Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Mares generated $500 in bone broth pre-orders from $250 in Bing ads

Justin Mares · How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand) · Apr 7, 2025 · at 9:16

Justin Mares describes the results of his initial 2015 validation experiment before launching the bone broth brand Kettle & Fire.

0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“After the entire test was over we had about a 30% conversion rate where people ended up clicking the order now button, and so over the course of the two-week test that I ran to this janky checkout flow, to this bad landing page made almost 500 dollars in revenue, and I figured that on that 500 dollars in revenue, I think I was spending 250 or so in ad revenue, in ads”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Justin Mares

Insight
Pre-orders on sketchy landing pages are the ultimate proof of demand
“If people are willing to spend 30 bucks on a product they've never heard, tasted, smelled, whatever, that doesn't exist on a landing page that looks like it was a scam, that is probably a pretty good sign that this is a thing that people really, really want.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 8:03 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Solo founders using AI now have an advantage over multi-person teams
“Someone that has a big, or has like a strong opinion on a product they want to make, or a direction the world is moving, They're almost at an advantage with these AI tools relative to like a small or even medium sized team, because if you are someone that like…”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 19:28 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Founders should build in domains where their interest is top 0.1%
“I think that generally people should probably go to wherever they are, like, on the frontier and they are among the most interested, like, top .1% of people interested in a topic. I think that that frontier for most people is where you end up having a lot of g…”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 14:54 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Becoming a top 1% user of frontier AI models is high leverage
“Playing with just the frontier models, Claude, GPT, Gemini you know, it just makes a lot of sense, in my view, and becoming a, like, top one percent user, there's probably a few things that you can do that will be as high leverage as that.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 16:31 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Mares: Core barriers to building CPG brands are steadily falling
“I think that there's all of these barriers to building CPG brands. It's basically like, Can you make the product? Can you design it? Can you build a good brand? Can you market it well? And I think that the barriers are just more and more coming down.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 24:08 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Assertion Supported
Justin Mares grew Kettle & Fire to over $100M in annual revenue
“By the end of the episode, people will understand the day one steps, really the day zero steps that I took to start Kettle and Fire, which is now a nine figure annual business.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 1:11 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.