How to Build an Entire Business off One Keyword | Leveling Up (EP3.3)

Today we are visiting Snack Nation. I'm gonna talk to the CMO, and the funny thing about this place is I started out as an intern when this company was doing $0 in revenue. Let's dive into it. Liftoff! So I wanna talk about the inbound process a little bit. What's the inbound marketing process, and then how does yours work?

High level, we look at inbound in terms of organic and paid. I mean, that's the kind of the easiest structure to think about. Organic is everything we do with content, so In the early stages of SnackNation, we did a whole bunch of keyword research. Use a keyword research tool like AdWords. Plug in, like for SnackNation, you'd plug in office snack delivery, healthy snack delivery, healthy snacks at work.

Mm-hmm.

You put in a few of these keyword ideas, and then the tool will spit out a whole bunch of other ideas and associative keywords that are like those. It'll also tell you the number of searches per month of those keywords. Once you get your massive list, you then export it into a spreadsheet. You know that like, Hey, office snack delivery, which is a direct hit on what our product is, like it's a smaller amount of search traffic, it's like 1,000, 3,000 searches a month or something, but then you go to like the keyword healthy snacks, which is higher up, and there's like half a million searches a month on healthy snacks.

Wow.

So big difference in the number of searches, but the search intent is different. So it helps you make decisions on what content are we gonna write, how do we wanna optimize our website so that we we have the right keywords on the website. Let's use a keyword like fun office activities. So, has nothing to do with snacks, you would think, but when office managers are online looking for fun office activities and having cool healthy snacks in the office, there is a tangent there that's part of it. Part of it. And so, we researched everything on the first page of Google. We said, all right, our content's gonna be 10x whatever number 1 is. We wrote it, had a really long, it was a listicle, it was like 87 fun office activities. Drove a lot of links to it. Ultimately, that's now We're ranking number 1. We also have spot 0 with the snippet. When someone types in fun office activities, we are— we're the one. We're the one that they're clicking on, driving traffic to our blog. They're reading that post. We then have mid-post ads occasionally, you know, parked throughout the blog that is saying, hey, want a free sample box? You know, want some free snacks? It could be like, you know, associating one of the fun office activities and it's like, oh, really like to do trust falls? How about putting some snacks into those trust funds? Like, literally tying the copy of the ad into what the blog post content was talking about. That increases conversion to click on those ads, ultimately drives them to a landing page, which they put in their lead information, comes into our system as an inbound lead. So that's the organic play, is you want to strategically pick these keywords from your keyword research, write the best content on them, get links driving to that blog post, Have that blog post rank high, and now you're— over time, you're doing that slow, steady organic traffic march every month increasing. That's the organic side that we look at.

Hmm.

Paid side, LinkedIn, we talked a little bit about AdWords, doing webinars. We put out a survey to office managers. It's called the State of the Office Manager Survey. We wanted to learn about what they're doing on the job, how much they're getting paid, how much they like their boss. Our own proprietary survey, we get all the data back. We analyze the data, we put it into, you know, 10 insights into this report called the State of the Office Manager Report, create a really nice PDF, 42-page PDF. Now we have our own proprietary report, and then we take a webinar and boil down the top 5 from there. So it's like content repurposing from all this data that we have. Ultimately, we have a webinar that we advertise on LinkedIn and through our email list and through some other sources, driving people to the webinar And then selling snacks on the backend. So that's kind of the paid content mix approach. So that's what we're doing.

What Andy's doing is he's creating a lead magnet. So a lead magnet is a really helpful resource. He's put a lot of time behind it, and he talked about building 10x content. You're just trying to kick someone's ass that's number 1 on Google, so you're de facto number 1, and it's much easier to reach out to people that are linking to that. The reason you need links is 'cause 2 things that matter with Google, right? Links and content. A lot of people forget about links. You need to do link outreach or else it's not gonna happen for you. So Andy's been very cognizant of it from the very first day he hired me as an intern. He was very cognizant of it, which is why we built all these healthy vending properties and wrote content and built links. And you know, that, that's what happened. But that stuff actually works. People forget about it. So super important, you have to build a lead magnet and then drive traffic towards it, build value with people. Then you can get them to commit to a webinar Which takes, you're asking for 30 minutes, an hour of people's time. You can't just ask, hey, Andy, I just met you, why don't I take an hour of your time? You can't do that. You gotta build a relationship, right?

