The Most Left Curve Pre-Sale In Jungle History
Level 2 - Value Investor
Welcome Avatar! Been awhile. As you know we encourage all of you to slowly but surely escape the W-2 jail cell by starting an E-com biz. Since your employer is looking to pay you the least and likely below inflation, your best way to reach financial independence is with Business Equity in something that will be around for 10+ years.
You can sell you business but you can never sell your career/job.
On that note, we’ve got Kobra here who is going down the physical recovery niche.
The below is written entirely by BowTiedKobra with formatting edits only.
Launching Zenith Supplements
Wanted to give a shout out to Bull because we would not be here without their guidance.
I’m BT Kobra. My background is sports medicine and keeping athletes healthy. My business partner is Hypertrophy Dad. He is a firefighter. I only bring this up to say our skill set and background is the furthest thing from ecom and business.
We recently launched our pre-sale for Morning Would, the flagship product for Zenith Supplements. At the time of this writing, we made back 70% of our initial investment during the presale alone.
I will lay out an outline of how we went through from a simple idea to pre-sale launch below. Keep in mind, we are married, work full time jobs still, and have 2 and 3 kids respectively. So yes, it can be done. This is also probably our 8th or 9th attempt at WiFI money combined.
Planning
We had each tried various other endeavors that never really got traction. Most things relied too heavily on other entities outside of our control (ex dropshipping), they didn’t scale well or were a poor exchange of time for money. Ultimately we needed something we had control over as much as possible.
We both have a background of lifting and sports. Supplements are something we’re very familiar with. We wanted to make a product that we ourselves would use so we set out to do that.
We live in a stimmed out society. Everyone relies on some sort of upper to get through their day. You wake up dehydrated, then slam caffeine which exacerbates the problem. What if instead of caffeine, you rehydrated with electrolytes, stopped the catabolic process with aminos while fueling your brain with potent nootropics? What if we could instead combine 15 things into one product instead? Efficiency.
While doing some market analysis we realized there was nothing good that had all the ingredients we wanted in one place. Whatever was on the market that is similar in function to what we made is severely underdosed and/or loaded with stimulants.
We could make our own concoctions with electrolytes, nootropics, aminos etc. This was super expensive (almost $150/month to source individually) , tasted terrible, and was a huge hassle. Nobody has time to make a drink with 10 different powders.
So, we wanted to make our own, we wanted it to taste good, and we wanted it dosed appropriately.
Next, sourcing. Got a few recommendations from jungle peeps and ultimately we found a great supplier that was able to nail our v1 formula.
Naming and claiming.
Now we needed a name for the product. We extrapolated off the “morning” theme and wanted to give it a little twist. “Morning Wood” was a little too phallic, and it needed to be a pun. Ding.
Enter the name “Morning Would.” …Would you?
Tony the Tiger, Michelin Man, Toucan Sam etc. Having a likable, lovable mascot would be the key to marketing and brand recognition.
Going off the tagline, finding a mascot was a relatively simple decision. A beaver. It’s extremely left curve and we’ve fully embraced and leaned into it.
Business Setup
Most of this has been covered by BTB and others. Nothing really novel here
LLC set up through WY Attorney LLC
Banking done via Relay (WY Attorney LLC helps set this up)
AMEX - we use the Plum card for inventory. I know this isn’t the best card for points/rewards but it's excellent for cash flow early on which was what we needed.
Website - all domain and store design was done by myself through Shopify
We use Shopify payments.
Be cautious with them here. They like to slap random “funds withholding” as a “standard procedure”. Look into other payment processors especially if you are a brand new store and even more so if doing a pre-sale.
Our Team
We did not go about this alone. We chose to outsource to people better than us at very specific tasks to get us off the ground. The jungle is full of so much talent. It’s redacted to not take advantage of the resources at your fingertips
Email marketing - BTGreaseMonkey
Branding and Logos - Haley Shane (Huge caveat here, do not obsess over a logo up front. More on this later)
X Marketing - BTYukon. He has a gift. IYKYK
Accounting and Tax Stuff - BTCEO.
