Simon sits down with Kieran Ball, co-founder of Cub & Fox, a premium kids' art brand built around a no-mess water painting scroll, for an honest conversation about scaling a product business from the garage to the US market.
Kieran and his wife Mayra sold 100 units off a Facebook parent group during COVID, without running a single ad. They sat on the idea for two years, launched at the end of 2022, sold out their first three production runs, and Kieran quit his job by March 2023.
The US expansion, launched mid-February this year, has already hit 3X Australian revenue inside six months.
We go deep into the year-two revenue cliff that nearly broke the business, how Kieran spent six months blaming an agency before realising the problem was him, and why he binned a detailed unit economics spreadsheet to go make ads instead. We also cover how a buy-two offer unlocked a broader audience without touching the product, the mindset shift that reframed advertising from a necessary evil to an act of value creation, and what it actually takes to scale creative output when you're a two-person team with three kids at home.
This episode is about how getting aligned, personally and commercially, turns a great product into a business that can actually scale.
