How Booty Bands & Barbells CEO Jay Crew grew to $10.2M revenue and 50K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is j crew he is booty bands and barbells uh he's one of the one of the founders and established female fitness brand their complete home gym educational content fitness app and their best tasting protein help women create long term results their goal is to end the toxic weight loss loop for over a million customers by 2025 jay you're ready to take the top let's do it all right and you are one of the co-founders right i am danita young is the other co-founder she's the face of the female fitness brand i'm the guy behind everything i know i'm going why is this guy leading a female fitness brand nothing doesn't make sense here right yeah all right so what's the bit what did it start off as was it an e-commerce plate to start or was it a protein powder or something else or an app or what yeah great question yeah we're the original booty bands we owned the trademark booty bands we started off as just the product the resistance bands booty bands made it a little bit different and better and then from there we really fell in love with our customers not the product and started making other products and uh barbells dumbbells protein digital products a fitness app and it kind of all formed into a complete home gym from there what so what year did you get your first dollar sales 2017 four years ago and bootstrap today or have you raised bootstrapped it until 2019 we had a hundred thousand dollars in debt equity capital injected into it other than that we uh bootstrapped the whole thing yeah you're 100k in debt in 2019 otherwise bootstrap i love that and then give me a sense like if you're comfortable what's revenue today and we'll break up all the different products yeah so last year was 5.5 million uh our run rate should be about six this year we had to slow back the reins on scaling we're planning to double our revenue but i'm sure as you know anybody else listen to this commodities have just skyrocketed lumber steel we were starting off in steel which is their biggest selling product 83 of our revenues our barbells and dumbbells still went from 30 cents a pound to a dollar 40 and under a year so our real main focus is figure out how to lower these costs of goods get our gross margins better and get these these prices down so all right what did it go up it went up to 140 from what 30 cents whoa yeah okay so 83 of your revenue your 6 million comes from barbell sales where's the other 17 the other 17 is resistance bands so those are the actual booty bands um long bands our fitness app and our pro team how much does the fitness i make this app right now we just started in november and it's growing about six percent month over month and we're doing we have about 800 active paid subscribers right now it's about 15 000 a month interesting 800 pages and what are they paying for is it is it courses or what yeah it's a fitness app so it's just kind of like a content for specifically how to use the products and get into the community and um they have essentially a personal trainer at their fingertips and when you look at your six million revenue this year how many individual customers will pay you at least one dollar whether it's across the fitness app the booty bands the barbell or protein how many individual customers yeah um that's a good question we have 50 000 now um i won't know i don't know the exact number of customers by the end of the run race that's a good question what does that mean so 50 000 does that mean everyone since 2017 just paid you at least a dollar yes okay our our clv to cac ratio is 3.4 to 1 right now so so uh customer lifetime value cap ratio 3.4 so tell me where you are spending dollars to get like to get new customers yeah most all of our customer acquisition paid customer acquisition is facebook and google ads um and influencer marketing and so what we spent on a facebook ad to get you know one new paid customer our cpa in a facebook ad right now is about uh hovering over a little bit of a hundred dollars and uh google's under 75 so our blended cac ratio with kind of all of our paid traffic channels is uh sorry it's 120 and then 80 so our blended cac ratio is about as close to about i think uh last i looked about a hundred bucks yeah yeah now you know sealed you know cap to l to b ratio can be fine but like what's more interesting to me at least money velocity help pay that period how quickly to get the money back so what is your average cart if you spend 120 bucks to get a sale from facebook do you make that back pretty quick yeah so i mean it's direct to consumer so we get it you know start as far as receivables you get paid right away but our average order value right now is 268. okay guys so that begs the question if you can spend an average of 100 bucks on a facebook ad or a google ad to get a new customer that pays you 268 bucks immediately um i guess you do have hard costs there that we mentioned the steel costs earlier so on a 268 checkout how much you're going to make profit on that um a profit on well our i know what our overall month over month and your profit is um if that's your question sure so right yeah so right now uh our net our gross margins are about 56 and our net margins are two okay interesting and i imagine those those growths and that have come down significantly because of the increasing price of steel yeah i mean that's what it is now it's just because everything's made in the usa which we're super proud about but it's come down to the point where we're going to have to get these products made overseas which we already have quotes and samples on and we go from 56 gross margins to 78 gross margins and a one a two percent gross margin to a 12 uh net margin to a 12 overnight just from lowering our cost of goods so a lot of people are like why don't you just debt finance this that's that's an easy way right uh rather than giving up so much equity which the cost of capital on on raising as opposed to debt is significantly higher yeah clear bank or something like that clear bank um just on debt financing there you know we don't have a lot of collateral like large assets on the balance sheet or anything like that to get the 2.2 million raise that we're going for so some of it will be debt but not all of it you're raising 2.2 million right now yeah at what valuation you think uh pre is 10 and post money is 12.2 free is 10 interesting and do you have term sheet already or you're still you're still hunting for the right partner uh no closed term sheets term sheets are out there i would say we have data rooms talked about it i would say due diligence is pretty i'd say they're doing due diligence i guess everyone's definition of that's a little different but yeah and why raise right now i mean why do you need more capital to grow why can't you keep self-funding it's just it's really expensive to buy like right now thankfully we're in made in the usa if we're in china trying to get you know product we'd have to buy a ton in advance and then wait months and months and months for it to get here um the great thing is it's kind of like