Justin Mares, co-founder of Kettle and Fire and Perfect Keto, joins Sam and Shaan to break down how both brands scaled to $100M+ combined revenue. He walks through his four types of side hustles (buy an asset, leverage existing platforms, niche product + paid acquisition, leverage your expertise), covers specific deals like the Fomo Shopify app acquisition, non-alcoholic wine with Surely, campsite Airbnb arbitrage, and a wearable accountability challenge. Also covers DuckDuckGo, testosterone health, and a VA-for-every-two-employees productivity system.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Justin Mares (guest)
Introduction: Justin Mares and the $100M Health Brands [00:00:00]
Sam: Justin, do you know what you’re getting into with what we do here?
Justin: Yeah, I know the deal.
Sam: Good. Quick intro: I’ve known Justin since 2013. We both had roommate businesses when we first met. He moved to San Francisco. He introduced me to — actually, he just met a girl in an elevator on the way up to our meeting who became his girlfriend for years.
Justin: She was a tiny bit drunk and tried to hit a button in the elevator, but it was one of those fancy ones with no buttons — an attendant sends you. So I made fun of her for that, and in the short ride said we should hang out. We had been friends ever since.
Sam: Did I spot early that Justin was going to do great things? We were both scheming at 22. He had the roommate thing, I had the roommate thing. Neither of those worked out, but that’s a stepping stone. He then co-wrote a book called Traction with the DuckDuckGo guy, was doing Udemy courses, bought cars, had Airbnbs. Then he started this thing called Kettle and Fire.
I thought it was the dumbest idea I’d ever heard. He was going to sell a hard good. Then he said it was food. Then he said it was bone broth. I was like — bone broth people drink bone broth? This was before DTC was even a word. I was completely wrong.
Justin: We thought we were building a $20 to $40K/month side hustle based on Google search volume. It turned into something much bigger.
Sam: And then he also started Perfect Keto with his neighbor Anthony — the ketogenic supplements brand. I’ve heard the two businesses combined hit $100 million in revenue. Is that true?
Justin: Yeah. We stopped disclosing revenue publicly, but I can say the two businesses combined did north of $100 million in 2019.
Sam: That’s wild. Kettle and Fire — you raised money?
Justin: We bootstrapped the first 18 months. Raised a tiny bit under $1 million, ran another 16 months, then raised $16 million in 2018. About half went to secondary, half into the business. Getting secondary was personally really meaningful — I still had most of my net worth wrapped up in the company, and it let me feel okay pushing for a bigger outcome. Amazing people are expensive. Being able to hire them with other people’s money — that’s a no-brainer.
The Four Types of Side Hustles [00:15:00]
Sam: You have a blog post that’s been sent to me multiple times. You break down side hustles into four types. Run us through it.
Justin: The framing first: this is not about building the next Facebook. This is about creating cash flow quickly, without waiting seven years for something to pay off. If you’re a Collison brother, go raise money and build something massive. But for most people, entrepreneurship is a means to an end — the lifestyle, the financial freedom. The faster you get there, the better.
Side hustle type 1: Buy an existing asset.
Find an asset you can purchase and upgrade using your skills, connections, or resources. Buy it for $X, improve it, and capture the value you created.
Examples: buy an email newsletter and grow it. Buy a software business and double the price. I did this with a Shopify app called Fomo — I’ll get to that. You did this with a Vegas apartment building.
Sam: My friend Ramon bought a software app doing $20K/month. All he did was double the price. Revenue doubled. Done.
Justin: Classic mistake with engineer-led businesses — they’re priced too low. I bought Fomo, a Shopify app. It was doing $14K/month at the time. We paid less than $400K. We bought 85 percent of the business. The founder was a solo founder who wanted out and agreed to seller financing — we paid him in monthly chunks over 20 months using the app’s own revenue. My partner and I came out of pocket zero dollars. We had to put in maybe $5K each for developers the first couple months — but that was it.
Sam: How big is it now?
Justin: About $95K/month.
Sam: That’s a great deal.
Justin: Great for him too. He’s gotten his time back, started other companies, and when we eventually exit, he’ll probably make more than he would have made running it himself for the last three years.
Side hustle type 2: Leverage an existing platform with built-in demand.
Find a marketplace where the demand already exists, and you just need to supply it. You’re the genie — people are already entering wishes into a magic box. You just need to be the answer.
I did this with Airbnb. In 2013 we had the third-ranked Airbnb listing in San Francisco. We rented out the living room most nights, and over summers we’d rent the whole place for $15 to $18K/month, paying $3K/month — incredible. I also did it with Udemy. I made an SQL for Marketers course in five days in my bedroom. No great production quality. But I put it up when there was almost nothing in the data analytics for marketers section, and it sold about $60K over the next couple years. I still get about $1K/month from it.
