2021 Challenge

Business and Entrepreneurship

Take 2 Businesses from $0 to $1M

The 2021 Challenge (before starting)

2021 Challenge: Q1 Update

2021 Challenge: Q2 (mid-point) Update

2021 Challenge: Q3 Update

Just a fast update as I have to get back to work 🙂

Meat Health: The plan for Q3 was to try and scale up sales with Facebook ads. After 3 months and a solid 5-figure ad spend, one thing became clear, we couldn’t profitably acquire customers with this “front end” offer. In hindsight, this seems obvious. Meat Health Academy is geared at people who have at least heard of meat-based/Carnivore diets, who have likely done some research themselves or dove in already, and either need help starting or need help making it work. This target audience is a more “middle of the funnel” customer, not a “cold” front end customer. Not surprisingly, the retargeting ads were able to be run profitably (but not enough to offset the front end ad spend).

Although the program hasn’t scaled like I hoped in Q3, I believe I will look back on Q3 as the most important 3 months in Meat Health. While I did spend time trying to get ads to work (to at least try and break even!), I spent many many hours developing the future plans of Meat Health. This plan won’t show up in the numbers, but I couldn’t be more excited about the future of Meat Health. Lots and lots to come.

NED: The plan for NED in Q3 was similar to Meat Health – use ads to scale up, and ideally make profits that could be allocated to more mass manufacturing so we can start moving towards B2B. Similar to Meat Health, it’s proven extremely difficult to acquire customers with any kind of profit. So the plan moving forward is to keep working on optimizing the website (conversions) and looking into other distribution channels until we can invest in the manufacturing that would bring down production costs and enable the unit economics to work (as well as open up the B2B distribution channel).

2021 Challenge: Final Review

I am planning on writing up a more formal 2021 Challenge Review, but have been putting it off because: ONE I failed (not even close) and TWO I’m busy getting after the 2022 Challenge (and rectifying the failings of last year)! 

While I failed the 2021 Challenge of hitting these arbitrary revenue goals, it feels like a learning experience and a semi-success. 

Learning Experience 

It clarified what I admitted at the beginning of the challenge: setting an arbitrary goal without a system is a bad idea. A goal without a system is wishful thinking.

Attaching a 4% System to an inspiring vision is how dreams turn to reality.  

Semi-Success 

While the revenue targets were missed (by A LOT) the effort was still there which resulted in NED getting better and better, and Meat Health building out its vision starting with a launch of a brand new program.

More to come from these 2 companies!