE's is a brand new, like Disney, their beaver mascot is iconic. You see it all over the world, okay? And to think that they didn't sell their stuff online just boggled my mind. And I wanted to fix that, right? I saw dollars being burned in front of me and I wanted to fix that. So I started cold emailing the founders, the two founders, over and over and over. No response. Nothing. And I'm good at cold emailing. Nothing. So I thought, kirk, what if we did this ourselves? What if we launched a viral publicity stunt and launched their store for them? And he's like, well, what if we get sued? It's like, well, let's look into that. So we start googling around and we learn about what's called the first sale doctrine. First sale doctrine means that anyone can resell whatever they want. If you have a used iPhone, you can sell it as an iPhone. You just can't pretend to be Apple. And so we knew that we would be protected under first sale doctrine as long as we didn't cause confusion with the customer about us being BUC EE's or not. And so we threw up A website. It was called Beaver snacks with an X.com because the Buc EE's mascot is a beaver. And it was an ugly website. And you can probably look at some pictures here or on the web archive of what it looked like. It was like a pale yellow, really, really bad. I hired a professional photographer from Thumbtack. She charged three or four hundred bucks. We had two or three thousand dollars worth of snacks. I've got some pictures here for you to see. Long receipts. And I thought, okay, worst case scenario, they try to sue us or it just never takes off. No one cares. It doesn't generate any attention, and I have a pantry full of snacks I don't know what to do with. Okay, And. But it's a good story. At least I have a good story. Best case scenario, it goes viral and it influences Buc EE's to partner with us. We want it to be their full e commerce provider. We wanted to basically do everything for them, head to tail, manage all their logistics, set up the website, everything which was abnormal. That's not what we did for our other customers. Our other customers already had a website. They already had a business and a brand. We wanted to bring them online. So best case scenario, we could bring them online and be their. Their official partner. And then anywhere in between would be cool too. Anyway, so we buy beavers next calm. We put up a website, we take pictures of everything, and we launch, quote, launch, and as crickets, because no one knew we were there. I posted to Reddit and we. We sold like a jar of quail eggs, pickled quail eggs. And I was like, yes, we got a customer. And people on Reddit loved the story. It didn't go viral or anything, but it had thousands of views and a couple dozen comments, and I think it's still around somewhere. And then I started cold emailing some reporters. This was November 2020. So coming up on four years now, early November 2020. And I basically said, this is who I am. This is what we're doing. Want to get Bucky's attention? Do you want to write about this? And they loved it. A reporter from Texas Monthly reached out to me and he asked me all these questions. He was excited and I was excited. And then he called me back. We were speaking throughout the day, and a few hours later, he called me back and he said, hey, good news. The Bucky's lawyer wants to talk to you. I'm like, how does the BUC EE's lawyer know that I exist? He's like, oh. I reached out for comment. In my head I'm like, why did you do that? I don't want them to know about this yet. Like I'm going to be shut down before I'm even launched. And so I called up the lawyer and he was actually really nice. He was a nice guy and he said, I need you to make three changes for me. But I'm not mad. We don't mind that you do this. We tried E Commerce, we thought about it, but it's just not something we want to do. They don't, they feel like they need to charge their customers more online than what they charge in store in order to make the numbers work. And frankly, I think they're right. They do need to and they don't want to. That's the whole thing. They really value their customers. They want to keep that in store experience sacred. And so they don't want to have to sell the same products or more online because they think it would upset their customers. And they want, they want their customers to continue to have a reason to come into the store anyway. And so it just fit for someone else to do this for them. And so we spoke and he said, make three changes, change the name. I don't want the word beaver in the name because Beaver's our mascot. It's kind of confusing. And I said, no problem. We haven't even really launched yet other than this Reddit post. Number two, we want a disclaimer in the logo and we want the logo to be on every page of the website. And I was like, oh, that's kind of ugly, right? Like, have you ever seen a logo in your life with a disclaimer in it? Probably not until you go to TexasTocs.com now you have. And so we said, okay, not ideal, but we'll do it. He said, number three, I want that disclaimer in every product description on your