← Making It with Jon Davids
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- [00:00]
A
This place is a country club for your dog, and it brings in 2.8 million bucks a year. But that's not even the crazy part. This business is so successful, they're opening a second location. And that's a drop in the bucket for this $140 billion industry. Yes, that's how much Americans spend on their pets every year. Pay attention here, because I'm going to lay out a money making masterclass. I'll share four lessons. Every business builder needs to know whether you're making $100,000 or $100,000,000 or if you're starting from zero. The first lesson save you years of burning cash. And the second lesson will guarantee you customers on day one. My name is John Davids. I'm the founder of influicity, where we help clients like these make a lot more money. And I'm giving you all this info for no money so you can make more money too.
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You're listening to Making it with John Davids.
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So let's rewind to 2021. These two guys, Alex and Liam, have a problem. They can't find a nice park in their neighborhood, and they really need a spot to take their dogs to play. So they decide to make one for themselves. But they want to take it a step further. Our boys aren't just going to settle for a dog park. They're thinking more of a private dog club. So they find an abandoned parking lot in Santa Monica where they live. They roll down some turf, they throw up a fence. They put in a few tents for shade. Just enough to keep the dogs in and the neighbors out. And next, they start promoting this place by posting online local Facebook groups, members only. Dog park. Clean, safe, private. Within a few weeks, they've got a wait list. And this part is really important. I'm gonna come back to it in a few minutes. So in November 2021, Alex and Liam opened for business. Their private dog club is called Dog People. D O G P P L. And the dogs come running a dog park. You know, it might sound like a simple business or kind of a crummy business, but this thing actually is money machine. Dog people sells single dog memberships for 120 bucks a month. And if you got two dogs or three dogs, you'll pay even more. Today they've got something like 2,000 members at that Santa Monica location. So even if everyone has the basic package, we're looking at about $240,000 a month from a parking lot. They're building a second spot right now in Brooklyn. It's going to be on a rooftop and number two is going to have a full kitchen, craft cocktails, a dj. I'm pretty sure they'll have some stu for dogs too. But if Brooklyn works, these things might be popping up everywhere. Dog People is kind of like Soho House but with chew toys. And it's actually more popular than you might think. Search up Private Dog Club in Google Trends. This category is exploding, and that's something you gotta pay attention to. You need to build your business in a growing market. You can be a great operator with a great product and a great team. But when it's a great business builder versus a crappy market, A my money is on the crappy market because the market always wins. Always. Imagine someone says, hey, I want to build the next great newspaper company. You don't need to hear the rest of that pitch. It doesn't really matter how good they are. Newspapers are a bad market today. That industry is shrinking. And if you're going to put years of your life into something, anything, you want to do it in a market that has momentum, where the winds are at your back, not blowing in your face.
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This episode is brought to you by my Playbook social media selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook. Let's be real. You don't want likes. You want sales. You want to know that customers are going to show up every day from the content you're already posting. This Playbook shows you how that's done, how to turn social posts into cash flow, and how to scale in a way that's simple, repeatable, and on brand. Grab it free right now@johndavids.com playbook that's johndavids.com playbook.
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So what does a good market look like? Well, dog people is a perfect example. The pet industry is on fire. It's burning up in a good way. It's got a fever. And the only medicine is an $800 Swarovski crystal dog bowl that actually exists. Google it. Americans spent over $140 billion on their pets last year. Buh, buh buh buh billion. And that's doubled from a decade ago. Dig a little deeper and you'll see almost half of that goes toward premium services. Things like grooming, wellness, nutrition, entertainment, perks for your pups. The humanization of pets is a megatrend. And that's why we see dog spas, dog hotels, dog ice cream, dog people just gave it a new twist. A members only park for dog parents who want a community who Want convenience, they want it all wrapped in status. They get it all right here. So how can you make sure that you're building in a growing market? Well, number one, check Google Trends. Type in your category or your keywords and look at the five year trend line. Is it climbing? Is it falling? This isn't make or break, but it'll give you a good pulse on consumer demand. Number two, search for industry reports. Go to Statista or Ibis World and see what they say. If spending in your category has grown year over year for the past five years, let's say that's a very good sign. If it's declining, you might want to pump the brakes. And number three, walk the streets. Talk to people. Count how many new stores or services are opening in your niche. Ask friends and family if they've bought something in that category in the last few years. You might be surprised. Okay, let's say you know, now that the market is growing, it's time to go out, make a product and sell it, right?
