226. How a 16-Year-Old Viral Meme Seller Built an 8-Figure Packaging Company

0:00When Jason was eight years old, he moved to the United States with his single mother. They lived in a crammed one-bedroom apartment while she worked long restaurant shifts just to keep the lights on. For years, Jason believed there was only one way out. Get good grades, become a doctor, don't mess this up. But by the time he was 16, he accidentally discovered online marketing and everything changed. When his friends were focused on school, Jason was quietly making tens of thousands of dollars a month running affiliate offers and selling internet products. He chased trends, he built viral meme businesses, and then he did something most marketers never do.

0:33He walked away from excitement and built something boring. Today, Jason runs a vertically integrated packaging company that serves brands, creators, and marketing teams who care about quality, speed, and reliability. No hype, no trends, just infrastructure that lasts. I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Up The Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. I am so excited to welcome Jason on the podcast to talk about how a marketer built a boring business that actually lasts and what you can steal from his playbook. So Jason, thank you so, so much for being here today.

1:01Ryan, it is an honor. Absolute honor. It's going to be so good. And let's kind of tell the audience, foundation level, like who is Jason Wong and like what is Packing Duck? It was a high level here. Absolutely. So my name is Jason Wong. I came to the United States when I was eight years old with my mom. And I just kind of got thrown into the deep end of this country. I had to learn the language. I had to learn the culture. I had to learn the ways of life here. And so for my early years, I was working alongside my mom. And when I was 16, my friend got me into running blogs, running affiliate offers, and really showed me a new world of making money that I couldn't even imagine.

1:41And so for many, many years, I was starting off in marketing. Then I got into e-commerce, selling my own products. I love design. I love production. And it's really what led me to do what I'm doing right now. But like all that experience in building brands, building teams led me to today I'm running Packing Duck, a custom packaging manufacturer. We're based in Shenzhen. We have four facilities across paper, plastic, glass and metal. So anything you can imagine in the packaging space from the box that you get from ordering stuff online to a shampoo bottle, we make that and everything in between.

2:13I'm so excited. We're going to talk about how you like transition to that and like the lessons listeners can learn about scaling this brand. But Packing Duck in particular, you've done like a whole lot of like different things here. Revenue wise, give us a range of like what you guys are doing today. Then we're gonna talk a little bit more about viral memes and how you guys got started with marketing. Yeah, we started about two years ago. So yesterday was actually a two year anniversary of building a company. And today we're at Mid Egg Figures. We have a team of 40 around the world. And it's really just due to a sheer focus on marketing.

2:43You know, I think a lot of factories don't really think about how to market themselves. But having a marketing background going into B2B was honestly a huge advantage. I want to talk about the marketing and like going into B2B. So wind us back the clock of like how you guys started and talk to me specifically about like the viral meme products that you're doing. Because that to me, when I'm reading your background, like that's the foundation of like what you're doing today. I'm sure your mind was spinning then about what you can do. So give us a little glimpse of what you're doing, like the viral meme products.

3:10So when I was 16, I was running these blogs and the blogs was on a platform called Tumblr. And at the time, I was just posting internet memes and culture and trends and whatever make people funny. And it was the greatest type of content to post because it was naturally viral, right? Like things that make people laugh, things are shareable, make people want to share more. And so I launched a product called Holy Mean Bible back in 2016, December 3, 2016. And it was basically a accumulation of the year's most popular memes and trends, but put into a pastime activity book. So think like Hingman, Warcross, Whirl, or any of these activities I can think of, we put into one single book and it went viral.

3:51It just blew up. But that was really my first glimpse into e-commerce at scale because at that time, when I launched that product, I just had a design of it and I posted online. I want to see if people are interested in it. And within six, seven days, we sold a quarter million dollars. It was just really neat. You know, having a freelancer design a product, I post it on Shopify. I posted on my blogs because I already knew how to market it. And I sold a quarter million dollars with no inventory. And so I basically got through into the ocean of figuring out supply chain, logistics, printing, production.

