How Bay Smokes Scaled to Eight Figures Without Traditional Advertising With William Goodall

William Goodall is the Founder of Bay Smokes, a national cannabis company specializing in high-quality smokable hemp products. Under his leadership, Bay Smokes has expanded its product line to include THC, CBD, Delta-8, and other plant-based medicines, gaining a significant following on social media platforms. William studied biomedical engineering at Arizona State University before leaving to pursue entrepreneurial ventures. His innovative approach to marketing and product development has positioned Bay Smokes as a prominent brand in the evolving cannabis industry.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:36] William Goodall shares the origins of Bay Smokes and scaling to eight figures in revenue
• [3:32] How Bay Smokes leveraged meme marketing and organic viral content during the early days of the pandemic
• [6:24] The value of constant experimentation and agility in growth marketing
• [8:46] Why William built multiple acquisition channels and trained teams to own each one
• [10:32] Strategies for celebrity brand partnerships and profit-sharing
• [14:53] Creating “closed loop” marketing systems for sustainable growth
• [17:13] Lessons from mismanaged channels and marketing budget leaks

In this episode…

How do you grow a brand when traditional marketing channels are off-limits? For companies in highly regulated industries, scaling without access to Meta Ads, Google, or standard influencer strategies can feel nearly impossible. What’s the secret to building momentum — and maintaining it — when your best growth tools keep getting shut down?

William Goodall, an expert in social-first marketing strategies, uses his cannabis venture as a compelling case study for navigating and succeeding in a restrictive advertising environment. William began by creating viral, humorous video content and distributing it through meme pages during a time of lax social media moderation. When platforms cracked down and accounts were deleted, he pivoted — experimenting with new social trends, empowering team members to own acquisition channels, and forming profit-sharing partnerships with celebrities to access fresh audiences. William emphasizes the value of rapid testing, staying agile as rules shift, and the need for tight budget oversight when scaling rapidly.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews William Goodall, Founder of Bay Smokes, about growing a cannabis brand without relying on traditional advertising. William explores alternative acquisition strategies, building “closed-loop” systems, and learning from marketing missteps. Tune in for insights on managing influencer partnerships, leveraging social trends, aligning team structure with growth, and keeping business partners motivated.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle on LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• William Goodall: LinkedIn | Instagram
• Bay Smokes
• “Scaling Unconventional Products Online: TerraSlate’s B2B Growth Blueprint With Kyle Ewing” on Minds of Ecommerce

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Quotable Moments:

• "You spend your 12, 14 hours every single day for seven years obsessing over one topic."
• "When you find that great partner that makes you a lot of money, you want them to make as much."
• "The joke in the company is like the sales hide the sins, and that’s kind of been this year."
• "People would love if they knew about it. We just got to educate them this is a thing."
• "We were kind of the first people doing this type of marketing in this entire industry."

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Action Steps:

1. Diversify your acquisition channels early: Relying on a single traffic source can put your business at risk if it disappears overnight. A mix of platforms ensures more stability and flexibility as you scale.
2. Test marketing ideas in small batches: Starting with low-budget experiments allows you to validate effectiveness before investing heavily. This minimizes waste and increases confidence in scaling.
3. Create closed-loop partnerships with strong incentives: Structuring deals so partners directly benefit from performance encourages sustained marketing effort. Everyone wins when incentives are aligned.
4. Embed innovation into team culture: A team trained to brainstorm and test ideas constantly can adapt quickly when tactics go stale. This keeps your brand competitive in fast-changing industries.
5. Monitor underperforming channels closely: Just because the business is growing doesn't mean every strategy is working. Catching inefficiencies early prevents major losses and frees up resources for what works.

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Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive into a strategy, so you get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, you heard from Kyle Ewing, CEO of TerraSlate, who shared how to market unsexy B2B products through ecommerce. Today, on episode number 44, get ready! William Goodall is the founder of Bay Smokes, one of the largest online dispensaries. And today we'll be talking about how to grow a brand in a space where restrictions limit traditional advertising options. And I mean pretty much every option. I'm your host, Raphael Daigle, and I'm the founder of Split Base. And this is Minds of Ecommerce.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 01:57

Now this episode is also brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Doctor Squatch, Hyperice, and Amika grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then, well, we help you fix it. The result is increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course more money, allowing you to scale advertising more profitably. Now, we've been at it for over a decade and we can help you manage CRO from A to Z, from customer research, conversion design strategy, copywriting, and development. We focus on growing your ecommerce sales while you get to focus on what you do best. Request a proposal today on splitbase.com to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right. Well, well, William, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.

