The Marketing Playbook Behind the $200M, Company Dude Wipes

Let's talk about the marketing playbook behind Dude Wipes. You know how much revenue Dude Wipes does?

I don't even know what Dude Wipes is.

Okay, it's wet wipes for your butt.

So wet wipes?

Yes, but it's called Dude Wipes. It's because it's rebranded differently.

What's the difference? You can just use the kid wet wipes that are flushable.

It's branded differently.

Okay.

It's just like when I put sleep tape on my mouth, it's just tape.

Yeah.

It's just sleep tape.

I get it.

You know what I mean? Okay, so Joe Pompliano. So he says, Dude Wipes has built an incredible business, $200 million in annual revenue. Available in 20,000 stores nationwide. They sell flushable baby wipes for men and have built the business primarily through sports marketing. Here's the wild story. So they, by the way, they're on Shark Tank and they have a billion-dollar plan to replace toilet paper. By the way, have you used baby wipes?

Yeah.

Yeah?

It's great. Yeah.

Yeah.

I have bidets in my house.

Oh, wow.

Probably too much information.

That's a good clip. All right. Dude Wipes was founded in 2011 by 4 childhood friends from their apartment in Chicago. They say 95% of their diets consisted of burritos and beer, so they definitely needed Dude Wipes, right? So friends started using baby wipes instead of toilet paper, and so an entirely new category was born. Dude Wipes then appeared on Shark Tank. They're only doing $1 million in sales at the time, but they convinced Mark Cuban to invest by telling him that his ass hates him for using dry toilet paper. Cuban cut a $300K check for 25% of the company. Dude Wipes exploded after Shark Tank. 2015, $1 million in revenue. 2020, $40 million in revenue. But given the toilet paper industry's $11 billion annually, the founders thought it can be even bigger. So what they started to do, just getting to the point here, is that they started targeting middle-aged men. So they started sponsoring UFC, right? So they couldn't afford to sponsor a team or a league. So they got creative paying Tyron Woodley $10,000 to put Dude Wipes on his butt during UFC.

Wow.

So you can see here, it's on his butt over here. It's Dude Wipes, right?

That's cool.

Which is cool, right?

Perfect placement.

Yeah. Good ad placement, right? And then Dude Wipes started doubling down on guerrilla marketing. So they sent people with huge signs to the 2016 World Series, so this is baseball, receiving millions of free impressions on TV. They also struck a deal with Jets running back Isaiah Crowell after he pretended to wipe his butt with a football, right? Look at this over here. So Dude Wipes, you have Dude Wipes back here. You can't see it quite clearly.

Yeah, I see it though.

Yeah.

In blue.

Yeah. And so I think it's smart that this guerrilla— okay, they target national moments and they aim for social media virality. And they did one with WrestleMania sponsorship, and then they also did a deal with Joey Chestnut, the hot dog eating champion, for the Netflix hot dog eating contest. So you can see he has a patch over here, right? So let's talk about guerrilla marketing. This is smart. That's how they got to $200 million in annual revenue.

I like this, but all they're pretty much selling is just baby wipes. There's no different formula.

Their revenue is primarily driven from their marketing prowess. Yeah.

It's just like Prime. There's not really any difference in the energy drink. Although I think they were getting sued too for some of the issues with the drinks. I don't know much. I don't take much energy drinks, but all they're really doing is just putting a spin on marketing.

I think they're going to where the attention is not as expensive, but they know a lot of eyeballs are there. And Dude Wipes is the large TAM is basically 50% of the world, right? Or the US at least, right?

It's not 50% of the world, it's a little bit less, 'cause you gotta exclude babies and little kids.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, but you know what I mean. You know what I mean. All right, so Dude Wipes' recent viral sponsorships include Pat McAfee's TST soccer team, okay? So you can see Pat McAfee, the punter turned podcaster, he's got Dude Wipes on his ass, right?

I would start sponsoring rugby teams too.

Yeah, yeah, and hopefully they can all put it on their ass, I don't know. But like they did Chicago Bears Hard Knocks. I didn't know they did that, that's cool. So they're going higher now, but they started smaller first because they knew they couldn't afford that much. So I think that's really smart. They were frugal about it. Yeah. Yeah.

