How We Hit $1M In Monthly Revenue
This is a follow up story for Jigsaw Health. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Patrick Sullivan Jr. I’m the Chief Entertainment Officer (CEO) and co-founder of Jigsaw Health, hydration & nutritional supplement company that my dad and I started together in 2005, and then “rebooted” in 2015.
Jigsaw Health is bridging the gap between health and entertainment by providing the highest quality dietary supplements that money can buy, while providing “edutainment” — educating consumers on how they can improve their health, in a fun and entertaining way, most notably through the Jigsaw Health #FunnyFriday video series.
In August 2020, to support our goal to become the #1 health & nutrition provider for Pickleball players around the world, we launched our latest product, Jigsaw Pickleball Cocktail® -- a sugar-free, orange-flavored electrolyte mix with as much Potassium as two bananas. As we like to say, “Finally… a cocktail you should drink at 7 am.”
And we’re now averaging $1MM a month in revenue, up from the $750K/month average during 2019.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
Well, let’s talk a bit more about Pickleball. Yes, it’s a real sport. And there are actually Pickleball professionals.
Once you know who you are talking to, all of the other pieces of the puzzle just start falling into place. So go find a TRIBE and FOCUS!
Pickleball is kind of like “tiny tennis”… The court is about 1/4th the size of a tennis court, and the ball is like a whiffle ball with holes, and the paddles are like over-sized ping-pong paddles. It’s incredibly fun & addicting, especially for ex-tennis and ex-racquetballs.
My wife (and business partner) -- Ashley & I -- stumbled into Pickleball in the Summer of 2018. And we’ve been hooked ever since. Pickleball has been an unbelievably FUN "life-enhancer" for us.
Along the way, we began to learn firsthand that Pickleball can be a very physically demanding sport -- especially those long tournament days -- and sugary sports drinks are NOT the answer.
Luckily, our company -- Jigsaw Health -- makes sugar-free electrolyte products that Pickleballers love. (Hint: The secret is the minerals!)
Since November of 2018, our company has sponsored 7 of the top Pickleball Pros in the world, we’ve become the exclusive hydration & nutrition sponsor of the two Pickleball professional tours (PPA & APP), and even became the title sponsor of the Jigsaw Health Tournament of Champions.
We launched Jigsaw Pickleball Cocktail® using this musical parody of LMFAO: “I PICKLE & I LOVE IT”.
And during the live broadcast of Pickleball tournaments, we’ve been running dozens of “We Love Pickleball, Too” commercials that feature our sponsored pros at the Jigsaw Health office. (Sort of like the EPSN “This is Sports Center.” commercials.)
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Since beginning to focus on the Pickleball community in November of 2019, I feel like we FINALLY found a “tribe” that we can be a part of and provide products to, like what Seth Godin talks about in his book, “Tribes.”
For all intents and purposes, before this, Jigsaw Health was a “direct response marketing” company constantly spending advertising dollars on “take it or leave it” offers targeted at random people who saw our ads, and if they said no, they were most likely never going to see us again.
But we all know that most buying decisions take time and repetitive ads/offers. So it’s incredibly challenging to get a positive return on ad spends from “direct response” advertising. And it’s almost exclusively based upon how good your offer is, rather than how trustworthy your company is.
Alternatively, with Pickleball having a large and growing community of diehard fans, we’ve now been able to run DOZENS of different “brand building” ads to the same audience over a long time period and build a bond so that when a Pickleballer starts getting muscle cramps, Jigsaw Health is the name they think of first.
We’re finally able to do the kind of advertising/bonding that I’ve always wanted to do -- in the words of the Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams: “Win the heart and the mind will follow.”
The second major accomplishment in the past year was deciding to switch from BigCommerce to Shopify Plus. There are a lot of things to like about BigCommerce, and we were on that platform for 5 years. But Shopify has grown so much and therefore, gets all the cool new toys/apps first, so I was feeling FOMO.
In particular, we really wanted/needed to add a “post-purchase upsell” feature to help improve the Average Order Value (AOV) of some Facebook ads we had been running. It was not on the BigCommerce feature pipeline, but Shopify + CartHook allowed us to do that.
So we decided to take the plunge in April of 2020, and we completed the platform, redesign, and data migration (using Cart2Cart) 7 weeks later. It was kind of stressful to do this during the midst of COVID-19 uncertainty, but I feel like it helped me and Team Jigsaw stay focused. Our mantra was, “While the rest of the world panics, we’re going to build.”
Since moving to Shopify Plus, the biggest surprise is that our new design product pages -- designed to look and feel like “Apple-Esque” landing pages -- are converting exceptionally better than our old “Amazon-like” pages.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We recently introduced a hand sanitizer product -- Jigsaw Health Clean Hands™ --- using yet another fun musical parody:
And we are working on several new healthy products that we believe will be excellent for Pickleball Addicts, including new flavors of Jigsaw Electrolyte Supreme™ and Jigsaw Pickleball Cocktail®, as well as nutritious snack bars in 2021.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
I’ll admit, I’m not a particularly fast reader. But I have been slowly working through The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham.
The first big takeaway is that when you don’t THINK through things, you often end up paying a “stupid task” -- so give yourself time to sit and THINK. As CEO, this is important for me to hear since I have a penchant for action.
The second lesson is that as we grow, my role as CEO needs to change from the entrepreneurial “jack of all trades” where I’m personally doing lots of design, coding, writing, etc. -- almost all of which is inevitably B minus work -- to recruiting and empowering people who are A+ at those jobs.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Finding a “tribe” that we ourselves enjoy being a part of has been a game-changer for Jigsaw Health. We love the game of Pickleball, and the community of Pickleballers can tell that it’s 100% authentic.
Do you have a tribe? You know if the answer is Yes or No. I sat through countless conferences where the speaker asked a question like that, and until Pickleball, the answer ringing in my head was “NO!”
Now, I’m not sure if it’s best to create products and a team-first and then find a tribe. Or if it should be the other way around. For Jigsaw Health, we “exploded” into Pickleball because we spent the past 15 years developing products and the team.
But if you don’t yet have a tribe, you know that, and it’s something that will stifle your growth. And it makes the decision making processes difficult. “Should we sponsor my sister-in-law’s charity golf tournament? Or should we advertise in Naturopath Doctor monthly?” It’s “Or, or, or” decisions to infinity.
Once you know who you are talking to, all of the other pieces of the puzzle just start falling into place. So go find a TRIBE and FOCUS!
Where can we go to learn more?
- What is Pickleball?
- Watch all the fun/funny Jigsaw Pickleball commercials.
- Try a sample of 3 great Jigsaw products for yourself -- the Jigsaw Pickleball Stack™ -- only $15 + FREE shipping
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