William Goodall: 01:57

Thank you for having me.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 01:58

Yeah. So as you know now, this podcast is all about going deep and dissecting one key growth strategy so our listeners can get the most value right away. Now, I think in your case, what's interesting is there may not be a single growth strategy because those tend to have a bit of an expiration date. Being in a regulated industry and being in such a competitive space. So definitely looking forward to hearing a bit more about that. But maybe just to give our listeners more context, can you tell us a bit more about how long it's been that you founded the company and what type of scale it's achieved over those couple of years?

William Goodall: 02:36

Sure. So Bass Smokes as a company is maybe four, four and a half years old, although I've been in the space for more like seven since the actual farm bill passed. I was kind of like in this space, trying to figure out how to do an e-commerce company. We started doing like CBD tinctures and stuff and eventually transitioned into like recreational hemp THC products. And since starting it, we're now over eight figures monthly in revenue. So I'm super stoked with what we've been able to achieve.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 03:09

Awesome. Well, first, congrats on that. But definitely I want to talk about growth. You guys have tried a lot of different techniques. Now most of the brands we have on this podcast, right? They talk about meta, they talk about Google. You guys are in a bit of a different game. So when you're in such a regulated industry, let's just start maybe with some of the basics. How do you get to eight figures?

William Goodall: 03:32

So I started off the company doing social media marketing. And during it was basically during Covid when this happened, it was super lax social media regulation I guess around like moderation, I'll say so pretty much all things was getting a lot less moderated and I was able to make funny videos, just good comedic videos and have them go viral organically. And then I would just pay a bunch of meme pages to repost the videos. So kind of meme page marketing with Instagram primarily, and also other platforms, but primarily Instagram. That was like the big thing that got us. I mean, within the first month, I think my, my first-month revenue was like 150,000. Second month was like 450,000 or something. So it's like really quickly we got off going, and it's not like I didn't first come up with making videos that month. Like I guess prior to that, my girlfriend and I had been making social media content, and I understood, like the background of how to make viral social media content. And this was kind of just my first like, hey, let's apply this to a cool, unique product that I don't see anyone in this entire industry marketing using this tactic. So we were kind of the first people doing this type of marketing, and it was during a period where social media was getting like no regulation. So the videos were going super viral and for like a good couple of months, you know, we were uninhibited growth straight upwards. But then the, you know, everything was getting deleted. All my social media accounts were getting deleted. All the posts, every time I would play a meme page to post it, it would all get deleted. And then we had to find new methods. So a lot of it is just constantly cycling of like finding new methods of of what's going to work. A lot of it was through social media though. And so, you know, when one stops working you pick up a different strategy.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 05:31

So that's super interesting. Obviously most brands would freak out. And maybe you did and certainly did.

William Goodall: 05:38

Yeah.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 05:38

At the thought that their main acquisition channel is disappearing and starting to disappear overnight.

William Goodall: 05:43

Now after a short period of time to.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 05:45

Totally now like how do you deal with that? Like you make it sound and I'm sure it wasn't easy, but obviously, you know, when you say, oh, now those disappeared, and now we have to find other channels. I know very few brands that would, you know, be able to turn on a dime like that. You know, if their meta accounts would get deleted overnight. So tell me more about like, what happens like, like, obviously now you've been running this brand for a couple of years. So evidently there maybe is a process to how you find the next growth channels. How do you find those next channels? Is there a process? Is it luck?

