How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)

0:00What if you can validate a startup idea without actually building it? So this episode I chatted with Justin Mayers who built a hund00 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 chat GBT to redesign uh what Kettle and Fire could be, how he would build Kettle and Fire differently

0:38in 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. [Music] 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 9 figureure annual

1:20business. All right, let let's jump in. Cool. So I I wrote a blog post on this that I I I think is worth going through. But basically in 2014, I was sitting in my job. I was at Rackspace. Uh and basically I was like trying to think about I wanted to start my own company. What do I do? Uh I'd heard a lot about bone broth from friends at CrossFit and been reading about benefits of bone broth for skin, gut, joint health. This was 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

1:56this 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 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? Um, is this okay, by the way? Like me just kind of

2:24running into this. This is awesome. Okay, great. Um, cool. So, I had I had to figure out how many people want this product. I looked at places where basically pale people in the paleo community, which I was one, uh, people in the CrossFit community, like where are these people hanging out? Uh, 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 for skin health, gut health, joint health, all these things. And when I saw that these people were like super super

2:55engaged. 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 at 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. Uh and so between those two things, um you

3:27know, I figured out that like 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 business, probably we could get around 10 grand a month in in profit from that. You only need a couple thousand customers to do that, spending, you know, a couple

3:57hundred a year each. So, question one figured was answered. Um, 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 What do you say to those people? I I 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 and it was a product that I

4:28wanted to help with my own gut, skin, and joint health. This was not like a random thing. I'm looking for any, you know, 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 use Google Trends to validate that this would be a decent business as opposed to just like Justin's side project or something like

4:51this that doesn't actually go anywhere. If if you went to Google Trends and there was, you know, no sign of life, do you think you would have ended up starting the business? Uh if if I had gone to Google Trends and 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

5:12you 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 uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, "How do you do email

5:37marketing? 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 uh that they need. So you can check out the link to

5:58startupmpire.co 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,.com. Um, and I had the genius idea to name it Bone Broths Co., which is like embarrassing in retrospect. Uh, you know, so we still have that the name still haunts me. I still have the bone broths.com domain name. And what I did from there, spent $9.99 on the domain. I

6:35then went to Fiverr. Now, you could get AI to do a way better logo than this, but I went to Fiverr and had paid five bucks for someone to develop this like god-awful logo. Um, and 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

6:54to build something way better than this. This these were like the tools in 2015. Um, and so I used AI to build this 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. Uh, you know, 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 at home. And then we use only organic ingredients and we talked about um, you

7:25know, the health benefits, 100% grass-fed, grass-fed grass-fed grass-finish bones and the like. So, this was the landing page. That was the horrible, horrible thing. And so what what I did is after I had that landing page um 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 charge $29.99 for 16 ounces. Um if you go to the grocery store, broth and stock is selling for like five d five bucks for like 16 ounces. And so I was like, great, if I

7:58can 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, 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 a thing that people really really want. And so, uh, 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 JW Bears a like $29.99

8:31purchase on PayPal. And as soon as people did that, uh, 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. Uh, and so after I got, you know, after spending about $100 um on Bing ads because Bing was cheaper than than Adwords, uh, we saw that people are actually like paying me money. Like you can see, you know, April 12th, someone paid, April 15th, someone paid. April 20th, someone paid. April 21st someone paid. Like these are very, very small um small dollar amounts, but

9:07I had a tiny advertising budget because, you know, I just that's that's what I was doing. Um, 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, um, 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, uh, to this janky checkout flow, to this bad landing page, uh, 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 I based

9:45on the conversion rate, uh, 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 um, you know, something on the order of like a $100,000 or so per year under this very janky flow. Um, and so to me, question two is 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

10:21think 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 um I I can also talk about the next steps here because I think the next step is is important too because at this point had validated the macro there's enough search volume and people and people care about this in communities. I' val validated the like the economic and the the micro piece which is people actually click on the

10:53order now button and PayPal me money. And then what I wanted to see is like um 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. Um, but I was like, either I can refund you in full today or I can give you a 50% discount

11:24and we'll ship in a few weeks is what I said. That was extraordinarily optimistic. It ended up being like eight months. Um, but we still had people that that were on the list and they were like, "Figure it out. I'm excited to try the product whenever you do it." Um, and so anytime a customer, everyone was

11:39happy. I was very upfront with them. Most of them decided to take the 50% off deal. Um, 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 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 um and do it in a way that, you know, we had people that were uh that that basically were paying us money for a product that didn't exist. And then it

12:08was just time, you know, it 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 uh 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

