1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Jerry Hoffmann: Well… I’ve always been a bit of a Smart aleck. In 2018 my family and I moved to a lake, with a boat in our dock, where we spend a lot of time together on the water. I got tired of paying the exorbitant prices at the local marina for fuel—nearly DOUBLE what it costs at the street. And boats use a lot of fuel, often 50 gallons at a time, maybe filling up twice in a week!

The options at the time were suck it up and pay the marina double, or lug gas cans or cheap fuel caddies that were not designed for off-road use and were not easy to get to docks, and still required multiple trips due to their small capacity.

Gas jugs suck, can you imagine lugging ten 5-gallon jugs down to the dock twice a week and holding them in the air pouring them into your tank while they leak all over the place? It was terrible. There had to be a better way. And now there is.

So…. The Smart Ass Fuel Mule was born. The world’s first and only motorized, off-road capable, high capacity gas caddy. Now patented, and manufactured here in the USA. There’s no easier way to transport fuel to your boat, airplane, or other equipment, and to pump that fuel efficiently with no spills, no mess, saving time and money.

And at that time, we didn’t even imagine the other markets that would take interest. Disaster Recovery for instance, fueling generators, heaters, light towers and more in remote disaster-torn locations that trucks just can’t get to. And fuel delivery services, which are rapidly becoming one of our biggest markets- young entreprenuers finding inspiration in what our product makes possible and starting small fuel delivery businesses all across the country, and more recently- a larger and quickly growing fuel delivery company Juiced Fuel that’s selling franchises across the country and using the Smart Ass Fuel Mule as a big part of their fuel delivery process, particularly to boats and for groundskeeping operations. They’re growing fast, and we’re growing with them.

Don’t be a dumb donkey! Be a Smart Ass!!!!

2. Who is your best customer today, and what specific problem are they hiring your product to solve? How has that understanding changed since you launched?

Jerry Hoffmann: Boaters are still our biggest consumers, largely private boat owners with private docks at their waterfront homes- but that’s a very seasonal business. Lately, Fuel delivery companies and startups are rapidly becoming some of our biggest clients. With outfits like Juiced Fuel selling franchises at a very excited pace, where the Smart Ass Fuel Mule will be put to work on a greater and greater scale, delivering fuel right to the point of need. Be it a boat, airplane, tractor, or other equipment – these services are fueling up customers on a schedule, or by request via their phone app. No need to waste time and fuel boating across the water to a marina just to pay double for fuel. You can fuel up cheaper and faster yourself, and people will see you for the Smart Ass that you are….

3. Which 2–3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Jerry Hoffmann: Influencers have been a huge boost helping us to make our niche marine audiences aware that our new product that solves their problem in a way that’s never been done before, exists. We’re currently looking for a few new opportunities to reach new niches in this space. Aviation for instance.

As for our analytics stats and what they show for engagement– Organic Search is by far the highest engagement audience. Direct sources, people that just key our URL into their web browser, is number two in engagement. And lastly, email outreach has lead customers to our site consistently. We are actively working to boost our company’s domain authority and SEO in order to focus on that highest engagement and highest converting audience– the organic search traffic.

We’re talking about 68% engagement staying an average of 49 seconds as compared to our number two– direct, which is 35% engagement staying for an average of 12 seconds. Email at 12% and 6 seconds. And then there is paid social taking up the rear… with 11.7% engagement, staying for only an average of 1 second. Leading us to really only use paid social for top of funnel efforts– general broad awareness campaigns. Just letting people know this new creation exists.

Revenue is almost exclusively attributed to organic as well. With Direct being second, and in our analytics at least, Paid Social shows third. But these GA4 Analytics don’t perfectly reflect our revenue attribution I don’t believe, as many customers call us to place their order rather than ordering directly through the website, with interrupts Google’s ability to properly attribute their purchase. That’s what leads me to focus more on the engagement metrics in GA4. That shows interest. That’s who is buying, whether by website direct or a quick phone call.

The winner is clear. Organic destroys everything else. And organic follows domain authority. So we’re putting in the work there. We’ve got a huge opportunity here.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 — Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Jerry Hoffmann: We’re continuing to work to build Domain Authority by seeking editorial and ultimately, high authority backlinks from relevant sources. We believe that will give us a boost with traditional SEO as well as AI or AEO as it’s being called.