William Goodall: 06:24

I think it's it's obsession. You know, like I'm just constantly thinking all the time, day in and day out, like, how do I do things to improve the business? How do I test out different things that may or may not work? And I mean, I guess also coming from the background of content creation and my girlfriend full time is like a social media creator. And so I'm observing everything she's doing all the time and seeing kind of like constant new trends and stuff. And that's kind of her mindset of success in her industry. And in the same sense, it's like, okay, I'm taking a similar mindset into this industry. It's like you're always kind of constantly looking for what's the next thing. And I mean, if you just spend your 12, 14 hours every single day for seven years, you know, obsessing over one topic you kind of like are constantly just spitting out new ideas all the time. And just like, hey, let's test this out, let's test this out, let's test this out. So it's it's kind of that being the base mindset. But also I guess having some insider observation to, you know, someone who's super successful in a social media field. And so I'm using social media market, whether you're marketing a personality or a product, it's very similar concepts just kind of applied in different ways. And when one thing works and this is like across all social media, it's like as a podcast too, you can look at like, oh, this was this concept was super successful and this person's podcast. How do I, you know, rehash this to my own niche and, you know, it will very likely be successful as well. So that's that's just the nonstop mindset of like looking in all other similar niches or things where I can kind of like apply similar concepts and, and redoing the same thing.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:14

Yeah, great. So looking for inspiration obviously beyond what the industry is used to at the end of the day. Now, you know, when you started, you know you were heavily, heavily leveraging, you know, kind of those social and meme accounts. And you probably quickly realized that you can't have all your eggs in the same basket when it comes to traffic acquisition, acquisition. So like today, when you're thinking about, you know, the brand, like how many different acquisition channels are you trying to have at the same time? Like, is there a number?

William Goodall: 08:46

I wouldn't say there's a number necessarily. I mean, everything kind of boils down to like, what do you have the bandwidth on your team for? And so, I mean, I guess like my my overall current strategy now is relies more so on building team members that are able to manage different acquisition channels and then train them and work with them to make sure that their channel is profitable. And this is across all sorts of, you know, multiple niches of social media content, multiple different platforms, multiple different methods. And this is from anywhere of like, you know, people buy stuff. People try to test paid ads channels, even though it's not it's not smooth. It's not a smooth process at all. Like if I was selling, you know, t shirts or fidget spinners or something like that, you can make a meta ads account, but it gets deleted. You know, if you break the, you know, the thin gray line. That's like not very clear which side you're on at any given point. Twitter ads thankfully allows us to do stuff, but it's we haven't had like overwhelming amounts of success with any paid ads channel nearly as much with like creative channels, like content creation, working with different influencers. And when I say also like making partnerships with people. So it's like, you know, we've started multiple celebrity brands where, you know, I offer, I guess, a creative deal structure. I haven't really heard of other people offering, but I'll go to a celebrity and this is my first founded, a company to it was like two months in, I met somebody who was a friend of. He was like an employee, I guess, of a famous rapper, Tory Lanez. And I was just like buying ads from all the meme pages at that time. And that was starting to slow down because they were all getting deleted. And so I heard from him. I was like, hey, can I buy from him? And, you otherwise. I had no idea how it would have bought an ad from a rapper to promote my weed company. But I met this guy, asked him, and he got back to me like the next day, hey, Tori doesn't want to, like, just do paid promotion. He's got he only works with things that he's like a part of. I was like, okay, well, what if I made him a brand? I could just make him a brand and we'll just make packaging for him and everything. We'll do a profit share, and I think he'll make even more money that way. And ultimately, yeah, he was like, yeah, I'm down. So I went over, met with him, kind of figured it out, and everything was kind of figuring out on the spot. I was, I guess I was 21 at the time, and I didn't really know so much about how any of this should have gone or should have looked like or anything. I just kind of got creative, was like, hey, you've got marketing capability. I can kind of manage all the stuff on the back end finance and take the liability. Let's see if we can work out a profit share. That makes sense. And we did that and it was super successful. And he was able to access even more marketing channels that that I wasn't able to. For example, he went on a podcast, and the whole time that he's on the podcast, you know, he's like smoking a blunt. And the first 15 minutes he walks in, he's smoking a blunt. He gets everybody in there to smoke the blunt and try it. And they're like, oh, he's like, oh yeah, this is my weed brand. It's available here. Smokes calm and they're all like gassing it up so much like, oh, this is the best weed ever. Like I don't normally don't like weed, but this is, this is the best stuff ever. And you guys all got to go try this. And I didn't pay a dime for that. And it should have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars probably that promotion. And it drove tons and tons of sales. So that's.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 12:26

So interesting.

