Josh's Frogs Revenue Journey

A story about discovering and analyzing Josh's Frogs, a successful bootstrapped exotic pet business.

Mehtab shares: "This is one of my favorite companies. It has all the characteristics of a company we'd love to invest in. I've been trying to invest in it since 2018 but he always says no.

Josh's Frogs does exactly what it sounds like - they breed their own frogs and exotics, and they also grow the bugs that they eat. They sell the food too. They do all of that in-house in Michigan and ship it to customers. I called Josh on a Sunday and the guy was catching frogs with his kids. I couldn't believe it. I think he's been doing this for 15-20 years and he still loves frogs.

What I really like is the steep operations moat. No typical ecommerce guy is going to boot up a frog operation. It's too intense for them. At the same time, someone overseas is not going to undercut you because you can't really ship a live frog from China directly to the US - it's just not viable.

According to some articles, they're doing around $15 million a year in revenue now, but I think they're bigger than that now."