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- Our $40M Year: A look back at what changed in 2024
Our $40M Year: A look back at what changed in 2024
The 3 factors that helped us double annual revenue last year
Hey everyone,
Welcome back for another bite to chew on.
Well...this is a big one.
We want to take some time to look back at 2024 and appreciate what happened. And more importantly, what we learned.
Obvi hit $40M in annual revenue last year. We doubled our business, but it wasn’t straightforward and it certainly wasn’t easy.
So we thought we'd do something different for this one. Each of us is going to share our biggest lessons from 2024.
Stick around to find out our biggest needle movers…
On the Menu
How we completely rewrote our product development playbook (Ankit)
What going international taught us about scale (Ron)
Why organic reach became our secret weapon (Ash)
Let's dive in…
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Rethinking Product Development (from Ankit)
2024 started with a tough decision.
After a deep dive into our product portfolio in late 2023, we made the call to discontinue several product lines. It wasn't just about cutting underperformers – it was about creating space for something better.
But that was just the start of a major shift in how we create new products.
Instead of chasing quick launches and rushing products to market, we spent the first 6 months rebuilding our entire approach to product development from the ground up.
Breaking the Single-Manufacturer Mindset
One of the biggest revelations came from diversifying our manufacturing relationships.
We found that different manufacturing partners brought unique strengths to the table. Some excelled at certain formulations, others at specific delivery formats. By expanding our network, we suddenly had access to capabilities we never had before.
The Retail Reality
But the real transformation came in how we thought about new products.
Previously, our product development was heavily influenced by our DTC roots. We could educate customers through email, retarget them with ads, and build trust over time.
But retail changes that equation completely.
Now every new product concept had to answer harder questions →
Will this make sense on a shelf without deep education?
Can we maintain margins at retail price points?
Will this resonate across different retail channels?
Our major learning on this came from selling in Walmart.
Some products that performed well in DTC struggled on shelves. Others surprised us with their retail performance. Each victory and setback helped us understand what it takes to win in physical retail.
We learned to pay attention to:
How quickly customers grasp the product benefit
Price positioning relative to shelf neighbors
Package hierarchy and information design
Channel-specific market dynamics
The Channel Challenge
Of course, it’s not just about Walmart. We launched in a variety of other retail channels, many of them with different customers and needs than the mega-chain.
So even as we started to dial in Walmart, we discovered:
What works in drug stores might fail in grocery
What flies in FDM might bomb in club stores
You may need to create new SKUs for your retail partners
This knowledge now influences everything - from initial product concepts to packaging design to price architecture.
The wild part? We used to get excited when retailers wanted our entire product line. Now we actually guide them away from certain products. We'll straight up say "This SKU won't work for your customer base."
Short term, we might lose some revenue because the initial PO will be smaller. But retail growth is about the long game. We'd rather build reorder velocity that compounds.
I think that's been the biggest shift in our thinking this year. We're not just creating products anymore - we're building distribution strategies that can scale.
Leaning into International Expansion (From Ron)
You know what's funny about hitting $40M? It almost didn't happen.
But then Australia changed everything.
By mid-2024, we were starting to hit a wall in the US. Not because we weren't growing, but because that growth was getting expensive. There’s that point when you’ve scaled in a certain region that you’ll start hitting saturation.
Then something weird happened...
We got a random $50K PO from Australia. 🇦🇺 🦘
Just out of nowhere. Some distributor wanted to stock Obvi products because people were asking for them.
Mind you - we had ZERO marketing presence in Australia. Never spent a dime there. That's when it hit us: What if we're thinking too small?
The wake-up call
Here's what we realized →
The US market is massive...but the TAM is only so big
Our CACs kept climbing as we targeted deeper audience layers
We were competing with both legacy brands AND new startups
Cultural trends around health and wellness are global
But that Australian PO showed us something else - Western markets were already familiar with our category and our brand. We didn't necessarily have to educate them from scratch.
This lead to us testing out a fast launch in Australia, just to see how fertile it was as a new region. Now, normally we're pretty methodical about expansion. But this time we did something different.
Instead of:
Creating separate landing pages
Building region-specific marketing
Developing unique product packaging
Setting up local fulfillment
We didn’t hear up any of that. With the help of OpenBorder we were able to just...launch with what we had.
We kept everything exactly the same, except for one tiny trick →
We baked shipping, VAT, and duties into the front-end pricing. So when Australians landed on our site, they saw their total all-in cost right away.
Then at checkout, we hit them with: "FREE SHIPPING TODAY ONLY!"
Conversion rates were bonkers.
This tactic avoided the terrible shock of a giant shipping bill at checkout, so it helped us get sales while maintaining our margins.
The Results
The best part? The CACs we saw were like the early-days of Facebook in the US. So scaling spend was nowhere near as costly, making it profitable from day 1.
Australia quickly became a significant revenue stream for us, opening our eyes to just how much potential was sitting outside the US market.
Now, we’re busy expanding to other global markets like Europe, Latin America, and China. They all won’t be as automatic as Australia, of course, but we’re super excited about fishing in new waters.
Going Beyond the Meta Ad Account (From Ash)
For years our marketing playbook was clear: scale Meta ad spend by dialing in the right combination of targeting, creative, and CPA/ROAS goals. Get that formula right, and growth would follow.
And it worked. Really well.
Even in 2024, we kept optimizing that engine. Cost caps became a crucial tool for us, helping control CACs while maintaining profitable growth.
But something bigger was happening. Our sales weren’t just living on our site anymore.
🏪 We were in Walmart aisles.
💻 On Amazon's virtual shelves.
👩🏻🌾 In Sprouts stores across the country.
Suddenly, our marketing strategy needed to evolve beyond just driving traffic to our store.
The Awareness Challenge
Here's what we realized: As an omnichannel brand, we needed to think differently about top-of-funnel marketing.
The goal wasn't just getting someone to click an ad and buy on our site. We needed to build brand recognition that would translate to sales in many different places.
This mindset shift changed how we viewed things like our Ambassador program and TikTok Shop.
Instead of measuring success purely on direct sales, we started treating these channels as a brand awareness play. We focused on maximizing reach and generating authentic content through our creator partnerships.
The goal? Break-even on direct attributed sales while seeding the market with compelling content that would drive recognition across all our channels.
Reimagining Influencer Partnerships
This thinking extended to our entire influencer marketing program. Rather than focusing solely on attributable revenue, we optimized for content that would resonate naturally on each platform.
We found that authentic storytelling from creators who genuinely loved our products had impacts far beyond what we could measure in direct clicks.
The new focus is to get our entire marketing ecosystem to work together. To create a high tide that lifts all ships.
When we get it right, here’s what we see:
Meta CPAs drop (because audiences were pre-warmed)
Retail velocity increases
Amazon rankings improve
Brand searches go up
As we get bigger and CACs on Meta continue to rise, the focus will be finding new, efficient ways to get in front of our ICP so we can drive revenue everywhere, not just on our store.
Sum It Up
Looking back at 2024, the big theme for us was evolution…
We evolved how we think about product development - building for retail from day one
We evolved beyond US borders - finding growth in unexpected places
We evolved our marketing approach - focusing on awareness over pure ROAS
But what’s most exciting is that we're just getting started.
Next year we're looking at:
New international markets
Deeper retail expansion
Moving beyond pure Meta → store direct response to drive omnichannel growth
2024 was the year we doubled to $40M. But honestly? The foundations we built have us even more excited about 2025.
All the best,
Ron, Ash & Ankit