And what they're going to find out is how they go bigger and bigger, the ROI is going to suck and suck more and more.

Yeah. Maybe they just sell.

What they need to do is do more of these $10,000 ones, but do them in quantity.

Dude, this is funny. One of the responses, like, these will clog your pipes up so hard you'll need to pay hundreds to a plumber.

Well, in theory, they won't clog up anything. They're just wiping the— feces from your behind.

And here's the other comment. This guy says, per my wife as well as my plumber, not the same person, there's no such thing as a flushable wipe. Anyway, it is what it is. So good marketing, guys, goes a long way because this is primarily— I mean, look, Prime was driven by marketing. I would say Fashion Nova driven by marketing, right?

Fashion Nova is driven by marketing. And then Cardi B, I think, was Fashion Nova.

I don't know.

It was one of those big celebrities that kicked it off, but they have so many influencers.

Yeah. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

You see what Nike is doing with their documentary with French athletes?

No. What's that one?

They're creating documentaries of these athletes and it takes 7 years for them to create all the video clips and the information. Did they finish one? I do not know. I did not watch it.

Did they do it with Mbappé? You know that soccer player?

Yeah, I don't know if they did it with him.

All right.

I don't think they did it with him 'cause that's 7 years.

Yeah, but he became a superstar the last 7 years.

Totally agree. But they started this a very long time, right? So they're just doing it in chronological order over 7 years. But that's like the type of marketing and content people want to see.

Yeah.

Because it's just like, it's unique.

Yeah.

It's people spending time to give us content and information that we haven't seen before.

And how does creative stand out?

It's unique. Yes.

And it's hard— it's harder and harder to find unique things because the bar is getting higher and higher for creative because everyone now knows they need to have good creative. And so it's— it goes back to quality content again. In fact, this whole entire podcast should just be about quality content because we've talked about it so many times.

And on top of this, when you think about creative content and just making it really amazing, it's hard for AI to do that. Like, try to get ChatGPT to eventually create something about an athlete and their 7-year journey. You can, it's not going to be the same as actually being there and filming it.

Yeah. Well, it goes back to one, it's the humanization of things. And 2, it's storytelling. Storytelling for 7 years, you're going to get some good stuff. I got one here on Why you need to join a community to grow faster. So we've talked about how community is kind of the— it's a big part of the new wave of SEO. We've talked about how communities like Skool or Circle are growing really fast. Reddit's growing really fast. HubSpot's community, Shopify's community, their traffic's going up and to the right. So you get the benefit of that too. But even like, you know, us going to speak at HubSpot's user conference, that in itself is a community because 20,000 people are showing up there next week. You were both in YPO, right? That in itself is a community of entrepreneurs, right? The Agency Owners Association that we have, that's a community. But ultimately, what do you get from it? It's you get people that are like-minded, you get people that are experiencing the same problems that you're facing, and you get people that have kind of been there, done that. Or, you know, someone shares an experience share about how like they raise their kids a certain way that might give you an idea of what you might do in your business, right? And so the world goes around with these things and You know, I like to always say that as you continue to climb the mountain, the air gets thinner and it's hard to find people around you that will just kind of pull you up, right? Um, and so that's why I think you, you, if you want to grow faster, join a community. It took me a long time to convince Neil to join YPO. I think he's just starting to see the benefit of a community. Um, cause before I dropped out. No, no, no. But you're in another, you're joining another one.

Yes, that's true. I dropped out of the chapter.

You're joining another chapter, but that still means you see the benefit of community.

I'm going to try it for a year and then go from there. I'll try it for another year. Because I only want to really— I went to a few meetings before joining. After I joined, I think I only went to one meeting. Yeah.

But okay. Like you and I hanging out, that's kind of like a mini community. You know what I mean? So it's like, it goes a long way. It's, uh, we all need connection at the end of the day. It's not just you can work at home in your boxers. Your business is going to be limited if you're not surrounding yourself with amazing people.

You and I going to dinner today, dinner meeting. That's community.

But you bailed. Oh no, I hey, I had a client that's like I would he's he's at the all-in summit. He's like I would really like to meet. I was like okay yeah, you had no choice at that point. Yeah, we're gonna meet. So you enjoy dinner. Let me know how it goes.

