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He befriended members of the American Peanut Council, the industry’s largest trade group. He went on a voracious reading spree, learning about the history of modern peanut butter.

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Purely out of curiosity, Mount began spending some of his free time studying the niche world of peanut butter. They weren’t looking to start a D2C peanut butter empire.īut the market had other plans for their product.

The couple was also raising a child - and another one was on the way. Mount already made six-figures running an SEO consultancy, a job which monopolized most of his time. “It became an excellent testing ground - and a perfect way for us to iterate.”īy the end of the summer, Nerdy Nuts was the most popular booth at the farmers market, routinely bringing in ~$1k every Sunday.įor Mount and Peterson, Nerdy Nuts was only intended to be a low-stress side hustle. “We spent hours and hours in front of live customers, whom we were able to see test out products in real time,” says Mount. The farmers market was the ideal focus group for a new product. That summer, she and Mount launched Nerdy Nuts ( ~$2.5k upfront investment in total) and began selling their first two flavors, honey roasted and white chocolate, at a local farmers market. In early 2019, Peterson, then pregnant and on the hunt for a new gig, decided to finally put the grinder to use. But shortly after the purchase, the couple moved to Rapid City, South Dakota - and the machine ended up gathering dust in the garage. In the summer of 2017, he logged on to eBay and bought a used Olde Tyme PN1 nut grinder for $870. Peterson (left) and Mount (right), with their son (Craig Mount) “So I just decided to give it a shot on my own.” “The shop closed down and I thought, ‘Where do I get this stuff now?’” recalls Mount. Mount would often grab lunch at a nearby eatery that sold jars of flavored peanut butter. The couple’s path into peanut butter began around 2015.Īt the time, Peterson was a clothing store manager at the Chapel Hills Mall in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The “Holy Grail” of a product feedback loopīut it’s also a cautionary tale about the unglamorous underbelly of overnight success.

The underutilized value of TikTok as an influencer tool.

It’s a case study in marketing, which touches on: Nerdy Nuts’ journey is every entrepreneur’s dream: Create a cool product. What began as a tiny side hustle at a farmers market in South Dakota had ballooned into a monster. They faced a backlog of $500k+ worth of orders, a depletion of inventory, and thousands of emails from cranky customers.

In the span of a few days, the couple had watched their sales multiply by 20x. Nerdy Nuts - the D2C peanut butter company they’d founded just 18 months earlier - had gone viral on TikTok. In August 2020, Craig Mount and Erika Peterson found themselves in an enviable position. Check out how their Collect tool helped Zack capture his ideas right here. This week, we’re giving you a glimpse behind our creative process with the help of our sponsor, WeTransfer. The Hustle is proud to deliver original longform journalism to your inbox every Sunday. How a tiny peanut butter company grew to $500k per month in sales This edition of The Hustle was brought to you by WeTransfer… Tools to move ideas. Nerdy Nuts leveraged TikTok, Supreme-style drops, and scarcity to scale their tiny operation into a peanut butter powerhouse.