What I Learned Growing My Business From 0 To 8 Figures In Less Than A Year

Hey! My name is Brock Mammoser, and I’m the co-founder Frost Buddy! About 2 years ago, my brother Mitch and I decided to go in on this crazy idea for a can cooler that fits all cans and bottles in one. If you would’ve told me we’d do upwards of $20M in revenue 18 months ago, I would have said you’re insane!

No, I had never started an online business and I had 0 experience on what the heck to do. So I’m going to try my best to break it down into how we’ve been able to really scale quickly and explode in the e-com world!

The Main Components Of An 8 Figure Online Business

• Manufacturing

• Fulfillment

• Website

• Marketing

• Social Media

• Financing

• Mindset

1. Manufacturing

If you’re gonna have a physical product, you’re going to need manufacturing before you do anything else! Some may argue that you could create an audience before a product, but that’s not how we did it. If you have an amazing product, the audience will come. Where do you find a supplier?? Well the place to go is a site called Alibaba, which is kind of like an Amazon marketplace for suppliers. We went there, typed in what “insulated koozie”, and you will see all sorts of suppliers that make insulated drinkware.

You’ll see something like this. Basically I went and reached out to a bunch of these suppliers, and explained exactly what I was looking for. You can either send sketches of your product idea, or for us, we sent over cans and bottles so that the supplier could get the exact measurements for the product.

This is what these suppliers do all day everyday, is make and sell products to businesses like us so they will work with you and know what to do! Once we got a 3D model of the product, we had them send us a couple samples before mass producing so that we could fix any issues beforehand. ALWAYS GET SAMPLES!

Once you can confirm that the samples are exactly what you want, then you’re good to go for mass production! Most suppliers will have an MOQ (minimum order quantity) anywhere from 500-3000 units so we ordered 3000 units to start off. Then you can expect anywhere from 20-40 days for mass production before the product is ready to ship.

Once our can coolers were ready to ship, we actually had our supplier handle the shipping through their freight forwarder, but it’s much cheaper if you go find a freight forwarder yourself. There are a ton of freight forwarders both in China and in the US that have great experience moving product from China to warehouses over here. Just do your homework here on the cost they give, and talk to anyone and everyone you can to find out what the current cost to ship goods is because we made that mistake ;) They will not give you bottom dollar unless you know what it is!

Now we are shipping to the US, but where the heck is it going??

2. Fulfillment

We are going to have to ship the products to customers so how did we go about doing that???

To start, we actually shipped all units to Mitch’s State Farm office because it was our first order from this supplier. You are going to want to make sure the quality is there because ask anyone that deals with China and there are horror stories. Not only is it great to check the quality, but it is great experience to learn and understand what it takes to do fulfillment. Mitch learned so much about it and now that we’ve scaled up, he is still learning.

We quickly outgrew Mitch being able to ship product so we found a small mom and pap 3PL (3rd Party Logistics). This is a company that will do all of your fulfillment from receiving the product to storing it and shipping it out to the customer. This was great for us so that we could scale without having to build our own fulfillment infrastructure. Basically you’re going to pay a fee on every single order for shipping + storage + other costs.

Eventually we outgrew this 3PL and we searched for a larger DTC fulfillment company that we knew could handle volume. Some great options for you to look at are 2 below that we like:

• ShipBob

• Deliverr 

Take it from me, ask for references and do your due diligence because we have found out the hard way that some 3PLs will try to screw you for every sneaky dollar they can, and it can also be a nightmare if they aren’t efficient with their order fulfillment. You know you have a good 3PL if you rarely have to meet with them. If you have to call and meet regularly, odds are it’s because of problems, not because things are going smoothly.

Now that we had a supplier, and we had fulfillment, all we have to do is sell product right?

3. Website

I had never built a website in my entire life. But thank god for Shopify, they make life wayyy easier. I dove in and learned all that I could about building a website with Shopify. One thing you should know, your website or your storefront is it’s a never ending optimization. Your website will always be changing because that’s where all your revenue is coming from! If I could go back, I would make life easier by paying a couple hundred bucks for one of the pre built templates, because at the end of the day, your site doesn’t have to be fancy or super duper pretty. It needs to be simple, explain why your customer wants/needs your product, and be easy to navigate. I’ve spent $20K on a custom built, beautiful website, and I used it for a week because my simple Shopify template site converted better 😂

My first website was beyond ugly, but you know what, I just started and kept making it better. The best thing I probably did was taking 5 or 6 of my favorite websites, and taking my favorite pieces of those and putting them together for my site.

At the end of the day, I’ve learned to not overcomplicate it because if you have a great product and a simple site, sales will happen!