Are you meeting your client at the same restaurant?

No, I'm going to an Asian restaurant closer to them. No, closer to me.

Oh okay, what's the Asian restaurant?

Ding Tai Fung.

Oh, that's a good restaurant.

Yeah, yeah. Yours is healthier though. Yeah, I had Din Tai Fung yesterday too. The client wanted Din Tai Fung? No, well, I wanted to give them a unique experience. So yeah, yeah. But then my parents wanted it yesterday too.

So you know you can make a reservation, right?

I did make a reservation.

Yeah, because if you go downtown—

Don't call the Asian to make a reservation at the Asian restaurant. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So, if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So, singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. Okay, we got one more here to kind of cap things off. You have a friend, Andrew Chen.

Okay.

So, Andrew Chen who's @andrewsonhorowitz. So, he tweeted something. He says, the end of the 1 billion active user ad-supported consumer startups. So, like a Facebook, or like Instagram and why highly monetizing useful vertical apps are the next thing. So he says, look, it's been a long time since we last built a broadly horizontal consumer app like YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Snapchat. In fact, I'm convinced it might not be possible anymore. We haven't seen that in the last couple of years, right?

Yeah.

But we do see like DraftKings or people monetizing within their apps like an Uber or whatever. Maybe Uber's not a good example. That's a consumer app. But he's saying, look, the next generation might be vertical apps appealing to a vertical segment of the market like Monopoly Go. DraftKings, Canva, etc. These are smaller audience products with a higher whale monetization, right? Um, so he's just basically saying, look, it's hard to build a massive product now, but when you have like Web3 games or whatever, you can, you can monetize more in there, and the LTV of a customer might be higher in that situation.

Go ahead. I, I pay for Monopoly.

Monopoly Go?

I don't know if it's Monopoly Go, but I paid for Monopoly in the past, at least the app. I have to win and I had to own all the real estate. Oh.

You know, I have Monopoly at my place. It's the socialist edition.

Okay.

So it says Monopoly and then it says socialist edition. It says everybody loses. So I haven't played it yet. We should play it. I seriously, it's been sitting there the whole time.

I love that game. I have so much Monopoly strategies.

But you don't have the socialist edition where everyone loses. Imagine if you buy this. Oh dude, you should play the socialist edition with your kids because then you'll teach them, you know, Everyone loses. Yeah, everybody loses in socialism.

You're going to get taxed.

You're going to die. Everything's going to get taken away from you.

These are the 2 certainties of life.

Yep. Okay, so it says, to conclude, tomorrow's apps might look more vertical, higher spending, smaller audiences, focused on interactions. Because you know some of these games, people are spending millions of dollars, these whales, right? Some may target productivity utility use cases, particularly as AI creates novel interactions, at least until the next platform emerges. I certainly hope a new broad-based social consumer app can emerge. And I know a few folks working on them still, but I want to also I want to advocate for a more focused approach. So I think in our current form factors, like the phone, the iPad, or whatever, I think we're basically capped out. But I think when we start to move towards AR/VR, we'll start to see more platforms emerge. But I think what Andrew is saying is for the next couple of years, we're going to have people that are having— well, it's going to be more focused apps. And that will be a good thing. Yep.

No, I totally agree with you. I do think it is harder and harder to create the next TikTok or anything like that. Because if you have a feature that works, everyone just copies. And it's just hard to penetrate the market unless you're going to spend an arm and a leg.

I mean, let's use Duolingo as an example, right? Duolingo has a lot of users. They teach people how to learn different languages. So what if you can automatically create different communities in there or pair you with the right people? That's, that's more value that's coming within the app and people that are using it all the time. Maybe there are whale features that can be developed where it's like, oh, if you use it all the time, then, you know, you will get access to talking with other power users. I'm just making things up right now. So.

Yeah.

Cool. That's your buddy Andrew Chen. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. You can no longer just sign up for it. It's application only now. And if it does look like it's a good fit, we'll have someone from our team reach out and see if it's a good fit for the group. So that is it for today. And we will see you tomorrow.