Tabs Chocolate Playbook

Owner

Marc Pfeiffer

Market Analysis

Amazon performance

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BT28F6WH

Using the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer

78,453/3 = 26,151 clicks per month - all the traffic is likely branded searches

Semrush data shows steady strong growth

Organic terms are mostly branded

No direct competitors yet

Focused on defending branded terms

Sample Ads

Future Plans

Get into international marketplaces - more than 40% of all of his traffic comes internationally and they currently only sell in the USA
Diversify away from the D2C website - Move to Amazon, Etsy, Wholesale and retail shops, smoke shops, sex stores, convenience stores, gas stations
Lastly he wants to break into paid advertising
He wants to build out new products and extension lines since currently they are only a one product shop
Looking at his performance on Amazon he is doing about 4000 units a month which is we assume is all the lower priced $29.99 price he’s making $120k/month on Amazon currently as of 8/5/2023. He listed his product there on May 6th, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BT28F6WH

It is interesting to compare his branded queries vs Mr. Beasts Chocolate

Took most popular and natural supplements for sex and put them into a great tasting chocolate that was a luxury experience. According to Amazon ingredients are “60% cocoa, Epimedium, Maca Root & DHEA”
They invested heavily into building an amazing package - the packaging needs to look attractive in order to help them acquire a customer. The packaging & branding was inspired by Truff (super expensive high end hot sauce brand). Tabs box is very similar to theirs

If the chocolate doesn’t deliver on it’s promise and give them a good experience then they’ll never reorder again.

Worked with a food scientist and chocolatier to come up a chocolate that was impactful and also tasted good.
He targeted Generation Z with "sex chocolate," which contained natural supplements sold in pill form and packaged in a unique way. By making these supplements luxurious and destigmatizing their use, he disrupted the pharmaceutical industry's traditional approach.
TikTok democratizes the ability to go viral. He got up to 30-40 TikTok creators on retainer putting out 1-3 TikToks per day so they were pumping out a massive amount of content - eventually he switched everyone over to fully affiliate commission based model which lowered the downside of non-performers and rewarded top performers more. Only some of his creators have a small monthly retainer with commission.
He doesn’t know what video will go viral but he does know that if they put out 50 videos a day then one of those will hit the algorithm. Instead of trying to find the needle in the haystack you just grab the whole haystack
Controversial product with luxury feel engineered to go viral on TikTok
Can you describe the essence of the product in 3 seconds? If so that will contribute greatly to your success.
They’re not selling chocolate. They’re selling an experience and a mood and therefore the whole entire vibe needs to be spot on. Otherwise how do you justify selling 3 tiny 20grams of chocolate for $29.99.

He’s not selling chocolate he’s selling you the best night of your life.

Called hundreds of chocolate Co-manufacturers before finding the right one with a low MOQ

Fixed costs of creating the tooling and cleaning it after each run stay consistent so Comans typically don’t want to do an order under $10,000 so 99.9% of the chocolate coman don’t want to touch you unless you’re doing big numbers. So from his research there were only 1-2 companies he found who were willing to do the low MOQ.
The Coman they picked specialized in specialty chocolates like one brand that had beetroot and other superfoods in their chocolate or like a CBD chocolate
They took supplements that promote sexual wellness and turned that into a luxury experience that was de-stigmatized, wasn’t taboo, and something people could be proud to share with their partner. Values that he defined from the start.

Supply Chain

3 different supplement suppliers - each specialty supplement comes from it’s own vendor
1 chocolate Coman - chocolatier

Custom virgin polycarbonate molds to create the look of the chocolate finished

1 box manufacturer based in China
In total he says probably has 8 manufacturers and they have different lead times

Started getting traffic on website Feb 2022. Doing over $10M in revenue for 2023. 40-45% net profit margin with over 1 billion organic views on TikTok
Product Development

Chocolate breaks in half which is intentional so each partner can get half of it. If you see it on video you don’t need to explain it.

Don’t need a lot of text to explain it. In 3 seconds visually you’re able to grabble with the idea of sex chocolate.