We’re writing content for our site as well in an effort to boost search engine rankings (more on that below).

Additionally, we’re making efforts to converse with AI tools ourselves about our products and the problems they solve in order to help to train the AIs. And we’re seeing that to work it seems, occasionally even having a customer buy and tell us that’s where they heard about us. “ChatGPT told me this was the best gas caddy on the market so I looked into it and and here I am” type of thing.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Jerry Hoffmann: Our product does that for us quite honestly. If it’s truly someone with a use case for our product…. they are blown away and will never use anything else again. They 100% absolutely love our innovative fuel transport and delivery/pumping solution. They tell their friends and neighbors about it, and those neighbors call us and buy a unit themselves in many cases. They’re the envy of their cove as it’s the coolest solution out there. And what’s not to love? We took a problem that most people just accepted as ‘just the way it is’ and had accepted that ‘this is just going to suck’, and we revolutionized it. We made last mile fuel delivery easy, fast, efficient, and spill-free, and we made it to where it would go darn near anywhere and could be operated by a child (though we should probably not recommend it because lawyers). Seriously, 50 gallons of gasoline weighs 300lbs. The Smart Ass Fuel Mule weighs 230 itself, so 530lbs total. My 19 year old small framed daughter, with a full tank of 50 gallons of fuel, can easily load and unload this thing in and out of a picture truck using a set of ramps. Motor does all the work on the way up, the brakes do all the work on the way down. And she can easily navigate it out onto our dock, right up next to our boat, use the onboard electric pump to fill the boats tank full in about 4 minutes or so, motor the unit back up to the house, and plug it in to the charger so that it’s always ready for action. It’s just that easy.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months — and what would you stop doing entirely?

Jerry Hoffmann: I can just tell you what I have doubled down on myself, and what I have stopped doing entirely. Paid Social Media bottom of funnel attempts have mostly ‘just not worked’ for us. We’ve had some success when running steeper discounts at key times in the boating season, 4th of July for example, but recently we experimented with our biggest investment and effort yet into Paid Social Ads on Meta.

We ran a big top of funnel campaign with video ads (product/solution awareness focus) and tracked the results, filtering those that viewed 95% or more of our video into a new audience. Surely they were the most engaged and likely are the most interested, right? You would think. Next we ran three different campaigns against this new audience. One they gave the audience a phone number to call. We got a TON of calls. Dead air. Spammers. Robocallers. At all hours of the night, mostly while I was trying to sleep, with only a few during the day. It was a failure.

So next, we changed the ads up to allow potential customers to request a callback. We got about 17 submissions in a 24 hour period. I was leery of the process at this point, so I wanted to evaluate quickly whether or not this was working. I was traveling, but took the time to call all 17 of these ‘customers’ back. Supposedly customers that went out of their way to request us to call them, because they were specifically interested in our product The Smart Ass Fuel Mule. About half of them were disconnected phone numbers. About half of the remainder answered but had no idea what I was talking about. And the remainder didn’t speak english at all and we were unable to communicate (all ads were run in the US only). That was strike two.

Lastly, we decided to add a little friction. To make it a little harder for someone to express interest and to be recorded as a lead. They had to fill out a short form, name, contact info, and a free-form text field asking them to tell us what product their were interested in and how they were thinking about using it.

I didn’t even review these personally, my marketing partner did, and quickly found again, 100% bogus, nothing of value to be found, at all.

I felt taken. Stolen from. Like Meta owes me a refund for these dozens and dozens of leads, that I had paid several dollars each for, that lead to absolute nothing but wasted time and money.

So what am I focusing on? Back to basics– Organic is king. I’m writing a series of blog articles to generate content aiming to broaden the search terms our website qualifies for. Most of this is hand-written, maybe with a little help from available AI tools, but AI generated content I suspect is not the way. People want to hear our voice. We may use AI in the process, but our writings are majority hand written, edited, illustrated, SEO’d, and then shared. I’m sharing these articles in email automations with segmented audiences related to the content of the article (Disaster Management is the current focus– one email per week going to our audience in that market). Backlink building the ethical, time consuming, but most rewarding way, working with quality publications. This is a new effort, but one that is showing potential for great fruit. Directory Listings on all of the major directories is another booster, which I can directly attribute for boosting our Domain Authority in short order, though it’s a lot of work to do manually. (there are services that can do it for you, I’ve done this the hard way, myself, so far)