Our first webinar that we did, it bombed because the content wasn't good enough. And then we had to go back.

What was it?

What was the content? It was some HR, I don't even remember, it was so bad. But it was for HR people. It just sucked, we just kinda like made up a list of stuff. And no, the key for us, the key takeaway is proprietary Data wins. So putting out your own survey, getting your own results, analyzing that data, putting it into a report. Is it a lot of work? Yes. But in order to win, you have to work.

And so how much time did that take you? And because here's the thing, like when I talk to my podcast co-host Neil, he spends like $30 grand for a piece of content, right? So you're spending a lot of time and money on this stuff. So what does that look like?

So, love Neil. We're definitely not doing it for $30K, and I still think we're doing the same, same output. But yeah, it's a lot of work. The first one took us The first one took us probably 3 or 4 weeks just to get the survey right. And this is not like working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to do the survey, but it was an extended project. Got the survey right, then you have to get survey responses. That was another 4 to 6 weeks of promotion to get the survey responses. Then we had to analyze the data. All in, it took us probably 3 months to put the first one together.

Wow.

But now we're on our third one that we're doing now, and it'll probably— it's probably about a month now, But, but much shorter amount of time within that month now. So it's, it's, it's like wash, rinse, repeat once you do it.

Great. Okay.

So yeah, and again, it's the niche, it's the niche idea that we talked about LinkedIn. We did the State of the Office Manager report, talking just to office managers. We're doing the State of the Executive Assistant report just for EAs. And the one we just did prior was the State of Company Culture report, and that one is for culture-focused leaders, a lot of HR So Addy, what is an inflection point?

What does that mean for a business?

For me, what it means is it's the different— if you look at like a graph and like how the business is growing, I feel like you kind of make some ground and then you hit a problem or you plateau and you make some ground. So it's these multiple points along the kind of the growth curve, right? For us with Snack Nation, first of all, we started Snack Nation while we still had our healthy vending business. We said, hey, let's test shipping some snacks to businesses. Totally outside our model. We had one person inside SnackNation, actually it was our first employee that we hired way back in the day. He was like, hey, I've been here for 5 years, do you have like a fun project I can work on? We're like, yeah, go see if this business works. So that was kind of the moonshot concept that I talked about. But he worked on it for a year all by himself, nobody else. So he put together the box, figured out the curation of the snacks.

Mm-hmm.

Figured out calling on businesses, what's the script. So it was like, he was like truly an intrapreneur growing a business within a business. And so he struggled the whole way through because it was just him, right? And so he grew, he grew the customers, was handling customer service, the whole thing. Then we hired our first sales rep. So that was, I would say that was an inflection point because now we had to make a repeatable sales model.

Right.

We had to really figure out the scripting. So we started like packing boxes Inside of our office, right? So we had like, you know, Fridays we'd like lay the training, we'd have this training room and tables and boxes and putting snacks in. That grew to be like, then it's like multiple days a week. And then we're dealing with how do we, you know, keep customers on board longer. And so we hit this another inflection point of where our office started, half of it turned into a warehouse.

Wow.

Because the business was growing.

So it was literally showing you that this might be the right thing to move because of all that inventory you had.

Yes, and we lived with like snack pallets and snacks being delivered, and luckily we had a garage door part of our office. A major inflection point was the day that we said, hey, we can't have half the office. We had snacks everywhere. They were stacked to the ceiling and we were packing them. Long story short, we got a warehouse. So that was a big inflection point for us to move the operations from our office to an actual warehouse and get the warehouse operations going. Other inflection points, When you not only hire your first sales rep, but you hire your first, second, third, fourth, fifth sales rep, and now you really have a sales team. And that's, again, that changes. Once you get to 8 or 10 sales reps, the management of one of those teams, right? Bringing in someone to kind of lead them. Then getting to 20, 30, 40, now you've got team leads, you've got sales managers, and then you have either a director or a VP of sales. So kind of putting in those middle management layers as we grow, all different inflection points.

Alright, so what are some Are there some other interesting stories you can share for people that are looking to continue to grow their business or start their business?

Yeah, well, I think the easiest story is my story. I was working in commercial real estate right after business school. I had some money saved up. I was a naval officer in the Navy. I'd saved some money up on deployments, decided that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, didn't have the idea yet, so I jumped. I jumped ship. The lesson That I learned from quitting my job with some money saved up was that you have a totally different view of the world and mindset when you jump without a net.