4. Marketing

This is my bread and butter right here haha This is what I love and I could go on and on about this, but I’ll try to do a nice overview! There are so many different aspects of marketing that have helped us scale:

• Facebook Ads

• Google Ads

• Tik Tok Ads

• Snapchat Ads

• Pinterest Ads 

• Email Marketing

• SMS Marketing

Yes, I use every single one of these methods and that’s how we spend upwards of $500k / mo on advertising sometimes. My philosophy with marketing was simple at the beginning. Let’s start with Facebook and Google ads and stay about 2x ROAS (Return on ad spend). For every dollar I spent, I wanted at least 2 back. Ideally 4-5x is great, but in the world today, it can be tough. I started by doing all of the marketing myself. I learned every social platform’s advertising, and I learned how to do email marketing and sms marketing. Eventually, as we grew, I couldn’t handle running the ads, so I had to find a full time digital marketing agency to take over.

I am so glad I did everything myself to start because it allowed me to have a full understanding of what the agency should do and how well they should do it. With the agency, we were able to go from $200k / mo. To $800k the next month to $1.2M the next. Now it helped that we launched the 2.0 version of our product right as we brought them on, but an agency will have systems and knowledge beyond what one person can do. As you get big enough, it’s a must to be able to scale efficiently and still hit that ROAS that you need to hit! I could go all day into this, but ill save for another week to dive deeper into certain platforms, and how we are able to hit such massive numbers.

For email and sms, there are a couple of different softwares that you can use that integrate with Shopify. The very first thing I’d do if I could go back is make sure that I have email and sms sign up forms ready to go because those lists have been crucial. Frost Buddy has over 350K subscribers now and the profitability of these channels is unmatched.

As we’ve grown our subscriber list, each month’s revenue has stabilized so much more because we make so much off of sending 3 emails a week and 2 texts per week. I don’t know the exact $ amount per subscriber that we make but I’ll dive in one of these weeks because these 2 things are beyond crucial.

For email, use Klaviyo.

For sms, use Postscript

5. Social Media (Organic)

I won’t go too deep into this one but it’s definitely an important piece of our scaling. Frost Buddy focuses organic social media on Facebook, Instagram, and mainly Tik Tok. If you follow me at all, you know that Tik Tok is our largest social media platform because I went viral in October 2021 with 20M views on one video. We went from 2K followers to 200K followers in 5 days. EVERY START UP SHOULD HAMMER TIK TOK!!

Tik Tok is the one platform where you can go viral every day, week, month because the algorithm is friendly still, and people on there love honest, genuine small businesses. I post every single day on Tik Tok and now we are up to 315K followers. I then take my Tik Tok videos, and post them on Instagram and Facebook reels. Yep, that’s it. That’s my strategy 😂 If it aint broke, don’t fix it! Haha

I hear it all the time! “I don’t have time to post on Tik Tok”. I sit down for 4 hours a week, and I make 30 videos all on one day. People don’t care if you have the same shirt on. Just post and learn!!

6. Financing

You think all this growth could happen without money? HA HA. Well it did, for awhile. We bootstrapped for the first year of business. When we sold product, we turned around and order as much as we could with that money. We ordered 3K units. Sold those. Ordered 18K units. Sold those. Ordered 35K units. Sold those. Order 67K units. You get the picture!

We were able to do this with a line of credit at a local bank. They gave us a line of credit for our second order and kept increasing it for us as sales increased. We had a personal guarantee on it which meant if things go south, we had to come up with money.

After selling out an entire summer, we wanted to really explode growth. So we found an investor that we know pretty well. With his net worth, he was able to get us a much much larger line of credit with the bank so that we could order way more units. Of course, for him to take on the risk instead of us, we had to give up a small % of the company. But that’s the name of the game. Could we have bootstrapped and kept growing slowly and reinvesting? Absolutely! But we are in a competitive market, and we knew we needed to go fast! There are a million different ways to use venture capital and I’m still learning as we go!

7. Mindset

This is the last thing that has helped us scale to 8 figures and beyond! MINDSET

I’m a 2 feet off the cliff kind of guy. Just jump in and figure that crap out. And that’s how you have to be in this world. I don’t set limits on Frost Buddy. I rarely set goals because that could limit us. I show up, work my butt off, learn, get better, and as a result, we grow. If I see someone else build a massive company or do something amazing, I tell myself that there is no reason I can’t do the same. We are all human and we all have amazing potential. Possibilities are endless if you are innovative, creative, and disciplined. So we show up! That’s it. Just set your sights on the stars and don’t stop until you get there.

We have gotten kicked, knocked down, beaten up, and whatever else on this journey. But if you don’t stop and embrace the failure, you can do some insane things!

I know this one was long! Hopefully it helped or gave some insight as to who I am and what we have done. If I can help one person gain one piece of information from these newsletters, that’s all I could ask 😄

I’ll be using these every week to talk about past stories, experiences, and current experiences with Frost Buddy! If you are interested in start ups, personal motivation, just like me, subscribe!!