This guy made $11 million in two years with just one product. How? By capitalizing on one of the biggest marketing opportunities in years. User-generated content. Oliver Boccato started Tab's Chocolate in his college apartment. Just two years later, he was a millionaire by age 21. I pretty much drained my entire bank account to go all in on this business. We met up with Oliver and he broke down exactly how he was built in a $11 million brand, how he runs it with zero employees, and why he created a product the world has never seen before. So I sell sex shock rate on the internet? The secret behind this business lies within a loophole in the TikTok algorithm. And Oliver breaks down exactly how he's leveraged user-generated content to take advantage of that loophole. I've created my own content machine where every day hundreds of videos are going out and reaching millions of people, which in turn is responsible for the $11 million plus we're going to do this year. Oliver is proof that anyone can turn a one product brand into millions with one marketing strategy. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, Oliver, tell us what business you built and how much money you make. Yeah, man. So I sell sex chocolate on the internet. In essence, we created an edible for sex. We took the most popular and effective natural supplements that typically come in a pill or powder format and we transformed it into a very luxurious high-end experience. This year we're going to do about $11 million in revenue. So it's pretty incredible how far we've come. No outside investments. Just been constantly reinvesting every dollar back in to fuel the growth. Sex chocolate is a wild product idea. It really stands out, starts a conversation. How did you come up with the idea for this? My buddy was scrolling TikTok one day and he was taking a... And he saw this video posted by some teenage girl reviewing a sex chocolate. And he sent me the video, he had 8 million views, 2 million likes, and I go to look up the product online and they don't even have a website. They didn't have a social media page, they didn't have an Instagram, they didn't have TikTok. And I was like, yo, this concept is absolutely brilliant. Clearly, they've already validated that it can go viral. If I were to take my prior experience and background in this space, I could make this into a multi-million dollar brand. I then ended up spending a year, you know, like building this out the right way, agonizing over every single little detail in order to create the best customer experience. There's a million products you could pick. Why sex chocolate? Yeah, we knew from the start that we were going to be able to take this from 0 to 100 super fast. We had the experience, we had the skill set, we had the knowledge and the marketing sauce. It was just now about finding a product that would, you know, intrinsically go viral. And that's exactly what Tabs is. You're scrolling through TikTok all day, you see it, sex chocolate, what? Like, it's a super novel, people have never seen it before, right? And so it invokes some sort of reaction, which is the key to going viral. It is, you know, something what they call emotional arousal, making the viewer feel something. And it doesn't matter what you're making them feel, it just, you need to make them feel like a super intense emotion. And that's what invokes people to A, watch the entire thing, and then B, like, share with their friends, which creates internal morality. Let's talk manufacturing and working with suppliers. How do you get something that's in your head, an idea, and turn it into this? Yeah, absolutely. You know, there is first the box itself. We had to, like, design the kind of raw files. I was designing them myself on Canva and Figma. And then we sent it over to a professional designer to really clean it up. Then we had to get 3D renders made. And then we sent it over to our manufacturer in China. The boxes are made in China. The chocolate and anything that touches the chocolate is made in the United States. That's super, super important to me. But, you know, in terms of the box itself, once we have the design file, once we have the 3D render, we sent it over to them and they made their first prototype. And then there's the chocolate itself. In order to create the chocolate, there are like four or five different niche supplement manufacturers. Each supplement has its own independent manufacturer because we source the best of the best. And then each chocolate is wrapped in a plastic that has its own manufacturer. And then, you know, the chocolate doesn't just spawn in this format. There is our logo, the two Ts over here. And then there's a clean break so that, you know, you can break it and split it, right? I mean, I don't know, I don't know, get away from me. