He Built $1M Business in One Weekend for $40 - Ep. #320

So I knew that I could start up for close to nothing, got on Shopify, built out the whole website. No coding experience. No coding experience whatsoever. That was our first full year, ended up closing out at just over a million dollars in revenue. I had a whole weekend to myself. I was like, I wonder if I just put my head down how far I could go on a website for this. We ended up doing over $80,000 in revenue. In those two months alone, I launched in 2019, literally months before the world shut down. And people did one of two things. I feel like they either got a pet or had a baby. Printer Pet absolutely skyrocketed. So this guy built a seven-figure business from a $40 investment, but sales are down and he's out of ideas. So today we're going to come up with some new ideas so both he and you can profit from it. Let's dive in. Spencer. Chris. How are you doing, man? How are you? Good. Tell me about your business. So Printer Pet is a custom pet gift company where we put your pet's face, this is my dog, Rue, on different products and SKUs that we have on the website. It was actually born by accident. I've always had some sort of entrepreneurial drive to start things. And prior to Printer Pet was working on a pet bandana and scarf company. It was like these weird little infinity scarves and bandanas for pets that I had manufactured here in Dallas. And as I was running, trying to run profitable ads for that and trying to run all the marketing, my whole Instagram Explorer page was just inundated with different pet businesses. And I remember scrolling one day and I saw a competitor that had pet portraits like this, only it was your pet in an old-timey, like, renaissance. I've seen those. Yeah, yeah. So I saw that company and I had seen this style of artwork on, on different websites for, like, houses, things like that. And after seeing the renaissance portraits, I was like, this style of artwork would work really well for, like, a custom pet thing. And it just so happened that I had a free weekend where I had a whole weekend to myself. Because I'd already known about outsourcing manufacturing with print-on-demand services were really new at that point. But I spent all my days on YouTube, just looking up, like, running profitable ads, different business types, everything I'd heard about print-on-demand. So I knew that I could start up for close to nothing. And the business I was running at the time with the pet scarves and bandanas was making money, was not making near enough for me to live off of. I was teaching, this was after I quit my full-time job in commercial real estate, and I was teaching fitness classes. And that was actually what was where I was getting the majority of my money to be able to live. And I was like, you know what, we'll just try spinning this out. So I spent one whole weekend, got on Shopify, paid the $30 for the Shopify membership at the time, and built out the whole website. Just a lot of University of YouTube and trial and error, and really rudimentary. Not even Photoshop skills ended up being Canva. So at that point, I didn't even know what Photoshop was. I was like, I'll figure it out on Canva. I'd used Fiverr and Upwork. And I was like, I'm going to do this. Before for different services. So if it really got down to needing some photos, did that, took some of my own photos, ended up launching that next week. And I launched in 2019, literally months before the world shut down. When all of that happened, people did one of two things. And Printer Pet absolutely skyrocketed. The pet bandana and scarf company stayed constant and ended up shutting down that business. Running this full time, by complete chance, I was talking to a friend who said that type of product would do really well on Etsy. And so we were already running sales directly through our site and the business was doing well, well enough for me to be able to pull money from it. I don't have to invest in inventory, anything like that. It was a pretty cashflow heavy business. And I was able to supplement my rent, everything low overhead at that time. And I put the products on Etsy. And that's where everything really just hockey sticked and blew up. 2020 ended up being a seven figure year in revenue, which was insane. And trying to figure out how to scale with that was a whole thing in and of itself. At the end of 2020, we had 80 artists on staff that were not full-time artists. They're paid commissions per artwork coming in. And then three full-time employees at that time, all of which were remote. So I was leveraging kind of remote employees to be able to take care of everything. So what month did you officially launch to the public? November of 2019. Okay. Super late 2019, November. Okay. And did you have paid ads when you launched? Like you had paid ad experience or no? So I had paid ad experience. I had wasted a lot of money on meta ads. When I launched Printer Pet was completely organic and me posting about it, telling people about it. Your launch was just you like personally posting. Me personally. Instagram, Facebook. Yeah. Check out my thing. Yep. And what was your first month like with regards to revenue? First month was low. First month was just over a thousand dollars in revenue. And a lot of that was attributed to friends and family that I had told about it. So it was a low first month. Second month, we saw that climb as soon as we started implementing some ads, which was month two. I was like, okay, I think this thing has legs. I thought the business model was really attractive. The fact that I didn't have to spend a lot of money on it. I thought it was really attractive. I thought it was just a stock up on inventory because with the previous business, that had been a whole nightmare learning all that. Finding a group of people to be able to sew all these bandanas and scarves and source fabric and do all these things was just a little bit of a nightmare. So I was like, you know what? Let's put some money into meta ads and everything. That's when we started running our basic Facebook ads and we were able to get up to $3,000 to $5,000 a second month. Can we sketch it out? