How Dylan Mullan Built Happy Skin Co into a $1.6M/Month Ecommerce Business

Introduction

In this Q&A, we dive into the Dylan Mullan Happy Skin Co success story, a masterclass in bootstrapped ecommerce growth. Learn how he took an at-home hair removal idea from a concept to a $20 million annual revenue business in just 24 months. Dylan shares the exact strategies, sacrifices, and mindset shifts that fueled this incredible journey, offering invaluable lessons for any aspiring entrepreneur.

Founder Success Story QnA

How did you find yourself doing the work you are doing today?

It’s actually a little bit of an interesting story. All through school, from maybe 7 or 8, I always thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I got into uni with early entry, which was cool. Literally six months in, I was done. Two weeks into the course, I was like, this is not me. I was so unhappy. I felt like it was almost destroying my soul. I thought for the last five or six years this is what I wanted to do, I got there and I’m like, this isn’t me, I can’t do this. So I dropped out of uni. In that six months I had off, I thought, what’s the opposite thing I can do to that? What’s just going to be something that isn’t what I should do or what I think is going to be a good job long term? What’s just going to make me have the most fun? So I did an acting course. I really enjoyed that and one thing led to another. I ended up spending like four or five years as an actor, full-time at an acting studio, got an agent, auditioned for film and some things. It got to the point maybe like three or four years ago where I was really enjoying that, but I just knew too many really great actors that, you know, in their 30s or 40s and still had to work second jobs like behind a bar or as a cleaner. I just thought I wanted to take more control of my life. I got pretty close to a couple of big roles and then you wouldn’t get it because you have the wrong hair color or you don’t quite look like the dad. I just thought, look, I love this, but for now I need to do something that I can take more control of my own destiny. And for me, that was always business and ecommerce. I found that was going to be the best path because you didn’t need a whole lot of upfront income or capital to start. So I got a job in the corporate space and spent two years just living on Instagram, living on YouTube, listening to podcasts, building Instagram pages just for fun, just learning how it all worked. That was the beginning of me really opening my eyes to the world of business and ecommerce. That’s kind of how I got to where I was today. It definitely wasn’t a straight path.

So was your first business Happy Skin Co?

Yeah, yeah. So we launched in April 2018. We probably spent about nine months to a year from when we had the idea for what Happy Skin Co was going to be until we launched. And that period was just grinding. We were at our jobs, we’d get home from 7 p.m. to midnight as many days a week as we could, three, four, five days a week. We’d work from 7 p.m. to midnight working on the business, growing our business, putting business plans together, trying products, failing, learning. There were so many times that there were obstacles and we’re just like, we’d just be stuck there for like a week or two like, how are we going to get past this?

What was interesting to me is you guys have had incredible growth. You went from zero to $20 million in two years in annual revenue. That’s pretty impressive. Let’s talk about the product. How did you find out about the product? Why that particular product?

The whole thing is, we didn’t try and reinvent the wheel. We sat back and analyzed what some really successful ecommerce brands that have launched over the last few years have done. Look at what happened with the teeth-whitening space; it was previously done in a dentist’s chair, it was quite expensive. Look at what happened with fake tan; you used to go to the beauty salon. I thought if you can take a product or a service that’s generally done in a salon or a clinic that may be a little bit inconvenient to book, maybe might be a little bit costly, and you can put that into an at-home product and still achieve the same or very similar results, you’re going to really position yourself with a good chance to win. We wanted to do something that hadn’t really been done before. The way we came across this was literally, it has nothing to do with our product. We saw some random ad for some shaver that had like a little light on it so you could see the hairs that you were trimming. We saw that and thought, hmm, what about this? Is it possible to get like a laser removal answer for at home? We probably spent three months trying to create one ourselves, talking to product engineers. We finally found a manufacturer in China who was doing something similar. We told them, okay, we want to change a few things. It was essentially like a tender process. We got down to one and we’ve been with them for years.

You guys are packing orders yourselves, you didn’t have a 3PL?

No, no 3PL, still to this day. Everything is shipped from my warehouse in Sydney. At the start, our very first order of stock was 110 units. Ten of them were for center influencers and 100 were to sell. That was it. We had it in a mate’s living room where the stock was on one side, a moon slot on the other side where the printer was, and in the middle was where we packed all the orders. Now we’ve sold well over a hundred thousand units in like two years, so it went really quickly. We didn’t see it coming. We always believed this was going to be a winning product, but to think we would go from… my whole goal for 2018 was to be able to quit my full-time job to work on Happy Skin Co full-time. That was my whole goal. We probably ended up hitting like $10 million revenue in our first year. We had to quit our jobs after two weeks. We had our first full-time staff member probably two months later. We had an office and a warehouse not long after that. It just blew up.

