The Startup Ideas Podcast - How he validated Kettle and Fire with just $50 (Now a $100M Company)

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Join me as I chat with Justin Mares, Founder of Kettle and Fire, as he explains his methodical approach to validating Kettle and Fire before fully launching it in 2014-2015. He created a basic landing page with a PayPal checkout to test if people would pay $29.99 for bone broth, achieving a 30% conversion rate despite having no actual product. The conversation highlights how modern AI tools have dramatically lowered barriers to entry for entrepreneurs testing new business ideasTimestamps:• 00:00 - Intro• 01:05 - The Scale of Kettle and Fire• 01:20 - The Initial Idea and Inspiration• 02:16 - Validating Market Demand• 04:03 - Addressing Skepticism on Market Research• 06:00 - Testing Pricing and Demand• 08:48 - Bing Ads and Early Revenue• 12:22 - Leveraging AI for Business Today• 13:42 - Finding Passion-Driven Problems• 15:28 - Identifying Trends and Tools• 20:15 - ChatGPT 4o for Initial Product DesignKey Points• Justin shares how he validated and launched Kettle and Fire, now a nine-figure bone broth business• He used a minimal landing page, Fiverr logo, and Bing ads to test market demand before creating the product• The validation process focused on identifying if enough people wanted the product and if they would pay enough1) The "Day Zero" validation strategy that worked:Justin wanted bone broth for his own health but couldn't find it online. Before creating anything, he asked two critical questions:• How many people actually want this?• Will they pay enough to make it a viable business?Smart validation = less risk.2) Finding your TRUE market size:Justin didn't rely on gut feeling. He went where his potential customers hung out:• Paleo forums• CrossFit communities• Reddit threads• Mark's Daily AppleHe found FANATIC engagement around bone broth recipes, sourcing, and benefits3) The Google Trends hack Justin checked macro trends to confirm his micro observations.He wasn't looking to build a 9-figure business at 24 - just wanted to make $10K/month with his brother.Simple math: A few thousand customers spending a few hundred dollars a year = viable business.4) The $15 MVP that ACTUALLY validated demand:• $9.99 domain ([bonebroths.com](http://bonebroths.com/))• $5 logo from Fiverr• Basic landing page on UnbounceNo product. No fancy design. Just a simple page highlighting benefits that his target audience cared about:- Healing leaky gut- Convenience- Organic ingredients5) The GENIUS pricing strategy:Justin priced at $29.99 for 16oz - 6X MORE than grocery store broth!His thinking: "If people will pay this much for a product they've never tasted from a sketchy landing page, they REALLY want it."High price = strong signal of demand.6) The checkout flow was HILARIOUSLY janky:"Order Now" button → Justin's personal PayPalThat's it. That was the entire checkout.And guess what? PEOPLE STILL BOUGHT IT! After spending just $100 on Bing ads (yes, Bing!), he made nearly $500 in revenue.7) The honest follow-up that built trust:After validating demand, Justin emailed every customer:"We don't have the product yet. I can either refund you in full or give you 50% off when we ship in a few weeks."Most chose the discount, giving him runway to actually create the product.8) From validation to execution:It took 8 months to figure out production and scaling.But because he KNEW people wanted it and would pay for it, he had the confidence to push through the hard parts.9) How would he do it TODAY with AI tools?• Better landing pages using tools like Bolt.new• Sentiment analysis across Reddit/Twitter• AI-generated product designs (as shown in the podcast)10) The bigger lesson for aspiring founders:Focus on problems YOU care deeply about.The best ideas come from the frontier where you're already spending your time.11) AI is LEVELING the playing field:One person with strong conviction + AI tools can now build products that previously required entire teams.12) Want to find YOUR startup idea?Justin's advice:• Find a problem that lights you up• Circle that problem until you find interesting solutions• Validate with real customers willing to pay• Use AI to accelerate everythingLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JUSTIN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/jwmaresHis Blog: https://justinmares.com/

What if you can validate a startup idea without actually building it? So this episode, I chatted with Justin Mayors who built a $100 million plus business called Kettle and Fire. And he walks us through how he comes up with the idea, how he figures out value props, how he uses Google Trends, how he spent $50 on Google Bing ads to actually validate demands. He walks through the entire story. And at the end, we use ChatGPT to redesign what kettle and fire could be, how he would build kettle and fire differently in 2025 with all the tools available. This is a really interesting episode around frameworks for coming up with ideas and validating the ideas because there's a million startup ideas you could be building, but you want to work on the right one.

