Kettle & Fire's $500 Launch

A story about how Justin Mares tested and launched Kettle & Fire bone broth company, growing from a $500 test to $2.8M in first-year sales.

"We first tested a landing page with no product and started buying ads to see who would click on it. We called it Bone Broths Co initially, which was a horrible idea. We mocked up an ugly landing page on Unbounce, paid someone on Fiverr $10 to make a terrible logo, and started selling a box at $29.99.

We put in $500 for ads on Facebook, AdWords, and Bing, and sold over $2,000 worth of product in about a month. I ran the numbers and figured we could turn this into at least a $200-300K yearly business with about $100-150K in profit.

To actually make the product, we contacted over 500 manufacturing partners. Nothing worked until my 19-year-old brother emailed Mark Cuban saying 'I'm a 19-year-old entrepreneur, please help.' Cuban introduced us to a manufacturing partner who we still work with today.

For those first $2,000 in orders, I emailed customers saying we wouldn't have a product for 6-9 months, offering either a full refund or 50% off when we shipped. The product had a 2-year shelf life, so I put my entire life savings at 25 into the first production run. It required $30,000 minimum runs with a $120K budget total.

Year one we did $2.8 million in sales. After about 6 months, a Whole Foods buyer saw an influencer talking about our product, reached out, and brought us into Whole Foods. We did extraordinarily well there and got national rotation the following year. That started our journey."