Joe Speiser built Petflow, a subscription pet food brand, into a $70M business. He later shared the exact playbook he'd follow if he had to start over and get to $50K/month as fast as possible. Here's that playbook, distilled.
The plan comes down to six steps:
- Choose a product to sell
- Make a website
- Advertise and take orders before you actually sell anything
- Find someone to manufacture the product
- Get packaging ready
- Set up logistics
Step 1: Find the correct product to sell
Don't start with "what should I sell?" Start with "what are other people already selling successfully?"
Say you're leaning toward pet food. Google and compile a list of 50 to 100 medium sized pet food brands, then pick "the one" using five criteria:
- Receives 50K+ website visits per month
- Has a high repeat purchase rate
- Has a local supplier available
- Average order value above $30
- Gets significant traffic from paid ads
Step 2: Validate the pick
Take a candidate, say Petflow itself, and check its traffic with a tool like Similarweb. If it's clearing 50K+ visits a month, that's a strong signal.
Then check the split between organic and paid traffic. If it's mostly organic, expect to spend 6+ months catching up on SEO. If it's mostly paid, you can be competitive within a week, since ads can be replicated fast. Petflow's split was 61% organic and 38% paid, a healthy mix: start with ads, then build SEO as the next target.
Next, check whether the product is habit forming. A dog eats every day, so once the owner is locked into a food, they keep reordering. Recurring purchase behavior compounds every later step.
Finally, estimate average order value from the product catalog (look at the SKUs and their prices). Petflow's AOV was around $75 at the time it sold.
Step 3: Build the website
Grab a solid template (Shopify works fine) and hire a designer with a few years of experience to put together the brand, logo, product photos, and page layout. A competent freelancer can turn this around in one to two weeks.
Once the site is live, you're ready to start collecting orders, even before the product physically exists.
Step 4: Set up ads and take pre-orders
Pull up your reference brand's ad history in the Facebook Ad Library. If they've been running the same ads for six or more months, those ads are working, they wouldn't keep paying for them otherwise.
Recreate that style: five photo ads using similar copy, keywords, and calls to action. Put $100 behind them and watch performance for two weeks. Kill anything that doesn't return at least 4x ROI, and keep scaling whatever does, as long as it holds 5x or better.
This step alone tells you if the business is viable before you've committed to inventory.
Step 5: Find a local manufacturer
With real pre-orders in hand, find a manufacturer who can produce locally. A marketplace like Sourcify can connect you to vetted factories. Order roughly double your pre-order volume to start, and keep a close eye on quality as you scale.
Step 6: Get packaging sorted
Start with plain packaging until you're confident in the product itself. Custom packaging usually needs a minimum order of 2,000+ units to get a decent price, and it can end up costing more than the product it wraps. Don't commit to it until the fundamentals are proven.
Step 7: Set up logistics
Once the website looks right, the ads are converting, packaging has arrived, and product is on the way, hand off fulfillment to a partner like Airhouse. Ship your inventory to their warehouse and they handle packing, shipping, and returns, so you can stay focused on the product and the marketing.
The takeaway
None of these steps require inventing something new. The fastest path is copying what's already proven to work (product, ad creative, positioning) and executing quickly on validation before spending on manufacturing or packaging. Pre-orders before production is the part most first-time founders skip, and it's the part that de-risks everything after it.
Source: Joe Speiser's thread on X