Enjoy the episode. Okay, Justin, by the end of this podcast, what are people going to get out of this episode? 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. All right. Let's jump in. Cool.

So I wrote a blog post on this that I think is worth going through. But basically in 2014, I was sitting in my job. I was at Rackspace. And basically I was like trying to think about I wanted to start my own company. What do I do? I'd heard a lot about bone broth from friends at CrossFit and been reading about benefits of bone broth for skin got joint health. This is at a time when basically no one was talking about bone broth and you couldn't find any online. And so what I did is I thought a couple things.

Like this is a product that I know I want. And what I didn't know was just how many people are there out there in the world? that actually want this product, and are there enough of them or will they spend enough on the product that I can start a meaningful business? These were basically like the two main questions that I wanted to answer. And so I thought about, okay, question one, how do I figure out like how many people actually want this product? Is this okay, by the way, like me just kind of running into this? This is awesome. Okay, great. Cool. So I had to figure out how many people want this product? I looked at places where basically people in the paleo community, which I was one, people in the CrossFit community, like where are these people hanging out?

I looked at Mark's Daily Apple, Paleo hacks, Reddit, and just kind of saw how much traffic is there, how engaged are these threads, you know, on Reddit and the like that are talking about bone broth or skin health, gut health, joint health, all these things. And when I saw that these people were like super, super engaged, they were talking about recipes, how do you source bones, how long do you cook it, all these things. you're like, okay, there is a small, but like, certainly, like, fanatic and, like, interested in this, in this product group of people. And then at the, like, very micro in these tight-knit communities that I wanted to target. And then I looked at the macro level, and I was like, okay, how are, how is bone broth trending from a Google trend standpoint? And you could see it was starting to take off more and more people were talking about bone broth. And so between those two things, I figured out that there are at least enough people, several thousand people,

that are interested in bone broth and looking for this product. At the time, I was 24 years old. I was not looking to start a nine-figure business, which it is today. I was literally looking at like, can my brother and I start a business that pays us each 10 grand a month? And, you know, if we could get to a $200,000 a year of business, probably we could get around 10 grand a month in profit from that. You only need a couple thousand customers to do that, spending,

you know, a couple hundred dollars a year each. So question one figured was answered. Any questions on that so far? What do you say to people who say the best businesses aren't started by looking at something like Google Trends? You have to go out there in the world and just fix your own problem. What do you say to those people? I think that's, I think that's totally true. And to be clear, like, I was fixing my own problem. I wanted bone broth. This was like, I was talking to people in my crossfit community. I was looking to start a business. It was a product that I wanted to help with my own gut skin and joint health. This was not like a random thing I'm looking for any sign of life on Google Trends.

This was like literally a product I wanted that people that I respected in a space that I cared about and was passionate about were talking about. Then I just used Google Trends to validate that this would be a decent business as opposed to just like just inside project or something like this that doesn't actually go anywhere. If you went to Google Trends and there was no sign of life, do you think you would have ended up starting the business? If I had gone to Google Trends, there was no sign of life and I had done this next step, which I'll talk about, and it didn't work, I would not have started the business. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about startup empire. So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that.

They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas.

Or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing. the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the description. Cool. Let's talk about the next step. Yeah. So the next step that I had was like what I think is the biggest one is will people

pay enough to make this a meaningful business? So I bought the cheapest domain name I could find that had bone broth in the name, bone broths, you know, dot com. And I had the genius idea to name it Bone Broths Coe, which is like, embarrassing in retrospect. You know, so we still have, the name is still Hansman. I still have the bone broths.com domain name.

