‘Shi* The Bed’ creator Renae Bunster left a career in journalism to create what is fast becoming Australia’s leading hot chilli sauce brand | #401

Tim

Love the story already, no wonder I got you on. So let’s just track back a little bit there. Did you go to Mexico looking for a business idea or were you lying on a hammock over there and it came to you in a moment of kind of clarity?

Renae

That I never thought it would be a business. Never thought it would be a business, but I was just backpacking. We’d packed up our lives in London and spent three or four months, maybe longer backpacking through Mexico and Central America. A lot of people do that when they’re in between countries, moving home from the UK to Australia and spent a lot of time lying on a beach. I honestly believe this is where all your best ideas come from. And when you’re lying on a beach with without the stresses of the world and I just thought about this recipe constantly about the recipe and pretty much the first batch of sauce I’ve made is the recipe that it is now.

Tim

Wow. What’s your background there, were you, prior to that a chef of sorts because you’ve been in journalism, haven’t you for a long time?

Renae

Had absolutely no food trading at all. I was a TV journo. I worked for Reuters, BBC, CNN, Associated Press.

Tim

Were you someone who liked to cook?

Renae

Not even.

Tim

I love these stories because I’m right now, I’m trying to figure out how the Renae journalist trained Renae, you know living the dream in London. Gets to Mexico and next thing she knows arrives back home in Australia to invent a hot sauce that’s gone nuts.

Renae

Within a year. Within a year I had people just demanding that I make more and more of it. I don’t know.

Tim

Were you looking for a business idea that could be yours as opposed to going back and working for the man

Renae

We already had a business, that was a thing. I think that we’d already tuned, we had our tuning fork set too. We want to be digital nomads and we set up the business making personalised children’s books which is a business that we could run from the Internet and we were setting that up when we got back to Perth and you know getting that all happening. So we were in the mindset of I want a business

Tim

So there was kind of an open door there you being you and hubby, correct

Renae

Yes me and Monkey Boy.

Tim

A listener, Renae, inform me that husband’s name is monkey boy prior to hitting record so very lovingly called Monkey Boy. I am assuming Renae.

Renae

Yes but all of the mistakes are so always down for monkey boy. Never me

Tim

Now you and my wife should get together. So you come back. You’ve gone, you know what I can’t find a hot sauce that really does it for me. You have come up with this recipe. You start making it the minute you get back home and over the course of a year, you’ve kind of finally gone, I think we’re onto something.

Renae

Yeah, I went to the chili festival in Perth and my parents already sold chili wine so I stood it alongside them one year, and we sold a thousand bottles in a weekend. Which is probably the most anyone’s ever sold at the chili festival for a bottle of sauce that’s over 10 dollars and that’s when I thought this is something I could actually make money out of here.

Tim

Was that Shit the Bed?

Renae

Wasn’t even Shit the Bed. That was that was a sauce that’s probably as hot as my weakest sauce now. So everything, all the weak ones gone and we just keep getting hotter and hotter.

Tim

So I’m guessing the thousand bottles that you sold at the chili festival which is essentially a market I guess they were done in a fairly home-style way out of the kitchen? Your own you know, bottles bought from a third party, handwritten labels and it was all fairly Hokey Pokey, correct

Renae

Yeah absolutely. Friends over thinking that they were going to have a glass of wine and a chat and I’m like sit.

Tim

Then you go okay we’ve just sold a thousand bottles time to get serious. What did getting serious look like

Renae

Well I kept doing that for about two years just at home because I was going to university and I actually studied a bit of marketing. But it was when I invented Shit the Bed at the end of 2014. Literally three years ago to the day and it went viral and my husband wasn’t working at the time. So he would sit in the lounge room boxing up bottles of sauce to package up and send out and I’d be in the kitchen cooking all day long. And we used every last glass bottle in Western Australia, every last bit of chili in Western Australia, and we just had to stop. And then we thought okay, we need to run a crowdfunding campaign because we need to go to a factory and the sky’s the limit with this. It didn’t matter how much we made it just sold instantly.

Tim

When you say it went viral, what went viral?

Renae

A photo, Shit the Bed.