William Goodall: 12:27

Creative partnership.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 12:28

And I love that strategy. But I'm curious how you know you're building this brand for this celebrity. How interlinked is it with say Facebook's the main brand. Is it on the. Is it on Big Smoke's website. Is it a separate brand? What's kind of the relationship and how is that fueling the brand's growth beyond the celebrity brand.

William Goodall: 12:49

Yeah, so at first we actually had all the products on the base box website, and eventually we made it a separate website because I figured, like, okay, like this will be more fair. Ultimately, I want them, you know, repurchasing when they're repurchasing. I want the repurchase. Of course, I want my brand to grow. But I also want to be fair to the marketers, because whenever you're doing a partnership with a good marketer, you know, you need to make sure they're getting paid as much as possible. Like whatever. You set up a structure with someone who's like a high-level performer, you know, you almost want to just take the minority cut as the facilitator and just let them make the most of the money because they need to be maximally incentivized to keep going full steam ahead. So setting up his own website with, you know, with only his products on it, but it was still optimized for conversions and everything that ended up, you know, making him more consistently get more and more money. And so then he was more motivated to go out and do more creative things for more marketing. But it started being on the basic side. Of course, all of this was just like, all right, you know, we're spinning up as we as we went along. So when that podcast thing happened that he did, the products were on the base website and there was like a huge, you know, growth in his numbers. Sure. The first two months and then it kind of went down and he's like, hey man, why did it go down? But my numbers were still up. I was like, oh shit, they're buying my products now instead of instead of yours. So I was like, I want to change this. I want to make it fair. So that we can keep this partnership going because it's like, yeah, that's how do I keep finding creative new? I call them closed loops where it's like, okay, I set up this person in this system and they're profitably spinning money. And I guess my goal is the owner of the business in this space, how many acquisition channels do I have? Like how many closed loops can I set up where this person is going. They know how to run things and they're they're creating good amounts of money for themselves. They have a good incentive structure and they're making the business money and they're growing.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:53

I think the quote of the day really is, you know, when you find the great partner that makes you a lot of money, you want them to make as much money as possible.

William Goodall: 15:02

Yeah. As much as possible.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 15:04

I love it. Now, I I'm kind of curious about your team structure because obviously, you know, you have to innovate on those channels quite a bit. You have, you know, those celebrity partnerships as well. But like, I'm curious, you know, like, you know, normally an acquisition team is going to be pretty straightforward with people, you know, assigned to specific channels or maybe for smaller teams, one person for a couple of different channels. In your case, when you need those teams to innovate and find new channels, what does it look like?

William Goodall: 15:36

I'd say I'm a big factor in the finding of new channels, and I have a couple of other high-level people that are also with me searching for new channels. And the process is more so, like, you know, a few high-level people looking for these new channels and then building a team like this, this closed loop that I say of, you know, people to manage it or people to, to own responsibility for that channel. And then, you know, lots of like brainstorming meetings with all the people all the time, you know, individually to kind of discuss the project or the area or the space that they're focused on. And how do we innovate, how do we make improvements, you know, what's a roadblock and how do we get over that? But it's it's a lot of brainstorming ideas and testing that that kind of mindset is, is kind of instilled in goes down throughout everyone in the company. It's all kind of about, you know, how do we keep looking for ways to innovate and change up things because, you know, a lot of stuff will go stale always and kind of all aspects of it.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:46

Yeah, I'm sure that ideation has to be part of the culture. Otherwise, if you've got someone who really likes just clear processes like that's not going to work in your case.

William Goodall: 16:55

Not not for marketing teams. No.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:57

Yeah. So when you think about kind of all the marketing that you've done over the past couple of years, what do you think may be one of the biggest marketing mistakes that you've made through that process of scaling and innovating?