4:22It was super fun. Yeah, I want to ask because you do a quarter of a million dollars at like 16 years old. And kind of going back to your story, I mean, you're living with like your single mother. What was that feeling like seeing a number that big like at 16 years old? Fathom it. Like I didn't even know my account can go into that many zeros. it was interesting but i think like i didn't think about immediately oh what can i buy with all these products my mind went straight into okay i by the grace of god got this great opportunity to jumpstart with i basically didn't have to take out a loan from the bank i basically just got a huge amount of money in seven days to do whatever i could to grow the business and so i'm straight into you know developing more products building a team expanding it and you know building it into a legitimized business.

5:08That's so cool. I want to now fast forward to hacking duck because we're going to give a lot of actual tips for like marketing and like growing a brand and everything. So how did this opportunity come across? I go on your guys' website. It's an incredible website. Like I'm really impressed by it. So how did like you think of like this opportunity? You guys just had your two year birthday yesterday. Happy birthday to you, of course. But like, how did this opportunity come up? So after the meme Bible, I started a few more brands. I had a home decor brand. I had a clothing brand. And then back in 2018, I started a beauty company called Doe Lashes, which is a company that I started with just$500.

5:41The idea was to show people that you can build a new business with just$500. That's not drop shipping. I did it with Shopify. I posted on Twitter and that's how I grew a little bit of following there was I documented every step of building that company. And after running that company plus a couple more consumer brands. What I realized is that supply chain overseas was fundamentally broken for a lot of people who don't speak Chinese and can't go to China. And so I went and started a sourcing company called Saucy, which is, Ryan, if you want to launch hoodies, if you want to launch your own wallet brand or whatever, you can come to me and I'll find the best suppliers at the best rates and I'll manage a whole relationship for you so you don't get scammed overseas.

6:22So I built a company in parallel while I was running a consumer brand. So I had a B2B supply chain company. While running that, I realized that it's great as a concept, but sourcing a thousand different products is actually not sustainable because realistically, how can you talk to a thousand different suppliers as a company? So we're like, what is the one thing that every single consumer brand in the world needs and they're not really thinking of? And I got this light bulb idea on a train to Guangzhou that every single product that we've touched at that company needs to be wrapped in packaging.

6:53And packaging is one of those things that people don't really think about, right? It's the first impression that consumers make with you as a product, but no one really thinks about that. They always think about what's inside, right? Like what's the formula? What's the water content inside a can of water? But no one thinks about the can. And to death, they really good job with their packaging. And like think about Voss water, think about Fiji water. There's memories of you having that first impression. So I was like, okay, let's pivot our supply chain company and start a new division just for packaging.

7:23And overnight it blew up. We took all the contacts I had running my own consumer brands. Because, you know, when you're running a brand, you know other guys that run brands, right? You run an agency, you know, 10 other agency owners. First 50 clients are friends of mine. You know, like people that I knew off the rip that were placing orders. Like, yeah, of course, I'll work with you. And, you know, I think everything happens for a reason. I just had to take it one step at a time. Are you ready to launch, grow and scale a business? Inside the Upflip Academy, you'll get a complete roadmap to shortcut your success with 25 plus step-by-step programs taught by active business owners, not gurus, who share their step-by-step blueprints, plus ongoing live workshops, skills training, a business idea database, and community to share resources and celebrate your wins.

8:10Click the link in the description below to join the Elphab Academy today and start surrounding yourself with the people and tools that can change everything for your business. I want to talk about your marketing background when it comes to all of this? Because how I say to like a lot of people, if I'm talking to like college students, I've given the unsolicited advice to like college students. A lot of times it's like, there's really two ways you can start a company is like you can be like really technically sound or you can be like a kick-ass marketer essentially. And I have a feeling you fall into like that kick-ass marketer like realm.

8:36How did like a marketing background help launch a business? And for someone that's starting a company, how should they think about learning marketing like from the get-go? Because it really is like the lifeblood of a company is to get revenue and marketing is a piece of that. 100%. So the way that you have to design your company is what is the one thing that your company can do that you feel like you're doing best and better than anyone else? And what are the pain points on the market right now that you can solve as an offer to your consumers, right? So when we looked at manufacturing, manufacturing is a very dated industry.