Only 3 chocolate squares per box was intentional. They could have put 50 or 100 chocolates into a box and have a massive bar. Instead they decided to go the opposite and do it very scarce. The reason being they wanted to create this luxury feel experience. By making it limited it creates this “vibe” & “feeling.”
Every detail was very conscious and intentional - one core value of delivering a luxury experience and making every decision based off that.
The box is part of the product

Gold foil
Socials are on the inside of the lid
There’s an emoji under the chocolate when you pull it out
You need to new customers through the door and give them an amazing experience if you want to get them to keep coming back
The box requires a lot of manual labor - lead times were months to do them
The box’s purposes is to be sexy enough to get someone to want to buy it and notice it

Chocolate

Made in Salt Lake City Utah however on his amazon listing states “made in our fully FDA-compliant facility in North Venice, Florida”

Only stuff made in China is the box and the chrome poly mailers which create an embryotic effect which traps the heat from coming into the chocolate because chocolate melts. Melting wasn’t something he thought about until the summer months came and customers were complaining left and right about the chocolate melting - this also negatively impacted his Amazon listing review rating.
Then there’s the special plastic that wraps the chocolate that is a particular manufacturer
For the customer acquisition

It’s not about the chocolate or the experience
It’s about whether it’s attractive (looks good). Is it something that I want to buy?
They talked with 100s of suppliers and got down to 3-4 potential manufacturers. Found the box manufacturer on Alibaba

Rather than building the product first and then trying to figure out how to market it started first with the marketing and then build the product to deliver it. Reverse engineer it from viral TikTok marketing. They saw a similar product on TikTok which was the genesis for Tabs

A random chick posted a TikTok about it and it had 8M views & 2M likes.
He does research on the brand and notices:

They’re not being sold online
They’re packaging and branding sucks
They have no social media presence
So to him it was “Holy shit there’s massive opportunity here. Clearly it can go viral and is an intrinsically viral product. If someone with the right background came in to execute they could make millions.”

Build an Amazing Product & Amazing Customer Experience worth talking about that has the ability to go viral
How do you build a product that’s going to go viral organically?
Make something that’s controversial so people talk about it

Sales - Go To Market Strategy

From the get go the focus was going to be going viral and get organic traffic on TikTok
He was going to find as many micro influencers as possible, send them free product and then try to pay them some sort of small cash bonus
TikTok has democratized the ability to go viral - doesn’t matter whether you have 500 or 500,000 followers for your video to go viral on TikTok
The smaller guys if they make good content can hit the “For You” page and create something that goes viral so he’s able to stretch his marketing dollars substantially
Initially started off micro influencer focused but this made it incredibly difficult to scale - for every 1000 emails sent only 30% would bother getting back to them. The vast majority of people who got back to him would ask for ridiculous rates
A valid influencer has 50,000-200,000 followers and more important than their followers is that they create amazing quality content that hits the for you page and gets views and eyeballs
In terms of thinking about ROI his question is what will the CPM be and he’s shooting for sub $1 CPM
That model didn’t produce consistently growing sales - the influencer posts 1-2 times about your product then moves onto something else.
He found a guy called Ke who wasn’t an influencer but was a content creator and paid him a flat $2000 fee to make 30 tiktoks about his brand, 1 tiktok a day and he ran the brand page “@tabs” and then by day 5 some video hit and blew up and so in that month he generated $70k-80k in sales - then he had his holy shit moment with his focus on this is the model we need to run.
Instead of chasing after the next influencer to post about tabs he would just pay people to work for him to make content. Find good creators, get them on a retainer and then it was set and forget because you don’t have to reach out to 10,000 influencers every week anymore
He was a new guy with no followers and just managed his tabs brand account and was the face of the tabs brand account and every day would make videos on behalf of his brand account.
You cannot add more creators to the same account - they need to have their own separate account. A lot of the social media channels with the algorithm it starts to under their ethos, pattern and schedule, consistency and they will reward good creators. Social media platform wants retention. If you put too many creators on the same page it confuses the algorithm. The most successful tiktok accounts are hyper niche and hyper specific.

They follow the same formula every time:

Same thumbnail, story telling, closing, same frame - it follows a recipe and formula and tiktok and viewers love it.
Instead of 20 creators on one account he diversified and had them set up their own separate individual accounts. He didn’t make the accounts for them because then tiktok would say that he was abusing the platform and then shadow ban him.