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So $3,000 to $5,000 a second month. So month one, we were around $1,000 in revenue. And all that was just friends, family, you know, and luckily we launched right around Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So we're able to, you know, kind of piggyback on that a little bit, which helps with the launch. I call these like unsustainable sales, right? Completely. Yes. You're not doing much, especially because there's, we have a lot of repeat customers, which is awesome, but it's not a product that lends itself to having a lot of repeat customers. A lot of subscription. Exactly. And it's, it's no subscription. It's no supplement, anything like that, that, you know, you can get a lot of repeat customers. So month two, this is when we started running Facebook ads. One of the social platforms I used with the most success was Pinterest at the time. Prior to doing all of this, when I still had my full-time job, I had learned how to scale Instagram pages to 10, 20,000 followers. And then I was flipping them, selling them. That was all done through like Telegram groups and stuff. That was back when all engagement pods used to work well. So I was using that when I was posting. So it wasn't just like me posting to my personal Instagram, like, Hey, look at this. I was kind of strategically going about that. All of that doesn't work at all anymore, but back then you could kind of utilize different groups. Exactly. Yeah. Things like that. And like you like 10 of these people's posts, and then you post the link to your most recent posts and all these different. Pages with authority. If Instagram saw big pages, liking your content, it would suggest your content to the followers of all the people with big pages. So you're able to get some explore page visibility and stuff. So I was kind of utilizing that a little bit as well as paying for that's back when different, uh, interest pages, like a pet page, you could pay like 50 bucks and get a post. So that's why I started utilizing with Facebook ads, pay posts, stuff like that. But it was like pay 20 bucks and get a page. With 400,000 followers to post a product, which was awesome and doesn't happen anymore. And that's when we were able to climb to anywhere from three to 5k. And then month three was when we started to see a lot of trash in months. Three was when we kind of implemented all the Etsy sales on the Etsy channel itself. So from there on, we started seeing about like anywhere from 10 to 20,000 up until the end. Of October, our business is very, very seasonal at this point. I didn't know that, but now I know that we'll do anywhere from 65 to 70% of our revenue is done in just the months of November and December. Wow. So we sustained that 10 to 20, all the way from month three down to month 10. And you were, it was about that same. Yeah. And so the nice thing about the business is through leveraging overseas labor, which by the way, I couldn't say good enough things about the employees we have. They work so hard. Communication's awesome. We primarily, a lot of our employees are in the Philippines so much. So I was actually looking at getting an office in the Philippines for them to be able to go and work from, but anyways, through scaling through labor overseas. And then the fact that we were dealing with all these different screen printing facilities that we would pay a premium for product too. So we could save a little bit on margin if we were to do it in house, but they took care of fulfillment, shipping, everything else. And we paid them a flat rate where they kind of. boiled that into one cost. And so our margin, and at this point, the only SKUs that we had were posters, framed portraits, and digital files that we would sell. Obviously, digital files had really, really good margins because all we're paying for is the labor for the artwork to be done. The portraits, the margins were not as great. We were, for certain portraits, depending on the size, anywhere from 40% to 50% margins. So pretty low on those. But overall, our margins were anywhere from 60% to 70% margins, which were pretty awesome at that point, especially when there's no investments necessary for reinvesting inventory, anything like that. So at this point, we are making profit. My gross profit margin was anywhere from like 20%, 30% a month. So 20% to 30% of this a month that I'm making in profit. So on a really good month, like $8,000, $9,000. On a month that's not as good, we're making like $3,000, $4,000. But luckily, my overhead at the time was not very high. Yeah. So that was your net profit. Gross is 50% to 60%. Netting, 20% to 30%. Yeah. Yeah. And in e-com, if you really want to push with paid ads, you kind of have to have a 60% to 70% gross margin. You do. Yeah. No. And that's what I started realizing