9:06Everyone in my industry are 20 years, 30 years older than me who have been doing this before I was born. But their way of doing things is very antiquated, right? Like they just go to trade shows, they go to conventions, they do cold emails, and that's how they get clients. And all of those cost a lot of money for very little return. So I took a step back and I was like, okay, what is the thing that's broken, right? Processes are broken. People really hate the communication issues that they have with overseas supply chain. There's a lack of transparency and pricing is not the best. Everyone's trying to charge more than they should in order to get the most out of the consumers.

9:40But for us, we're like, okay, we can actually still make good margin if we're able to really integrate every step of our process, cut out the middleman, and take the savings that we get and pass it on to the consumer. So it's not like we make any less money, but the consumer can pay less money because there's no extra fees in between. And so when we thought about marketing this product or this company, the first thing was it needs to look nice, right? Packaging and manufacturing is not sexy. When you're thinking about a factory, you're thinking about a big warehouse, a bunch of like tables and like just people working their ass off in there.

10:15But what if we can make the entire process pretty sexy? So we went straight into content. If you look through our Instagram right now, it's very aesthetically pleasing. Like we focus on creating really cool images to showcase what we've done. We make short form videos every single day, breaking down the process of how packaging is made. One of my best video was breaking down how the Rolex packaging gets done, right? You go to Rolex, you buy a watch, it comes in a box, comes in a bag. I broke down how it's made, what kind of materials they use, how much does it cost to make it? So consumers next time when they go shop at Rolex, they're like, oh, I know this bag costs X, Y, Z.

10:51And I think it ignited this curiosity towards our industry overall that people now care a little bit more about packaging, or at least that's what I hope I've done. And that in turn brought more business to us because we're educating people on why it's important. There's a lot there that we could go down, like a lot of different avenues this podcast could go down. I want to talk about the content piece because you guys are crushing on your Instagram. Like everyone, I would encourage you to check out the instrument. Like it does look really, really good. There's a big saying now that like content is king.

11:17Is that true in like this manufacturing industry where you're making an unsexy industry, like sexy again, that's coming through like the content? 100%, I think, you know, eyeballs now is a very, very valuable currency. If you're able to get a lot of eyeballs on your content without spending a lot of money, you're already ahead of your competitors. So it's just thinking about how do I get more eyeballs at lower costs? And we've never spent a single dollar on ads in our company history. And I plan to not do that for the rest of the industry. I have this goal that I want to exit and it's a very big exit go without spending a single dollar in paid ads.

11:47And we're two years in, we're hitting every single revenue milestones without ever spending money on ads. It's because we focus on a circle of really good content that drives the customers in and really high degree of customer support that keeps people there. And it comes back and over and over again. Our clients on average refer to other clients to us because of the work that we've done. So I don't need to run ads. I feel like that's like the goal is like never run ads. So if someone was starting a business from zero, then like what are the content pillars they should be thinking about to like actually stand out from the competition there?

12:20Or yeah, give us any advice that you have. So it's a little bit different depending on if you're selling to consumers or to businesses. So from consumers, I can speak on that too, because I've run my own consumer brands. For a consumer content strategy, there's a few avenues to go down. But first, you want to create a content archetype, which is what is the product or feeling that you're trying to create in the content that education is it like a big sister big brother vibe do you want to feel like you're giving them behind the scenes footage or do you want to be a little more polished there's different ways to go about it depending on the value of your products too right so when i was selling our beauty product the way that we looked at it is people want to buy makeup because they want to feel good you don't need to over explain the technical specs of your product you just need to talk about how does it make them feel and so we started making content around that same Northstar, which is how does this product make you feel?

13:12And we start creating a lot of video scenarios that can integrate this idea of, oh, this product is super lightweight, this thing is super comfortable. And we show them in so many different scenarios. Okay, that's archetype number one. Then we're like, let's do education. Because if people don't know about our backend process, they can't really appreciate the thought put into it, especially since we're selling things at a little bit higher price point than what the market does. So we start doing behind the scenes, factory videos, story times of like how we did this. We document our failures and whatnot.

