The Marketing Playbook Behind the $200M Company, Dude Wipes

0:00Let's talk about the marketing playbook behind DudeWipes. You know how much revenue Dude Wipes does? I don't even know what Dude Wipes is. Okay. It's wet wipes for your butt. So, wet wipes? Yes. But it's called Dude Wipes because it's rebranded differently. What's the difference? You can just use the kid wet wipes that are flushable. It's branded differently. Okay. It's just like when I put sleep tape on my mouth. It's just tape. It's just sleep tape. I get it. You know what I mean? Okay. So, Joe Pompliano, so he says, Dude Wipes has built an incredible business. $200 million in annual revenue, available in 20 ,000 stores nationwide.

0:34They sell flushable baby wipes for men and have built the business primarily through sports marketing. Here's the wild story. By the way, they're on Shark Tank and they have a billion dollar plan to replace toilet paper. By the way, have you used baby wipes? Yeah. Yeah? It's great. Yeah. I have bidets in my house. Oh. Wow. Probably too much information. That's a good clip. All right. Dude Wipes was founded in 2011 by four childhood friends from their apartment in Chicago. They say 95 % of their diets consisted of burritos and beer. So they definitely needed Dude Wipes. Fred started using baby wipes instead of toilet paper.

1:13And so an entirely new category was born. Dude Wipes then appeared on Shark Tank. They're only doing$1 million in sales at the time, but they convinced Mark Cuban to invest by telling him that his ass hates him for using dry toilet paper. Cuban cut a$300K check for 25 % of the company. Dude Wipes exploded after Shark Tank 2015,$1 million in revenue 2020,$40 million in revenue But given the toilet paper industry is$11 billion annually The founders thought it could be even bigger So what they started to do, just getting to the point here Is that they started targeting middle-aged men So they started sponsoring UFC So they couldn't afford to sponsor a team or a league So they got creative paying Tyron Woodley $10 ,000 to put Dude Wipes on his butt During UFC 174 So you can see here, it's on his butt over here It's Dude Wipes which is cool, right?

1:56Perfect placement. Good ad placement. Then Dude Wipes started doubling down on guerrilla marking. They sent people with huge signs to the 2016 World Series of baseball receiving millions of free impressions on TV. They also struck a deal with Jets running back Isaiah Crowell after he pretended to wipe his butt with a football. Look at this over here. Dude Wipes. You have Dude Wipes back here. You can't see it quite clearly. I see it though. In blue. I think it's smart. They target national moments and they aim for social media virality. They did one with WrestleMania sponsorship. They also did a deal with Joey Chestnut, the hot dog eating champion, for the Netflix hot dog eating contest.

2:39You can see it has a patch over here. Let's talk about guerrilla marketing. This is smart. That's how they got to$200 million in annual revenue. I like this, but all they're pretty much selling is just baby wipes. Their revenue is primarily driven from their marketing prowess. It's just like Prime. There's not really any difference in the energy drink, although I think they were getting sued too for some of the issues with the drinks. I don't know much. I don't take much energy drinks. But all they're really doing is just putting a spin on marketing. I think they're going to where the attention is not as expensive, but they know a lot of eyeballs are there.

3:11And Dude Wipes, the large TAM is basically 50 % of the world, right? Or the US at least, right? It's not 50 % of the world. It's a little bit less because you've got to exclude babies. Yes, yes, yes. But you know what I mean. You know what I mean. All right. Dude Wipes' recent viral sponsorships include Pat McAfee's TST soccer team. You can see Pat McAfee, the punter turned podcaster. He's got Dude Wipes on his ass. I would start sponsoring rugby teams too. Yeah, and hopefully they can all put it on their ass. I don't know. They did Chicago Bears hard knocks. I didn't know they did that. That's cool.