William Goodall: 17:13

There's definitely been situations where I was too loose with money in the sense of it's hard to call it like a mistake because I got to where I am. Also, I guess being loose with money and like, you know, the idea is like you got to take risks in marketing and if you don't take risks, then you're never going to grow. But there were some dumb risks that I took. And some, like leeks in the in the ship, I'll say, is like, you know, I had a non-closed loop. I was trying to be too ambitious, setting up too many new acquisition channels, and didn't properly give the attention to each one. And one, for example, is like, got somebody in it? Oh man, I had somebody that was in charge of the Twitter account for a while, and I kind of like wasn't paying a lot of attention to that because so much other stuff was like succeeding way, you know, a lot. So I was more focused over here and I go back and look over here, it's like, oh my God, we're we're burning six figures a month and it's it's not converting at all. Like, how did this happen? Like and you know, that's that's what I'll say is like, you know, it feels like the biggest mistake of like, okay, just because there's a lot of success in one area, other areas get more or less ignored. And, and if they're getting ignored to, to whatever extent and they're hemorrhaging money like, that's like a really bad situation. And you know, the the joke in the company is like the sales hide descends and it's like that's kind of been a this year particularly has been a lot of like going back and accountability of looking at everything and making sure all of our dollars are really like, you know, being held accountable for and everything, especially marketing spend, because we, you know, we were testing out too many things and there wasn't enough strict management of all the dollars being spent. So there was a lot of waste happening. And so ultimately it's like, yeah, just because we're growing, you know, if we just didn't have all this waste, we would actually have had a lot more profit to go out and spend on more things that are actually working, for sure.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 19:28

But on that, do you like right now, do you have a specific percentage of your budget that goes towards finding new channels only, or it's a bit more loose?

William Goodall: 19:38

It's it's really disorganized. It's really disorganized. Like, I don't have a I don't tell my marketing team ever. Like, hey guys, this month we have $1 million marketing budget and we want 40% to go here and 30% here. I'd say it's more so, like the way that I look at this because, you know, it's essentially a hyper growth industry. We're coming out of prohibition, right. And so this is the first generation of cannabis companies that have access federally. Like, you know, this is a really unique and cool space, but it's a space where I mean, now and for the next however many years, the growth is going to be insane. So the way that I see it, every dollar I have free and available is going into marketing as long as there's a reasonable way to spend it. And so I don't cap anybody on on what is like the budget. I just tell them like, hey, if you find a good way and it seems like it's making sense, like how I like doing stuff is test stuff with like a couple thousand dollars. If it seems like it's working, then it's test stuff with like low tens of thousands of dollars and then it seems like working. Let's spend like 100,000 or a couple hundred thousand or what? And just keep trying to scale and see if your method is scalable. Like that's kind of every person's initiative is like test it small, test it in the middle. And then let's try to scale it large. And if there's an opportunity that's like, hey, let's go get a Super Bowl commercial. But we're confident it's going to work because we tested it with, you know, $300,000 on these other smaller games. And so let's go spend a couple million. It's like I told him, we will find a way to make any amount of dollar work for for marketing, because in this space, it's like it's hard to find expense. But if you can prove it on the scales, you know, it's probably going to work on the bigger scale too. And, you know, we would love to be able to get those marketing dollars out the door to see if we can generate new, new customer acquisitions. Tell new people about this, because still, it's like most people don't know about we're coming. We're selling a product, and it's like people would love if they knew about it. We just got to educate them. Hey, this is a thing. Now you can get this to your door.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 21:49

Amazing. We've been talking with William Goodall, who's the founder of Bay smokes. Now, William, this was an amazing conversation. I wish we could keep going and going, but we have tons of actionable nuggets. But if people are interested in learning more about you or the brand, where should they go?

William Goodall: 22:06

Well, the brand is based baysmokes.com. I have a personal social media trying to start posting more on it myself because I like sharing, you know, entrepreneurial stuff because ultimately I was expired, I was inspired, I dropped out of college because I saw young kids on the internet making a lot of money doing ecommerce stuff. So I want to start posting more stuff about education on that. But my Instagram is WilliamGthe4TH.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 22:31

Amazing. William, thank you so much.

William Goodall: 22:33

Thank you man.

Outro: 22:38

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com to learn more or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me at @rpaulin-daigle and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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