naturally nutty nondairy creamer. put it on kick starter and asked people to invest their money only if they thought it was something they would buy. the $30,000 will go towards converting my kitchen formula into a commercial formulation. what i specifically said is if you actually think that you would use nut pods, then by all means, i d love to have your support. in just one month, she raised $32,000 from 500 people. and that, she says, was her answer. it really told me that people wanted to have this. with their production in place, along with information about future customers thanks to kick starter, madeline was ready for launch, and the place she went was amazon. for us to be able to go on amazon have pretty much nationwide distribution overnight, it really allowed me to have a direct way to consumers so they could learn about who we were, what we were trying to do, and what our products were. oh, boy.
amazon has been huge for our business. jeff hayden is chief financial officer for nut pods and he s also madeline s husband. after a long career in investment banking, he s well suited to monitoring the company s bottom line. a lot of our kick starter backers loved the product, went on amazon and wrote great reviews. that sort of launched us a little bit on amazon. so we did $10,000 in amazon sales our first month. the company s success on amazon has not gone unnoticed. how did you figure out amazon? that s probably the first question we are asked. we wanted to know too. what are the key elements for doing well on amazon? start with a great product. you just can t fake that. number two is make sure that you set up your listings correctly. i think three is get the word out however you can to get people to review and find you on amazon. sounds simple, but of course it isn t simple at all. it s not enough to just create a product, list it on
borrowing it. then i realized, you know, it s not just me that s looking for something. and that was my lightbulb moment. that was only two years ago. today madeline s home-brewed creamer is called nut pods. it s being produced commercially and sold in grocery stores and online. and looking at her annual sales numbers, it s doing remarkably well. i can say we re making considerably more than $5 million in revenue. how did she turn a homemade recipe into a multimillion-dollar business? for madeline, the answer starts with a question. we needed to know, is this too small of a niche? is this a viable business? to find out, madeline surveyed the market by making clever use of tool usually associated with fundraising, kick starter. don t get me wrong. we absolutely needed the funds. what was more important for us is that we needed to see if people were interested. she made a short video about nut pods. in fact, we call nut pods the
exactly to her taste. she used it in her coffee and for baking. and then my friends started borrowing it and then i realized, it s not just me that s looking for something and that was my light bulb moment. that was only two years ago. madelyn s home brewed creamer is called nut pods. it s being produced commercially and being sold in grocery stores and online. it s doing remarkable well. we can make more than $5 million in revenue. how did she turn a homemade recipe into a multiple million dollars dollar business. we needed to know is this too small of a niche, is this too small of a business. by making clever use of a tool usually associated with fund-raising. kick starter. don t get me wrong. but what was more important for us, is that we needed to see if people were interested. she made a short video about