with ads, which is why, the Facebook ads as soon as we launched Etsy scaled down, became non-existent. Etsy ads ended up being such a godsend. But for anyone that has ran ads on Etsy, there's no guaranteed spend, no matter what your budget is. So for example, right now, our budget on Etsy is $1,000 a day on ad spend. We'll be lucky to hit anywhere from $100 to $200 a day in ad spend because Etsy determines. Yeah. And it's a pay-per-click. Which is really nice where you're only paying for actual visits to your listing. But because of that, they don't have enough traffic to guarantee that you're able to spend your whole budget. And beyond that, you can't get very granular with any of your ads. You literally check mark a listing and say, yes, we want to advertise this listing. And you have a list of a couple of listings that you want to advertise, and they choose where that ad spend is allocated, who it's shown to. They take care of all that, which is nice if you're looking for hands-off. But if you're looking to actually be able to scale something and grow it, very, very difficult. And then in those holiday months, so as soon as we got to November, that's when the ads started spending at $1,000 a day. That's where conversion rates went through the roof because we have a very giftable product. We see probably 30, 40% of our sales. We see probably 40% of our sales are for people buying them for themselves personally. The other 60% is people buying as a gift for someone that has unfortunately had a dog pass. They want to celebrate a new puppy that they got. It's their birthday and they love their dog and they want something to have them around the house, something like that. Very giftable product, which lends itself really well to November, December time of the year. December with Christmas and then November with all the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales going on. A lot of people will buy gifts then to be able to give to people. So in month 10, this year, we ended up at just over a million dollars in revenue. So up these 10 months until then, we're at just over $100,000. So I'm like, $100,000 is awesome. That was always my goal to be able to. Yeah. No, for that first year, I was like, if I can do 100,000 revenue, that's like six figures is such a big. That's what you want to aim for. And keep in mind that month one was November of the previous year, December. So we had another couple months where we were just seeing about 150,000 revenue that we'd done in 2020. And then end of Q4 2020, November and December, absolutely exploded. We ended up doing over 800,000 revenue in those two months alone. When I say working, 12 to 16 hour days, it was me sitting on my computer. I had to learn how to create all the raw files for the products themselves because I wasn't able to hire employees at the rate I need to hire them. There was a moment where we had to turn off the Etsy shop because we couldn't handle the influx of orders that were coming in. I was hiring new artists, trying to do everything. And that was our first full year, ended up closing out at just over a million dollars. And that was our first full year, ended up closing out at just over a million dollars in revenue, which was insane. Something just happened with Beehive that I think you might have missed. You can now connect your Beehive account directly to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever AI tool that you use through something called MCP. So last week, I connected my newsletter to Claude. And now I can sit in Claude and say, look at my open rates from the last 30 days and tell me which subject lines perform best or draft next week's newsletter based on the topics my audience clicked on the most this month. And Claude does it. It can see my real Beehive data, subscribers, engagement numbers, automations, revenue, everything. And I've already cut my weekly production time because I stopped guessing what to write about and started letting the data decide for me. So instead of using AI to just write generic content, use AI to plug into your actual newsletter to make decisions based on what's already working. Beehive built this MCP so your favorite AI tool can be your newsletter strategist and your data scientist all in one. So move your email list over today and try Beehive 30% off for 30 days with code CHRIS30 because this might be the simplest, highest leverage business you can build right now. How big is your email list? Email list now is 24,000. Nice. And that's after we prune it every whenever with like flow people. Yeah. Yeah. We have like a midnight flow and stuff like that. If people end up not interacting with emails for a while, but the we have now are so the portrait and this is actually this whole flow, this checkout flow is, is a lot different than it was initially. And we've actually customized a lot. So now we don't just have the normal block style portrait option. We have line art, which is more of a minimalistic look. And then in an effort to cut back on, to make things a little more streamlined and more automated. We also have this Vogue style, which you get to put some texts about your pet and it has like more of a modern kind of, and it just uses the photo. And then if your pet is opposed to using our own artwork. So do you not need artists for that style? No, no, no. This is all automated completely. I have an employee that goes through and creates the raw file that we send to the print on demand supplier. But outside of that, there's