Tim

I shit you not. You should have said it would be much better. You put a photo on Facebook

Renae

Yeah actually that one of the bottle shops that stocked my sauce he put it up. And I didn’t even think to put the photo on Facebook and Elliott at my liquor put it up and he just said Look at this Buns, it’s had 20 shares. And I thought oh maybe I’ll put one on my page and then I went ballistic. All of my fans shared it. Everyone who saw it shared it. They just thought that a hot sauce with that name was the funniest thing that ever seen

Tim

So let’s pull apart the name because it’s funny and there’s so many lines and we’re going to giggle all the way along this interview and that’s your life now because you came up with it. But I’ve seen a quote from you saying you attribute the success of Bunsters hot sauces in particular Shit the Bed, but you’ve got a hot sauce, you’ve got a chili chocolate as well, to the name Shit the Bed. Is that like the main thing that you attribute success to.

Renae

It gets people’s attention and buy it for the joke. But then they taste it and they taste that it’s actually one of the finest hot sauces that they’ve ever tasted. Because we put so much emphasis on ingredients, good quality ingredients. So when you go into a business like this you can either decide to be the cheapest or the best. And everyone in the middle just kind of has it has a lame outcome you know a so-so outcome. So you can either be that the best quality and the most expensive or you can be the cheapest and go after that Tobasco Sriracha kind of market. And we thought you know what let’s just go the best and I’ve never, never skimped on ingredients ever.

Tim

So the name was critical in getting attention but everyone want to get attention. You’re not going to get repeat purchase if the product’s no good. Your product is ace. What’s ace about it.

Renae

Ace? The heat. Honestly, the most expensive thing in a chili sauce is the chili. And that’s where the hot sauce makers skimp. They will add water because adding water makes the burn feel hotter. You know when you have those sauces they just like stab your tongue and it’s really uncomfortable. We don’t add any water. We get the finest organic bio dynamic chilis that we can get our hands on. And we often speak to our supplier and we just buy his whole years’ worth. It’s really hard to get the chili, that’s the one thing that stops us from being able to produce as much as we want. So that is really key. And hot sauce lovers, imagine people who love a really fine car like my neighbor has a Bentley. I’m into Porsches. You’re going to get in a Hyundai and you just know the difference. That’s the same thing with hot sauce lovers. You know they know the difference.

Tim

Gee it sounds like there’s a bit of a tribe already established for someone who gets it right in this category of hot sauces. There is a tribe ready to give you plenty of advice I’m guessing good and bad.

Renae

Yeah. And they went once you get into this scene which I never knew about. There’s lots of reviews online and there’s all these communities and clubs that there’s already this established tribe of hot sauce lovers. And I’ve got in there by having a really high-quality sauce and they write about it to each other. So this is one of my key business points when people say I want to start a business I quit my job. Find something that people are passionate about. Find one of these little subsets of the community or the world. Sub read it’s where people just write about something and half the job is done for you marketing wise because you impress them and they tell their friends and job done.

Tim

I like that. So what you’re saying is if there’s someone listening thinking I wouldn’t mind starting a business of mine. And there’s a few cubicle escapees who listen to the show, Renae who are stuck working for the man and just looking for that way out. So you reckon get on to something like a Reddit or a BuzzFeed and maybe see what’s getting the most response and where the passion is and maybe look for a product or service in that industry right.

Renae

Yeah. But make sure you’re interested in it as well. So yeah I see these blokes these middle aged blokes, we call them mammals.

Tim

Careful. Careful.

Renae

You know you’re one of them.

Tim

Well I had a guy bike riding. Are you referring to the blokes on bikes?

Renae

Yes. And they are they love it and they spend so much money on their bikes and on their lycra and their padded bomb pants. You look like testicles hanging out the back

Tim

So what about them

Renae

That is for instance a business where people absolutely passionate. You go down to a bike shop, a weekend bike shop. Those weekend warriors are down there spending the cash. Although they can buy a lot of it online. But you know that’s an example of something where people are passionate about it.

Tim

Its great advice. I understand another tipping point for Shit the Bed was getting your US Amazon listing

Renae

Yeah. There’s so many hurdles. Well, to get your sauce of a food product imported into America. One of my mentors is Carolyn Creswell who’s the Carmens music start. You know, started out in her kitchen and she said, why would you want to go to America. I once shipped 100 grands’ worth of stuff over there and it rotted on the dock because she didn’t have paperwork in order. So we realized at that point that there’s so much paperwork to do just even to get a food product into America. So once we got through all those hurdles, getting onto Amazon, imagine filling out an online form every day for three months and the computer just says no every day and it doesn’t tell you why it said no

Tim

You persevered?

