Becoming a Dog Ramp Mogul

Published Mar 17, 2022, 4:02 AM

Ramon van Meer is the CEO of Alpha Paw. His problem: How do you grow a niche business (ramps for weiner dogs!) when a pandemic blows up your supply chain and Apple ruins your targeted ads?


Ramon has sold over $30 million worth of dog ramps. That’s a lot of dog ramps. But in order to do so he has to deal with some of the biggest companies on earth. On today’s show, we talk about how he has built his company on top of the tech giants – and how they threaten his very existence.


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Pushkin. Maybe just to start, can you just, like, off the top of your head, list a bunch of the businesses that you've started in your life. Oh? Okay, yes, that's a lot. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where we talk to entrepreneurs and engineers about the future they're going to build once they solve a few problems. My guest today is Ramon van Nir. He's been starting companies since he got kicked out of high school in the Netherlands more than twenty years ago. A lot of companies. A construction company, online pianta website, soap opera blog, a YouTube channel, festivals in Vegas? What else? What else? Oh? I did, an online travel company. And at the moment, Ramone runs an e commerce company that has sold tens of millions of dollars of ramps for docsins like ramps that let weener dogs get up and down off the couch. And as the owner of an online weener dog ramp business, Ramone has to figure out how to solve some really big global problems, you know, everything from jammed up supply chains to privacy fights between Facebook and Apple, and on top of that, even more interesting. Ramone is trying to solve these problems as a relatively small business in an era of giants. You know, there's this obsession right now with trillion dollar tech companies and ten billion dollar Decca Unicorn startups, but we do not hear much about this whole big ecosystem of thousands of small and midsize online businesses like the ones that Ramone has built. All these entrepreneurs who make stuff and sell stuff and solve problems and in many cases build multimillion dollar businesses. They build on top of the giant tech companies, and also once in a while they end up getting crushed by the giant tech companies. My conversation with Ramone started with his first big success, a blog about soap operas that he started back in twenty fifteen. At the time, he had never watched a soap opera, no Silicon Valley startup, was thinking, hey, let's build a block for soap operas. Everybody was laughing at me when I was, you know, saying like, yeah, I just started a blog about soaps. Don't want to made me make a two personal at that time actually was going through a really difficult time personally and I'm a single father, was me and my son. You know, when I started this, I was literally at that time paycheck to paycheck barely. I actually paycheck to the less paycheck, like I barely could make the rent when I started soap op. And actually I think that helped me motivate, like, shit, I need to soon. As I saw like okay, we have ten dollars a day with soap Opera the blog, I said, Okay, I need to make this work. I can. I can get this to one hundred dollar day if I just work my ass off. So I'm interested in the work you did on that soap opera blog, and in particular, I know you used all these tools and sort of tricks that people can use to build a business almost for free. So can you talk me through the story of how you did that. You started out basically on Facebook? Is that right? At that time Facebook was it was a different time for Facebook where more or less two fifteen sixteen, okay, where it was very fairly easy and cheap to build a huge fan page around any topic, right, And I've learned very quickly, like okay, instead of building a fan page about daytime TV shows or even soap operas. The best engagement you get if the fan pagees is targeted and niche as possible. And so I saw that building a fan page that just talks about days of our lives or just talks about the young arrest O soap because people don't care for these others. They just care for their soap. So you start these pages on Facebook. You figure out that building a page for one show is kind of the right way to do it. And then what do you do next? Yeah, as you can hear, I have an excellent English is now my first language. And I also am not really good at writing, and I don't watch the show, so I couldn't really write. So the idea was, okay, let's start a blog to write about what's going to happen tomorrow in the show. So I bought the domain first. I never buy a premium domain. I just bought whatever was available. What was it at that time of soap shows? Dot com? Dot com? Okay, yeah, so now I have the website. Now I need the content. Um, I cannot write it, So let's find a writer. So there's these websites platforms out there. I use upwork dot Com. You can basically hire any type of freelancer that you can think of. I found a writer that started writing one article day, and then we shared that on our fan pages. And that's how we started to drive traffic slowly from Facebook back to our website. And how are you making money? UM? There's a service called Google ad Sense that's like everybody's seen the banners when you go to a website. Typically those banners are served by Google. And then the more traffic you get to your website, the more money you make. And it started with one dollars a day, and then five dollars a day, and then ten dollars, and then slowly, you know, and went up, keep going up. What did I get to? UM? Right before I sold the business, the company was doing or a website was doing around four hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. And then so it's making all this money and then you sell it, right, Yeah, for a lot, it's public, right, the amount of the sales much? How much was? It? Was close to nine million dollars