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Wrong. We're not going to make anything yet. We're definitely not going to spend a dollar. First, we're going to validate the idea. We're going to see if anybody wants this thing, if they're willing to hand over their cold hard cash. Because if not, we're not interested. And that takes me to lesson number two. Test the market before you make anything. Once you've decided on a category and a product that you might want to sell you, you need to validate demand. Make sure customers are begging for that thing. Begging. And do it before you sell it. You do this with the minimum viable concept. Y' all know the minimum viable product, the mvp. But JD don't have time for that. Why test a product when you can just test a concept? And here's exactly how we do it. Number one, whip up a one page website. You can head over to lexflows.com, it's an AI powered website builder. It's also amazing. It's a company that I own, which makes me totally biased, but it doesn't make me wrong. It is a great product. So go to lexflows, type in what you want to sell and who you want to sell it to. Lexflows will build you a sales page in 60 seconds. Check. Now you got your website. Number two, we're going to create some Google Ads promoting the thing that you want to sell. So head over to Google Ads and log in or set up an account if you don't have one already. And to actually write the ads you can use my AI ads maker. Head over to JohnDavids.com ads, download it. It's 100% free and it'll write you the best ads for Google and Facebook. Better than anything you could write, Trust me. Set your budget for like 12 bucks a day. That's all you need. And you can run the ads for a week. That's $84 in total ad spend. Number three, run your ads to that page and see if people want it. Now this part is important. And speak to a lawyer to make sure that this is okay wherever you live. If they click the buy now button on or book a time to speak with you, whatever, show them a note that says this product is coming soon. Then grab their email address and add them to your wait list. If you have lots of interest, awesome. People want it now. If you want to get gangsta, go ahead and take pre orders on the spot. Collect the cash, then make the product. Or take your time. Just capture emails and you got a full list to contact when you're ready to sell. And guys, if there's no interest, just go back to step one and repeat. You see businesses fail when they make stuff nobody wanted in the first place, so just skip that. Your minimum viable concept will tell you everything you need to know before you waste a whole bunch of time and money. And there's something else happening here too. It's something that dog people does really well. You guys notice. You notice how much a community accelerates a brand like this, how people rally behind a business they love? Well that's lesson three. You gotta create community early. Now dog People is kind of cheating because they have community built into the brand. The whole product is kind of like a dog community. In fact, they probably started building community long before they ever built their brand, which is a real cheat code. Everyone who joins this club is a dog person. And this is something every business can do. Keep this in mind. Community isn't about your product. It's about the people. You leverage those people to sell more of your product. But you gotta do this in a way that feels real. It's gotta feel like, ah, I can't believe I'm gonna say this word. It's gotta feel authentic. Bleh. I feel icky just saying it's such an overused word. Right? But it's true. Here's how you can build your authentic community. Foreign.
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So I can tell you about Influicity. That's the little marketing agency I started in my apartment about 10 years ago. Well, fast forward it is not so little anymore. Influicity works with some of the biggest brands in the world, building customer communities that drive revenue. We do this through influencers, podcasts, paid media, social media, content, AI and so much more. You can learn more@influicity.com and hey, while you're there, check out our case studies. We have a lot of them. That's influicity.com number one. There's gotta be something at the core of it. There's gotta be something they care about, whether that's dogs or sports or money or makeup or travel, coffee, hunting, fitness, tech, whatever. Now, I'm assuming your product takes care of that piece, something they care about. But just make sure you got a solid foundation because that's at the core of your community. Number two, give people a place to gather. This can be a physical space if you've got a store or you're doing a monthly meetup or an annual event. Or it can be a digital space, a Discord server, a Facebook group, a WhatsApp. Number three, give them the space to shape the culture of that community. You can guide them with themes and general policies, but the members of your community will define the culture. They'll show up, they'll hang out, they'll become regulars, they'll build rituals of their own. We see this from Vuori to Harley Davidson. Every brand that has a built in community, they make it themselves. And when you have a community, that's when you've got serious brand gravity. Community takes your product out of yucky commodity land and turns you into a thing people need to have if they want to be part of that community. I want to drill down on a couple examples of this because it's really happening all over the place and