You've built the only fully disposable, fully compostable grill scraper in the world — a category of one. The next twelve months build the system that turns every wire-brush user into a Scrappy buyer.
Every griller with a wire brush is a prospect. The job isn’t to invent a market — it’s to migrate one.
What you and Miles have built is rare. A triple-weave recycled cardboard scraper that scrapes, steam-cleans, and seasons a grate, then composts at the end of its life. No metal bristles to swallow. No plastic to landfill. A product invented in Ottawa, manufactured in Ottawa, and priced for impulse and gifting at three dollars a unit. There is no direct competitor in the disposable lane — Grill Rescue is premium reusable, the bamboo and hardwood scrapers are durable, and the metal-bristle category is the very thing you’re replacing. You sit in a category of one.
What’s missing is the engine that compounds it. The site is a Shopify storefront with two SKUs and no email capture beyond checkout. There is no subscribe-and-save, no gift bundle, no Father’s Day funnel, no holiday landing page. The press has been earned — Ottawa Business Journal, Tailgater, Price of Business Show — but it lives as one-off mentions rather than a content engine. Amazon sells the same Box at twice the DTC price, which leaves a channel gap that’s either an opportunity or a problem depending on how it’s handled. The category-shift story (bristle ingestion, Leave No Trace, the "of course it’s cardboard" self-aware voice) is sharp on the site but invisible on paid social where it would actually move volume.
What AYMI builds is The Conversion Engine — a paid-social-led system that captures the wire-brush switcher at the moment of decision, routes them into a gifting and replenishment flywheel, and turns the seasonal peaks (Father’s Day, July 4, Labor Day, Q4 stocking-stuffer) into the cadence the rest of the year hangs off. The product is already a category of one. The next ninety days build the engine that makes it the category default.
This proposal sizes the engine, names the anchor asset, walks the three buyer wedges, and lays out the directional benchmarks we’d hold ourselves to. The long-term goal is simple: a system in which every wire brush retired, every gift box sold, every camping trip carried, every Amazon search corrected back to the DTC channel makes the next conversion cheaper than the last.
Eight axes of the marketing surface, current state and post-engagement state.
Mostly earned PR through Blaze, organic word-of-mouth, and Amazon search for the existing buyer. No paid social channel running. The 2025 Kickstarter raised $210 of a $15K goal — the lesson is that disposable cardboard doesn’t pre-sell well in a pledge format. The buyer needs to see it work first.
Meta and TikTok running daily on the wire-brush switcher hook and the gifting moment. Paid search defensive on category terms (grill scraper, bristle-free, disposable grill brush). Direct-response creative tested against $3–$6 customer-acquisition target.
Two-SKU Shopify with a strong founder voice but no segmented landing pages, no gifting page, no email capture above the fold, no subscribe-and-save mechanic, no PDP comparison vs the wire brush category.
Three purpose-built landing pages (Wire-Brush Switcher, Father’s Day / Gifting, Outdoor & Tailgate), a gift bundle SKU, subscribe-and-save engineered for the Box, exit-intent and SMS capture, A/B cadence on hero, PDP comparison module.
Will’s LinkedIn active, Instagram and Facebook present but light. No video pipeline. The bristle-safety origin story and the eco mechanism live in press but not in repeatable short-form video.
Weekly short-form unit on TikTok and Reels — origin story, MacGyver moment, side-by-side burn-off demos, Leave-No-Trace tailgate runs. Founder-led long-form on Will’s LinkedIn for the B2B retail pitch. Repurposing pipeline atomizes every piece.
The product is positioned as a stocking stuffer and Father’s Day gift, but there is no gifting SKU, no seasonal landing page, no holiday email campaign, no paid concept built for the moment. The two biggest revenue spikes of the year are uncovered.
Four named seasonal beats — Father’s Day, July 4, Labor Day, Q4 gifting — each with its own gift bundle SKU, dedicated landing page, paid creative set, email broadcast wave, and post-purchase replenishment trigger.
Transactional emails only. No welcome flow, no post-purchase nurture, no replenishment reminder, no Amazon-to-DTC conversion sequence, no winback. The two-SKU catalog and disposable mechanic make repeat purchase the entire LTV story — and it’s unbuilt.
Eight automated flows including a Box-replenishment trigger (timed against typical grill cadence), a Father’s Day pre-cart sequence, a wire-brush-switcher convert-to-subscriber arc, and an Amazon buyer reactivation that pulls margin back to DTC.
Box of 12 at $17.99 on the DTC site, $36 on Amazon. Whether intentional channel pricing or an error, it teaches the buyer that Amazon is the discount path and the DTC site is the premium — opposite of what the unit economics want.
Channel pricing reconciled, with DTC carrying the gifting bundles and subscribe-and-save mechanic Amazon can’t. Subscribe-and-save discount sized to make the DTC repeat path cheaper than the Amazon repeat path. Channel reporting in one place.
