Founder Mike Salguero started ButcherBox, a meat and seafood delivery subscription service, as a hobby. He himself struggled to find high-quality grass-fed beef, so he set out to help others source meat as well.
But Mike jokes that he sort of failed at keeping it a side hustle. His hobby business turned into a full-fledged subscription service that’s disrupting the meat industry. Last year, ButcherBox brought in more than $550 million in revenue and is on track to do more than $600 million in 2022.
Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe to Shopify Masters
Those are staggering numbers, considering ButcherBox hasn’t taken any outside investment to date. Mike says self-funding has cayman islands mobile database given ButcherBox the ability to think more long-term — like 25 or even 100 years — about how they can change what consumers eat and how farmers raise animals.
“If we’re actually set on disrupting meat, that’s a big undertaking and that is not something that can happen overnight,” Mike says. “It’s gonna require patience. It’s gonna require a long-term time horizon. And I’ve yet to meet an investor who has the appetite for that type of hold.”
But because ButcherBox didn’t take outside funding, it had to be profitable from the very beginning. Here’s how Mike and his team did it.
Get the subscription model right
ButcherBox’s Kickstarter campaign in 2015 was wildly successful. Within the first 24 hours, they had already exceeded 3x of their goal of 25,000 pre-orders.
“And so right from the michaela mills start, from that first day, it was like, ‘Wow, I think we might be onto something here,’” Mike explains. “I had been running a company for about seven years before I started Butcher Box. And with that company, things never seemed to work. Like we would try really hard, we’d launch a be numbers feature, we were really excited about it, and then it would be crickets. And so it was just a totally different feeling to feel like the snowball was rolling down the hill and we were part of the snowball.”
It wasn’t just luck though. Mike knew there was a special badge for Kickstarter campaigns that would unlock promotion. Campaigns with that badge would be featured on the Kickstarter homepage and in emails. Mike essentially reverse engineered his way to getting a badge, and it worked. Kickstarter did the rest.
