The Email that Helped Change the Trajectory of AmmoSquared

Last December we received an email that didn't really impact me at the time, but now as I look back I see that it probably helped change the course of our entire company.

Here is the email with the sender's name removed for privacy: 

12/1/23

Hello, 

My name is xxxxx, I recently had the same idea as what you guys are doing with your company. My first step was to see if this was a service provided already, a quick google search of “automated ammo delivery” led me to your website. 

So my next question is, why haven’t I heard of Ammo Squared yet?! Most of what I consume for advertisements is outdoor/shooting type content. I get hit over the head with SDI (Sonoran desert institute) advertisements all the time, almost annoyingly so. Your service is something I would actually buy into as well as I think a lot of other people, we’ve just never heard of it! 

Is there any reason in particular that you do not advertise more aggressively…? Better social media presence…? 

I look forward to hearing back from you, take care! 

And here is how I replied: 

Hi xxxxx, 

Thanks for the email. Yep, we've been around for 8 years now, started in 2015. In the past we've primarily relied on word of mouth marketing which has grown us consistently but gradually. We're not on social media (at least not the Zuck, or "only do harm" Google properties). We are on Gab and X currently. In 2024, we'll have a booth at the NRA show for the first time so more people will get exposure to AmmoSquared. Honestly, we expect this year will be a breakout year for us: the proverbial overnight success that took 8 years. ;)

Take care!

Dan

Dan Morton, CEO, AmmoSquared Inc

I was thinking back to how this email started us on a path that has resulted in some incredible growth the past few months. It is funny how an idea can be planted and you don't realize it at the time, but looking back you see how it germinated and grew fruit. 

Let me give you some background so this makes more sense.

From the time we started in 2015 until this year (early 2024) we’ve relied on low cost marketing techniques to attract new customers. As I mentioned in the email reply above, we've primarily relied on word of mouth (refer-a-friend). We also have used other channels such as affiliates, giveaways, event sponsorships, email list sends and some limited social media. We’ve tried to keep it cheap but effective. It worked… up to a point.

Honestly, we’ve grown steadily every year but have never had a breakout year. Here are our annual active customer growth rate numbers for reference: 

2019: 60% 

2020: 248%

2021: 61%

2022: 12%

2023: 17%

As you can see, 2020 was a big year for us - but for obvious reasons. We had tremendous growth because gun owners couldn’t find ammunition and our customers were able to receive their stockpiled ammo with just a few clicks. Word of mouth was huge that year. We actually had so many new customers that we had to turn off sign ups and put people on a waitlist!

Those new signups from the waitlist helped carry us through 2021 but then our growth slowed in 2022 and 2023 because we were doing the same old strategies we used in previous years.

This year is different. 

Getting back that email I received in December 2023, it started me thinking: "Why DO so many people know about the Sonoran Desert Institute?" I knew exactly what he was talking about because I'd seen SDI on multiple gun related YouTube channels. We needed a new strategy. We needed to try new channels and truly get our name out there to the community through influencers and “guntubers”.

Earlier this year we made a change and invested heavily in influencers advertising. Here are some of the places you might have seen/heard about us: 

Armed America Radio

Armed Attorneys

Ben Ferguson Show

Colion Noir

Dana Loesch Show

Guns and Gadgets

Johnny B

Langley Outdoors

Liberty Doll

Live from America (Rumble)

Military Arms Channel

Officer Tatum Show

Prepper Broadcast Network

Prepping 2.0

Public Square

Sabastian Gorka

Verdict with Ted Cruz

Veteran Biker (Rumble)

And of course starting this month: Garand Thumb

What a difference actively getting your name out to the community makes! For a reference point, we've added more customers this MONTH then we did in the entire year of 2020 - our biggest year on record. Said another way as a percent of customer growth, the month of July is showing 17.9% vs the entire year of 2023 which showed 17.3% growth.

Holy smokes!

In fact, we’re seeing such tremendous growth this month that our credit card processor couldn’t raise our upper transaction limit fast enough and we had some transactions decline because of it. (It is fixed now with an extra buffer just to be sure.) That's incredible growth folks.

Since we aren’t a public company, we don’t publish financial statements but just to give you a sense of our scale at this moment: we just passed a major milestone of $10 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue)!

This is a HUGE revenue milestone for any business but especially for one pioneering a new approach to automatically stockpiling ammo, which as you might have guessed, is not something people intuitively understand right away. It's not like traditional ecommerce, which honestly would be an easier sell.

So I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of our new customers that heard about us through those channels above and signed up recently. I think you'll love what we've built and I hope you'll be part of our community for many years. I also especially want to thank those of you that have been with us for many years already, your willingness to try something new has helped give us the steam we needed to get to where we are today. Thank you.

We started out of our garage but we are no mom and pop shop any longer! 

We’re now entering a new phase for AmmoSquared Inc. That means we’ll be expanding across the board. We'll be adding new functionality to our web app, new caliber options, and everything in between. It also means we’ll be adding new warehouse locations as we grow. We're already looking for more ways to add capacity to our Nampa warehouse and looking ahead at the next location.

Like every growing company, we're going to be on the hunt for good people.

If you are interested in joining AmmoSquared someday, maybe not immediately, go ahead and shoot us over your resume and/or LinkedIn profile so we can keep you in mind as we grow. As a company, we would much rather hire people that know and love AmmoSquared. Shoot it over to: hiring@ammosquared.com and we'll reach out if there is a need.

[I realize I have been absent from writing blog posts lately but this blog post will kick off my return to the digital pen. I plan to publish once a week and sometimes more often if I have something that needs to be said sooner.]