(Some NSFW language ahead, and pictures of candy)
Ok, so I made a clickbait title. But the thing is, it’s actually a true story. The business is a website called DicksByMail.com and I made it one day when I was a bit drunk, and a bit bitter. I don’t know how to code, I don’t know how to design. I do know how to think.
In the beginning, of my story at least, I was working 2 different jobs. All in, I’d worked about 40 days in a row, it was the end of February and the cold and dark Canadian winter was setting in. As a bartender in a pub I wouldn’t say that my job was exactly difficult, but it could get stressful. The regulars had become a bit of a family for me, and we would often shoot the shit. As the drinks and the night continued, the conversation turned towards women, as it often does. I’d recently stopped seeing a gal that I’d seen for a few months. Couple dates, definite attraction, but it dragged on for longer than it probably should have. As a few of us exchanged stories of heart ache, we came to the inevitable conclusion that these women could go fuck themselves. Looking back, that was pretty harsh, but in the moment it was funny and felt good to say.
The idea of telling people to go fuck themselves stuck in my head more than it should have. It was a moment that you feel like you’re remembering for no reason at all, but I’m glad it hung around. I’m not sure if everyones mind works this way, but if something is in my consciousness, then its kinda always there. Obviously I forget about certain things and situations, but ideas are always in arms reach. If 2 ideas are there at the same time, they can be combined and form something new. Sometimes its good, sometimes not but that’s just the way I’ve always thought. I’m not sure if I’m the least creative person out there, or the most because of this method of thinking, but again, its just the way I am.
That’s where SHIPYOURENEMIESGLITTER comes in. About a month or so prior to this part of the story, the internet was taken by storm by the ability to send envelopes full of glitter to friends, enemies and coworkers. The best part – It was anonymous. With the idea of telling someone to go fuck themselves, and the idea of anonymously shipping things to enemies, my first idea was born.
TELLENEMIESTOFUCKTHEMSELVES.COM
Not a great ring to it eh? The idea that I’d come up with was to send a dildo to people with the anonymous message ‘Go Fuck Yourself’. And with that, I started looking for wholesale dildos online. RIP my search history. I managed to find some pretty terrible dildos for as low as $6 each. There were cheaper ones, but I wanted ones that looked like actual penises. I’d decided that I would take the next Wednesday to create a site, as it would be my first day off in a while. But there was always the nagging feeling in my head that it was TOO graphic. I mean, sex toys are for adults and not all adults buy them, someone is going to flat out not have a sense of humor about this.
The idea eventually changed. I forget when it was sparked, but I remember what prompted it.
A bachelorette party.
You know when a gaggle of women wearing sashes and crowns made of dicks walks into the bar waving wands made of dicks, throwing dick shaped glitter everywhere? That reminded me that there is dick shaped EVERYTHING (insert comments on the patriarchy here). But that did remind me that there is dick shaped candy out there as well.
‘EAT A DICK’ became the PG13 version of my R rated idea. It was accessible, less vulgar, and at worst, it was still candy. So I decided that, since my search history was already ruined, I’d start looking for dick candy.
There was dick chocolates, dick suckers, hard dick candy and plenty of others. Eventually, I settled on Gummy Dicks for a few reasons.
1) The least graphic of all the candy. (the dick chocolate was super veiny)
2) It came in a bag, which reminded me of the saying ‘Eat A Bag Of Dicks’
The prices were fairly good too, as well as having a lot of sources I could buy from. It wasn’t cheap, but if I bought them by the dozen, I could get it to about $5 per bag.
This might make you think that I bought a dozen bags of candy and set to work right? Wrong.
I wasn’t about to buy bags of candy without having any sales first. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I knew that I could get it quick if there were any sales.
Wednesday came and I woke up early (for a bartender) and set to work. I cracked out my laptop and started to make a website using Shopify. I’d decided that a template site was good enough for what I wanted to do. It was also pretty cheap ($15/month) with minimal processing fees. I settled on a basic template and started writing. I don’t know about you, but I think I’m hilarious after a few drinks. The key is to limit the few so it doesn’t become a drunken rambling. Your results may vary. All in, I needed a few paragraphs to describe the product, and sell the idea to anyone that came to the site.
Now, if you’re plan in reading this is to take away a lesson, then let it be this: Nobody buys a bag of dicks. They buy the FEELING that they get in sending it to someone. The Feeling that you get when you think of sending a bag of dicks to an ex, or boss or best friend lets you justify the cost. I understood this. I also knew that the result of this particular product made it something that you could send to friends. Your friends are people that you’re nice to. Your best friends are people you treat like shit, but would still take a bullet for. I knew that the difference between this and Glitter was that you don’t REALLY want to make your friends clean up glitter, so you’d hesitate in sending that to them. A bag of dicks? Its just candy, so it really doesn’t harm them or put them out in any way. If anything, free candy.
Once I crafted what I thought was a funny enough site, I had to settle on a name. You’d be surprised at how many names are already taken, just sitting there, waiting for someone with deep pockets to come along and make an offer. After about 10 attempts on the domain name, I thought as literal as I could and typed in DicksByMail. It worked. It wasn’t my first choice, but it worked. A friend even did up a logo for me.
Now I had to set a price.
I made sure of 1 thing: that I would break even. Even in worst case scenarios. Looking at my prices:
Cost of product: $5
Cost of Shipping: $5 (canada sucks for shipping costs)
Cost of envelope and paper to send message: $.50
Cost of website and processing: $2
With the website costs, I basically only planned to sell a dozen or so of these joke products before shutting down, so I figured I’d aim to break even that month.
Total cost of the product was about $12.50, so to make any money I’d have to charge more than that. I played around with the costs vs shipping costs, but I settled on a total cost of $20. I tried with $18 product and $2 shipping, but my friends said it was too much for a bag of candy. So I changed the prices to $15 with $5 shipping. Perception is everything I suppose.