And what I did from there, spent $9.99 on the domain. I then went to Fiverr. Now you could get AI to do a way better logo than this. But I went to Fiverr and had paid $5 for someone to develop this, like, god-awful logo and some renders. And I basically put this all on a landing page that looked like this.

I used unbounce. Again, you could use AI to build something way better than this. These were like the tools in 2015. And so I used AI to build this thing. And I was like, okay, I looked at paleo forums. What are the things that people care about? They were interested in healing leaky gut. That was a big thing in paleo at the time.

They were focused on convenience. You have to cook bone broth for 24 to 48 hours to get all the nutrient density out of it. So talked about that. Like this is way more convenient than making it home. and then we use only organic ingredients, and we talked about, you know, the health benefits, 100% grass-fed, grass-fed, grass-fed, grass-fed, grass-finished bones, and the like. So this was the landing page.

That was the horrible, horrible thing. And so what I did is after I had that landing page, is I set a price. I had no idea how to make bone broth. I had no idea how we would go about this. But I figured that I could easily sell bone broth at a profit if I charged $29.99 for 16 ounces. If you go to the grocery store, broth and stock is selling for like five bucks for like 16 ounces. And so I was like, great, if I can charge six times more, I'm pretty positive.

I can figure out how to make the economics work. And it's a very, very good sign that if people are willing to spend 30 bucks on a product they've never heard, tasted, smell, 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. And so what I did is this landing page, when you hit order bone broth now, what that did is that took you to my personal PayPal where you would send me J.W. Bears a like $29.99 purchase on PayPal. And as soon as people did that, yeah. So this was literally the flow for someone coming to the website was someone would end up on the site, hit order now and then get prompted to send money to my personal email address. And so, after I got, you know, after spending about $100 on Bing ads because Bing was cheaper than AdWords, we saw that people were actually like paying me money. Like you can see, you know, April 12th, someone paid, April 15th, someone paid, April 20 and someone paid. Like, these are very, very small, small dollar amounts, but I had a tiny advertising budget because, you know,

I just, that's, that's what I was doing. And so even without a product with a super sketchy checkout flow, people were actually converting. And so this, 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 in revenue. And I figured that on that $500 in revenue, I think I was spending $250 or so in ad revenue in ads. And based on the comparison, conversion rate, the incredibly janky checkout flow, you know, the ad costs, all this sort of stuff. I backed into the idea that I was fairly certain that if I made a product that we would be able

to sell, you know, something on the order of like $100,000 or so per year under this very janky flow. And so to me, question two was answered. Like people will actually pay for this. The best part of the story is you use Bing. Yeah. Like how, ghetto and sketchy Bing is? I was so broke. It's perfect. Yeah. No, but I think there's a lesson in there, right?

The lesson is, you know, you were just trying to validate your thesis, ultimately, right? So it didn't make a difference if it was Google or Bing. Exactly. Yeah. And so I can also talk about the next steps here because I think the next step is important, too. Because at this point, had validated the macro, there's enough search volume and people care about this in communities. I validated the economic and the micro piece, which is people will actually click on the order now button and PayPal me money. And then what I wanted to see is like

basically can we actually make the product? And so the first thing that I did after validating those two things is I sent this email to every single person that had placed an order and basically just said like, hey, I'm the founder of Bone Brothco. I wanted to reach out and say I'm very excited. we don't have the product in stock because I'd never made it and we had no product. But I was like, either I can refund you in full today or I can give you a 50% discount and we'll ship in a few weeks is what I said. That was extraordinarily optimistic. It ended up being like eight months.

But we still had people that were on the list. They're like, figure it out. I'm excited to try the product whenever you do it. And so anytime a customer, everyone was happy. I was very upfront with them. Most of them decided to take the 50% off deal. you know, and the few customers that didn't, I just refunded them. And so through this entire process, this is basically like how I validated the idea for kettle and fire.

I made sure that this was an idea that enough people cared about that they would actually send me money, that I think we could build a good business and do it in a way that, you know, we had people that were that basically were paying us money for a product that didn't exist. And then it was just time, you know, took me the next eight months to figure out how to actually make this and scale it. and like all these sorts of things that go into business building. But I think that this was, this was really the start of our experience, you know, building kettle and fire.

