Michael Satterlee filmed himself putting a can of Dr. Pepper into a cooler he had made. The video was low budget. It has since collected more than 50 million views and almost 2.5 million likes on Instagram, and his company, Cruise Cup, now takes up to $300,000 in sales a month.
Satterlee is a teenager. His explanation for the demand, given to Business Insider and reported by Entrepreneur, is unglamorous: viewers "just hadn't seen anything like it before."
That sentence is the whole mechanism. The product was not better than the alternatives in any measurable way. It was unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things stop a thumb. Novelty is not a strategy that lasts, but it is a legitimate way to buy the first hundred thousand customers without a media budget.
What Satterlee says next is the part worth keeping. He advises companies against posting product pitches too often, and says business accounts should be "disguised" and post like influencers. "At the end of the day, what followers are is an audience," he said. "People aren't just going to follow a product. You want to build a community."
That is a correction most small businesses need. A feed of product photographs is a catalog, and nobody subscribes to a catalog voluntarily. The account that grows is the one that gives people a reason to return between purchases.
His three operating rules are simple enough to test this week: track what is currently working on the platform, publish fresh material rather than recycled promotion, and reply to the people who comment.
The second business in the story uses the same tools for the opposite purpose. Kirk and Jacob McKinney founded Junk Teens, a junk removal service operating in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, while they were teenagers. The company reached $3 million in revenue last year and is on track for more than $5 million this year.
Their social accounts are large: more than 213,000 followers on TikTok, 269,000 on Instagram, 69,000 subscribers on YouTube. They are not primarily used to find customers. They are used to find staff.
Most of the company's employees are high school or college students, paid about $25 to $30 an hour including tips. "A company is just a group of people at the end of the day, and when you see yourself in these videos and the social media's capturing it, you're a part of that, and it really elevates the culture," Kirk told Entrepreneur. He adds that the platforms "actually attract more people who want to work with us."
Read those two businesses together and a useful distinction appears. Satterlee has a product with a low price, an impulse purchase and effectively unlimited supply, so attention converts directly into revenue. The McKinneys sell a local service with a hard capacity limit, because every job needs a crew and a truck. For them, extra demand is worth very little without extra labor. So they point their audience at the constraint that actually binds.
That is the question worth asking before writing another marketing post. What is the thing your business runs out of first? For some it is customers. For a great many service businesses it is people who will do the work well, and no amount of demand generation fixes that.
There is a second observation buried in the junk removal story. A business that most people would call unappealing has turned its own visibility into a recruitment advantage, in a labor market where small service firms routinely say they cannot hire. Showing the work, honestly and often, turned out to be worth more than a job advertisement.
Neither company invented anything. One made an ordinary object look unfamiliar. The other made an ordinary job look like something you would want to be seen doing.