3:45Super Bowl billboard. They're going higher now, but they started smaller first because they knew they couldn't afford that much. I think that's really smart. They were frugal about it. And what they're going to find out is how they go bigger and bigger. The ROI is going to suck and suck more by more. What they need to do is do more of these 10 grand ones, but do them in quantity. Dude, this is funny. One of the responses, these will clog your pipes up so hard you'll need to pay hundreds to a plumber. Well, in theory, they won't clog up anything. They're just wiping the feces from your behind. Here's the other comment.

4:17This guy says, per my wife as well as my plumber, not the same person, there's no such thing as a flushable wipe. Anyway, it is what it is. So good marketing, guys. Goes a long way because this is primarily driven. I mean, look, Prime was driven by marketing. I would say Fashion Nova driven by marketing, right? Fashion Nova is driven by marketing. And then part of you, I think was Fashion Nova. I don't know. That was one of those big celebrities that kicked it off, but they have so many influencers. Yeah. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners.

4:48Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. and I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas, the leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds, great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well.

5:16And so if you wanna grow your agency faster and you wanna peer group to do so, just go to marketing school.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketing school.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. You see what Nike is doing with their documentary with French athletes? No, what's that one? They're creating documentaries of these athletes and it takes seven years for them to create all the video clips and information. finish one uh i do not know i did not watch it with mbappe you know that soccer player yeah i don't know if they did it with him all right i don't think they did it with him because that's seven years yeah but he became a superstar the last seven years totally agree yeah but they started this a very long time right so they're just doing it in chronological order over seven years but that's like the type of marketing and content people want to see yeah because it's just It's unique.

6:14It's people spending time to give us content and information that we haven't seen before. And how does creative stand out? It's unique. Yes. And it's harder and harder to find unique things because the bar is getting higher and higher for creative because everyone now knows they need to have good creative. And so it goes back to quality content again. In fact, this entire podcast should just be about quality content because we've talked about it so many times. And on top of this, when you think about creative content and just making it really amazing, it's hard for AA to do that. try to get Chad GPT to eventually create something about an athlete and their seven-year journey.

6:48You can. It's not going to be the same as actually being there and filming it. Yeah. Well, it goes back to, one, it's the humanization of things. And two, it's storytelling. Storytelling. For seven years, you're going to get some good stuff. I got one here on why you need to join a community to grow faster. So we've talked about how community is a big part of the the new wave of SEO. We've talked about how communities like School or Circle are growing really fast. Reddit's growing really fast. HubSpot's community, Shopify's community, their traffic's going up into the right. So you get the benefit of that too.

7:22But even us going to speak at HubSpot's user conference, that in itself is a community because 20 ,000 people are showing up there next week. We're both in YPO, right? That in itself is a community of entrepreneurs, right? The agency owners association that we have, that's a community. But ultimately, what do you get from it? It's you get people that are like-minded, you get people that are experiencing the same problems that you're facing. And you get people that have kind of been there, done that. Or, you know, someone shares an experience share about how like they raise their kids a certain way.

7:48That might give you an idea of what you might do in your business. Right. And so the world goes around with these things. And, you know, I like to always say that as you continue to climb the mountain, the air gets thinner and it's hard to find people around you that will just kind of pull you up. Right. and so that's why I think if you want to grow faster, join a community it took me a long time to convince Neil to join YPO I think he's just starting to see the benefit of a community because before I dropped out no, no, no, but you're joining another one yes, that's true, I dropped out of the chapter you're joining another chapter but that still means you see the benefit of a community I'm going to try it for a year and then go from there I'll try it for another year because I only went to really I went to a few meetings before joining after I joined I think I only went to one meeting but okay you and I hanging out that's kind of like a mini community you know what I mean so it goes a long way we all need connection at the end of the day it's not just you can work at home in your boxers your business is going to be limited if you're not surrounding yourself with amazing people you and I going to dinner today, dinner meeting that's community but you bailed oh no, hey I had a client that's like he's at the all-in summit, he's like I would really like to meet I was like okay, yeah, we're going to meet at that point.

