The Small Business Big Marketing Podcast with Tim Reid · Tim Reid

Renae Bunster's Fiery Path to Success: Transforming a Passion for Hot Sauce into a Thriving Food & Beverage Business | 662

December 18, 2023·51 min·1 clip

Founder story

The chilli market has plenty of noise now. Tim brings Renee Bunster back five years after her first appearance to talk through what has happened with the hot sauce business. The sauce has not been sitting quietly on the shelf. She has added tequila and a pre-mixed cocktail brand, which pulls the chat into the kind of nearby products that make sense when the audience already knows the flavour. Then Tim latches onto the email work. Her long, weird, joke-heavy emails do what a plain product pitch usually cannot: they get people to keep reading. Instead of sending a bare sales nudge, Renee fills the emails with photos, bits of dialogue, observations, odd jokes, and headlines that sound almost too strange to ignore. Tim loves the banner-ad idea. His point is simple enough. Plenty of business owners send dull reminders, but Renee makes people scroll before the sauce even turns up. The headlines wander through a bear that ate cocaine, koalas, and body jokes, with chilli sauce waiting lower down. It sounds loose, but there is a plan inside it. Tim treats it as an EDM strategy worth borrowing, because inbox attention still exists when the email has a bit of life. Social media comes back into it too. Renee says she drops strong Facebook or Instagram posts into the email, so readers get that social hit while they are at work. Useful, a bit cheeky, and not precious. Tim keeps pushing past the idea that email has to mean spam or clutter. The ending lands on doing the work. Ideas stay soft until someone actually acts on them.

As heard by us

A founder update with a practical lesson in email-led marketing.

Renee Bunster's return frames the episode as a check-in on a hot chilli sauce business that has widened into tequila and pre-mixed cocktails. Tim Reid keeps bringing the discussion back to the practical marketing takeaway, especially the long EDM approach that folds storytelling…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a smarter way to sell without sounding like a sales email.

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