The fact that these boxes keep turning into successful small businesses is amazing to me. Especially when this box already has a competitor that I thought of as soon as I figured out what it is.
The article wasn't as insightful as I hoped. Though I'm pretty impressed by that growth in 3 months. You often see things like SaaS growing much slower. I see people talk about taking years to scale to 20k in monthly recurring revenue and they did it in 3 months. I appreciate that they shared their story but it seems like mostly they built a following by sharing dog pictures on social media. Maybe that's the lesson?
They did drop some info about AdWords not working which sounds like the targeting might have been weak or just not good for their target audience. The 100 conversions from a 10,000 person email list is very low for email. Most lists outperform any other media in conversion rates from my experience but those lists are filtered before people even join. It sounds like they have a bunch of people that simply like dogs and decided to join the mailing list. I could see why the conversion could be so low in that case. I still think focusing on a better mailing sequence is an easily hanging fruit to attack but it looks like social is working for you. It would be interesting to see churn numbers in a few months.