we take it for granted. Sports, right? You're a fan of a sports team. You get together with your buddies to watch the games. That's your community. And that team, the product is at the center of it. You need the team to have the community. The product is at the core. Music. If you're a fan of an artist or a brand, you go to a concert with your friends. That's the community piece. That's the important layer. And the artist or the band, they are the product. They're at the center of it all. High school. When you go to high school, it quite literally forms your identity and that's your community. Those are your friends. The school itself is the product. It's at the center of it all. You want to be part of that community. The school is really important. We see this everywhere. Tech, food, real estate, politics. Create a community around what you sell and people are going to feel like you're not selling anything at all. Okay, Okay. I want to share something that took me way too long to learn, caused me so much heartache for so many years. And I don't want you to suffer like your main man, JD did. I'm going to give you a shortcut. I'm going to lay it all out right now. Markets can grow for a very long time. Markets can keep growing and keep growing and never stop. If you think you're late to a market, if you think it's too big, it's already too crowded, it's too mature, it's played out, it's past its prime. Let me tell you, my friend, you're probably wrong. Because many markets never, ever stop growing. They morph, they shapeshift, players come and go, but the market continues to live on forever. Here's a really simple example. Real estate. If you rewind the clock 250 years, let's go back to the independence of the USA, 1776, and you're in New York City. Around that time, NYC had probably about a population of 25 or 30,000 people. So you think, hey, this place looks pretty good. People are here. Maybe I'll buy some real estate here on this little island called Manhattan. You could have purchased a property back then, Manhattan, for about $2,000 in 1776. And I'm using 2025 DOL. Inflation adjusted, you're looking at 2 grand for a property in 1776. Now, what if you hesitated and you waited a couple decades, you weren't quite ready. So maybe in the year 1800, you want to pick up that same property in Manhattan. Well, now It'll cost you $10,000. Shoot, shoot. You're too late. That's a 400% increase. Why would you invest in Manhattan real estate now? Well, you'd actually be very smart to invest because fast forward another century and that same property will run you $40,000 in the year 1900. And in 1950, it'll be 250,000. And in the year 2000, it'll be 1.5 million. And guys, today you're not touching that property in Manhattan for less than $5 million. So that's a 75,000% increase from $2,000 to $5 million. Again, this is all inflation adjusted. Now, this is of course, a weird example because you wouldn't be alive to experience all this yourself. But I'm giving you this example, for that exact reason, at every point over the last 250 years, it doesn't matter when. You could have reasonably thought you were late to the game and you'd be wrong. And every single time. So if you're a real estate investor and you're looking at Manhattan today, you could say, well, we've reached the top. The market can't possibly get any more expensive. And I'm here to tell you you're probably wrong. It can still go up a whole heck of a lot. When I founded my agency, influicity back in 2015, the premise was an influencer marketing agency. That's all we did from day one, influencer marketing. And I gotta tell you, in 2015, I, I already felt kind of late to the party. There were companies with names like Full Screen and Maker Studios that were doing influencer marketing at a much bigger level. They were all getting funded, raising lots of money, and then one or two of them actually sold. They had big exits. And I literally felt like, oh my God, what am I doing? This thing is over. I'm too late. In 2015, guys. Well, guess what? In 2025, it's very clear that influencer marketing is only getting bigger. There's different kinds of influencers on different platforms in different categories with different ways to make money. And at Influicity, we run influencer programs for lots and lots and lots of brands. We've also grown into lots of other kinds of digital marketing, which is awesome. But you can clearly see how I thought I was too late in 2015 and I was so, so wrong. Now, the only real exception to this is when you a winner take all market. Those are very rare. Google did it with search. Facebook did it with social networking. And even those guys will get disrupted. We already see it happening. It's just much more expensive. But assuming your market is not dominated by a multi trillion dollar company that has 90% market share, trust me, you're gonna be okay. You're not too late. So get to work. Go make some money. Subscribe and follow me here. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com.
- [17:28]
This episode is brought to you by my Playbook website selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com Playbook Most companies want websites that look nice. But a lot of nice looking websites don't sell. What you really want is a website that grabs attention, builds trust, and turns visitors into buyers while you sleep. That's what this Playbook gives you. Based on 10 years of work we've done at Influicity, optimizing websites for 7, 8 and 9 figure brands. Download the Playbook now at johndavids.com playbook that's johndavids.com Playbook.