He lets the creators make their own accounts with their own email and password and phone number. They make a new account.
Then he gives them instructions - name the account some variation of tabs
He has 100s of accounts but he doesn’t control any of them. He doesn’t want to control the content he wants to cast as a wide of a net as possible and hit as much scale as he can. He doesn’t want to be in charge of the TV show he wants to own the entire news channel. So his approach is he has 300 TV shows going on and doesn’t know which one will hit. It could be the: Pranksters, Grandparents, could be the model, the only fans hottie, etc. but he does know if he has enough content going out each day that one will hit and all he needs is one to hit in order to drive a lot of sales.

Popular examples

The ice cream guy - https://www.tiktok.com/@dylanlemay
The subway guy - https://www.tiktok.com/@miladmirg

Where do you find these content creators?

He found them on twitter and leveraged his personal brand and own following to onboard them as a TikTok content creator for his brand.
He wasn’t super picky. Do you have a phone and your limbs? Let’s work.
His product is intrinsically viral that it doesn’t take a creative genius in order to push out good quality content with it. They don’t have to come up with a crazy script and story and concept in order to get views you just need to flash the product and then boom 2M views.
How can I bring on as many creators as possible. Then he got referrals from other creators he was paying $1000 to $3000 a month and then have to do 1 upload a day. They have full creative control. Then when a video does go viral he sends that video to all his creators and tells them to remake it in their own style.
With tiktok it’s not about reinventing the wheel. There’s no originality with tiktok. There’s no secret formula. If you see a viral hit remake it and chances are it will go viral again.

The question is how do we make a product that makes the process of creating viral content a lot easier? Which was the gensis of tabs. Actually what is more accurate is find something that already went viral on TikTok but just wasn’t converting that attention into sales and execute better on that. The viral tiktok of that sex chocolate brand never went anywhere because they didn’t see that information and jump on the opportunity so they missed out on achieving their full potential.

TikTok Sales Strategy

Most sales aren’t made with the viral video they are done by responding to all the comments on the video and selling hard there. Respond to comments from the original viral video with new TikTok videos and in those videos is where you sell and you sell hard.

1st punch = the creator makes a Viral Video and it’s all about how do I get eyeballs and seen - TikTok cheapest CPMs of all the platforms - so when creating videos you want to optimize for eyeballs and not for conversions. First video = How do I get eyeballs, how do I get seen
2nd punch = how do we optimize for conversions. Once a video goes viral. When you have a viral video a lot of people leave comments like:

What is the product?
How does it work?
Is this real?
Is it legit?
Is it a scam?
With these the original creator makes videos responding to comments from the original viral video and they’re new tiktok videos so with these TikTok actually retargets all the original viewers of the video. So video replies # 2,3,4,5,6,7,8 you can make as many as you want will remarket the original viewers of Viral Video 1 so it’s free retargeting/remarketing. In those retargeting videos is where you sell hard

You address pain points
You tell them where to shop
Tell them to go to your store and buy it right now before you sell out.
Video 2-20 is where the bulk of the sales will come

He had a video that did 30M+ views which generated $40,000 of sales in that day. The follow up videos generated $130,000 in revenue the next day. For the next week they were ripping the responding to comments videos and that month they did close to 7 figures.
The creator responds to comments from the original viral video with specific conversion focused product centric tiktoks that are focused on converting a viewer into a customer.

How to find content creators for your product?

Go to twitter and search

UGC
TikTok creator
They’ll tweet about UGC, the brands they work with, clients etc. that’s how they find clients
High school kids, college kids, random people on twitter

He converted the monthly pay to a pure affiliate commission basis to mitigate his downside risk and he can weed out the weak. Anyone not worth their weight will just leave.

How to pay the sales force

Some are on full affiliate basis where they get 20% of all the revenue that they drive which they track with a UTM link in their bio and a trackable coupon/discount code.

Some it’s a hybrid model

A little bit of cash and then affiliate commission.

To setup the UTMs he used Social Snowball and he says shout out to Noah Tucker

They have a lot of viral content that’s super viral on tiktok and it’s saved into a google drive folder without the tiktok watermark. HD file format. Just use a tiktok downloader for that. So chances are that it will also go viral on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and other channels. So how do they take the content and reuse it on the other channels. Initially he had a VA reposting all the video content on multiple channels. The social media platforms are smart and realized that the accounts were all connected to one IP address and then banned and shutdown all the accounts.

