Going Viral in Russia on TikTok

A friend and I started a new brand called Billy’s Sports Energy during covid.

In a weekend, I sprinted to get the business off the ground. I built and finished the e-commerce site on Shopify, hired two designers on Fiverr to submit multiple logo options, ordered packaging, and purchased the initial product in bulk — smelling salts (ammonia inhalants). It was a productive weekend.

If you’re not familiar with smelling salts, this is what they look like in action.

They are tiny sticks of ammonia used in professional sports to give athletes a quick boost of energy. They smell terrible, but they’re effective at increasing your respiratory rate and shocking your system.

Where did the idea come from?

Shaan Puri, from the podcast My First Million, was pitching listeners the idea of using smelling salts in the workplace — to replace caffeine. While I was intrigued by the concept, and admittedly have since used smelling salts to prep for early morning meetings, I felt that the easier segments to sell into would be sports.

As someone living in Halifax, NS , Canada— home of NHL stars Sidney Crosby, Nathan Mackinnon, and Brad Marchand — hockey was the natural place to start promoting our product because they’re ubiquitous in the NHL.

Despite their popularity among pro-players, there wasn’t (until now) a brand that owned that market.

There are multiple brands selling smelling salts to powerlifters, and making millions, but no-one targeting impact sports such as hockey, lacrosse, football, etc…

This seemed like great opportunity, so we promoted the brand on TikTok and the brand went viral overnight — literally. Overnight in Russia, our first post took off and reached 1.8 million views by the time we woke up the next morning.

We received hundreds of emails from Russia, tens of thousands of website visitors, and we sold out our store.

In the following days, we were on multiple calls with Russian lawyers, distributors, and retailers who were helping us to get the product into the country.

After weeks of discussing logistics with lawyers and distributors, the answer we received was that we would need to pay CAD $200k to get the product over the border, and ‘a lot more’ if sales went well.

The whole thing didn’t feel right, so we set our sights on Canada and the United States.

Back to TikTok.

While most of our attention was acquired in Russia, Google Analytics was showing that an increasing amount of traffic was being generated in the US and Canada.

We continued posting on TikTok and traffic from North America kept up.

The more we posted, the more sales we would get, and the more customers we acquired, the more we learned about who was interested in our product.

Shortly after our first post went viral, we went viral again — this time with over 3 million views, and our store was flooded with traffic and sales again.

We didn’t know exactly why our posts were going viral, but we knew that more posts = more sales.

Today we have a much better sense of what will work and what won’t, but at the end of the day, we believe it’s a volume game and there’s a lot of luck involved.