He Built $1M Business in One Weekend for $40 - Ep. #320

Spencer (0:00)

So, I knew that I could start up for close to nothing. Got on Shopify, built out the whole website.

Chris Koerner (0:05)

No coding experience.

Spencer (0:06)

No coding experience whatsoever. That was our first full year. Ended up closing out at just over a million dollars in revenue. I had a whole weekend to myself. I was like, I wonder if I just put my head down how far I could go on the website for this. We ended up doing over 800,000 in revenue. And those two months alone, I launched in 2019, literally months before the world shut down, and people did one of two things. I feel like they either got a pet or had a baby. Printer Pet absolutely skyrocketed.

Chris Koerner (0:36)

So this guy built a seven-figure business from a $40 investment, but sales are down and he's out of ideas. So today, we're gonna come up with some new ideas so both he and you can profit from it. Let's dive in.

Spencer.

Spencer (0:53)

Chris, how you doing, man? How are you?

Chris Koerner (0:55)

Good. Tell me about your business.

Spencer (0:56)

So Printer Pet is a custom pet gift company where we put your pet's face, this is my dog, Rue, on different products and skews that we have on the website. It was actually born by accident. I've always had some sort of entrepreneurial drive to start things and prior to Printer Pet was working on a pet bandana and scarf company. Where it was like these weird little infinity scarves and bandanas for pets that I had manufactured here in Dallas and as I was running, trying to run profitable ads for that, trying to run all the marketing, my whole Instagram Explorer page was just inundated with different pet businesses. And I remember scrolling one day and I saw a competitor that had pet portraits like this only it was your pet in an old timey like Renaissance.

Chris Koerner (1:47)

I've seen those. Yeah.

Spencer (1:48)

So I saw that company and I had seen this style of artwork on different websites for like houses, things like that. And after seeing the Renaissance portraits, I was like this style of artwork would work really well for like a custom pen thing. And it just so happened that I had a free weekend where I had a whole weekend to myself. I was like, I wonder if I just put my head down how far I could go on a website for this, because I'd already known about outsourcing manufacturing with a print on demand services were really new at that point, but I spent all my days on YouTube just looking up, like running profitable ads, different business types, everything I had heard about print on demand. So I knew that I could start up for close to nothing. And the business I was running at the time with the pet scarves and bandanas was making money, was not making near enough for me to live off of. I was teaching, this was after I quit my full-time job in commercial real estate, and I was teaching fitness classes, and that was actually what was where I was getting the majority of my money to be able to live.

And I was like, you know what, we'll just try spinning this out. So I spent one whole weekend, got on Shopify, paid the $30 for the Shopify membership at the time, and built out the whole website.

Chris Koerner (3:04)

No coding experience?

Spencer (3:05)

No coding experience whatsoever, just a lot of University of YouTube and trial and error, and really rudimentary, not even Photoshop skills ended up in Canva. So at that point, I didn't even know what Photoshop was. I was like, I'll figure it out on Canva.

I'd used Fiverr and Upwork before for different services. So if it really got down to needing some photos, did that, took some of my own photos, ended up launching that next week. And I launched in 2019, literally months before the world shut down. When all of that happened, people did one of two things. I feel like they either got a pet or had a baby. And Printer Pet absolutely skyrocketed. The pet bandana and scarf company stayed constant and ended up shutting down that business, running this full time. By complete chance, I was talking to a friend who said, that type of product would do really well on Etsy. And so we were already running sales directly through our site, and the business was doing well, well enough for me to be able to pull money from it. I don't have to invest in any inventory, anything like that. It was a pretty cashflow heavy business, and I was able to supplement my rent, everything low overhead at that time. And I put the products on Etsy, and that's where everything really just hockey sticked and blew up. 2020 ended up being the seventh figure year in revenue. Which was insane, and trying to figure out how to scale with that was a whole thing in and of itself. At the end of 2020, we had 80 artists on staff that were not full-time artists, they're paid commissions for per artwork.