With the site launched it got precisely zero sales in the first few days. I mean, why would it, nobody was looking for it. But I told my friends about it, and the regulars at the bar, and before I knew it, I had 3 sales within a week, which is pretty much my goal of 12 per month. So I’m rolling pretty well at this point.
Considering I’m actually getting sales, I figure it's time to order product. Other than $8 for a domain, I actually haven’t spent any money at this point (thank you free trial at Shopify) So I placed an order with rush deliver, and in a few days had a dozen bags of dicks sitting in my living room. I also had a few more orders and would need to likely order more products pretty soon.
I spent less than an hour prepping the products. And figured since it was anonymous and I didn’t allow anyone to put a private message, I could prep them then just slap on a shipping label and mail them out.
Even though I had a few orders, I knew who the first bag of dicks was going to be sent to. It wasn’t one of the orders placed by my friends or coworkers, It was to my best friend. I slapped a shipping address on the bag and even a stamp. But I decided I wanted feedback much sooner, so I drove over to his place and put it in his mailbox myself.
That evening, I get a message from him about it. He’d taken some pictures, and posted them on Imgur, an image sharing site similar to reddit. After opening it, he repackaged it and took pictures of all the stages of opening it. Overnight, it hit the front page of imgur and traffic started rolling into my site. By midday, sales started to roll in even more. I now needed to order more dicks. By that evening I was up to 50 sales, which was $1000 in revenue.
What I thought was the end of a joke was apparently only the beginning. That 50 sales was basically all directly from Imgur. Once bloggers got a hold of it, images of bags of dicks spread around the internet. Within hours of the early morning, another 50 sales had rolled in. Then the number was over 100. Over 500. Over 1000. In one day. By the end of the day, over 1500 MORE bags of dicks were ordered. A literal ton of dicks.
But now the bigger blogs started to take hold. Buzzfeed, dozens of joke pages on facebook, 9gag and a hundred other sites that I never visit started to share it, not only share it but get in touch with me. The day after I sold $30k in sales, I’d already passed that number by noon. It was getting out of control. It was exciting, but it was stressful as well. I was looking at ordering over 5000 bags of dicks and the numbers were growing.
I couldn’t do all that myself, it would take weeks to fill those orders. It would be pallets of bags and I had nowhere to put them. I couldn’t even afford the tens of thousands of dollars it would cost to order them. The site I originally ordered from didn’t have enough to supply that much. As sales approached $100k inside a week of the first shipment going out, I was worried that this would blow up in my face and I would be a be the guy that had the chance, but failed in front of millions of people.
Solve one problem at a time.
Problem 1) Supply. Is it even possible to get this many bags of dicks? Time to find the supplier. I looked at the packaging of the dicks and found the actual supplier, not the secondary people I bought from. I placed a phone call and left a message saying I needed at least 5000 of a product they carry and was looking for pricing. Not surprisingly, they called me back in only a few minutes. The price dropped drastically with an order that size. From $5 down to $1.63. Now we’re cooking.
Problem 2) Money. Though I was getting these sales, I didn’t have the money for them yet. So I needed it now. Enter Bank of Dad. Have you ever had a conversation with your parents about needing $10,000 so you can buy candy from a sex toy supply company? Its surreal to say the least. But I was able to get the money to pay for the order.
Problem 3) Shipping. I was at the point of having 6 pallets of product that needed to be prepped and shipped. That’s a lot. If you didn’t know, there are dozens of places that do exactly that. They’re called ‘fulfillment agencies’. I talked to a few, found one that was a solid price and told them my predicament. They didn’t ask for money up front, but needed money before physically shipping the product out. This actually saved me more than a headache. Because I’m Canadian, I no longer needed to deal with the product making 2 trips across the border (to me, then shipped back to the states). I shipped directly from their US warehouse to the US fulfillment agency and they took care of the rest. This also made shipping A LOT cheaper. Canada Postal services are expensive. All this land and 1/10 the population of the US, makes it costly to ship anything anywhere. Considering 90% of the orders were placed in America, using USPS was the best option there was. It actually made it so that my fulfillment costs (the packing and handling) + the actual costs of mailing, were cheaper than the costs of mailing from Canada. That’s the biggest win so far.
With all that taken care of, I still felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. I didn’t want to be ‘The Bag of Dicks Guy’ so I took the route of the ‘Glitter Guy’ and looked to sell the business.
Selling a Viral Business is tougher than I thought. I honestly didn’t want to give someone a sour deal, so I made sure that I’d sell the site for a price that would likely make them their money back at the least. That was a mistake, not because I’d make less money, but because people thought it was too good to be true. I used an agency that often sells sites and I thought it was a good idea, but after a false bid caused the auction to falter, I was starting to think I’d keep the business for myself.
Then I got an email from someone that was interested in buying. We went over numbers, and made a good deal for everyone involved. Within a few days, the website was sold for 6 figures plus an ongoing royalty. Not too bad. (Legally, I cant go into much more detail than this. Sorry)
The biggest surprise to me, was how steady sales have been. What I figured would be a flash in the pan and be forgotten in the coming months has stayed steady. A few weeks ago, I got word that the 50,000th bag of dicks was sent out and that over $1,000,000 in sales have been made.
Do I regret selling DicksByMail? No. Because I didn’t regret it in the moment, I don’t regret it now. But I won’t underestimate myself again. I guess the lesson to anyone thinking of starting their own business is to just do it. Work with an idea and think ‘How can I do this now?’. Solve the problems as they come to you. And don’t underestimate yourself.
And always remember that anyone that stands in your way can eat a bag of dicks.