Special thanks to VampDeer, Gator and Broseidon for insight along the way
Demand Testing
We went from a “what if we did'' phone call in early February to testing demand on X in a week. We may be idiots but we move fast. The worst decision is indecision.
We spent just over $1,300 to get our formula made and had 3 tubs of samples sent out to us. If we didn’t generate any traction or interest, then no harm no foul.
We reached out to over 30 accounts on X, sent them samples of Morning Would *FOR FREE*. Our entire game plan was to get product in people’s hands and let word of mouth do its thing. We asked for people to give their honest reviews and share publicly.
We took the feedback, went back to our supplier to adjust the formula and got more samples to test the revision and then send to even more people.
At this point, there was a lot of organic interest on twitter so we capitalized and launched our presale weeks earlier (about 8 weeks) than we expected or planned to so we could capture the hype (thanks Jester).
Logistics
We are both busy with work, life and kids. For this endeavor, we didn’t want to deal with the hassle of manually fulfilling orders initially. Nor did we want toddlers tampering with products. We both live in warm climates and didn’t want our product getting cooked in our garages during the summer. Apologies to those that never got a handwritten thank you note from us. For these reasons we set up a 3PL right away
A local 3PL was the route we chose. We called around several places, got quotes and went with the best offer AND most responsive team. Using the bigger brands such as Shipmonk and Ship Bob will eat into your margins heavily. Plus, a lot of the national 3PLs won’t work with you during a presale anyways and if they do, they want you to have 1,000s of units pre-ordered.
Quick side note regarding quality control. Pay the little bit extra to make sure your product is properly tested. People smarter than us told us the time for penny pinching isn’t early on when the main focus is getting product in hand. It’s much better to pay that extra $200 for heavy metal testing, for example.
Marketing
Not much to add here. We are currently running off of organic X traffic and word of mouth as we are still in month 1 of this journey. We are in the process of getting TikTok ads running, IG and YT content. These may very well be live by the time this gets published. If you’re so inclined, check out HTD on Tik Tok, IG, YT for some good content coming down the pipe (nice).
Scaling
Our initial pre orders are expected to arrive the 2nd week of June if our supplier cooperates. We are still getting this thing off the ground and running. At this point, we are nearing a 2nd inventory order based on the presales alone, thank you to everyone who supported us so early.
We have added some accessories (merch, shakers, etc) to help drive up AOV as well to continue to build brand identity.
There is 0 rush to add more SKUs. We will likely add a few other flavors and a caffeinated version at some point but not in the immediate future.
Final Takeaways
Don’t obsess over themes, logos etc
We did $20k presale and counting with a free Shopify theme, an unfinished store because we don’t have complete real world assets yet and an unofficial Dall-e logo. Make a great product and drive traffic to it
Suppliers move slow and are [redacted]. Yes, that 2 day turnaround can turn into 17 very quickly. Plan accordingly. We were initially told 8-12 weeks and it ended up being 16. So apologies to everyone for the wait.
Don’t set a hard timeline on events, especially a pre-sale. Be flexible (thanks Jester)
Ask a ton of questions.
There are a ton of resources in the jungle. They have likely done what you’re stuck on
Move fast
We went from “what if” to pre-sale in 6 weeks
We are idiots and we’ve had some early success.
If we can, you can
Just one final question Would you? ZenithSupplements
BTB Notes
Some common themes across all of these launches pop up: 1) don’t waste a ton of time on design/perfect layout, 2) having an expensive logo isn’t important unless you’re talking about millions of views on a mega influencer thumbnail, 3) you can spin up a lot faster than you think and 4) if you want to avoid maximum pain, you must demand test because it is better to lose a small amount vs. waste time and lose tons of money on inventory. Better to lose 5-10% of the amount you’re willing to risk versus 50% of it without doing basic testing.
We’re not sure how the marking angle works for this niche, but we’ve seen Kobra solve injury issues on X over the past year or so. There isn’t anything preventing them from expanding or including the physical therapy niche in various forms.
On that note, lets see how they do and if we’ll have yet another success story!
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.
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Jungle full of smart jacked chads
honestly one of the most important quotes of this article is "We may be idiots but we move fast."
Speed wins.