So kettle and fire was started years ago. And my question to you is, it's 2025 now. A lot has changed. What would you have done differently today? You mentioned AI? Yeah. So I think today I probably would,

I mean, the landing pages, all the stuff that I made would be much better if I was doing it today. You know, you saw the landing page I used. It was terrible. So I think that there's an improvement there. I think that there's also ways that you can use AI and other tools to quickly scrape and get a sense of like sentiment analysis across Reddit. Are people talking about it on forums? What are people saying about it on Twitter? There's all these really powerful tools that didn't exist then. but I still do think fundamentally that the core thing of like try and sell a product,

even if it doesn't exist now and see if people will give you money for it, even if it means like DMing people on Twitter, emailing friends, texting friends, like just try and get like 10 people to pay for the thing that you're trying to build. And you will have, it will be massively validating and you'll very quickly understand, is this a thing that people care enough about or not?

You have a history of building CPG products. Kettle on fire, Shirley Wine. Now you're building more of a marketplace software product. Do you see, like, for the person listening, who's looking for startup ideas, who wants to build a business, who believes in the framework that you have, is there still opportunity in CPG?

Should people be focusing on software? I think that I think honestly that's such a personal question like there's not really like the people that end up making the most money are generally not ones that are like I want to focus on software because I want to like make the most money in the world like I often think that I often think that like I had really I ended up that I've had a bunch of good ideas in CPG but that's because I'm very very interested in the health stuff and so like I have consistently been early on bone broth was early on the Keto trend was early on the non-alcoholic stuff, all because, like, I have this macro passion and interest in just, like, improving human health and so, and trying to solve the chronic disease crisis, which I think is the biggest problem in the country. I think that generally people should probably go to wherever they are, like, on the frontier and they're among the most interested, like top point one percent of people interested in a topic. I think that that frontier for most people is where you end up having a lot of good ideas is one where you're just

naturally spending a lot of time and because you're spending a lot of time, your ideas are much more likely to be new and interesting and different than if you were just like, hey, I'm going to find a software company just to find a software company, you know? I want to end this pod with two last questions. One is, well, the two questions are what are the three trends? that you think there's opportunity in. And then what are the three tools that, you know, you mentioned using all, you know, new types of tools now,

easier than ever. What are three tools that people could use today that they might not be using? Yeah. I think one of them is, there's a company called Bolt.comnew that is like a very interesting kind of tool that you can use. I think if you're not getting obsessed about how to use this newest wave of AI tools and building a business, like, you're just going to get left behind. These things are so insanely powerful.

And it is going to change how people build and scale companies over the next one to five, 10 years. Like I have zero doubt about that. And so I think they're getting familiar with these different tools like bolt dot new is one, Rourke. R of RK is another one. And just sort of, and frankly, playing with just the frontier models,

Klaude, GPT, Gemini, you know, it just makes a lot of sense, in my view. And becoming a like top 1% user, there's probably a few things that you can do that will be as high leverage as that. From an opportunity standpoint, it's an interesting question. I think the things that I am interested in right now

is I like to think about like, What are the big problems in the world that have relative a few people focused on them? Or where there's more energy moving in that direction? I cared a while ago, you know, started caring like 10 plus years ago about the chronic disease crisis and all of this, like our food system being poison, all of this like health and wellness stuff. And more and more people are starting to wake up and care about this. And they're starting to wake up and care about it because it's a massive problem.

Like the after American is sick. People are getting sicker. Our kids have never been sicker. Type 2 diabetes rates are going. crazy cardiovascular, it's just everything. And so I think that generally, so often I advise people to find a problem that really lights them up or that they find interesting, like more interesting than the opposite, and just kind of circle that problem for a while until you find interesting ideas that potentially solve that problem. And if there is a problem that you're really

interested in, then naturally, like if you can figure out a way to address a top, one of the most important problems that people have and their health is certainly one, you can build a business that that does quite well doing that. And so I often like, that's kind of what I recommend people. I love it, man. I love it. It's simple. It's like find something that you care about and basically your first product that you're going to build might not be, you know, hit escape velocity. But if you keep kind of circling around it, I think that eventually you'll hit something. Yes, exactly. But I think your point around, like, you need to validate, you need to validate the market,

you need to understand the pain points, look at Reddit, look at community sentiment, all the data's out there, it's just about, you know, distilling it in a way. I think what you did, I don't know if you did it manually, you probably did, but on your original kettle and fire website, you had like the three almost like problems that you're solving. Yeah. And it was so clear you wrote it like, you know, you wrote it like you talk. Super plain English.