So he created a discord similar to Andrew Tate model. His own discord channel called “Make Money Online” and it started with 5 members and now they have over 2500 members. There’s super clear instructions. He basically has them set up an Instagram, Facebook, & YouTube with some variation of Tabs and he gives them their profile picture and instructions on how to create the bio and then give them the content library of all the viral videos and then they are posting them all over the place. Then they use social snowball to track what kind of revenue they’re generating and it’s become a fucking machine for generating sales for them and it’s generated millions of dollars in revenue for them.

His thesis is if you have enough scale then you will win. The caveat is if you have a product that can go viral that’s necessary as well. If you’re selling a toaster that isn’t controversial then best of luck man. In relation to his discord group being his army of sales associates to repost the most viral content that hit on tiktok to other channels to get a commission. He doesn’t know why for one kid it went viral vs another kid.

Discord Community Around his Business with an affiliate opportunity

In the discord community he gamified it. There’s a gym channel where people are posting their gym selfies everyday. They give money to people each day randomly to keep retention in the community high and keep them excited to post. They get 20% of any sale that they drive. They do invite tournaments to grow the discord. It’s like it’s own mini marketing engine in and of itself.

The discord group grows through invite tournaments where the person who invites the most members gets $100. 2nd person gets $50 and 3rd person gets $25. He threw money at it because it was printing money for him which was one of the biggest levers.

Then he switched some tabs influencers to start promoting the discord group instead of the tabs chocolate product. Hey kid you want to make money online? Join this discord group and then they promote tabs indirectly. So he leveraged the organic content creators to funnel people into the discord.

Then they did shout out for shout out with discord groups that had similar followings.

Channel 1 is TikTok content. Then take the viral winners and give it a second life by blasting it across other social media channels through his few thousand affiliates in his discord. Then he puts paid ad spend behind all of them but not the traditional paid media like facebook, tiktok, snapchat, instagram ads. They pay meme pages with millions of followers to post their most viral content for 24 hours on instagram, twitter, snapchat you name it. There are networks of meme accounts that combined have 100’s of millions of followers. They pay the meme page owner to post their content organically and it’s already viral content so it gets a boost from their distribution network and it also goes viral because it’s a Reel. So they get a boost because of their 2M followers and then another boost because it’s a reel and it hits the algorithm and that does really well. For this the meme page owner gets $100-$2000 to do it depending on what their audience demographics are. And he says they spend 6 figures a month on memes. On instagram it’s reels and on twitter it’s tweets. There are twitter meme pages with millions of followers.

For twitter not directly linking to the store - these two are posted together.

The paid tweet is a native integrated post with a viral video
Tweet #2 is a reply to the viral tweet which is along the lines of “OMG I just discovered their website. It’s tabschocolate.com then it’s #partner”
Has to not feel like an ad it’s not going to work so they try to keep it super native. Tabs wants to make it feel like the customer discovered them and that they are making the decision to buy it on their own accord.

When it feels native then people are more likely to send it to their friends vs it being an ad (people don’t want to send ads to their friends). And that’s why it works.

It’s hard to track their LTV. They only have 1 product and 1 line and so now it’s time to add new products he says. Flavors, new moods and SKUs all together. Maybe venture into CBD, Shrooms, sex toys he doesn’t know yet. Lots of avenues to take it.

Incentivizing 2nd, 3rd order with subscriptions. The purchase funnel flow is super important. Without all of the steps in his funnel they are looking at an AOV of $25. With all of the addons and boosts the AOV goes from $25 to $50 per order which is 100% increase and can squeeze out way more money from the consumer.

They started with incentivizing the total amount you buy when you get to the website.

1 box = $29.99
2 boxes = 7% discount + Free Shipping
3 boxes = 17% discount + free shipping

Later via split testing he tested the assumption of offering free shipping and found that it had no impact on conversion rates.