buy on demand so we buy a week in advance two weeks in advance and that's awesome but we really want to lower these costs of goods we want to increase these margins we want to build a 100 million dollar company and be one of the biggest female fitness brands in the on the planet and expand and move our product line from just these one-off barbells and to 60 of our revenue being consumables pr other protein powders protein flavors protein bars and really focus on the app where it's monthly recurring revenue subscription products um let me ask you like when i look at a lot of you guys landing pages the top of your funnel is usually the lower margin product it's the physical asset versus the digital subscription which your margins are much better on why not flip the funnel like why don't you put the digital stuff at the top of the phone then upsell barbells later yeah that's a good question so one of course the average order value is uh really great our barbells are a huge hit the conversion rates are great on amazon and direct to consumer on our website there's nothing like it like i said we're the first female fitness home gym the majority of our customers 89 85 to 90 of our customers are women who wouldn't be caught dead in the gym in the first place that we gave them a solution that they never had and we're really proud of that and so the fitness app there's a lot of apps out right out there right so cost to acquire customer we've tried on a fitness app is is much more expensive and tougher and a lot of people our customers are typically not going out there looking for apps and like we're really really good at creating content so the content that we create that is our paid content and stuff like that it's really catching and really speaks to the pain points of our customers who want a home gym solution so that's kind of the direction why we went there interesting can i take that average order value of 268 bucks divided into your revenue this year about about 6 million that would mean about 22 000 customers are checking out once for 268 bucks does that sound about right or no uh if you did the math right that's probably right yeah so cool that's super cool well what else can you like are there opportunities to upsell other things what's like the most effective upsell for you and and and how do you determine whether you upsell someone else's product versus building it internally um yeah i mean we're complement like we're doing a lot of complimentary products if you buy this we have a complimentary product that goes here uh we're really focused on the complete home gym and getting people like everything that we have so that they kind of self-identify with the brand and all of our products are in their house like we have our barbells and dumbbells in the corner of their house and we have our protein and their cabinet and soon to be female fitness supplements in their cap you know by their bedside and their fitness app on their phone and so it our upsells kind of complement each other depending on what they buy and so we do a pretty good job at the upsells and crosstals there and the other question was regards to uh other people's products you're saying yeah partner verse build yeah we i think just being the brand we've just kind of focused on our on what we're good at and in our our products we haven't really ever explored like a really intense jv collaboration or anything like that how what's the capital of like today how much do you own danita and i own fifty percent and where's the rest and the rest was uh another partner that came in for a hundred for the hundred thousand that uh at the time we only were doing three hundred thousand dollars in revenue that year and injected the hundred thousand and he owns the other fifty percent what year was that were you turner can sales 2018. okay got it got it that's different than the 100k 100 debt that you raised that was it yeah wait that that 100k was the debt and he get 50 equity no sorry did i say that was the equity that we raised at the 100 000 yeah there was no debt with 100 i misunderstood got it so you effectively had a pre-seed round in 2018 where you raised a hundred thousand dollars when you're doing 300 000 a year and you sold 50 of the business when you did that correct man that's a big slug it was it was a big slug but it's i'm actually really you know i'm really proud of it because it actually took us to a new area in the country allowed us to make barbells and and dumbbells and everything here and you know that investor as like an angel investor is willing to dilute his percentage to bring in other investors in here to really get this company to where we want to go so it was it was a it was a choice that we had to make and at the time there was a the protein collaboration essentially the protein that we got was because of him so i think without him we wouldn't have had the protein all right so 50 50 split right now how many are on the team the team full-time employees six and contractors five interesting any engineers full-time to manage the app or no no got it very cool any other big costs i'm missing besides steel um no that's the biggest cost yeah very cool all right let's wrap up here with the famous five man number one favorite book favorite book uh good to great number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yes uh ezra firestone is always a pretty pretty interesting one for me and then i would say um uh i mean dalio i don't know you got me on that one can't i can't think of anybody in particular you're following ezra afs he loves that space um number three what's your favorite online tool for building the platform for building a business overall no no the one you use the most to build booty band shopify you mean okay that's and that's it yeah shopify yeah cool do you have to give them 30 revenue give shopify 330. they take thirty percent cut no they don't no cut there okay no cool um how many hours i'll sleep to get every night seven good and then married single kids danita and i are partnerships single i guess you could say no kids our our business is our kid and we we it cries and throws up on us every day and it's slowly growing up yeah jay how old are you how old am i yeah 38 last question something you wishing you when you were 20. but i wish i did something you wish you knew i wish i knew oh probably better cash flow management guys there you have it booty bands launches an ecommerce product the last you did 5.5 million in sales this year doing six million i think that's growing really fast well 800 uh females paying 15 bucks a month for their fitness application team of 22 people they basically bootstrapped today they did about 50 of the business back in 2018 for 100 grand but they're now raising 2.2 million on a 10 million pre we'll see if they can get it done over 50 000 folks have purchased at least one product through the platform since founding in 2017 they want to be the biggest women's fitness brand in the world jay thank you for taking us to the top yeah thanks so much appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want 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