Will’s LinkedIn (4,000+ followers, active) is the right channel for the Canadian Tire and Home Hardware buy-side conversation, but the posting is sporadic and not built around the retail BD goal.
Will’s LinkedIn programmed as a thirty-touchpoint retail-buyer narrative across twelve months: traction posts, sustainability proof, retail-merch-ready packaging, and the Ottawa-made manufacturing story. Built explicitly to warm Canadian Tire and Home Hardware category buyers before the cold outreach.
Lean two-founder operation, light tooling, no unified dashboard for paid, organic, email, Amazon, and DTC together. Decisions get made on what’s easiest to see, not what’s actually compounding.
AYMI AI Dashboard: CAC by channel, gift bundle vs single-SKU mix, Amazon-to-DTC conversion rate, replenishment compliance, and a weekly action list named for the next decision worth making.
Illustrative twelve-month targets, anchored against AYMI benchmarks for emerging DTC physical goods at this stage.
Targets are directional and tied to the middle-shape engagement. Aggressive scaling shifts the CAC ceiling up and the ROAS down in the short term to compound the order lift; conservative pacing preserves margin and trades absolute volume for retail-readiness. Locked once we look at the real numbers together on the scoping call.
Each lives in a different feed, hears a different hook, and arrives at the same gesture: putting the wire brush down.
The three personas don’t need three product lines — they need three doors into the same two SKUs, each timed to a different surface. The wire-brush switcher converts year-round; the gifter spikes twice; the outdoor buyer pulses seasonally with grill weekends. The mechanic is identical: the disposable cardboard scraper. The system’s job is to put each door in the right place and let the math compound.
One anchor asset that compresses every door into a single, paid-led acquisition system.
Built around a quarterly creative bank of fifteen to twenty concepts in the three persona-doors above (each with the four-placement build-out: 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 16:9), wired into three new landing pages (Wire-Brush Switcher, Gifting, Outdoor), and metered through the AYMI Dashboard with a single number that matters most: cost per shipped order.
The engine’s job is to make each subsequent order cheaper than the last. The first hundred days establish baseline CAC, AOV, and repeat rate. The next sixty layer in the gift bundle SKU and the subscribe-and-save mechanic, so the same paid dollar buys a more valuable customer. The last quarter of year one wraps the retail-BD warmup around the same engine, so the trade buyer at Canadian Tire arrives at the meeting having seen Scrappy work.
Four content pillars, each tuned to one persona door, each atomized across paid, organic social, and email.
Short-form origin storytelling from Miles and Will — the bristle-in-the-burger moment, the kitchen-table prototype, the cardboard-vs-wire side-by-side. Three new spots per quarter, native to Reels and TikTok, repurposed into paid concept frames.
Father’s Day and Q4 hero content. UGC + studio gift bundle frames, "twelve weekends, one Box" gift-with-purpose narrative, ship-by countdowns. Owns the seasonal moments paid and organic can lean against.
Tailgate, campsite, glampsite, parks-and-rec footage. Compost-the-scraper end-of-life shots. Pairs with the existing Parks Canada / Leave No Trace narrative on the site. Repurposes into Outdoor and REI-adjacent paid placements.
Founder-led long-form on Will’s LinkedIn — the manufacturing story, the recycled-cardboard supply chain, the retail-merch-ready packaging, traction milestones. Designed to warm Canadian Tire and Home Hardware category buyers before the cold outreach.
Every griller with a metal brush is a target. Paid’s job is to be at the moment of decision.
Meta (Facebook + Instagram) and TikTok carry the volume — both are the right surfaces for the wire-brush switcher and the gifter, and TikTok is where the disposable mechanic genuinely surprises people. Paid search (Google) runs defensively on category terms ("grill scraper," "bristle-free grill brush," "disposable grill cleaner," "grill brush no bristles") so the high-intent searcher doesn’t hit Grill Rescue first. Pinterest tested in Q3 for the gifting moment specifically; YouTube pre-roll considered if Q1 ROAS clears the threshold.
Canadian Tire and Home Hardware don’t buy from cold pitches. They buy from brands they’ve already noticed.
The retail aspiration is the right second-year unlock — but Canadian Tire and Home Hardware category buyers don’t make first-meeting decisions on a cold deck. They make them on the second or third contact, after they’ve already seen the brand work somewhere they trust. The play is to put Scrappy in those somewheres before the meeting.
Every Scrappy buyer is a finite-supply customer. Replenishment is the entire LTV story — and it’s currently unbuilt.
One weekly broadcast to the engaged list, tied to the seasonal beat and the active persona door. Anchored around a recurring "From the Hammond brothers" voice — short, useful, written like a friend telling you something worth knowing. Open rate target 32–38%, click rate target 4–6%, revenue share target 15–20% of total by month twelve.
Persona-led pages do what the homepage can’t. Each door converts its own buyer.
