How Dylan Jacob Built a $1.1M/Month Drinkware Brand at 23

ChatGPT is insanely powerful.

But most people waste 90% of its potential by using it like Google.

These 1,000+ proven ChatGPT prompts fix that and help you work 10X faster.

Sign up for Superhuman AI and get:

Claim your free prompts

By the time Dylan Jacob started BruMate, he had already run the entrepreneurial gauntlet twice. His first company, started in high school, supplied repair parts, batteries, LCD screens, flex cables, to repair shops and tech centers. He sold it in 2014 to one of its own franchise customers, after dropping out of engineering school to pursue entrepreneurship full time.

After that sale, he bought a foreclosure on short sale and spent about nine months remodeling it. In the middle of that project, he started a second company, a high end glass tile business supplying residential and commercial remodels through Wayfair, Overstock, Houzz, and a dealer network. He ran that company until July 2017 and sold it too. It is still operating successfully under its new owners.

Neither company let him do the thing he actually wanted to do: design and develop a product himself, then watch strangers use something he had made. He found that idea for the third time in January 2016, after a run of warm 16oz beers sent him into an hour long Google search for a koozie that actually fit his can of choice. He came up empty. So he started sketching a rough prototype for what would become the Hopsulator.

That search became BruMate, an insulated drinkware brand built specifically for the adult beverage community. The flagship product, the patented Hopsulator TRiO, is a three in one insulated koozie that fits 16oz cans, comes with a freezable adapter for 12oz cans, and works as a pint glass, keeping a beer at the same temperature from the first sip to the last. The lineup also includes the Uncork'd Wine Glasses, the largest triple insulated wine glasses in the world, and the Winesulator, which holds a full bottle of wine at temperature for over 24 hours.

The first product line launched in November 2016. That November and December alone brought in $250,000 in sales. 2017 closed at $2.1M. By the time of this account, BruMate was doing more than $1.1M a month, sold through over 1,000 retailers nationwide, and on track for $20M for the year, with a bottom line running 35 to 45% depending on ad spend.

Here is how a single frustrating search became a patented, retail scale drinkware company, and why refusing outside money shaped nearly every decision along the way.

Before investing in molds, Dylan wanted proof there was an actual market. The process started with a rough drawing brought to a local engineer for modeling. Once the 3D model was ready, he sent the files to a 3D printing lab in Maryland for creation, then used the resulting prototype to pitch local breweries that packaged in 16oz cans.

After convincing one of the largest breweries in Indiana to carry the Hopsulator, he spent around $3,000 producing 100 rough prototypes and put them in that store for direct customer feedback. Over the following 45 days, alongside targeted Facebook ads to gather pre-orders and emails, he became confident a real market existed, but he also knew the product still needed real refinement. It took 13 more prototypes and almost a full year before the final version was molded, produced, and finally in his hands.

The Hopsulator sparked the idea, but it was not actually the first product to launch. Dylan started designing the Winesulator about two months later. It had far fewer moving parts and was faster to bring to life. He ran targeted Facebook ads for pre-orders starting in August 2016, and the response was strong enough that the cost to mold and manufacture, roughly half of what the Hopsulator required, felt low risk enough to commit to molding without releasing a single prototype first. He relied on photoshopped imagery to gather leads while it was in production, and by the time inventory arrived in November, he had a list of around 7,000 people ready to launch to.

Dylan learned a sourcing trick during his second company that made finding good manufacturers considerably easier: import records are public information, accessible through sites like portexaminer.com. He took a handful of larger companies he already knew in the industry, traced their manufacturers through those records, and flew to China to evaluate the best candidate directly.

Switching manufacturers ranks among the worst situations a company can face, particularly once specialized tooling and molding are involved. A small facility might work fine at first, but once a company outgrows it, quality control and production times can quietly cripple the business. Using the import record method meant starting with a manufacturer that was both high quality and capable of scaling alongside BruMate.

Once that manufacturer was in place, Dylan also secured backup facilities and kept copies of the tooling and molds, so a transition could happen quickly if it ever became necessary. A manufacturer that specializes in your specific category typically has in house engineers who already understand the procedures and limitations involved, which makes development considerably faster.

Before the Hopsulator hit the market, Dylan spent around $15,000 securing a utility patent and a design patent through a local lawyer. Because he qualified as a micro entity, he was able to pay an expedite fee and get both applications approved within 12 months, rather than waiting the usual four or more years for an examiner's decision.

When Dylan first started BruMate, he had nearly everything about the target customer wrong: the demographic, the age range, the target genders, the focus. Launching the product publicly and testing different audiences before locking anything in was what kept the company from building an entire brand around the wrong customer.

His view on what separates catastrophic failure from success in entrepreneurship is the ability to pivot. Catastrophic failure is usually not one dramatic mistake but a series of small ones that snowball. Staying self aware enough to recognize when something is not working, rather than assuming you are right by default, is what determines how far a founder ultimately gets.

Financially, everything in the early days was bootstrapped. Dylan was still running his second business at the time, with significant money tied up in inventory and overhead, so he took out a home equity line on his own house to finance the original molding costs. He designed the website himself in Shopify, ran his own Facebook ads, learned through trial and error and YouTube videos, and handled customer service and design personally. It was a one man operation until July 2017.