in cash. After the break, Ramone takes his millions and starts investing in new businesses, including that company that makes ramps for wiener dogs. And he comes up against a few gnarly global problems. Now let's get back to what's your problem. With the millions of dollars he got from selling a soap opera blog, Ramone invested in a few different companies. Some didn't work so well, but one that did was that company that sells ramps for wiener dogs, which apparently wiener dogs tend to have spine trouble and so they can actually hurt themselves by jumping down from the couch or whatever. This is a show about technology and business we're doing here, not a show about wiener dog physiology. But in any case, the key thing for us is in this instance, Ramon did not start the company from scratch. He bought an existing online wiener dog ramp company for around three hundred thousand dollars. The company was actually called Sausage doc Central at the beginning, so they were really leaning into the wiener dog market, exactly the weiner dog market. And but I love the idea because it really it solves an actual problem for a target audience. The wiener dog ramp does feel like the sort of e commerce version of a blog for one soap opera, right, It's like this very narrow thing that some universe of people care a lot about. Yes, and nobody was looking at it seemed like with soap propose. So I bought this business instead of starting it, and the previous owner build an amazing product, but they were not Internet marketers. So there was a lot of low hanging fruit that I saw that I can, Hey, I can just you know, improve conversions, or I can do X y Z to increase revenue. So it's kind of like a house that's like a nice house in a good neighborhood, but the paints peeling off and the roof needs a patch, and so you can get a deal on it and fix it up and make it worth a lot more. Yes, And that's funny, you say, because I used that same example all the time. Their website was very old, not pretty, the copy was not great, It was very difficult to navigate, it was very slow. So I thought, okay, we can just redesign it for fairly cheap, higher copywriter to make the copy and and make better pictures. That will for sure increase the conversion rate, Like more people will buy once they're on the website. And did you also change the sort of commerce kind of backbone of it, the way that actual commerce back end of the site work. Yeah, so we switched to Shopify. Shopify is you know, to you like, I'm sure it's like Google or whatever, but most people don't know what Shopify is, and yet it's this giant force on the internet. Right, just talk for a minute about Shopify. Yeah, Shopify, it's basically anyone can set up your own store and start selling products within a matter of hours. I think that is their mission, right, that my mom, without knowing anything to code, could basically, within a couple of hours, set up her own store and start selling whatever she wants to sell. And it's giant, right. What was there was some metrics I heard recently that there were more visits to Shopify sites than to Amazon over the last quarter or something like. It's like millions of businesses at this point, certainly billions of dollars in revenue flowing through the businesses. Yeah, Shopify is actually on a mission to really compete with Amazon. And that's why Shopify, right sort of shot, they're succeeding that thread, right, the thing we were talking about earlier of you know, everybody is so focused on the giant tech companies and for good reason. Right, clearly, they're extraordinarily large, powerful companies worth paying a lot of attention to. But at the same time, there is this other parallel thread that I feel like you are emblematic of, and in a way, Shopify is kind of emblematic of, right of all of the dog ramp and soap opera blog and custom pinata businesses growing alongside the giants. Yeah, and it's it's really um especially last year, and you know, maybe this is a good pivot into like the e commerce you know world in the last year. How much has changed it actually in the last twelve months? Yeah, tell me, Yeah, what has changed for most has unfortunately has changed for the worst for a lot of e commerce, including ourselves. So on one hand, the supply chain has dramastically changed and we're still in it. But because with covid, there was a huge backlog of containers coming from overseas to a point where there were over one hundred container ships stuck at sea waiting in front of Los Angeles Ports. So that's what does it mean to you? What does it mean to your business? So that means for me and a lot of companies is that we were not able to get inventory or if we ever got inventory huge delays. Instead of you know, waiting a month, it took three to four months. But most importantly, the prices of getting our products to our warehouse went up. Like for US ten x so we used to pay two thousand, five hundred to get one container from Asia to the United States, we got quoted twenty nine thousands. Well that's just for shipping to be clear of containers of dog correct. Yeah, And there's no I have to pay. It's like I have to choose between not being able to sell something or you know, just pay these fees. And that's just one. So just to be clear, this show is called What's Your Problem, and we're definitely into the what's your problem portion the interview. So what are you doing about the supply chain problem? Can you do anything about that? Yeah? So we moved our manufacturing to Mexico. Oh interesting, interesting from Asia? It was in China before? Where was it before? We used China and Vietnam both countries. So okay, the supply chain problem, that's one big problem that you and like every other importer and exporter on the planet are dealing with, and like a lot of other companies, you're moving product to Mexico? What else? What else you got? What other problems are you working on? On the marketing