website. Alright, that one's easy. So we did, we made all the changes. The articles went live and we went viral. Now when I say viral, I mean like Texas viral. Okay? Dozens of articles written. Eater. Texas Monthly. Texas Monthly is the biggest news publication in the state of Texas. A few others, and we did almost $200,000 in those first 30 or 45 days. Now it really helped that we were right up against Christmas and Thanksgiving. Timing was perfect and it was a madhouse. Now we already had a warehouse, we already were shipping food and other E commerce things for other brands. So this wasn't way out of the norm. But they have thousands of SKUs. SKU stock keeping unit things to sell, and it's hard managing. And then they had hundreds of different expiration dates. And you don't want to ship something that's been expired, or you could get sued, or Bucky's could sue us, or it's just. It could get ugly. And so we had to work through all these on the fly. And, you know, I've once heard that entrepreneurship is like building an airplane while you're trying to fly. And that's exactly what this felt like. We were doing all these sales, but we weren't taking very good care of these orders. It was taking a long time to get them out the door. And we had stakes, and it was just hairy. But we figured it out because at the same time, we're still having to ship orders for all of our other customers as well. And it was just. It was hairy, but we figured out. And so we got into 2021, and things were getting a lot better. And we just kept growing. Every month, we grew a little more. And then for the first couple of years in business, we were growing, but, like, we weren't really putting enough attention into it because we had all these other customers for our E Commerce brand. And some of these were paying. Some of these customers were paying us 1 to $300,000 per month to ship their products. Whereas with Buc EE's, it was if we were late on an order. Then Karen in Omaha, Nebraska, got a little upset about her $60 order. And so we kind of had Texas snacks on the back burner until we realized that all these big fancy customers paying us hundreds of thousands per month weren't really all that profitable. We looked at the numbers. We thought, okay, Texas snacks is profitable. These guys are profitable. What are we doing? So we ended up making a really hard decision and firing all of our E Commerce fulfillment customers. We just. We shut down that whole business, and we had to let some employees go because it wasn't very profitable, especially for the headache. We had to cut our lease early. We got in a fight with our landlord, moved to a smaller warehouse, and we went all in on Texas Snacks. And it was the best decision we ever could have made. Our sales doubled every time they opened a store. We kept growing, and we have been off to the races ever since. So our net profit margins are somewhere between 10 and 20%, depends on their discounts, if we're doing paid ads at the time time or not, but it's somewhere around 15%, give or take, and we're doing millions of dollars a year. I don't want to tell you exactly how much, but we're growing 30 to 70% every year. And it's. It's healthy and it's a good business, and it has good margins, and we're actually really, really good at shipping our stuff really fast now, which took us years to learn. And so we've got great reviews. Anyway, what I care about is you taking something away from this that you can apply. So I gave a keynote speech in Utah earlier this year called how to find your white whale. And you can see it right there if you want to check that out. And Buc EE's was my white whale, right? It was my fat pitch. Warren Buffett says that he only makes one or two investments per year. He says no to hundreds of things. He waits for that fat pitch to come along, and when it does, he swings hard. There are fat pitches like this everywhere. White whales, fat pitch. Call it whatever you want. But it's also an asymmetric bet, right? You lose $3,000 in snacks and you create potentially a multimillion dollar company and jobs and profits and freedom from working for the man, right? It's an asymmetric bet. And so I challenge you to look for those white whales in your life where you can risk a little bit to gain a potential huge reward. There's another story that I told here on YouTube, right here, where I showed up at John McAfee's House of McAfee Security. And I knocked on his door and I asked him to partner with me on a project project back in 2018. And he said yes, that was another white whale. I love chasing white whales. So if you want to learn stuff like this, then please hit subscribe, Follow me. And I have a lot of stories like this. Like, this is one of a couple dozen stories like this, I promise you. And I'm going to tell more of them. I'm not here to sell you a bunch of courses and all that. I just want to get people to quit their jobs if they hate their jobs, and to try entrepreneurship. And if they learn, they don't like it, great. At least they tried it. That's why I'm here making content for you. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.