8:58Yeah, we're going to meet. So you enjoy dinner. Let me know how it goes. Are you meeting your client at the same restaurant? No, I'm going to an Asian restaurant. Closer to them. No, closer to me. Oh, okay. What's an Asian restaurant? Ding Tai Fung. Oh, that's a good restaurant. Yeah. Yours is healthier though. Yeah. I had Ding Tai Fung yesterday too. So the client wanted Ding Tai Fung? No. Well, I wanted to give him a unique experience. Yeah. But then my parents wanted it yesterday too. You know you can make a reservation, right? I did make a reservation. Don't tell the Asian to make a reservation at the Asian restaurant.

9:57And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. Okay, we got one more here to kind of cap things off. You have a friend, Andrew Chen. Okay. Andrew Chen, who's at Andreessen Horowitz, he tweeted something. He says, The end of the one billion active user ad-supported consumer startups, like a Facebook or Instagram, and why highly monetizing useful vertical apps are the next thing.

10:41He says, It's been a long time since we last built a broadly horizontal consumer app like YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Snapchat. In fact, I'm convinced it might not be possible anymore. We haven't seen that in the last couple of years. But we do see DraftKings or people monetizing within their apps, like an Uber or whatever. Maybe Uber's not a good example, that's a consumer app. But he's saying, look, the next generation might be vertical apps, appealing to a vertical segment of the market. Like Monopoly Go, DraftKings, Canva, etc. These are smaller audience products with a higher whale monetization.

11:13So he's just basically saying, look, it's hard to build a massive product now, but when you have like web three games or whatever you can you can monetize more in there and the LTV of a customer might be higher in that situation go ahead if you've ever built a website you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast that's where framer comes in and it totally changes the game framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes i recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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13:27Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. I pay for Monopoly. Monopoly go? I don't know if it's monopoly go but i paid for monopoly in the past at least the app i have to win and i had to own all the real estate oh you know i have monopoly at my place it's the socialist edition okay so it says monopoly and then it says socialist edition it says everybody loses so i haven't played it yet we should play it i seriously i it's been sitting there the whole time i love that game i have so much monopoly strategy but you don't have the socialist edition where everyone loses imagine if by this oh dude you should play the socialist edition with your kids because then teach them.

14:06Everyone loses. You're going to get tax, you're going to die. Everything's going to get taken away from you. These are the two certainties of life. To conclude, tomorrow's apps might look more vertical, higher spending, smaller audiences, focus on interactions. Some of these games, people are spending millions of dollars, these whales. Some may target productivity utility use cases, particularly as AI creates novel interactions, at least until the next platform emerges. I certainly hope a new broad-based social consumer app can emerge. And I know a few folks working on them still, but I want to advocate for a more focused approach.

14:40So I think in our current form factors, like the phone, the iPad, or whatever, I think we're basically capped out. But I think when we start to move towards AR, VR, we'll start to see more platforms emerge. But I think what Andrew's saying is for the next couple of years, we're going to have people that are having, well, it's going to be more focused apps. And that will be a good thing. Yep. No, I totally agree with you. I do think it is harder and harder to create the next TikTok or anything like that. Because if you have a feature that works, everyone just copies. And it's just hard to penetrate the market unless you're going to spend an arm and a leg.

15:13I mean, let's use Duolingo as an example, right? Duolingo has a lot of users. They teach people how to learn different languages. So what if you can automatically create different communities in there or pair you with the right people? That's more value that's coming within the app. And people that are using it all the time, maybe there are whale features that can be developed where it's like, oh, if you use it all the time, then you will get access to talking with other power users. I'm just making things up right now. So yeah, cool. That's your buddy, Andrew Chen. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe.

15:44Go to marketingschool.io slash agency. You can no longer just sign up for it. It's application only now. And if it does look like it's a good fit, we'll have someone from our team reach out and see if it's a good fit for the group. So that is it for today. And we will see you tomorrow. Thank you.