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This is a great podcast with Jack Haldrup from Dr. Squatch, a soap company that grew to a $5 million per year business before taking outside capital and turbocharging growth to $100 million revenue within 18 months.

A few highlights from the podcast:

• They’re a men’s personal care brand, soap is their largest category. They just launched a deodorant.

• They started in 2013. Jack was reading Four Hour Workweek and Lean Startup and was looking into his own personal experience to find a niche to start a business in.

• He had tried cold processed soap at a farmers market, enjoyed it and it seemed to help with his skin issues. He found it was a better experience than the typical bar or body wash.

• There’s a lot of market share to take from the big corporate companies like Proctor and Gamble.

• Soap is not very fragmented compared to other categories. Men’s personal care is still dominated by a handful of large brands.

• Started online and went door to door to generate sales for the first year or two, didn’t do a lot of trade shows, just walked into little boutique shops.

• Door to door made money and they spent it growing their online business.

• After bootstrapping for 5-6 years wanted to grow the business quick or make it passive, got outside investors. Deal specifics aren’t public.

• Went with an investor who had other consumer brands in their portfolio that weren’t competitive. 

• $5 million in revenue they had 5 people, then 18 months after funding they had 150 people, built out manufacturing and will had annual revenue of over $100 million a year.

• Worked in a townhouse at the start, moved into an office when they had 20 people, signed 5 year lease but only used for 45 days as covid hit and now it’s too small.

• Studied viral videos in early 2018.

• Spent $18,000 on the video below, which is fantastic.

• Were paying 2 cents per view on YouTube, but average view time was 1:58; Facebook was similar cost but only had an 8 second view time so engagement on YouTube was through the roof.

• Subscriptions are 30% of their business.

• 85% of their revenue is from their website with the majority of the remainder from Amazon.

• They use Shopify and haven’t had any issues, even with their revenue exploding.

• Influencer marketing is not a huge part of the budget, tried it but haven’t seemed to crack the code yet, hasn’t matched the efficiency on what they’re doing internally and with YouTube.

• Ad content is a mix of internal and external ad agencies.  

• Some of the most successful YouTube videos are 5 minutes long, people can decide when to move on in YouTube vs. some other formats so they have the flexibility to create longer videos.

• With agencies you need to partner with them to provide the feedback loop on ad creation.

• You need something visually engaging on screen.

It’s a pretty amazing success story and built on a simple product with great marketing.

Dr. Squatch Revenue Update

Jacques Spitzer, the CEO of Raindrop, the marketing firm that worked with Dr. Squatch, released a video that noted Dr. Squatch had reached $150 million in sales (February 2023). And in a reply to a post on the video he mentioned that they’re over $200 million a year now (as of September 2023). The amazing growth continues!