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Shaking Up The Candy Industry (The Simple Way)
How To Dominate The Untapped Marketing Channel
Andrew Davis
January 11, 2024
What’s up? You’re reading Founder Runway. It’s gonna be an awesome one (and I’ve got a cool new thing for you guys).
Let’s get into it:
I tested a trend myself (huge results)
This week’s new trend: Freeze-Dried Candy
The criminally overlooked customer acquisition channel that will separate the brand
I decided I’m gonna start doing a few cool new things with this newsletter.
I’m going to personally try out certain trends and see what the results are like. Granted, my time is split between a few things, so I can only test the “lowest hanging fruits”
I’m also going to start doing interviews with people who have successfully capitalized on current trends (and hopefully, the action-takers here can get a piece of that pie). Later this month, I’ll be interviewing a guy who made a million dollars in 1 year using ChatGPT to write books (his marketing strategy is so simple it makes me mad I didn’t think of it).
Now, that we’re all up to speed. I’m so pumped to show you the first experiment I’ve been doing.
The Trend I’m Experimenting With: TikTok CPB
Before you shoot this idea down, delete the email, and throw your phone in the toilet, you’re gonna want to see my results.
This $2200 is over 10 days roughly and took about 10 minutes of work per day (not kidding).
If you don’t know what the TikTok Creativity Program is, it’s a program where TikTok will pay you a certain RPM (revenue per 1,000 views) simply for making content that’s over 1 minute long.
Personally I’m not a big “show my face” kinda guy, but you don’t have to do that to qualify. You can make videos of pretty much anything (that’s not against their community guidelines) and they’ll pay.
I started this account in early December (you can’t join CPB until you’ve hit 10k followers) and was accepted to CPB 10 days ago, with the idea of testing this trend for you to see in real-time.
As you can see, the income is pretty skewed to one specific day, and that’s because I had a video blow-up. Now that I’m in the program, and making decent money from it, my new goal is to outsource the video creation to an editor and hopefully make around $6k/month passively.
Let me know if you want to see more of me testing out certain trends…
(hopefully, you do)
This shit is fun.
Trend of The Week: Freeze-Dried Candy
One of the latest trends to explode (thanks to TikTok) is freeze-dried candy.
Freeze-dried candy is candy that’s been frozen and then dried in a freeze dryer (link to example).
The process is simple. First, the candy is frozen until it’s super cold, then all the “icy parts” of the candy turn into vapor (aka skipping the watery phase). Then, any last bits of water are removed.
This process causes the candy to completely change texture and become crunchy and light. The taste even gets more concentrated.
Why is it going viral? TikTokers are creating videos of both, the process of making the candy, and eating it. The videos are essentially ASMR videos due to the weird texture of the candy (if you don’t know about the ASMR market, I suggest you deep dive into it and see just how much some of these creators are making).
There are two huge areas for getting customers.
The obvious one is TikTok. The less obvious one is below.
Business Idea: CandyCrisp
Problem:
The trend of freeze-dried candy is booming, especially among the 18-24 age demographic in the United States. However, the trend is being fueled by social media platforms like TikTok, and there’s an untapped market for consumers who are looking for the product through search engines like Google. Moreover, the current SEO leaders have pretty garbage websites (like this one). The competitors lack a good consumer experience from top to bottom; landing page, checkout experience, packaging, variety, you name it.
Solution:
CandyCrisp will be a direct-to-consumer brand that offers an unmatched selection of freeze-dried candies, available in 3 cool ways.
First, single-flavor packaging.
Second, assorted gift boxes (will be a best-seller on holidays like Valentine’s Day).
And third, highly limited-edition runs of freeze-dried candies that nobody would expect. Things like free-dried Cadbury Eggs or Sour Patch Kids.
This marketing method is beautiful for TikTok and specifically influencer marketing. I’ll explain how below.
Customer Acquisition:
Alright, I’m going to go over Tiktok first because this is what will bring “fast wins”, but the long-term foothold on the market is even better. TikTok marketing will consist of multiple brand accounts for “horizontal scaling” like Tabs does. Build these out fast by replicating previous videos that have gone viral. Hire influencers for posts featuring your candy, but don’t just give them regular candy. Here’s where the kicker comes in:
Give influencers the highly limited-edition candies.
This will separate your brand from any other emerging freeze-dried candy brands. Why? The only freeze-dried candy they’re doing is Skittles. Easy win. This creates an easy selling point for your influencer like “I’ve tried the Skittles, but I’ve never seen freeze-dried (insert candy here)”.
Get it up on the TikTok shop as well. That trend hasn’t shown any sign of slowing down.
Okay. Now we’ve got TikTok out of the way. Here’s how you dominate the channel that is so overlooked in this niche it’s criminal.
SEO:
On Google, the search term "freeze dried candy" gets 58,000 searches per month in the U.S. alone, with a keyword difficulty of 7…. 7!
In other words, it's easy to rank in the top 10 on Google for this search term if you take an SEO-focused approach to the freeze-dried candy market.
The competition is putting 100% of their efforts into TikTok and missing an easy market opportunity on Google.
If you have an interest in this niche, I’d recommend pursuing a dual-focused approach through TikTok and SEO.
PRO TIP: Follow us on Twitter. I’ll be breaking down more trends on there this week.
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That’s all for today!