I think that, you know, what you can do now with AI is you can go and sort of distill that simply use bolt.com to actually build the landing page, launch it. Like we're talking about a startup in like a day. Totally. I mean, if anything, I think that someone that has a big or has like a strong opinion on a product they want to make or a direction of 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 has a very strong opinion of like what

the world should look like, you can use these tools to build that product, whereas a team of three, team of five, team of ten can do the same, but it requires coordinating a vision across like all of these different people. And so I basically think that the new types of, there's a whole universe of products that can now be built by like one guy in a basement using these AI tools that can be as good if not better than many of the tools that have previously taken like tons of people to build. Dude, have you been playing with the chat GPT40 image? Not yet.

It just came out today, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm getting a bunch of texts about it, but I haven't yet. So let's just do this for fun. I attach the kettle and fire product. Let's redesign that product and using ChatGBTGBT 4-0 and see what happens. Let's see if ChatGBT can redesign this in a beautiful way. If you were talking to your chief design officer, what would you say for fun?

How would you, what should I prompt it? I'd be interested like if we wanted to make a functional beverage or a drink. Like what would that look like and how would we make it accessible and look good? If we wanted to make it make a functional beverage, how would we design it to make it look fresh, cool, engaging? We being were kettle and fire. And let's just see if what happens. Because in your day, in our day, really, we would have to go to like Fiverr, right? Totally.

But like if you can create something that's high quality and it's just, by the way, I think you do need to pay $20 a month for this, but it's literally $20 a month. It's, you know, you could be testing dozens of startups a month to find that right one for you. Totally. Okay. So usually I've noticed it takes about like 30 to. 30 seconds to a minute to generate these. And it's funny because when I'm watching it,

I'm always like, why is it taking so long? But it's like, this is actual magic. I know. It reminds me the Louie CK bit of like people complaining about airplane Wi-Fi, you know? Right. Exactly.

We're hurtling through the sky at 30,000 miles an hour and you're like complaining about, you know, 600 miles now, whatever. You're complaining about like airplane Wi-Fi being slow. Exactly. And by the way, we gave it like basically no, basically very little constraints, right? If we were working with a designer, I think we probably, like a real designer employee, we probably would be, I mean, we would have a kickoff meeting. We would have like a one pager, right? Yep.

And I actually think that's best practices for a lot of that is, you know, create. I do find that a lot of these AI models work better when you do give it a bit more constraint. So we're getting some, it's starting to load. And you can see that it took the image and it's making it look like the same, right? It doesn't look like in the image I gave, it's a non-3D image basically.

But what do you think so far? I mean, this is pretty wild. I haven't played with this at all. This is amazing. Right? 10 grams of protein, collagen. I don't know if that's accurate. Yep.

And it's cool. It's definitely cool. Yeah. Totally, man. This is so cool. So how does this change how people build CPG products? 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. Like, this is great design. You know, my day we paid an agency, I think, 60 grand to come up with this vibe and look and all these sorts of things. Maybe if that collapses to $200 a month, you know what I mean? Like all of a sudden, it's a different kind of thing. Totally. Look at the functional beverage logo coming on right now. Yeah. Pretty fire. People in the comments section are going to love it or hate it.

Yeah. Like, this was one prompt. Like, we one prompted a whole new product line. Wow. It's crazy. So it's not fully loaded, but you get the idea. Justin, thanks so much for coming on the show. I'll include where people can find you in the show notes if they want to follow you for more.

but is there anything else you want to leave people with? No, I just want to say thanks for having me on. I'm super excited to chat about this and yeah, I love it. All right, my man. I'll see you around. All right. Thank you.