Mm-hmm.

Now, I'm not— I am not recommending this is for everyone, but in fact, I recommend to most people that if you want to get started in business, that you do nights and weekends and you hustle on the side. And once you get some revenue going and you feel a little comfortable there, then you jump. For me, I was doing nights and weekends, but I wasn't making that much money.

Mm-hmm.

But I jumped anyway because I had savings.

Mm-hmm.

And when you do that, when you put your back up against the wall, success— for me, success was the only, the only option. Failing was not. And when success is the only option and you have to make it work, it's amazing how your brain and your eyes, they open up and they see opportunities. They see things that you wouldn't normally see when you have that cushy job.

Yep.

When you have to make it work. And oh, here's the other thing, it always takes 2 to 3 times longer than you think it's gonna take to actually start generating revenue. I estimated when, when we first started the healthy vending business that it was gonna take about a year to start generating revenue. It took over 2 years.

Wow.

I went into $150,000 of personal credit card debt across 10 to 12 different— back in the day, 10 to 12 rotating credit cards. One of the most bittersweet feelings with a pit in my stomach knowing that I had that debt, but the excitement of knowing I had a business model that I, that I believed in. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel creating the product, knowing that I had something but that I hadn't realized it yet. Talking to friends, talking to family, my mom saying, when are you gonna get a real job?

Yeah.

You know, that, that kind of stuff hurts, right? Like 2, 2+ years into it with no revenue generated. So But when your back is against the wall and you have to make it work, at least for me, it was an incredible motivator, an incredible creative way because of what my brain saw and the opportunities that I saw to help me get to that spot. Right.

And every single entrepreneur has one of these stories. Every single one I've talked to, they've come close to, you know, falling into hell, the pits, right? And they end up making it out because they burned the ships. And that's what I hear, right?

You gotta burn the ships.

What's next for SnackNation? What are your goals?

Yeah, you look at our total addressable market of 2 million businesses, we have a few thousand that are monthly members. We're just scratching the surface. We're just getting started. So we have a lot of runway in front of us. For us, it's more of the same. It's making sure that we can hire more high-quality sales reps, efficient sales reps. We're expanding into beverages, expanding into coffee delivery. And then we're also talking about some other kind of moonshots. That you can't talk about right now?

Not yet.

Okay, we'll go back next time. Moonshots are important. I was meeting with Jay Abraham the other day and he called it the jackpot theory. So it's like putting one person on a project that you're willing to invest at least a little bit in and expecting to not get any return. It's binary, it's 1 or 0. You could— it's going to go big or it's going to fizzle out and you wasted some time and some money, but You have to put some of your rods in other fires.

There you go. Alright, well, this has been great. Thanks so much, Andy.

Absolutely. Good stuff.

Here are my thoughts around today's shoot. So I think the most amazing thing to me is I started out as an intern here when there was only 5 people, and Andy and the CEO, I mean, when this company was doing $0 in revenue, it's just amazing because even now when they have 140 employees and they have this massive office, The culture is still the same, and it's incredibly hard to maintain that culture, because usually when you start to hire a bunch of people, things change quickly. And if you don't— if you're not deliberate about your culture, if you're not intentional about your culture, then things start to fall apart. You know, Andy and Sean, I mean, they're fun people. They know how to work hard, they know how to play hard, and it really starts from the top. And they've been really good about maintaining that. For me, I talk about entrepreneurship, I talk about marketing, I talk about sales a lot, but to me, this is the ultimate growth hack. If you're able To maintain that culture, like you're going to do great things, right? We were just talking about this a little bit. I was talking to Andy and Sean. You get culture right, 80% of things are going to take care of themselves. You know, sometimes you can't control things such as sales numbers, things like that, or maybe there's a downturn in the economy, but the thing that you can control is the culture. So number one by far, like all the things we talked about, all the hacks, marketing, all the stories, I think that's the number one thing I learned. And just seeing the fact that they get together on Fridays, you know, they're drinking beers afterwards. When you see people doing the crush, the Friday crushes, I didn't see one person looking at their phone. It was Friday, but usually on Fridays people just wanna get home. They don't wanna think about this stuff, right? So that's what a real culture is, and I think that's the prime key— that's the prime takeaway from this shoot. Number one growth hack when you start to scale a business is the culture, and that's how you build great things. So that's it for today. We'll see you in the next video.

Bye.