13:41And that's one, educating people. First was, you know, entertaining. Second is educating. And then third is a founder's perspective, which is like, you know, let me show you how I built this company. You kind of humanize the brand a little bit by putting a face behind it. And so those are three pillars. And I think that's translatable to any other categories. But from the B2B perspective, you can't really do the same thing. From a B2B perspective, it's all about getting your brand out there and attaching it to something that people aspire to. And so when you look at our content, the way that we design our content, the way that we push all the content feels a lot more premium because we want to make sure that people know that when they're coming to us, they're getting the best product, but they're not necessarily the most expensive price, right?

14:25Have to elevate the quality and at a lower rate. The other thing that we do is we're thinking about how do we educate people more? I think the two parallels between B2B and B2C is that we have to teach people what we're doing, especially because you're a new player in this industry. We tell people exactly what our process is, how much things cost. People feel comfortable with the transparency. And so they are more likely to trust us in the end. So when I like go on your Instagram, like I get that like premium feel, like these images are awesome. So I'm going to give you that feedback here, like on the call here.

14:55If someone wanted to replicate this, I mean, how are you guys like designing this content? I'm like personally curious here too because i'm thinking about like my own company with like space for our visuals like you know how do we come across as like a premium feel and like when i land on your instagram it's like very premium so like kind of break down the process like are these ai generated you guys have like world-class designers or like if someone goes on your guys's instagram how can they be like i want that too they're hybrids and you know you don't have to clone this exactly and if you want to you could but there's so many different styles that you can follow what I look at for inspiration.

15:27And I'll tell you, like, this is not my original creative direction. I looked at fashion brands, fashion labels, and I looked at how they present their pieces and their Instagram. And I'm like, okay, I like to follow that. And sometimes I take inspiration from car brands. So I'll look at other industries and see how they've been able to elevate their product at a higher price point. So I'll look at how Porsche does it. I look at how Jaguar does it. And then for fashion labels, I was looking at Kith. I was looking at all these like streetwear brands. And I was like, okay, how do you make something so casual look elevated?

15:57For our designs, it's a hybrid of AI and our great designers. So I always tell our designers, I don't want to make anything that's fully AI because people will immediately know it is. I want you to put some human touch to it. And so there's a lot of things that they adjust after the AI image is created to still make it in line with our brand guy. That's the important part too. I feel like when AI came out like two years ago, everyone was like, oh, that's AI. That's like really sick. But now it's like, oh, that's AI. Like that like kind of degrades the brand. And I love what you said right there.

16:25There's often a quote that it's like good artists copy, like great artists steal. Like you guys, you're getting inspiration from like the market about like, hey, how can I also do this? One thing that we did that Space Star Visuals this year is I got an offer from like Rippling or something. I don't know. Like it was like a free like AirPods or like free like O-ring. And I was like, oh, that's genius. Threw in our own emails for sponsorships. And like, I would say 75 % of our revenue this year came from like that offer. So it's really goes back to what you're saying, like, kind of like the good artist copy, like great artists steal type of meeting.

16:54100%. Like there are so many things in the world right now that's been tested by bigger companies with more budget than you. You just need to bring into your own industry. I want to give the audience as much like value out of you as you can because like you're obviously a great marketer. I can understand that. I feel like listeners will understand that. So we talked a little about inspiration, but what's another thing to like your secret marketing sauce that has made you like so successful? Is it like the offers? Is it just like, you know, know, I'm a great marketer. Is it SEO? Like what kind of what is it that you pride yourself on so much when it comes?

17:23I know it's a huge question, but like I want to provide the most value I can out of you. No, I think the answer is actually simpler than you think. It's consistency. We have posted five videos a week, every single week since the day we started the company. We just been consistently doing that. And that's just videos. And then we're also posting tweets. We're posting LinkedIn posts five times a week, sometimes two times a day. We're just consistently doing it. After you do something consistently, people will tie your name and brand into a particular industry. And so they remember you and you're top of mind when they need something like that.