no labor and that takes him a couple of minutes ends up costing less than a dollar to be able to make that, which is nice. And then as far as all the framing options, we've extended, we've expanded past just frames, posters, and digital files. We now have canvases and surfaces. We have hanging wall art that is kind of those magnet poster things, and then still posters in digital file. What about AI, like image generation tools? So I've gone back and forth because it's definitely an option, but one of our differentiators in the market right now is that we are hand drawn by people. And there are people that will want things removed from certain portraits. For example, if you have your dog wearing a bandana and you're like, I don't want having a bandana on the portrait, we're able to go in and our artists are able to just remove that with any AI. It's tough to be able to specify, Hey, remove that bandana while keeping everything, you know, the same with our work without looking really off. So we've gone back and forth with it. And right now we're kind of using as a differentiator because there are competitors that are just using AI for everything. Yeah. But you know, AI is also advancing, you know, extremely quickly and the image generation, in the past year has significantly like when I started using any AI image generation just a year ago, they couldn't even get texts. Like text was something that was really tough for all the, all the different generators, but now they can get texts perfectly. We actually use AI image generation for a lot of our blog posts and stuff. But as far as the artwork that's all done by our artists right now, and because we are leveraging labor overseas, our artists is significantly less than it would be here in the US. So it hasn't gone to the point where it makes sense for the business quite yet, but it's definitely something we've looked into. I feel like AI agents could be good too, for all the back and forth with the customer. I'm actually just, I just bought a Mac for a minute. Yeah. I feel like orphaned clock claw. Yeah. Yeah. So did I. Yeah. Did you? Nice. Yeah. And that's another thing. I mean, I think one of the coolest things about entrepreneurship in general is you are a constant entrepreneur. You're a constant student and there's all these new, like, I have no idea how to work cloud, but I guarantee I could go on YouTube. Yeah. And if I spend a week really diving into it, I can figure out how to get it out and get it working. So I think that's one of the things that makes me love entrepreneurship so much, but that's actually funny. You mentioned, yeah, is I've been looking into it for sourcing influencers, customer support via email and live chat, and then just image generation for a lot of, a lot of our blog posts, but using it for like email marketing itself. Yeah. Yeah. Which has been super fun to kind of dig into. So the, um, checkout for just the pet portraits has the first page is just choosing your portrait style how many pets are in it you can go up to five pets and we see a lot of people with multiple pets and they like to be able to have all their pets in one portrait so we'll do that and then the next step is going to go to the different flame frame styles we have so we have three different frame styles and with the business to get our aov up we've been adding in a bunch of different services that we add that are extra cost to us but for example the red oak frame is an extra eight dollars for us and we've just round out to an extra 10 so that's an extra little bit of margin that we get with the order which is nice and we have other upsells that you'll see later down the line that are more convenient for the customer and if they're willing to pay for it we're willing to do like we have one where you skip the artist queue and you go to the front of the queue not to the detriment of any other customers you're still going to receive it along the same time frame it'll just depending on volume be towards the latter end of that time frame then yeah other people can pay to have that moved up and then we have these premium design backgrounds where we hire an actual artist to go in and they design those so this second step you get to choose the size the framing background color whatever it is and then this is where you get into the weeds with a lot of customization you upload all the photos here your pet name if you want or don't want it you can add a halo to your pet we have a printed font we have a script font you get to choose from those you can also go with no font notes for your artist if you have anything specific and then that you have to upload files to be able to do it but the very last step is going to be those final customizations you can make to the portrait and everything so building out this whole flow was something that really changed everything for we saw our aov rise 20 percent with being able to what is her aog right now it's at ninety dollars or yeah for the online store and for etsy excuse much lower because we sell a lot of digital products there it's sixty five dollars on minutes okay so at the end etsy is significantly lower just because the bulk of customers are buying a digital file not framed where it's where the majority of our sales are direct side or frame portraits and you know even this two-pad portrait is 105 because it's our all the shipping of the portrait is we offer free shipping and that's a cost we take on our sales but shipping is pretty expensive for all these portraits