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what the whole entire supply chain looks like. Tell me about some of those mistakes that you made in the moving pieces. What are like the top three? A lot of mistakes. Inventory management or packaging management mistakes you made. Yeah, so I can tell you like right off the bat, when we sold out, we decided to ship our next order boxes by boat. And the reason being is that when you ship it by boat, it's a lot cheaper than shipping it air-fried. But it also takes four times as long. So we ordered, you know, like I think it was like 60 or 70,000 boxes and it was a disaster. The container got delayed. And so, you know, as a result, we basically just put everything on pause. We moved to pre-orders, but sales just declined, declined, declined, almost went to zero. So, you know, there have been many, many times where we've run out of chocolate or we weren't able to forecast the man properly. So what we've been trying to do is just order as much inventory as we possibly can. And it's just why we've been reinvesting every dollar back into buying as many boxes and chocolates so that we can hopefully be prepared. But it's been a perpetual problem. In fact, in our first year of business, we were out of stock for more months than we had stock. And we still put up like four million dollars. So yeah, pretty proud about that. Hey, real quick, that business you want to start? Let me show you. You can make your first dollar 10 times faster by using case studies. Imagine you could read the exact steps to how someone built a million dollar business and the mistakes they made so that you can avoid them when you launch. Well, at Starter Story, we have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can do this all backed by real data. For example, Luke joined Starter Story in Dove into our case study about a newsletter that makes 25 million dollars a year. Just one month later, he launched his own newsletter that did $5,800 in revenue in the first 30 days. It's simple. He studied what works, implemented it, and avoided the mistakes of people that were just a few steps ahead of him. If you're serious about building something, check out Starter Story.com. We're running a special deal this week and you can click the link below in the description to get it. Much love and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the video. Peace. Let's talk about the power of a brand. There's a lot of people on YouTube that talk about dropshipping and how it's easy to get started. What's the difference between what you're doing and dropshipping? Everybody that you see on YouTube, like perpetuates like this dropshipping story. Like, oh, like you want to get rich overnight, like make money dropshipping. The only people making money through this dropshipping thing are the people that are selling the courses like secret for you. It's the YouTuber that's behind the camera that's like, get into dropshipping, get into dropshipping. Like, nah, they're the only ones profiting on that. Dropshipping sucks. You're selling a trendy product in an incredibly saturated market and you have no competitive advantage. Why is the consumer going to buy it from you versus buying it from Amazon? Why are they going to buy it from you versus, you know, buying it from the other 150 sellers that are dropshipping the same exact? The answer is that they're not. The power of the brand is dropping a product on your website and in 30 seconds, it's sold out. The power of the brand is creating a community and like an identity, you know, between you and your consumers, where they live and breathe and die for your shit. When you unlock something like that, you've made it because it doesn't matter what you sell. It doesn't matter what you drop. You got a cult like following and on a business sense, what that means is that you have evergreen customers forever. So like when you have new product drops, when you introduce new SKUs, like, you know that people are coming back and. Whether you're off to the big match, get in. Enjoying a trip to the coast to catch up with friends. Or exploring some incredible history with your family. With up to a third off most rail travel, a rail card can help you save on train journeys all around Great Britain. Find the one for you at railcard.co.uk. Teas and seas apply. You're going to be able to make money off of this customer cohort time and time again. On top of that, you know the brand, you're building equity. The people that make money, I'm talking real money, they don't make it off the cash. They don't make it off the yearly sales. They're making it off the exit with dropshipping. There is no brand equity, which puts you in this really difficult spot to ever build any sort of thing. That's concrete or build anything that's of real value because every two months you're closing down shop, opening a new shop, closing down shop, opening a new shop. So at the end of the day, people that are thinking long term and people that are focused on building brands are always going to win. Hi man, you're a young guy, only 21 years old with massive success, made millions. Take me through your minds at the time where you really did decide, okay, I'm going to start something. What was really kind of like the impetus was Christmas break when I was a freshman in college. At the time, and so there was like this two month break between first semester and second semester. And so during that break, I'm back at home. I'm sitting around my house and I was like, this is the perfect time and opportunity to build something. And so I did just that. And it took a year to go from idea to bring it into reality. It was super slow. Like I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Like