How a Poor Ad Almost Tanked Josh Snow’s 8-Figure Company

Listen in on -- and learn from -- this eye opening discussion with 27-year-old, monster online-brand-builder Joshua “Snow” Elizetxe about how he turned Snow Teeth Whitening into the #1 oral care brand in the world. We’ll talk about the tactics, tools, and strategies that drive his phenomenal cash-flow management that lets him self-fund the company -- and gives him instant access to $10M to roll into R&D.  100% debt and VC free.  Then prepared to be impressed by a fly-on-the wall campaign that crushed -- and shocked by a “try before you buy” offer that almost tanked the company...and more, including:
           
• How Josh got insanely rich earning $60,000 a year.

• The anatomy of a “ripple effect ad campaign” that has generated a virtually un-churnable customer base.

• The priceless financial lesson Josh  learned from a company that sold bologna to Walmart at a breakeven price -- and ended up being bought for $1.3 billion.

• Why the oldest, tried and true offer in the world  nearly assassinated his business -- and what he did to dig himself out of the mess.

 • How to cash in on the customer converting power of celebrity endorsements -- using $0 of your own money.

BIO:

At just 20 years old,  Joshua “Snow” Elizetxe graduated Summa Cum Laude from the W.P. Carey School of Business and Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University with a degree in Information Technology while running a successful company -- Pocket Your Dollars -- from his dorm room.  After graduating he started Foresold, a private holding company for high-performing online companies. The company bootstrapped (absolutely zero outside capital) its portfolio into becoming a leader in several hyper-competitive industries. 9-figures in sales.  In 2017, he founded Snow Teeth Whitening,  a direct to consumer leader in oral care and oral cosmetics that has over 1 million fans, and customers in 175+ countries around the world.

TRANSCRIPT

Host: Zach Johnson

All right, all right, all right here we go! Dylan, you ready to kick up another episode of the Rich Ad, Poor Ad podcast?

Host: Dylan Carpenter

Yeah man you know I'm honestly a little cold but I feel like it may be Snow!

Host: Zach Johnson

Yes, we have an amazing guest, an amazing entrepreneur on today I'm so pumped to introduce. You guys have probably all heard the brand.  You've seen it everywhere online. It's the number one oral care online brand. TrySnowcom. These guys are killing it.  if I could overuse that term, 10s of millions in revenue, nine figure valuation, 2.6 million visitors in traffic in April alone. And a phenomenal entrepreneur. So I'm so excited. Welcome to the show, Josh Snow. How’re you doing?

Guest: Josh Snow

Hey, what's going on guys?

Host: Zach Johnson

Yeah, man. We're so excited to have you. You are like the epitome of a “Rich Advertiser” that has taken paid ads to the next level man. So we're excited to dive into not only the winning ads, which you obviously get to talk about all the time, but like what sent you to the poorhouse.  I want to  hear about the losers today. So tell everybody a little bit about you. For those that may not have heard about Snow, give us a little overview of the brand and your entrepreneurial story as well.

Guest: Josh Snow

Yeah, absolutely. So we're on Instagram as Snow.  Snow is essentially an oral care company. But we like to think that we've reimagined the oral care space and really met at the intersection of oral care and beauty. So we consider ourselves as much a personal care brand as we do as a beauty care brand. 

And so you can see from the products we create -- we create every single product ourselves.  It's something that we hold very close to us when we're thinking through which products we're going to provide to our customers. There's a reason why we still only have a handful of products years into it. It's because we are focused on developing hero products that we can sell for the next 50 years and feel comfortable about. We also make iterations upon our products, but at the end of the day we are an oral care, beauty care brand,  

We're primarily direct-to-consumer. We've got about a million social media followers --  we're really close with our customers. And they now pretty much dictate what we do in terms of which products they want to see us come out with next.  We've been kind of coined is, like the “Apple” of oral care in the sense that not just from our packaging and the quality product we produce, but the anticipation and the excitement from our customers of what is Snow going to reimagine next. What are they going to do next?  And so that's exciting. 

There's also a lot of pressure on us.  That's a good way of making sure that the products we do come out with are something that not only that we would use on a daily basis, but something that we could recommend at the highest level. 

My background has been for more than half of my life now, in terms of years in the online marketing space.  So I stumbled into entrepreneurship when I was 13 years old, literally. And I've got websites sitting on my old computer that date back to when I was 14 years old. And so I'm 27 now, so I started 14 years ago, building websites, designing websites.  I've self taught 100% through books and YouTube and Google.  I kind of learned all that myself and was fortunate to discover search engine optimization, which led me down a path of online advertising and then into paid advertising, once I had a little bit of money to do it. 

And so by the time I was 16 or 17 years old, I was managing a lot of money for clients --  just paid ad  management.  Nobody knew how old I was.  

Host: Zach Johnson

What kind of ad budget did you get to manage on a yearly basis when you had your agency?

Guest: Josh Snow

So when I was just 16, 17 years old, I was in charge of millions of dollars of management at that point.

Host: Zach Johnson

That's awesome. Good way to bring it in.  So one of the things we're all about at FunnelDash is helping advertisers deal with more cash and more liquidity. One of the things that I'm particularly impressed about from the outside looking in is how much Snow has been able to not only handle the day to day, just insane level of growth, but we all know that growth is expensive. It requires a ton of cash right? And so margins are typically super small in D2C and ecom.

I want to talk to you about how you've done it. Inventory.  How you manage cash flow, and at the same time invest so much into R&D. I mean one of those is typically the one to give right?    And most ecommerce brands don't have that much cash to invest into R&D. 

So you’ve clearly done a great job, because you're self funded, right? Like, that's the beauty of this whole story is that you've gotten this level of scale, which means you have to be incredibly disciplined with your cash management and the investments that you make. 

So how have you done it, man?  Open up the kimono Josh and and shed some ...