The playbook: find an emerging platform before it’s crowded, be early to the supply side, and you benefit from the platform’s distribution.
Sam: The waist trainer example from your post — tell that.
Justin: A girl was building a waist trainer business. I asked how she was growing so fast without spending on marketing. She said she looked at YouTube and saw nobody owned the keyword “waist trainers.” So she created a YouTube channel that was the answer to every search question about waist trainers — how to size one, how to wear one, do they work. All her sales came from that. She was doing a few million in revenue with $1 million in profit per year, off of one channel alone.
Side hustle type 3: Launch a niche product with paid acquisition.
Find a gap — more Google search volume than you’d expect, no good supply — make a product, and buy keywords to sell it. Your goal is not a $100M business. Your goal is $1 million/year. There are almost infinite niches where you can be first and win.
Example: a company making vests for dogs with spikes on the outside so coyotes don’t attack them. Amazing niche product. Not going public, but could be an incredible business.
That was what Kettle and Fire was going to be. We saw 2,000 people a month searching for “buy bone broth online.” We thought we could convert 10 percent, do 200 orders at $50/month — a solid side hustle. We had no idea the category would take off like it did.
Side hustle type 4: Leverage your unique expertise.
Use what only you can do. Consulting, a course, an advisory role. This is more personal and depends on what you’ve built. I’d put Shirley — the non-alcoholic wine company I incubated — more in the “leverage your expertise” bucket. I used my DTC and health brand knowledge to validate the category, line up supply, recruit a CEO, and raise investment. I put in close to $100K and about 5 to 10 hours a week to spin it up.
The Fomo Acquisition Deep-Dive [00:28:00]
Sam: Tell us more about how you found Fomo and what you looked for.
Justin: I was looking for assets to buy with seller financing. Fomo is a social proof app for Shopify — it shows notifications like “John from Texas just bought X” to build FOMO in other shoppers. Clean product. Engineer-led, so priced poorly. Great underlying demand.
The structure: bought 85 percent with seller financing. Paid in monthly installments over 20 months out of the app’s revenue. Nearly zero cash out of pocket. We knew we could market it better than the original founder, and we had e-commerce connections that would help us grow it.
Sam: It’s basically a cash flow positive acquisition from day one.
Justin: Exactly. You use the asset’s revenue to buy the asset. That’s the ideal structure for buying a small internet business.
Campsite Airbnb: The Next Big Short-Term Rental Play [00:35:00]
Justin: I’m bullish on campsite rentals on platforms like Hipcamp. These are exploding and supply-constrained. Basic campsites — water, toiletries, the fundamentals — in high-demand areas. It’s way less management overhead than Airbnb. You’re not dealing with stove burners and AC.
The numbers: I modeled this at a 30 to 40 percent cash-on-cash return. Sounds like the greatest thing ever. The only reason I haven’t done it is I get higher returns from my time elsewhere.
Shaan: I want someone to run this. If you’re listening and you’re in an area with high Hipcamp demand, have a camper, and want to build a short-term rental business — email me at shaan@shaanpuri.com. I’ll put up the cash to buy RVs, you run the operation, we split it.
Justin: These platforms are here to stay. A lot of venture capital is going into them. The demand side is built. You just need to build supply.
Surely: The Non-Alcoholic Wine Opportunity [00:42:00]
Justin: We launched Surely earlier this year — surley.com — a clean label, high-quality non-alcoholic wine brand.
My thesis: Bud Light bought three Super Bowl spots that year. One was for Bud Zero. The non-alcoholic beer category is mature, the spirits category has some good options, but wine had nothing. No clean label, high-quality non-alc wine. So we built the first one with real winemaking talent.
Shaan: I’ve been talking about this space for four years.
Sam: That’s not a brag. That’s a knock on you. He took the action.
Justin: The category tailwinds are real. Gen Z doesn’t drink the way prior generations did. My whole peer group at 30 has shifted — one glass of wine at dinner instead of going out and getting drunk. People are opting for cannabis, ketamine, psychedelics — compounds that don’t give you the hangover or the 30 extra pounds of a year of heavy drinking.
The investment: close to $100K to launch. About 5 to 10 hours per week. If this becomes a $10 million/year brand doing $2 million in profit — that’s a realistic outcome — it could sell for 1x revenue, meaning we turned $100K into $10 million in equity. And I don’t even think it’ll take 6 years. Probably 2.
The Wearable Challenge: Accountability as a Business Model [00:48:00]
Justin: The Wearable Challenge — wearablechallenge.com. This came out of an experiment I ran. I sent continuous glucose monitors from Levels to 50 people including Sam and Shaan, put everyone in a WhatsApp group, and gave them a financial incentive: pay in upfront, get $25/day back for every day you stayed in range. If you missed, you lost the money for that day.
Sam: I loved it. I was texting Justin every day. I was into it.