to make sure they get to their destination all in good shape and then obviously the labor with all the artists our work has to be done and in the product so yeah so did you have any specific questions or so i think right now i've proven out that there's a demand for the product which is nice and helps me sleep a little easier at night but as far as driving traffic finding a consistent because like you said like in month one that's you can't rely on that thousand dollars from friends and family just like i can't rely on holiday season every year you know i need to find some consistent way to drive traffic i've yet to find what that is so i don't know if i just haven't given ads enough time i have never really tried influencer marketing to the degree that i know i need to be able to attack it to be able to see that difference and then honestly i'm not very good anymore at making content on my own about my business and raising awareness because i don't like feeling like i'm peddling product to people that follow me it's just it's weird for me i don't like right right selling to people so any any ideas anything yeah so look up custom captain that's my buddy's company he does over 10 million dollars a year with this business and if you just look that's what he started with is boat and car artwork and wait no way it's very it has the line drawing very similar to what you're doing but he gets all of his business from facebook ads really yeah and with my e-commerce business texas snacks we have relied on google ads since day one and we've kind of forayed into facebook ads every 6 12 months and it just wasn't quite profitable enough and we just kind of abandoned it until a few months ago we just kind of abandoned it and we just kind of abandoned it we cracked the code we were profitable on facebook ads like four years ago and i think we were spending seven dollars to acquire a fifty dollar customer which was great so we don't have great margins so we need to be like below 10 okay right but then it just it got less and less profitable we try every six or cold months and didn't see much but i i've got a new ads guy now and he just kept like pestering us for more creative more creative more creative and that's the name of the better way and it's not harder as in you gotta spend more money you gotta it's like you need more creative you need to test more things and have you ever used hey gen no so hey gen like is it like it's an ai avatar yeah you could like you could test 100 different ugc ads user generated content ads with ai avatars and it looks almost real but you don't have to pay anyone or you don't have to go back and forth and i've been hit with their ads so many times on instagram and like the stuff they create yeah okay that's good but we don't even do that like with we don't use any ai in our texas snacks ads and our row as our return on ad spend today is 10x at scale we're spending like 500 a day on facebook ads and we're at 10x row as and it's just because we just feed it more creative we keep the creative fresh and it's hard it's not super expensive but it's just hard and time consuming yeah we have someone there like look at this new product oh they have this new st patrick's shirt and how are you gathering a lot of the ugc are you from our release no there's no ugc there's our employees are just filming content like in the store or in the warehouse with the products really and just talking about it in different ways and we'll try a 10 second video and a 10 minute video and we just try everything and then we just put all the ad spend behind the ads that work and then after a week or two you know the performance dips and then we test new creative and like that's what we're gonna have to do forever but that's okay yeah like we're doubling our sales that's awesome and our sales have been growing it you know but now they're like doing this that's so all from facebook i've so i guess my my follow-up question with the strategy of actually running the ads from what i've gathered thus far with the research i've done meta pretty much takes on their own as far as targeting audiences because i remember when i initially started it was like targeting down to interest and age and i'll do any of that you just really audience advanced insight you just worry about creative and they'll find the people are you guys pretty much using just cbo ad group that's okay yeah then how much time have you spent in the meta ads library looking at competitive recently yeah little to none recently um two years ago i was spending hours a day going through the meta ad library for we have a really big competitor called willow and they do a they're pretty much an exact same product it was and they crush it i mean i would just copy them i would pull your audience and i would pull them and say hey like if you could buy this product for ninety dollars and it was drawn by a human or the same product uh that looks you could even send pictures of each yeah this was drawn by a human and it's ninety dollars this was made with an ai model and it's 65 which would you prefer because because sometimes we assume like they want it to be drawn by a human like that's why they don't always want that yeah i just want cheaper and if all of your competitors are doing using ai models and just printing money and it's like do we want to be like dogmatic about our mission or do we want to be profitable because there are and that's one of the reasons that etsy has become so much more competitive is that