Then he added a subscription layer to it. If you add a subscription you also get 20% off your entire order. He found people opting for 2 or 3 boxes were now instead opting for 1 box with a subscription. So he asked “How do I get the best of both worlds? How do I incentivize the bundle at a higher AOV while also incentivizing the subscription without sacrificing one or the other. So instead of having that all on the product page what he does now is only a one time buy and they incentivize the 2 or 3 box package. Then they incentivize their “Melting Insurance”

It’s great because if the customer had a bad experience and received melted chocolate they would send them a replacement anyways. For the melting insurance there is a 80% take rate on it and there is no cost of goods with it, it’s free money for him.

When you get to the checkout page with Shopify Plus that’s when they push the subscription. By this time they’ve already bought the 2-3 boxes, the melting insurance. At this point the take rate is much better for subscription.

If you present too many things at once things get sacrificed. But if you build it in a very methodical way. After their purchase there is the post purchase “Hey do you want to add another box for 50% off?” they click buy and it gets added seemlessly.

They use a shopify app called “One Click Upsells” app so that they don’t have to put their information in all over again they are able to add it to their order and the order gets updated.

Then they land on the thank you page where there’s another upsell for another box for 50% off.

Then post purchase they get emails saying “Are you sure you don’t want to subscribe” if they didn’t subscribe already. “Hey upgrade your order to a subscription and save a lot of money.” Which is called a Drip Campaign.

At the end of the day:

One store can get 100 visitors and squeeze out $50 out of them.
Another store can get 100 visitors and have the same product and be different with all of these upsells and cross sales and squeeze $500 out of the same 100 visitors.
At the end of the day the person able to squeeze the most amount of money out of customers will win long term while of course offering an amazing customer experience as well as being cognizant that they’ll return and have a good experience.

Pricing

Originally they charged $19.99. There really was no competition or market so at the end of the day they got to create their own price. With other industries and markets you can’t charge too much or too little because customers have an anchor in their mind about what the product is worth.

They wanted to go the luxury premium route so he just pulled a number out of his ass. His competitors for the pill and powders was around $10. Pill isn’t a competitor. They sell an experience instead of a pill or powder. They don’t want to be pharmaceutical or taboo they want to sell something that is luxury, shared, that people are proud to take. Not like a sneaky pill. Enjoy it with your partner together.

Then he split tested new prices and when he increased price he saw an increase in conversions. He thought $19.99 was crazy to charge for 3 chocolates. Then when he increased the price more people were paying for it. Now they do split tests for pricing sending 20% of traffic to one price, 20% to another, etc. to start to hone in even further.

The greater scale you operate at the more leverage you have. Little optimizations add an extra 6 figures into your product. They are decreasing the weight of their box by 1 ounce which will save them over $300,000 this year. So if it is 1 ounce less they fall into a different shipping threshold. So that one ounce difference costs them $300,000 at their current run rate.

Tech Stack

Shopify & Shopify Plus (he pays $2000/month for it but he saves it on transaction fees) and Shopify apps

Shopify App = One click upsells for post purchase upsells

He uses Trello & Slack
Social Snowball - they streamline the whole influencer and affiliate process.

When a customer buys it creates an automatic coupon code for them that they can share with their friends and so whatever they buy then they’ll get 20% of it
Influencer & affiliate marketing at scale
Creating coupon codes is automatic and seemless for new affiliates.
He wouldn’t have been able to run the 2000 affiliate discord group without Social Snowball

Klaviyo for email
Analytics

He uses shopify analytics
Google analytics
He would recommend a triple whale attribution software if you run ads
He would have a VA look at all the influencers and provide a summary at the end of each month

Revenue they generated
Commission they earned
He would go through the sheet at the end of every month and then pay them out their commission
Now he has a software that does all the view tracking & follower tracking for all the accounts in their network
For him he just wants more creators, more affiliates, more scale then he knows he’ll make more money if he does that.

Amazing text messaging platform called One Text they are revolutionizing text messaging game and are in YC

They allow people to buy your product within the message. Press 1 if you want to buy it but now their card is vaulted in the one text messaging system and they can just press 1 and buy the product.
TCPA guidelines state that in order to send a text message to a consumer they need to opt in twice. Because this is not marketing, it’s considered part of the same transaction as before they are able to send an abandoned card to every single customer who abandons on your site whether or not they opted into marketing. So if only 20% of visitors opt into the marketing then you can only send abandoned text messages to 20% of the people now it allows him to 5x that and send an abandoned cart message to all the people who abandoned their cart which adds a huge amount of revenue to his bottom line.
He gets their phone numbers when they are filling in their information on shopify because it’s required but in order to text message market them they have to check a box allowing it on the site.