Renae

Yeah. Just kept going, well monkey boy did.

Tim

He’s good like that old monkey?

Renae

Yeah. He doesn’t give up. That’s how he got me as a wife.

Tim

So you’ve gone and you finally got through all these forms and you’re gonna get listed on Amazon and again you know, the proof is in the pudding people buy it once. But you, the biggest hot sauce is Sriracha?

Renae

Yes Sriracha. And there’s just lots you know like craft beer. There’s a lot of craft hot sauce brands in America who’ve been around for five, 10 years who have got a lot of fans. They’re getting those repeat sales and what it all comes down to on Amazon, is the reviews. And we’re all like it, you want that social proof. You kind of want to buy this and you read the reviews and if people are saying what you want to hear, you buy it. And it took us six months basically to build up these reviews of people raving about us and now people just go, oh yeah I’ll get that.

Tim

Did you actively chase reviews or because Amazon does ask you to review after post purchase, doesn’t it

Renae

Yeah we did actually. We set up these links and Pixel’s and we were able to. We didn’t actually get the email addresses of our customers on Amazon so that’s one thing you need to keep in mind when people buy things through your website you get their address you get their name, you have them. With Amazon, we don’t know who they are but we were able to send follow up email somehow and request them and we made it really easy for them to leave reviews. So that’s a hot tip.

Tim

So you make it easy for everyone to give your money to leave reviews to be contacted, it’s just business 101 really isn’t? It amazing when you get it wrong. But so what you could do is you could communicate with them through Amazon and then have that conversation and get those reviews. I skipped over the crowdfunding Renae. I’m interested to know when you realize that you’re onto something. Did you do a crowdfunding campaign like Kickstarter or your own website and what were you offering

Renae

We ran it from our own Web site because a lot of people don’t realize about Kickstarter they take 8 percent of your money and they don’t do anything. They don’t promote you, they don’t send an e-mail out to everyone who’s backed other hot sauce campaigns. You have to do all your own marketing so we thought okay we’re pretty smart. Let’s run this from our own website. It’s all about the ticker. People just want to see that ticker going up so we built one ourselves and it was after Shit the Bed went viral. At that Christmas. Christmas 201, three years ago to the day. And yeah, so we ran on our own site and what people got was just a bottle of sauce. How many bottles of sauce do you want. And we did this amazing deal, 10 bottles delivered for 120 US dollars and that went off like a frog in a sock. And that’s how it went viral. So once we got the bottles produced, I sent some to a journalist at BuzzFeed in America and they had the predicted response which was “this is hilarious.” Yeah they made this right. They wrote an article that read like a paid advertorial. That you’d pay tens of thousands of dollars or that went viral, that got shared on Buzzfeed Australia and BuzzFeed U.K. and then Kyle and Jackie O picked it up and made one of their staffers eat it on air and he nearly died and the rest is history.

Tim

Well we’ve had a lot of that. I mean it’s one of those products that opens itself up to people trialing it on video and then I think Vixie and Fitzy. They did it you know you’re getting a whole lot of people, known and unknown kind of posting videos of them trying Shit the Bed and the reaction that follows. So that’s just like that marketing rights itself. I’m talking to Renae Bunster. She’s the founder of Bunsters hot sauces famous for the Shit the Bed product but also there is a 7/10-hot sauce and a chili chocolate which I’ve tried the seven out of 10 and the chili chocolate they’re both ace. I can tell you right now I don’t have the courage to do the 12 out of 10. I just, I can’t bring myself to do it and I don’t want to do it just for laughs you know. Because I think, I could I may well self-implode so we’ll save that for others who may want to buy it. So Renae, I want to talk marketing because you’re big on it, but just wrap some numbers around where Bunsters is at today.

Renae

We, monkey boy, you know being good with numbers and pretty much he’s not even good at that. He’s built this thing. Okay, so reporting knowing where you’re at every day is really important business. If you don’t know your outgoings and what’s coming in and the bottom line. And he’s worked out this reporting mechanism that tells me my bottom line every day. So we know every day we’re pulling in about 8 grands plus during this Christmas period from our Australian site, from Amazon, and from our American site and about eight grand a day. And then we work out what we’ve spent on marketing and we think we can say oh yeah, it’s working.