there's people now that will offer digital files for 10 bucks a file and they're just using ai yeah to be able to do all of it so they cut out any of the overhead it's 100 pretty much 100 profit outside of whatever their labor is for generating the image itself and i've been really back and forth on how much does that differentiator actually help us and is it worth the money we're leaving on the table because i i can use open generated like yeah not it's not tough anymore maybe a year ago it would have been difficult now it would not be at all and then we'll have people that accuse it like we'll have customers if they get the artwork back and it's not their style this looks like it was just ai or something i'm like i wish it was because we want to save money yeah yeah it's actually not have you played with nano banana at all have you heard of that no idea what that is so you've got to play with nano banana it's a google product it's google image generation they're number one in the image so riley was just telling me about that an hour before you walked it yeah that's awesome okay that because i've been using opens here just chat yeah for pretty much all damages so i posted a video about how people should start like a a lead generation business for home service business where you just take like pictures of homes from the zillow api or redfin or google maps and then you run it through nano banana and just say like make beautiful landscaping native to north texas landscaping right and then you send that lead to the person it's like hey we could make your yard look like this and you just automate it and it doesn't look like an animation or a drawing it looks like a picture of their exact house with perfect landscaping and then you get leads and you sell them to landscapers so you don't have to start a landscaping business but there are other there are real estate agents doing this and i posted that video and i've had people reach out saying hey i started that business it's working i posted another video about take nano banana and go to real estate listings that don't have nice pictures or at least that don't have pictures of homes that are so first yeah they're not so yeah and then send them all the you send the listing agent the staged pictures yeah and say hey did you know that homes on average sell for seven percent more or you know for 23 days they're on market for 23 days instead of 42 days if they're staged well why didn't you have a stage because it costs four thousand dollars and it's annoying you know furniture is heavy so here you can pay me a dollar for photo per photo just upload your photos into my web app and you'll spit out a staged version of it and what do you have to lose it's 20 bucks and you could sell your home for 20 grand more so our point is like nano banana is that good that when you see that image it puts out it looks to them they look for video animation as well or is it just i think they do yeah i would think very seriously about live selling and everything i'm about to tell you i learned from this guy behind the camera brayden he is a live selling master on like what not and tiktok live i'm i'm really into pokemon cards yeah i own i've spent way too much money on pokemon and i have like all the vintage cards and everything and so i get ads for whatnot all yeah so it's whatnot and what else and and tiktok live tiktok live just launched auctions and it's very early and so basically the first movers to any given category on tiktok are getting pushed like crazy to the algorithm so brayden my friend slash that guy right there holding the camera breaking the fourth wall here he sells food he sells protein bars on whatnot what protein and tick built bars whatnot and tiktok live and tonight we're doing a live show uh we're gonna make a video about it and he's buying these bars for 75 cents and selling them for like at or above retail that's right and he sells them for the most on tiktok because it's so new and people are just excited they want to bid like they might even know it's above retail but they just get caught up what you could do is you could just have some physical prints and you could sell one of two things you could just do digital stuff yeah digital only five bucks yeah 10 it doesn't matter use ai to generate all of them you don't need any of your team in the philippines or you could do physical ones he'd like you could do drawings different styles you could just pull up like 20 different styles like yeah golden doodle frenchie like just get like the most common breeds yeah because that's going to be the broadest for people that are watching and do an auction like for a 8x12 or whatever for the drawing style french oh seven bucks 850 850 and like you will make money but the point is to is to bring people to your web somewhere yeah okay there we go that's all i have my marching orders all right a ton of ugc need to look into everything with ai and need to start some tiktok lives because that's fun like i like doing stuff like that yeah i like yapping did you have noticed hey guys if you're still listening to this it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your airpods out you're still mowing the lawn you're still driving what have you if you're still here with me i would really really love and appreciate a five-star review on spotify apple or wherever you get your podcast it would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business it would mean a ton hope you have the best day of your life today