Lean teams don’t need more dashboards. They need one number per question, every Monday.
Three engagements anchored to the mechanics this build needs — DTC physical goods, seasonal gifting cadence, subscription LTV economics.
Three shapes the engagement can take. Each is a real version of the work — not a stripped one. The middle shape fits Scrappy Scraper today.
| FOUNDATION Foundation | GROWTH SYSTEM Growth System ★ RECOMMENDED | FULL REVENUE OS Full Revenue OS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team | One AYMI strategist embedded with Will and Miles. Core build cadence, monthly written reporting. | One strategist + a paid acquisition lead. Both embedded. Weekly readouts. | Two strategists + paid acquisition lead + a creative producer for the short-form video pipeline. Embedded creative team. |
| AI Dashboard | — | CAC by channel, AOV, repeat rate, Amazon-vs-DTC reconciliation, weekly action digest. | Everything in Growth System + replenishment intelligence model + quarterly board-grade scorecard for the retail BD audience. |
| Paid acquisition | Meta pilot on one persona door (Wire-Brush Switcher). No TikTok, no paid search, no Pinterest. | Full paid stack: Meta + TikTok across all three persona doors, defensive paid search on category terms, Q3 Pinterest test. | Full paid stack + influencer / creator partnerships + YouTube pre-roll + REI-adjacent placement testing. |
| Lifecycle & retention | Welcome flow + post-purchase nurture only (two flows). | Eight-flow lifecycle architecture including replenishment trigger, seasonal pre-cart sequences, Amazon reactivation, and convert-to-subscriber arc. | Everything in Growth System + SMS programme + corporate-gifting B2B sequence + post-Q4 retention design. |
| Creative bank | ~8 ad concepts per quarter, single placement each. | ~18 concepts per quarter across the three persona doors, expanded into 4-placement sets per winning concept. | ~24+ concepts per quarter, full multi-placement sets, founder-led long-form video unit produced end-to-end with Will and Miles. |
| Conversion infrastructure | One new landing page (Wire-Brush Switcher). Subscribe-and-save scoped, not built. | Three new landing pages (Switcher, Gifting, Outdoor) + Gift Bundle SKU live + Subscribe-and-save built and tuned. | Everything in Growth System + a quarterly CRO test cadence + a full site rebuild scoping in Q4. |
| Retail BD support | — | Will’s LinkedIn editorial calendar + buyer warmup list + one-sheet collateral. | Everything in Growth System + active outreach assist to Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Ace, REI category buyers + trade press placement support. |
| Best fit for | An operator who wants AYMI inside one channel first, before broadening scope. | A two-founder team ready to put paid, lifecycle, and CRO into a single compounding engine in year one. | A team ready to push for retail distribution and put the founder voice itself on a production schedule. |
The investment for each shape is held for the scoping call — we’d rather decide together what’s actually in scope first, then price it once the answer is real. Media spend, software, and creator partnerships are always pass-through and quoted separately from the retainer.
Foundation is right if the goal of year one is to prove the wire-brush switcher hook on Meta alone before committing to the broader build. Real, useful, but it leaves the gifting flexion and the retail BD warmup uncovered for another year.
Growth System sizes the engine to the moment Scrappy is actually in: a real product, real traction, real seasonal moments coming, and two founders who need the system more than they need more people in the building. The paid stack, the lifecycle architecture, the three landing pages, the Gift Bundle SKU, and the dashboard arrive together because they only compound when they’re built together. This is the right shape for year one.
Full Revenue OS is the right next step once the engine has cleared the first ninety days and Will has decided that the retail BD push and a founder-led video unit are the year-two priorities — not the year-one ones.
A sprint plan we’d revise with you on the scoping call. The point isn’t to hit every milestone in the first quarter — it’s to leave Q1 with a working engine, measured properly, and a clear picture of which lane to scale next.
At the end of Q1 you should have a working paid engine with a measured CAC, three converting landing pages, eight lifecycle flows that turn first-time buyers into replenishers, a Gift Bundle SKU you can lean into for every seasonal beat, and a retail-BD narrative running on Will’s LinkedIn that compounds without further effort.
You’ve made the only product of its kind in the world. The question for the next twelve months isn’t whether Scrappy works — it’s whether the engine around it does. Whether the wire-brush switcher converts at a price you can afford. Whether the Father’s Day moment is the moment of the year or just a moment. Whether Canadian Tire calls back.
The final goal is simple: every wire brush retired, every gift box shipped, every camping trip carried, every Amazon search corrected back to the DTC site makes the next conversion cheaper than the last. The system becomes the moat. The product was always going to be a category of one. The engine is what makes it the category default.
The proposal is high level, prior to speaking with you. The scoping call is where we put real numbers against the engine and decide together what year one actually looks like. A companion creative preview is included alongside this proposal — six concept frames across the three persona doors, to make the look and feel real before the call.