Tim

So nice little dashboard to know exactly where you are. And most of your sales done via your website, via Amazon, or through retailers

Renae

I’d say about half retailers in Australia. And we don’t even have a distributor on the eastern seaboard of Australia yet. It’s just through to a sort of smaller one’s state by state and in Western Australia and half would be online in America.

Tim

Well so the upside is pretty huge.

Renae

Yeah. With 2018, we are going to pick up a big distributor on the eastern coast and it’s really going to explode. Probably a lot of people listening who are thinking, I haven’t seen this

Tim

So you got a distributor or are you looking for one?

Renae

We’re looking. We’re looking, a bit stalking a couple.

Tim

Well there may well be one listening, how they’re getting contact with you?

Renae

Hit my website. Just google Shit the Bed, we own that. It just another marketing thing on your search terms. We own shit. The minute that we went viral and we made sure we owned Shit the Bed. You could see all these other people bidding on it. It’s really interesting to see how many other people will just want to jump on your bandwagon as soon as you are successful. And so many people have tried to buy Shit the Bed and the price of it has gone up on Google AdWords but we still own it.

Tim

How much a click is it?

Renae

I don’t know. That’s a monkey boy question.

Tim

Probably three or four bucks I reckon.

Renae

Probably. That sounds about right.

Tim

Oh monkey boy, should have interviewed him. He’s probably a lot smarter. Now where was I.

Renae

He doesn’t really speak. He just makes noises.

Tim

I’ll tell you what us blokes, we take a beating but we move on. That’s the great thing about us. Now let’s talk marketing because you’ve embraced it everything you’ve spoken about already really is marketing but social media has been very good to you.

Renae

Yes and we get it and a lot of people don’t get it. They think I put this picture up and nobody bought my stuff. So what happens is you put up amazing content. So I put up funny videos, people watch them. And then we got a little thing called your cookie and a lot of people don’t really understand cookies. But the more videos you watch the more you click on my site website or my Facebook page, where compiling information on you and what you like about us. So maybe you haven’t watched any of my sauce videos but you’ve watched all my chocolate videos, ah, this person is interested in chocolate. And then all of a sudden on your Facebook feed you’re going to get an ad for my chocolate. So that’s the information gathering that we get by putting up good content. And if you don’t know how to do that, you need to work out how to do it.

Tim

Well yeah. Yes, probably get someone to do it if I can afford to. Any business owner listening, that’s kind of you should be doing it. Not overly difficult but it does require a bit of now surrounded. Facebook don’t make it too hard. They want you to do it. So what would you advise, if you haven’t got a monkey boy and you haven’t got time to do it yourself, is it someone you go and find what a web developer or who would you advise

Renae

I’m actually really, really wary. I call them snake oil salesmen. Every man and his dog are doing this PR, marketing, digital strategy. We will make a video for you, you give us ten grand and we’ll go make a crappy video for you. And you see him online, they’re just they’re rubbish. These videos are getting like a thousand hits and you know that this person’s paid five grand for it. You need to learn how to pick up your mobile phone and make interesting videos and just start posting them and you’ll see what people like and what they interact with and then you know they want more of that. People don’t want to see news, you know really more polished flashy news stories. They want to see you, they want to see what’s going on behind the scenes with you. They want to see your personality and what made you start the business. And then from that you’ll be building up this cookie pool of people watching your videos. And then when you find the right, Facebook advertising need to find people who specialise in Facebook advertising. Don’t get a jack of all trades mob who try and sell you snake oil. Find people who specialise in Facebook advertising.

Tim

Yeah, that’s good advice. There’s too many people who are “I can do everything.” So Facebook has been good to you. You’re doing a kind of had a look. You’re doing a mix of your own videos and also just finding funny videos from around the world of hot sauce jokes and stuff that’s going on and that seems to work. You get a lot of good engagement. Any other, are using Insta, or Pinterest or Twitter or any other social media platforms

Renae

I don’t use Pinterest. I am the target demo. I’m you know in my thirties, got a child, married. I don’t know how to use Pinterest. I don’t think it’s my channel because I know who my customer is and my customer is not that. My customer is blokes.