Why did you believe it was a winning product?

If you just look at the reasons I listed before: if you can create a product that’s going to give people more time or more money, convenience and affordability are massive things. In our market research, which was probably nothing crazy, maybe one to two hundred people, every girl that we spoke to between the ages of 20 and 30 had either currently was doing laser hair removal or had done in the past. I’m talking 95% at least. If they hadn’t done it, they either stopped because they couldn’t keep up with their sessions or couldn’t afford it, it was too expensive, it was painful. There were just so many areas of opportunity that we thought, okay, some people are going to be loyal to their laser clinics, that’s fine, but for a lot of people, we’re going to solve a problem and make it more affordable and accessible. So we knew it was going to be big. We thought it would take people time to get used to this new idea, but literally from the third day we launched, we had an influencer post, and probably from then it’s been busy since.

What made it take off in the first couple of weeks? Was it the ten influencers? Were you strategic with them?

The first day, no sales. I was going to bed at about 11:30 at night. First day, nothing had happened. We were probably spending maybe like $50 to $100 on Facebook ads that day. Just about to go to bed, I get a phone call at 11:30. It’s my mate. He goes, dude, we just got our first sale. I’m like, right, that’s crazy. He’s like, come over. So I jump out of bed, went over to his house. He’s like five minutes away. We cracked open a bottle of champagne, and we’re just like, dude, this proves the concept, people are going to want these. Second day, again, probably spending like one or two hundred dollars on ads, no sales. The third day, we had our first influencer post. It was about 7:30 p.m. at night. I was just about to leave for martial arts. He calls me. He’s like, we just got our second sale. I’m like, dude, no way. Five minutes after that, another sale. I’m like, dude, what is going on? And then literally 30 seconds later, that little Shopify chi-ching goes off again. I’m like, that’s it, I’m coming over. Between 7:30 and midnight, we probably made like seven and a half grand just from that one post. Our first influencer was from I think it was ‘Bachelor In Paradise’. We sent one to him not even knowing he was on the show. By the time we posted, it had been like an extra six weeks from when we first hit him up, and he’d grown like 30-40K followers since then. He was still cool about it, like, I’ll still do it for free just for the product. He posted it and it worked. So I literally hit up every single person I could on that show and they were like, yeah, we’ll do it for this. We just worked with probably anyone who would say yes. At that point, because it was such a new product, putting our product in front of people was always the first time they’d seen it. We weren’t paying them, so that allowed us to take whatever money we got and put all of it into stock.

You said when it comes to market research, you only spoke to a hundred to two hundred people. Why did you do that and how did you reach out to them?

It was a little bit obsessive. Everyone that we both spoke to that we knew, our friends, friends we met at a party, or we stopped in the shopping center and they had a friend with them, we’d just ask, what’s your experience with laser hair removal? It was just in person. Then we did a couple of really basic survey monkey surveys and got as many people as we could to fill out those forms. But like that was important to a degree, but also I just trusted my gut at that time. I just knew it would work. I trusted that as long as we had a fact that was the first thing, once we got the product and went through all the legal and operational things and that was all good, I knew that if this works, it’s going to take off eventually. It just needs its work.

How has the COVID-19 situation affected your business?

The first thing that impacted us was operationally. We’re still a small team, maybe 10 people. Whoever doesn’t need to be here, we get them working from home. So it’s literally my operations coordinator and one guy downstairs doing all the orders every day. That’s it. Everyone else is working from home. Maybe two weeks ago, we had a really quiet weekend, like a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and I was like, okay, this is going to start to affect us. But weirdly enough, I think because we are an at-home product, we are that solution that you can use at home. Obviously, the clinics and salons are all shut in Australia. The last couple of weeks have actually been really, really strong for us. We’ve had a lot of people reaching out with questions that are coming from a market that may not have been interested before. So we’re actually doing okay. We’re very grateful that we don’t have a business that’s completely blown to pieces from this.

What are some of the core marketing principles you learned in your early days?

