Hitting the Million-Dollar Mark with Dog Products - #FFLTV Case Study

This is the part of Freedom Fast Lane TV where we look at one of our students’ businesses and examine where they could be making more money and where their best opportunities are. Today we’re looking at Tuff Mutt.

This is a submission from The Tribe and Tuff Mutt sells products for pets. Their website is TuffMutt.net and they have most of their sales coming from Amazon.com. Owner’s name is Nathan Colba.

Hey Nathan, what’s goin’ on, man?

And they’re also on Walmart.com and Jet.com.

So, a couple things. Nathan, your branding is awesome. Love the logo. Your website is spot on. You’ve done a great job. I love the header at the top that tells a little bit about the story of Chester.

I love that, can I say humanizing, the dog-anizing approach to that? You see what I did there? Anyway, I’m not a funny person.

So I think your branding has been great. I think the overall personality of the brand is great. Your reviews are really solid. Now Tuff Mutt right now is doing between $40,000 and $50,000 a month in sales, which is a great start. The question is, we’re kind of at this point where we’ve hit a moderate amount of success. What do we need to do now?

You’ve got to this point where you’re profitable, you’re selling a good amount of products. I am going to touch on what you said in your submission about your audience. Your audience is less than 2,000 people. On your Facebook page, you’re looking at only about 114 likes.

What do we do about this? Two things. One, we have figured out a process to take a product and to get it profitable, selling quickly, and to have a lot of solid reviews. We need to double down on that process.

Since you’re not at the million-dollar mark, you need to be at about some $81,000 to be at that million-dollar mark. Double down on what’s got you to this point. That means releasing as many products as you can comfortably handle.

Two more will probably give you the infusion that you need to be able to get at or near that million-dollar mark.

Everything changes when you’re at that million-dollar mark. You’re open to more investment opportunities. You have more customers. You’re taken more seriously as a brand.

You have more profit margins, so you can do more to advertise. So we need to sprint to that $80,000 a month. You’re going to get there by releasing probably two more products.

The second thing that we can do to both accelerate that process, and to set us up for larger and wider success, is to start building that audience specifically on Facebook or an email list or both. You are in a highly visual, highly emotional industry, and that’s pets.

We all love ours, some of us a little bit too obsessively. What that means is, we can very easily get people talking and communicating around our brand by highlighting people’s pets, showing the products in use, having a contest with our customers to send pictures of them actually using the product and then sharing that on Instagram, sharing that on Facebook.

That’s viral gold. People love that stuff. They love to be participating in that process. So start engaging an audience.

Your cost per audience member will be super low because you can target people who own Golden Retrievers, who own every type of dog, or just dog lovers.

I would go more specific, just to keep the costs down. But that amount of targeting is possible, and the clicks are really cheap, so you can get a bunch of really high quality traffic that is exactly for your market, and we can get them rallying around a conversation doing contests and showing the products being used.

This will get people talking about your brand and give you an audience to launch further products to, for you to do discounts and giveaways to, and to also just increase the overall interest in your brand.

If you do that you’ll solidify yourself against Amazon changes, you’ll give yourself a pool of potential buyers to buy the next product, and you will have more repeat customers and engaged people who find out about your products, which will get you closer and closer to that $80,000 mark and that million-dollar business.