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October 14th, 2021

thoughts

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#[Twitter thread] Ramon van Meer: 2.5 years ago I bought a dog ramp business for $300,000.

Since then, I’ve sold $35,000,000 of dog ramps.

I’m going to explain: Why I bought it, How I scaled, Why I bought a business vs built from scratch. But first...dog ramps?

Yeah. Dog ramps. I know. Odd.

But there’s a reason behind this: dog ramps solve a very specific problem. If you have a small or old dog that struggles to get onto your bed or couch, you immediately react when you see a dog ramp ad. Why?

It's a very specific problem for a relatively small but targeted audience that you can explain very well in a video.

Jumping of sofa hurts dogs joints and can cause injuries and spinal issues --> surgery can cost up to 8k --> a ramp can prevent your pup from a painful surgery *

Let's go over why I bought it, scaled it, and why I personally like to buy vs build:

Reasons why I bought it:

  1. Solves a specific problem for a targeted audience.
  1. Prev owner wasn't doing any FB ads.
  1. No email marketing or retention AT ALL.
  1. Old, crappy website with poor conversion
  1. Huge social media following but no way to convert into sales

How we scaled:

  1. Moved to @Shopify, updated all images, videos and copy
  1. Social ads, just took videos from customers and created ads
  1. Built email flows and campaigns with @klaviyo
  1. Paid ads, mainly FB/Instagram

Now expanding into dog food, cat litter, and more

Why buy vs build:

  1. For me, it is easier and faster to go from 1 to 10 vs 0 to 1.
  1. There is already a product-market fit (of some sort), there is history, revenue, and data you can work with.
  1. Similar like real estate, I look for "crappy fixer-uppers" in "up-and-coming areas". I know how to fix and increase value, I am not a great building.
  1. Typically I want to see 3 things I can improve on the website and increase value

to find deals I use: @quietlightinc

I typically like to stay low-key (I am shy and an introvert AF), but I want to get out of my comfort zone and start building more in public, as it maybe can be helpful for others.

App/Treeverse ideas

Don't create pages for names

For the parent page add Person/

decide which tags to use tweet or Twitter thread

don't include comments beyond the main branch

don't convert line escapes to new bullets, keep a single tweet in a single block

upload images to roam

don't add in image links

don't link to each individual tweets just the parent

make sure to grab images from the first tweet

link to the date it was first published

use 🧵 instead of *

October 14th, 2021