Before the first real launch, Dylan had a lot of free time while the product was being designed and produced, so he spent it testing marketing tactics. He tried a Kickstarter campaign, which failed outright. He ran giveaways. He paid bloggers and micro influencers. He tried a bit of everything until a pattern emerged, and then committed to what was actually working: mainly bloggers and Facebook ads.

In the beginning he spent $20 to $30 a day testing different audiences using the same images and copy, narrowing the list down based on performance. Once a few audiences proved themselves, he ran ads directing people to a landing page where they could sign up to be notified the moment the product launched the day after Black Friday, positioned as the perfect holiday gift. That approach built the initial traction and produced $250,000 in sales between November 24th and December 14th, 2016.

From there, the company built out its audiences using customer data and grew a team of seven working daily across Facebook, Instagram, Google AdWords, Bing, Snapchat, and Pinterest ads. Of all those channels, Facebook and Instagram consistently drive the most cold traffic and the most conversions. For a genuine lifestyle brand, dialing in the right audiences and starting profitable from day one is, in Dylan's experience, remarkably achievable. BruMate sees a 3 to 4x return on ad spend across the board, a result he has not seen replicated at that speed through any other channel.

Once a customer lands on the site, the team focuses on four specific things:

The email list itself, around 250,000 subscribers at the time, makes up roughly 20% of monthly revenue. Dylan's rule for that list: about 70% of emails should provide genuine value, blog posts, tips, useful content, with only 30% dedicated to selling. Even a simple value focused blog post sent to the list produces a measurable sales bump of around 20% for the day, without asking for anything directly.

Amazon rounds out the picture. BruMate does roughly $40,000 a month there with zero ad spend, mostly from customers who visited the website but were not comfortable purchasing directly, or who wanted two day shipping. Dylan considers this money that would otherwise be left on the table entirely, since Amazon handles customer service and shipping on those orders, and many of those first time Amazon buyers end up subscribing to the email list and converting on the main site later anyway.

Gross margins before ad spend run around 59% on average, after cost of goods, shipping, and fulfillment. The real swing factor in the bottom line is ad spend itself, which varies month to month based on how competitive the specific audiences are at that time.

In June, BruMate did $1.1M in sales at a 4x return on ad spend and a 33% bottom line. In May, Father's Day competition combined with a Facebook algorithm shift tied to GDPR pushed ROAS down to 3.1x and the bottom line to 26%. Around Christmas, ROAS can climb as high as 6x because conversion rates rise sharply. Across the year, the average bottom line sits around 30%.

The business sees 400,000 to 500,000 monthly visitors, a roughly 4% conversion rate, and a 15% return customer rate. Facebook is the single most powerful asset in the mix, with over 270,000 followers and thousands of comments on every product related post.

Online sales, including the majority of small retailers ordering through the online wholesale portal, run around $1.1M a month, with another roughly $100,000 a month coming through secondary channels like Cabela's and Amazon Retail. The team includes two full time employees handling customer service, with everyone else brought on as freelancers or agencies: seven people managing digital advertising, two managing social media strategy and photography, and a fully remote structure that Dylan considers the future rather than the exception.

One of the hardest decisions Dylan made was holding out on outside investment entirely. He was committed from day one to keeping 100% control of the company and refused every offer. In hindsight, that decision clearly slowed the company's growth.

BruMate was constantly out of stock through 2017, including three weeks of prime holiday selling time in December, and the business absorbed a real hit from it. Even so, looking back, Dylan remains glad he self financed and kept nobody else at the table.

Inventory and cash flow issues are, in his framing, a clear signal that something is working and can usually be fixed. A lack of sales or demand is an entirely different and far more exhausting problem to solve. BruMate's biggest operational issue was cash flow and inventory, which repeatedly forced air shipping to stay in stock, eating directly into the bottom line.

The clearest example came right after one Christmas season, when the company was still out of stock and facing nearly six weeks to get new inventory in by sea because of Chinese New Year timing. Dylan paid roughly $70,000 to air ship a 40 foot container, close to $1M worth of inventory, to the facility. Losing 6 weeks of sales while that inventory floated somewhere at sea would have hurt more, so he took the 7% hit and had it in the local airport within four days.

Dylan's clearest advice is that the finished product you see today is never where a company actually started. The most important skill for a founder is the ability to adapt and pivot, to recognize when an idea genuinely does not work or simply needs adjustment. The idea you start with is rarely the idea you end with, and how hard that transition feels comes down to how willing you are to actually make it.

No amount of reading, podcasts, or online courses replicates real experience. If a friend is running a semi successful company, ask to intern for a few months just to see what it is actually like. Starting a practice business purely for the experience, sourcing a product, finding a target market, testing unique marketing angles, builds invaluable knowledge even if it never turns a profit. Each company Dylan built was a stepping stone that ultimately gave him the tools to scale BruMate into what it became. Jumping straight into this six years earlier, he believes, would have meant having no real idea where to start, and likely failing.

At the time of this account, BruMate had six new products in development and had just signed a rep group across all 48 states to get products in front of more retailers. Retail made up only around 10% of revenue then, with a goal of scaling that to $1M or more a month by year end, working toward a $50M or larger company within the following year.

Every day as an entrepreneur is a genuine challenge. For anyone on their first venture, the honest expectation should be that Murphy's Law works against you constantly. It is stressful and lonely, and there will be moments questioning the whole decision, before the progress finally shows and makes it feel entirely worth it.

You can learn more at brumate.com, on Facebook, and on Instagram.