17:57I have clients who have seen my post from a year ago, and then now they need packaging. They're like, oh, I remember seeing a post from you a year ago. So that's number one, consistency that you keep top of mind. But also the algorithm rewards people that are consistent. They want someone who's posting multiple times a day. And it doesn't always have to be perfect. You just need to get your reps in, right? Like not every single video needs to be super polished. You just need to be present. It's really that simple. There's no other secret sauce. And it's something that anyone can do. I want to ask, is there like a balance there, though, of like, you know, quantity over quality, quality over quantity?

18:31Because I've heard this advice, and it's like, obviously great advice here. But sometimes it's like, oh, well, I'm posting 50 times a week. And like, maybe that's a quantity over quality play. Is there a balance for you when it comes to quantity and quality, then? 100%. We're not spamming people 50 times a week. I think my sweet spot is two, three times a day at most. Now we kind of slow down to like five times a week, just while we're readjusting our strategy, just because like algorithms change. And so like your strategy for content for the last 52 weeks might be different than the next 52 weeks.

19:00And so we're reassessing the first year we did it, we were posting two, three times a day. Now we're posting five times a week and figuring out like what direction people like. LinkedIn, for example, the first year we're cranking 50 million views on LinkedIn. Oh, wow. On just videos. But now videos don't do well on LinkedIn anymore. It's a little bit longer posts. Same thing for Twitter. Twitter just launched an article feature where you can read one from article, right? The most view article or most view tweet of last week has 100 million views. It's like how to change your life in one day. Have you seen it?

19:31By Dan Coe. yeah so it's like every platform changes the way that they reward content and you have to stay on top of it so like the advice i'll give you on like what works for us right now will probably antiquated by three months later but the core difference you just need to be consistent on the platform and kind of look at what's working and hop on it as soon as you can so it's kind of identifying the trends of like what's working like what's not because i know the exact post you're talking about i believe it was from dan co on this one so when you see that happening are you like, I'm going to go start posting long form articles on Twitter now just to get like views and impressions?

20:03Or like, how are you approaching that? We're for sure doing that. I mean, we're trying to do our best. From a B2B perspective, there's only so much long form you can write before it's like, ah, I don't want to read another long form about packaging. But we do do that still. When we see like a strategy working, we don't shift our entire strategy to that. We'll add in like maybe 30 % of our posts now will be longer form rather than 100 % of our posts will be longer form. And at the end of the day, like you still need a test. The more tests that you're running in terms of like your hooks, in terms of content, in terms of like if you want more visuals, more pictures, more videos, we're testing everything in the way that we're publishing content.

20:36So I also want to talk about like your guys' sales process. And if there's any like levers you guys like strategically pull like during the sales process here. So I go to like, you know, backinduck.com, like submit a request, contact us, like either of those doesn't really matter. But like, what's your sales process? And specifically, like, are there any, you know, levers you pull during the sales process to like really help convert to lead? I want to talk to the audience that like needs to think about their sales process and like getting people to actually buy. So when you submit an inquiry on our site right now, traditionally, it would just go into our CRM.

21:06And then we will send you an email, probably like 12 hours later, because our team works in Asia, and say, Hey, Ryan, thanks for submitting inquiry, or we're gonna put together a quote for you and get back to you later. But that 12 hours is honestly kind of a long wait. And I've recognized that. And so now integrate SendBlue, which is iMessage, you can have virtual iMessage numbers. And you know, you live in America, you understand the importance of having a blue message text you, then a green message text you, right? That's just where we're at culturally. So I'm gonna adapt to that. Now when you submit an inquiry, as soon as you do, and next like 2040 minutes, we have a stem blue automation that sends out and say, Hey, Ryan, we just got your request.

21:44Thank you so much for telling us about what you're looking for. Our team is reviewing this right now. But if you have any questions, let me know. It's like when you're waiting at a restaurant and someone hands you a water while you're waiting, instead of waiting 20 minutes. Now you have water, you got something to do. And I think that really puts us top of mind because customers are typically getting quotes from four or five other people at once, right? Evaluating vendors. We're probably the one of the few vendors that's proactively reaching out through text and giving that personal connection.