12:35today? You mentioned AI. Yeah. So I think today I probably would I mean the land the the landing pages the like all the stuff that I made would be much better if I was doing it today. Uh you know you saw the landing page I used it was terrible. The I 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. Uh are people talking about on forums? what are people saying about it on Twitter? There's all these really powerful tools that didn't

13:11exist then. But I still do think fundamentally that the um 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 that you're trying to build and you will have it. It will be massively validate validating and you'll very quickly understand is this a thing that people care enough about or not. You you have a history of building CPG project products, you know, Kettle and Fire,

13:48Shirley Wine. Now you're building more of a marketplace software product. Do you see like for the person listening who's who's looking for startup ideas who wants to build a business who believes in the framework that you have? Um you know is there still opportunity in CPG? Should people be focusing on software? Uh I think that I think honestly that's such a personal

14:13question. Like there's not really like the 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 it 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 in just like

14:48improving human health and so and trying to solve the chronic disease crisis which I think is the biggest problem in the country. Uh 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 good ideas is one where you're just like 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 and different than if you were just like hey I'm going

15:24to find a software company just to find a software company you know I want to 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. Um, 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, uh, that they might not be using? Yeah, I think one of them is, uh, there's a company called Bolt.new new that is like a very interesting kind of tool that that you can use. I I think that I think

16:09if you're not trying getting obsessed about like 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, two, five, 10 years. like I have zero doubt about that and so I think that getting familiar with these different tools like uh bolt new is one rok is another one um and just sort of and frankly playing with just the frontier models claw gpt gemini um you know it just makes a lot of sense in my view and becoming a like

16:50top 1% user there's probably few things that you can do that will be as high leverage as that uh from an opportunity standpoint point. It's an interesting question. I I I I think 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 relatively few people focused on them or where there's more energy moving in that

17:13direction. I cared a while ago uh you know started caring like 10 plus years ago about the chronic disease crisis and all of this like our food system being poison uh 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 average American is sick people are getting sicker our kids have never been sicker type two diabetes rates are going crazy uh cardiovascular it's just everything and so I I think that generally so often I advise people to find a problem that really lights them

17:46up um or that they find interesting, like more interesting than 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 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. Uh, and so I often like that's kind of what I recommend people. I love it, man. I love it. Simple. It's like find something

18:20that 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. Um, all the data is out there. It's just

18:49about, 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 uh 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 super plain English. Um, I think that, you know, what you can do now with AI is you can go and sort of distill that simply use bolt.new to actually build the landing page, launch it. Like we're talking

19:23about a startup in like a day. Totally. I mean, if 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 the world is moving, they are 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 10 can do the same. But it requires coordinating a vision across like all of

19:56these different people. And so I 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 uh using these AI tools that can be as good if not better than many of the you know tools that have previously taken like tons of people to

20:14build. Dude, have you been playing with uh 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 let's just do this for fun. I I attached the Kettle and Fire um product. Let's redesign that product and and using ChatgBT40 and see what happens. Like let's see if Chat GBT could redesign this in a in a beautiful way. If you were talking to your like chief design officer, what would you say for fun? Like how how would you what should I prompt it? I'd be interested like if we wanted to make a functional

20:59beverage 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? Um, we being we're kettle on fire and let's just see if what happens because in in your day in your day in our day really we would have to go to like Fiverr, right? And 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 it's a you know you

21:55could 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 cuz when I'm watching it, I'm always like, why is it taking so long? But it's it's like this is actual magic. I know. It's It reminds me of the Louis CK bit of like people complaining about

22:24airplane Wi-Fi, you know? Right. Exactly. We're h hurtling through the sky at 30,000 miles an hour and you're like complaining about or you know 600 miles hour 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? Um if we were working with a a designer, I think we pro like a real designer employee, we probably would be

22:55I 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 for a lot of that is, you know, create like I I do find that a lot of these AI models work better when you do give it a bit more constraint. Mhm. So, we're getting some it's it's

23:19starting to load. Um, 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 what do you think so far? I mean, this is it's 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

23:48accurate. Yep. And it's like it's cool. It's definitely cool. Yeah, totally. Man, this is so cool. So, how does how does this change how how people build CPG products? I 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

24:21coming 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. Um maybe if that collapses to $200 a month, you know what I mean? Like all of a sudden it's it's a it's a different

24:39kind of thing. Totally. Look at that. The functional beverage logo coming on right now. Yeah. like pretty fire. People in the comment section are going to be are going to love it or hate it, but 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. Um Justin, thanks so much for coming on the show. Uh, I'll include um 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

25:25super excited to chat about this and and uh yeah, love it. All right, my man. I'll see you around. All right. Thank you.