Mindset

There’s a clear path to success and it’s not rocket science
It’s at bats. Keep going. Failure gets you closer to success. The more shots you take the more chances of success you’ll have
It’s not about intelligence it’s about experience - the more experience you have in the space the sharper you become and that leads to training your intuition and subconscious
The more experience you have the more you have pattern recognition so you know how to best navigate the situation and know what moves you need to make in order to cross the finish line
Whereas a newbie falls into all the traps and landmines simply because of having less experience
Biggest piece of advice is to get that experience and there is no shortcut you need to fail along the way
Before tabs he had 20 other ventures and a lot of them were massive failures and ridiculous concepts but that’s part of the game and each one you get a lesson out of it and then everything starts to click.
Experience you can take to any other business.
3 years of entrepreneurship you get the basic skills
Best information - Y Combinator and Stanford have their content all online for free
Building a personal brand is THE business
If you have a personal following an average or even below average product will sell
He has people texting him and saying that they want to work for free
When building a business it’s the people in your business - your businesses value is the sum total of the average IQ of the people in your business. Attracting talent with a personal brand is huge.
If you spend 4 years working on a business or anything you’ll be a millionaire after those 4 years if you stick it through and $250k in startup capital you’ll be a millionaire.
The goal is to get good at something and be a killer in that space.

The Math / Financials

In first year he sold $4M worth of sex chocolate. Assuming most people go for the middle order option with the 7% off price the average sales price per box of chocolate would be $27.89 so that’s 133,378 units or about 11,115 units per month
He told his parents he would sell $1M in his first year so he beat that by $3M
For 2023 he will sell over $10M worth of chocolate

Recruiting Process

Being in the know - who’s a killer vs not a killer - he does not have any full time people on his team, everyone is either working as a contractor or agency basis. If performance isn’t good then they wouldn’t last.
These types of people can have a team that can execute things underneath them to manage parts of his business for him.
How many people core to his operation - he says 8-12. Trend that you can do a lot more with a few amount of people. The flex is having the fewest amount of employees as possible.

Taking the Leap

He built in optionality by taking a gap year at college vs just dropping out completely
When he first started tabs he was recruiting for a summer internship then decided not to take an internship then lived at home to work on tabs so he didn’t completely drop out of school but went part time student and took 2 classes then he decided to take a gap year
He took the gap year.
He moved to Miami during his gap year
Moved to an apartment he couldn’t really afford in Miami and the company was growing month after month after month and he was reinvesting all of the money back into growth
Then July happened and shit hit the fan

He started getting banned on all his social media accounts
Revenue fell dramatically
His co-founder and partner who was supposed to be contributing became completely MIA
His business partner told him he was going to go back to school despite his pledge to take a gap year with Oliver to help scale the business and by the way I’m going to start other businesses too and I’m going to do the bare minimum per our contract agreement and I think you should do the same.
At this point he can’t afford the apartment that he’s in or food because all his money is tied up in buying 100’s of thousands of boxes and chocolate orders
Sales are falling and he’s living in a penthouse in Miami
He’s thinking what the fuck do I do now
So he called up his academic advisor and said that he needed to go back to school but because he didn’t take an economics class to assimilate he had to wait a year to do that so he was forced into the gap year.

So he ended up moving back home and was incredibly depressed. He was in Tampa now with his parents, alone, his co-founder left, company is tanking, his co-founder is back at school partying with his friends and having the time of his life.
For a little bit he gave up hope and stopped working out, gained weight, he stopped seeing people, and stopped showering every day. It starts to permeate in every part of your life.
At the same time it forced him to put his back against the wall and slowly he started to build things back

Built a team
Brought on some killers
Moved into quarter 4 - black Friday, cyber Monday, Christmas and the holiday season soon after valentines day in Q1 things started to rebound and explode and after July they have been growing month after month after month where they are pushing million dollar months.
First thing he did was travel for a month and half all over Europe and got excited about life again.
His business went from $60,000/month in July to now pushing over $1M months

Mental Health Side

If you’re not happy you won’t make good decisions
How are you going to run an ecom brand if you’re not motivated to wake up in the morning
For physical ecommerce the tempo is 2 weeks where you’re working hard and then 2 weeks where you’re waiting on things to come in. Things take time to get a sample, get shipped to the USA from China, etc.

