2-Year-Old Business Just Earned $2 Million in 30 Days

📝 Craig Rukus wrote in a recent newsletter…

Shaan Puri had a great piece on marketing halfway through this podcast (33 min mark) where he takes you through the levels of marketing. His question – what are you actually selling?…

Shaan sees it as five levels:

– Level 1 Sell a Product – Don’t do this

– Level 2 Sell a Solution – Head and Shoulders

– Level 3 Sell a Lifestyle – Lululemon, Slack, this is how you create a category

– Level 4 Sell a Feeling – “I sell holy shit moments” – Dana White UFC President, Disney = magical family experience, Louis Vuitton = status, Nike = greatness

– Level 5 Sell an Identity – Religions, political parties, tribe, label, purpose, sense of belonging

This framework reminded Craig of Dad Gang, “a simple product line of hats” 🧢

Dad Gang was started by three guys in May 2022.

🚀 With only $750 of startup capital…

They made 100 hats, sold out in 36 hours.

Then they made 300 hats, sold them in a week. Repeat!

By August 2023 they had sold $1.5 million [worth of] hats.

The hats don’t look like anything special; it’s more about the identity they have come to represent.

The origins of Dad Gang, from the official website 👇

We are all dads and we’ve been in a text thread forever now talking about the dad life. The great things, the not so great things, and everything in-between…

we would always share those stories followed by #DadGang at the end of our texts. If any of us had an especially tough day we’d just say “hey that’s DadGang”.

During all this time the term just seemed like something that could be understood by plenty of other dads. So we figured “hey let’s make 100 hats and see what happens”

Back to Craig’s commentary…

One of the co-founders Bart Szaniewski was on a podcast a few days back and mentioned they’ve sold 110,000 hats…

So that means in the last nine months they’ve sold approximately $2.4 million in hats and $3.8 million so far. This is from a brand that’s just two years old.

And how?

A level 5 approach.

Looks like that crazy growth is continuing as one of the founders recently tweeted…

$2m in 30 days is crazy. Onward. ➡️

Given that incredible success, it’s worth asking 👇

• What other identity could you build a business around?
• What tribes are people proud to be a part of in your niche?
• What tribes are you proud to be a part of?

Also, probably not the best idea to start this kind of business on your own.

Better done with some buddies 👍

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