side, we had Apple making updates to their operating system called to iOS fourteen updates, where it makes it more difficult for em or for online businesses to target um their potential audience. And just to be clear, like I remember that as as an iPhone user last year, there was some update and I was able to like opt out of being tracked so intensively by Facebook and other similar companies. It was like, not a huge deal to me, But we also know that that that iOS update from Apple, it wound up costing Facebook billions of dollars in lost ad revenue because they could no longer track users like me so so intensively. And then for you, it means it's suddenly harder for you to get someone who is whatever, who is a weener dog owner and is worried about their dog spine, you know, to target exactly the customer you want to target with your ants exactly what do you do about that problem? Yeah, And that's a tough problem and everybody, a lot of e commerce are trying to figure that out. We're looking at you know, Okay, what where else can we put our marketing dollars? Can we do YouTube? Can we do TikTok? Can we you know, we're all trying different things. Um, we we are allocating some of our ad budget to influencers. That's been working well for us. Okay, So like weener dog influencers. Is there like the weener dog Queen of Instagram or something who you're sponsoring? Now? Yeah, like funny like you have you have? You have no idea? How I have no idea? Dog have? How many instagrams about dogs are? Meaning like dog insram like an actual you know, the influencers you're sponsoring our dogs? Are you sponsoring? How many dogs are you sponsoring? Well, we have a lots. Well, we're working with four hundred influencers and the majority of them are actually not a person, but it's actually a dog and some of them have over a million followers and it's just an account of a specific dog, you know, Rudy the dog fluencer. Is there one dog fluencer that's like killing it for you that's gonna save your business? No, it's it's because it's always it's It does well in the beginning, but after a couple of times, right, Like their audience have seen our ads and then affects it hard down right, So that makes it hard. You always have to find new influencers and new you know. Um. Actually the big takeaway is pivoting actually away from ramps. The big problem with the ramps, it's like, okay, ramp, it's a one time product. Sometimes a person buys another one for the bed, but there is a ceiling. There's technically going to be a day where I sold all the all. You know, there's every Wiener dog will have a ramp in the house right there. The bull is finished, right, there's no more Wiener dogs that sell ramps too. You gotta close up shot. Yeah, and so we are still going to sell ramps, but it actually we six months ago we really started to pivot to dog food. So dog food, the lifetime value is a metric that is used often in e commerce. Is like, the lifetime value of a dog food customer is so much higher, meaning it's thousands of dollars. Right, it's a dog owner and presumably most people who have dogs, when their dog dies, they get another dog. Right, So if I buy dog food from you and I live for another forty years and worth tens of thousands of dollars in dog food sales to you exactly versus so the amount of work to acquire you as a customer is more or less the same if I'm selling a ramp or I'm selling food. It's a little bit more difficult in food because it's more like it's a little bit more tricky. But in essence, it's like the amount of work I need a product, I need a website, I need a warehouse, I need you know, customer servers, I need ads. All these things are the same if ourselves ramp or food. But if I do all this work and try and sell and focus more on food, the return on my time and return on investment is so much higher because you know you're going to keep coming back every two weeks or every month. Coming up next, the Lightning Round, including the biggest bet Ramona's ever made, and the one piece of advice you give to someone who wants to start a business. Let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with the Lightning Round. Okay, Lightning Round, don't think about it too much. I'm gonna try. Are you ready go? What's the biggest bet you've ever made biggest bet was an big EDM party in Holland. I set all my money into one party plus more and it was a total flop. I lost everything. What's your favorite app on your phone? Slack? Wow? What's a trait you cannot stand in? A coworker? A big ego? If you have a ten minute break? What do you do to relax? I M call my son? Um. I like that. You're giving me a little musical accompaniment for the lightning round vibe? Oh yeah, this is my dog just locally. What would you do if you couldn't do what you do? I would do something in music? Yeah, oh in music. What's a piece of advice you'd give somebody who wants to start a business to not overthink it and just start and improve along the way? That was Ramone van Nier. The company he runs is called Alpha Paul. Today's show was produced by Edith Russelo. It was edited by Kate Parkinson Morgan and Robert Smith, and it was engineered by Amanda Kwong. The music by Luis Gara. Our development team is Lee, Tom Mulad and Justine Lang. A huge team of people makes What's Your Problem Possible? That team includes but is not limited to Jacob Weisberg, Mia Lobel have their Fame, John Schnars, Kerrey Brodie, Carli mcgleory, Christina Sullivan, Jason Gambrell, Brant Hayes, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner, Nicolemrano, Mary Beth Smith, Royston Deserve, Maya Kanig, Daniella Lakhan, Kazia Tan and David Clever. What's Your Problem is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcast listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or Where Effort. I'm Jacob Boldstein and I'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.

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