Justin: The thing I learned: that tiny financial incentive — where a brownie isn’t a $4 brownie, it’s a $29 brownie — goes a really long way. We’ve filled up 50-person cohorts every month since February with literally no marketing. One person has gone through it seven times and lost about 50 pounds.
Sam: The opportunity is: everybody wants the outcome, everybody wants to eat right and lose weight. The biggest hack isn’t knowledge, it’s accountability. This could be Weight Watchers 2.0.
Justin: I think there’s something here. We’re thinking about what expanding might look like — maybe premium health boot camps in Austin or LA where you handle meals, provide the monitors, provide the whole infrastructure. We haven’t gone full-time on it yet.
DuckDuckGo: The Under-the-Radar Search Giant [00:55:00]
Sam: You’re friends with Gabe, the guy who started DuckDuckGo. What’s your read on that business?
Justin: I’m very bullish. DuckDuckGo is the counterpoint to Google — privacy as a core value. They’ve been building for 12+ years, and I knew Gabe when it was him and one other person, quietly growing.
The flat part of their curve lasted a long time. But he kept getting small bits of positive feedback from communities like Hacker News — DuckDuckGo is great for Stack Overflow searches, great for specific niche queries — and invested incrementally to make the product better. After 12 to 14 years the product is genuinely good, and the trend line for big tech is getting more invasive, not less.
They do north of $100 million in revenue now, I believe. But the key was: they never pivoted. Privacy was the core value from day one, and the world has moved toward caring about that. It’s not a side hustle — it’s a 12-year bet that paid off.
The Automation Officer Idea [01:02:00]
Justin: One of the things that’s made us most efficient at Kettle and Fire: we have basically one virtual assistant hire for every two employees. We give every new hire an internal training on how to use VAs and get all repetitive work off their plate.
I wish I could hire someone — an “automation officer” — who sits in on product, marketing, and logistics team meetings and says: here are five things we should automate. Then just does that, continuously, across the company.
Sam: That’s a great consulting or services business. There are obviously tools and VAs — but someone who makes it systematic and teaches the company how to think about it is different.
Justin: We probably spend $10K/month across a 33-person company on VAs. That’s how we’ve kept the team lean. VAs handle everything people uniquely don’t need to do. The team focuses only on what they uniquely can do.
Sam: Most people know they should use VAs. Most people don’t know how to do it well. You said this was one of the top things your readers wanted to learn. That’s a business — productized VA training for small DTC teams.
The Purchase History Dating App [01:08:00]
Shaan: My friend Nick screens potential dates with a phone call before they meet. One question he asks immediately: what’s your credit history, do you have debt?
Sam: Not your credit rating — he wants to look at your purchase history. If you shop at Whole Foods, if you go to the gym, if you run up bar tabs — that tells him compatibility faster than a Hinge profile.
Justin: I think there’s something real here. Where you spend your resources tells you a lot about someone. A Hinge profile optimizes for attraction. Purchase history would optimize for lifestyle compatibility.
Shaan: The problem with dating apps is the action doesn’t match the stated preference. When we ran our roommate matching app, people said they wanted certain things and then met someone and said forget it, never mind. Dating optimizes for getting to date one. After that people are on their own.
Justin: Maybe this works better as a matchmaking service — curated, high-intent — than a broad-based app. But the insight is interesting.
Health Practices That Actually Move the Needle [01:12:00]
Justin: The things that matter most for testosterone and baseline health:
Diet. Cut out vegetable oils. Five to ten years from now, linoleic acid — the compound in vegetable oils — will be as well-known as trans fats. The inflammation damage is significant. Replace with olive oil, avocado oil, animal fats, butter, ghee.
Sleep.
Reduce inflammation. Includes the above, plus reducing endocrine-disrupting compounds. BPA-free is step one, but the whole class of phthalates — synthetic materials in plastics, food packaging, personal care products — are affecting testosterone and hormonal systems. They’re everywhere. Avoiding them requires getting serious about what you use daily.
Avoid processed foods. Not just a cliche — the degree of processing correlates with inflammation.
Sam: Your house sounds insane. Water filtration system 25 feet tall. Glass Tupperware only. No microwave. No non-stick pans — only cast iron and ceramic. I saw you got a sauna.
Justin: I have a sauna, yeah. The water filtration system alone made the plumbers say they’d never installed anything like it.
My overall framework: these things are mostly preventive at my baseline. If you have a high health baseline, you won’t feel a dramatic shift from adding these. But if your baseline is average — poor sleep, high stress, excess weight — you’ll feel a material difference in 20 to 30 days after cleaning up the inputs.
The bigger opportunity: someone should build a Wirecutter for this space. Honest, research-backed reviews of supplements and interventions. Does this actually do anything? Skip the woo-woo. The challenge is that influencers get more attention by talking about extreme stuff than by saying “just eat real food.” That’s a trust-building problem, not a product problem.