there were weeks where I wasn't even working on the business because I was waiting on this person or I was waiting on this to get done or I was waiting on this thing for this thing. You know, it didn't just like kind of like materialize overnight. It was a long, long, long process. But once we had product in hand and we had an incredible product that you know, I poured my blood, sweat and tears into over that year, we hit the ground running. And in our first three weeks, we sold out of all of our inventory. And in our first month, we had to move to pre-order and we did over $280,000 in revenue at like 50% net margins because we were just going viral left and right. It was absolutely bonkers. And so, you know, from that point on, I knew that I had something and I knew that I had to like see it through in order to take it to the next level. Bye. Let's talk startup costs. How much did it cost to start Tabs? And how much does it cost to start an e-commerce business? So I started Tabs with $30,000 total. I pretty much drained my entire bank account, which came from like all my previous ventures from when I was younger to go all in on this business. So like, I don't know if that would be like the average business. I think that like, honestly, you could probably start anything like any sort of e-com brand, at least with an MVP with like 10 grand. I think like the biggest cost, the R&D side of things, right? Like the research and development of the product itself, A. And then B, like in terms of like developing that sample, like that first initial sample. Once you have that down, it's then about finding a manufacturer that's willing to work with you. Because here's the deal. A lot of manufacturers don't give you the time of day because you're too small. So if you could find a manufacturer like a small guy that's like willing to kind of take you under their wing and like bet on you, you can for sure make something happen for sub 10 grand. Yeah. How do you find a small manufacturer that will take a bet on you? Yeah. Google, man. Everything is at our fingertips. I literally typed in on Google, chocolate contract manufacturer. I went through all the pages on Google, like the first 20 or 25 pages and made a spreadsheet, you know, collecting their information, their name, their website link. I was just ringing them up. I would just literally like make phone calls and dial them up, send out emails and go from there. Let's talk about marketing. I know you've done hundreds of millions of views on TikTok. Yeah. And you make most of your business through short form social media. Yeah. Can you tell me more about how that works? Yeah. Basically, I have like hundreds of people that are on my payroll and they're pushing out content every single day. They're putting up videos on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube. Any short form platform you can imagine, I'm on it. And so through that, I've created my own content machine where every day hundreds of videos are going out and reaching millions of people, which in turn drives tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales a day. And you know, on a macro level is responsible for the $11 million plus we're going to do this year. And so you actually have a bunch of people that just make content for you? Yeah, dude. I have like over like 60 people that make content and I have thousands of people that like post the content across a web of accounts. What kind of videos are they? Yeah. So I try to make them seem as native as possible. Consumers are smart. If they think it's an app, they're not going to watch it. So I make the videos like super on par with whatever's trending in the moment, whatever sound is popping, whatever like movement is happening, like whatever it is, like my creators are making content around that. And then of course we have some like validated concepts that like push really hard. But yeah, that's pretty much it. So you don't do a lot of like paid ads? Not really. It's like mostly organic. It's mostly like all the content creators and the reposters. I do double in paid where like I take my most viral creatives and pay these mean pages that have tens of millions of followers to post my content. And then I also run a little bit of Google ads. I do email and text message marketing, which is more like kind of bottom of the funnel. But yeah, I mean, for the most part, it's a pretty crazy organic system that I've pioneered. Hi, to close this interview out, some people will be watching this. I want to start their own brand. They want to start their own e-commerce brand potentially. What's the one thing they can do today to get started? The best advice that I can give anybody that's like watching this today is that like, I'm not smarter than you. I don't have a higher IQ. There's not like something like special like sauce that I'm gatekeeping. Literally just go out there and make some shit happen and never look back. And in three or five or 10 years from now, you're not going to recognize like how much progress you've made because it doesn't just all happen at once. It's like every day you're compounding, compounding, compounding. And then one day you wake up and you're worth millions of dollars and that's kind of how it is. Oh yeah. Thank you, sir. True.