Growth strategy

Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, gas stations, sex shops, convenience stores, and other channels
Shroom chocolate brand
Sex shop for Gen Z
The mood - functional food brand
He is going to dip his toes in the software space now
3-5X EBITDA - for ecommerce brands
10-20x revenue multiple for software - he thinks this has more potential
Also really focused on building his personal brand
20,000 followers on twitters has been great to have on twitter

Education & Prior Experience

He worked in growth for an app company and learned a lot there (HUGE)

Understanding the process of growth hacking and then applying that to a product opportunity. The sales process / growth hacking process is more important than the product itself.

He has a great network - had a friend who was a growth hacker who started the fidget spinner trend
Parents - mom went to Harvard and dad worked in corporate finance
Grew up in Westchester, NY
With the internet now you can learn from the best minds at your finger tips

Good Tidbits

No one is above the process of failing to get to success - you’re not going to go from 0 to millions instantly you can’t be above the process.
Entrepreneurs are wired differently than employees - they get bored doing the same thing over and over again
The only difference between Oliver’s dad and his friend’s dad was Oliver’s father worked in the business whereas his friend’s dad owned the business. Ownership is important.
There’s a lot of waiting in ecommerce and physical products

Couldn’t start photography until he got the packaging, and couldn’t get the packaging until they finished the design.
So it happened over the span of 11 months but it wasn’t something he was grinding out day in and day out.
It was grind for 2 weeks then wait to get this thing back. grind then wait a month to get the sample

Drop shipping is a scam

No LTV so you need to be profitable off the first acquisition
When he acquires a customer he wants them coming back to buy more to have a high LTV.

Legitimate brand should create a returning customer. When he acquires 1 customer he knows they’ll come back over the next 5 years 10-20 times (his assumption since he has only been in business about a year) which gives him margin to play with when he’s acquiring them in the beginning
With a brand you’re building equity vs with a drop shipping business you’re just chasing the next quick buck
Real wealth comes from the exit, not the cash flow. Every $1 you generate with a real brand you get to see 3-5x of that when you eventually exit and it could be more and not that they’re forcing it down their throat.

Most people start off trying to build the product and brand and then try to figure out how to market it. THIS IS KEY. Distribution/marketing plan > the product

Whereas I have a very clear understanding and background of TikTok and viral marketing… so I kind of reverse engineered it… I was like, how do I build a product that’s going to go viral, that lends itself to organically going viral? But really he found a product that went viral then engineered on top of that to ensure it would be even more viral.

It’s interesting to compare Tabs Chocolate strategy vs Ryze Superfoods.

Ryze is doing a big facebook/instagram ads push of their product whereas Tabs is pursuing the organic awareness approach with content creators making content for them. Ryze doesn’t have as controversial of a product and is creating ads more aimed at making women look slimmer so they are more weight loss ad oriented.

He pays the content creators a retainer and then commission on sales

Some have 10% off codes while others have 15% off codes

They use UTM links to know who is actually driving sales

Some Viral Tabs Videos - What are comparables of what goes Viral on TikTok

10.7M views - Video
6.3M views - Video
2.9M views - Video
1.9M views - Video
2.7M views - video
5.4M views - video
3.3M views - video

Product Packaging

Things I don’t know about Tabs

What are their box dimensions?

He said they will optimize the box to remove 1 ounce so that they can save $300,000/year from this in shipping costs because they will be in a different shipping tier
On Amazon since they do FBM (likely to avoid melted boxes) there’s no information on their box dimensions or what their FBA fee would be

Sources:

Oliver shares the companies that have helped him to scale here:

Oliver's Tech Stack: Affiliate Marketing (referral) -

https://platform.shoffi.app/r/rl_XOzf...

Email Automation -

https://www.klaviyo.com/

Online store -

https://www.shopify.com/

Text SMS Marketing (referral) -

http://oliver.onetext.com/link?token=...

Organization task tracking -

https://trello.com/

one click upsell -

https://apps.shopify.com/zipify-onecl...

There is also video content with Oliver on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CqqgzxPvvKg/