Your Biggest Competitive Advantage in Marketing? Having No Money …
We launched a simple innovation on a nipple cover in 2022 without a plan, investors, a following, and any money in a marketing budget. This was the beginning of CAKES body, which will generate over $30 million in revenue in its third year in business — and do so very profitably and donate over $1 million to women’s health causes. What we thought was a disadvantage (no money) turned out to be the foundation of our extremely profitable marketing engine, something any business can replicate.
How it Started
TikTok was still in its post-COVID honeymoon phase when nobodies like us, with no following, were blowing up overnight. We started sharing three videos daily about the many use cases of CAKES covers, testing strategies like using different verbal and visual hooks in the first two seconds of every video, tying trending audios to our video concepts to boost them in the algorithm, and things as crazy as closing the app immediately after posting vs. leaving it open. Within 30 days of testing that bordered on the verge of conspiracy theorizing, our first organic video went viral and we went from selling a few hundred units a month to hundreds of units per minute. What we didn’t know at the time is the formula for virality on social media is something that can be replicated, and we did, month over month.
The Formula to Scale: Organic Content is King (or Queen in Our Case)
While going viral isn't a predictable way to grow a business, it did give us a competitive edge. For every 10 videos we posted, nine would be watched by our mom and a couple friends, and only one would blow up and get hundreds of thousands of views. We were able to take the organic (unpaid) “winners” and bring them to our meta ads. To no surprise, our ads were wildly efficient and we were able to acquire customers at an extremely low customer acquisition cost because it was already tested. We weren’t wasting money on losers.
What if TikTok Goes Away?
Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the “Tiktokification” of all social media platforms — i.e., the algorithm will be more interest-based vs. follower-based. Even if you don’t have a large following, if you're creating relevant and entertaining content on any social media platform, you'll be able to reach more customers for less money. Regardless of the platform, the principle is the same: organic content is king. If you can test and learn with great organic content, you can ultimately bring the winners to your paid marketing strategy and it will be more efficient than if you have to put paid media behind every ad idea you have. The reason most businesses don’t do this (and in turn, have higher customer acquisition costs) is it’s a lot of work and they have massive marketing budgets. They don’t have to go through the agonizing exercise of posting nine losers to get a winner. But if they did, just think about how much more profitable they could be.
The Good News …
The empowering thing about all of this — for us as a bootstrapped business or for a marketing team that just got its budget cut — is the playing field is being leveled. For the first time in advertising history, creativity can compete with big budgets. And can win!
Taylor Capuano and Casey Capuano Sarai are co-founders of CAKES body, a company dedicated to reinventing the traditional bra while supporting women’s health causes.
Taylor Capuano and Casey Capuano Sarai are the cofounders of CAKES body, a multimillion dollar, high-growth startup dedicated to reinventing the traditional bra while supporting women’s health causes. After spending 10 years working in corporate America, the sisters were overworked and on the verge of layoffs at the same time. What started as a simple innovation on the traditional nipple cover quickly went viral on social media and illuminated a much bigger opportunity – to disrupt the bra industry all together. Since then, the company has appeared on Shark Tank, secured an investment from Good American and SKIMS co-founder, Emma Grede, is valued at over $100M, and will donate over $1M to women’s health causes by the end of this year.
Taylor Capuano and Casey Capuano Sarai are the cofounders of CAKES body, a multimillion dollar, high-growth startup dedicated to reinventing the traditional bra while supporting women’s health causes. After spending 10 years working in corporate America, the sisters were overworked and on the verge of layoffs at the same time. What started as a simple innovation on the traditional nipple cover quickly went viral on social media and illuminated a much bigger opportunity – to disrupt the bra industry all together. Since then, the company has appeared on Shark Tank, secured an investment from Good American and SKIMS co-founder, Emma Grede, is valued at over $100M, and will donate over $1M to women’s health causes by the end of this year.