Tim

Come on, you were much more of a boast when you were describing your customer in our pre-interview. You tell us who your customers

Renae

My customer, good day, Dave. Dave is age 25 to 45. He’s a tradie. He gets to spend all of his money on himself. He’s a bit of bogan and he likes poo joke and he’s quite frankly the kind of guy I’d marry.

Tim

There you go. It’s very clear which therefore makes it easy for you to create marketing that hits Dave between the eye right? Or eyes he’s probably got two. Perhaps he’s got two eyes.

Renae

Sometimes he wears a patch and when he’s on a pirate stag weekend day but I know who you are.

Tim

Love it. So that forms a great foundation for creating your marketing messages. How else do you get customers for Shit the Bed?

Renae

Really that’s how we find them, online. I don’t like my house. People ask me to go to market some things and I’m like, no I can’t. I’m on catch. We really just find everyone by doing great online content and funny things. Funny things to do with hot sauce. Anyone who watches that is interested in hot sauce and a really hot, hot sauce. That’s how I find them.

Tim

How do you maintain, because the joke can wear thin right? I mean it’s up to you to keep some excitement around and the laugh around. But how do you maintain interest in it?

Renae

In the sauce?

Tim

Yeah and the whole kind of gag around Shit the Bed and you know you can only do so many videos of people crying once they’ve tried it right?

Renae

Yeah, I don’t know Tim, I think my days are numbered.

Tim

I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Renae

Let’s be real about this. Well, we’ll have more products that don’t have “shit” on the label because we realized that we can’t even go to Coles and Woolworths and say, hey what about this product. So we’re going to be making more and more products that don’t have “shit” on the label. Hot sauce fans just want more good hot sauce. So that’s what we’re going to work on in 2018.

Tim

So are you saying that you are going to remove the word “shit” because you want to get into Coles and Woolworths?

Renae

Not off that sauce. Shit the Bed will always exist but we need to make more products that don’t say shit on them.

Tim

You know the conversations I’ve had on the show previously but there’s is a first for everything. Had a 15-year-old entrepreneur on last week and now you know talking like this is fantastic absolutely fantastic. So it sounds like it’s been a pretty good journey Renae. Is there have been any bumps in the road where you might have look monkey boy in the eye and gone maybe it’s not as good as we thought

Renae

All the time. No just one monkey boy stuffs up something and we think like we’ve just thrown a heap of money in the toilet. But way back that, like even at the crowdfunding campaign we put in all this effort. We went to the factory made this sauce, and all the bottles started exploding when they were going down the line. And we lost so much money during the crowdfunding campaign because we had to replace so many bottles that broke. But we made so much money. We got up to 250 grand on the crowdfunding campaign that we were able to pay for all these mistakes but we walked away from that going wow, we just broke even. But we had all of these customers gagging for it. We’d already found the production line. We just needed a new bottle. So that was pretty bad. Getting to the end of the crowdfunding campaign and everyone saying, wow this is amazing, I want more and we weren’t able to give it to them. It was a low point. But then once we got the new bottle and we knew it wasn’t going to smash. Things have just been getting better and better and better. Month on month, year on year.

Tim

Great story and it’s time to shit the road. Thank you very much. You know there’s a big delay there, I thought god, she didn’t get that gag. I thought was pretty good. But you know hey, is it bunstersworldwide.com.au that people go to buy this stuff

Renae

Yeah just go to dot com and then they can choose their region because we have different regions. bunstersworldwide.com. It’s international

Tim

Why did you go bunstersworldwide?

Renae

We used to be punsters fresh but in the process of trying to get our source into America, they said you can’t have fresh on the label because this product being fresh is being cooked to put in bottle.

Tim

Were started by talking to someone in the Deep South?

Renae

Yeah they’re all like that. I’m sure he had a Californian accent because that’s who we dealt with. But yeah, we had to remove fresh from our labels so that was one of the just niggly little things we had to take care of before we could get into America. So then we went, you know what we’ve always been a fan of the film stepbrother’s, why not bunsters worldwide because we like to call our business you know holdings prestige worldwide. Some people get the joke

Tim

One of my favorite films. I don’t know that line in it but I’ll go with it because it’s a good reason for having bunsters worldwide. Hey thanks, Renae. Love your work. Look forward to seeing where it goes in the coming years.

Renae

Thanks Tim. You are getting a stubbie holder.

Tim

Oh wow. Never been given a gift from a guest before. Thank you.