These are super different, super simple things. Things like repetition builds brand. Something as simple as that. You need to be there consistently in front of your customer’s face; they’re not going to purchase necessarily the first time they see it. Things like if you put out an ad and you’ve got all this text and you think that’s the perfect ad, I’ve said everything I want to say, that’s probably not the best ad to do. If you can put an ad out and it’s just relying on a few key emotional elements, and you think maybe it doesn’t say enough, that’s probably the ad that’s the best one to go. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, a little bit nervous tension, that is the best one.

What has been more powerful for you? I assume the biggest channels would be influencer marketing, Facebook ads, and email marketing?

Exactly. In the early days, it was influencers for sure. We went really, really hard on influencer marketing for the first 12 months. We worked with as many really great influencers as we could. At the start, it was just pure a numbers game. We were literally working with anyone who had the right demographics for us and we thought was a good person. We just wanted to get our product in front of as many faces as we could. Since we grew, we’re a lot more selective. Influencers now play more of a brand role. But Facebook Ads has definitely been the biggest driver of sales for us for the last year and a half. Our first Black Friday in 2018 was the day our business kind of changed forever in terms of our numbers. We were probably spending a couple thousand a day on ads before that, and we never really pushed past that. Since then, we’ve kind of learned how to scale Facebook Ads and how to grow, and we’ve never been the same since that day. And of course, email and PPC sort of follow in the back of that.

What kind of ROAS do you look for?

I won’t give out our exact ROAS, but as long as we’re bringing back more than we’re putting in, then we’re usually fine. We don’t have to go too aggressive. We just like to see sustainable numbers. That first nine months was that hyper growth, doubling your numbers every single month. Now that we’re a more mature business, we find growth in other areas and we just try to make sure we’re building slowly and holding the markets that we have at the moment.

What’s your take on Facebook ad gurus and agencies? It’s very difficult to know who to trust.

There are so many gurus out there and a lot of people that over promise and just can never deliver. We learnt that pretty quickly. We do almost everything ourselves. We do sometimes partner with some media buy agencies that support us, but everything core to our marketing strategy comes from in-house. One thing I would say is, if you don’t want to do your Facebook Ads long-term, you can go to an agency, but don’t go to an agency until you’ve learned how to get your ads profitable yourself, even at a smaller scale. Don’t go there and have no idea what to do. Get to the point where you can profitably spend on Facebook ads to a certain point and then say, okay, I understand that enough now, I know what works for us, let me take it to an expert who can take us to the next level. You need to be able to keep them accountable. Be smart with your money in the early days; your marketing budget is crucial.

Have you added any complementary products or any other flagship products since inception?

In October last year, we launched a Gen 2 version of our handset. That’s the only thing we’ve launched since then. Our product development process, given that it’s an IPL handset, there’s a lot that goes into one. You can’t design one and get it to market in a month or two. There was almost a year behind the scenes of working on that. We’ve probably had 10 products behind things that we could have launched in the last two years, but we just got to the point where, as heartbreaking as it is, you put months and months into a product and you just can’t get it to a point or something you’d be proud to sell, and we’ve just not done it. This year is a big year for product launches for us. We’re very picky with what we want to launch. We want to make sure everything we do can help people feel good about themselves from their own home, same principles as before: making things more affordable, more accessible. It might not necessarily be in the hair removal space; we’re probably going to step outside of that soon.

How do you know when to move on to the next product? Some store owners have too many SKUs.

That was always the plan: to build a brand around one product. It’s going to be the easiest to manage, it’s going to be the least capital needed up front, and also you’re not confusing the market at the start. If you can become famous for one thing, it’s going to be a lot easier to get that brand recognition. People are going to remember who you are and what you stand for, and then you can add things into it. I wouldn’t add a massive product line to launch; it’s going to be too difficult to manage. I always recommend starting with no more than three products at the start. If it’s one product, do that really well.

Talk to me around copycats. I’m sure you’re seeing people trying to copy what you’re doing.

Yeah, that’s something we know all too well. That’s been a big part of our first two years. The first six months, there was none of it because everyone was so far behind. From about six months to 18 months, it was crazy. There was a year in the middle where everyone was trying to launch whatever they could to try and copy us. People would blatantly rip off our content, our design, everything. That’s why, as soon as we could, we started working on a product that was our own, that was bespoke, that was created by us, and every single bit of IP is ours. Over the last six months, we’ve actually come out the other end of it. A lot of people who jumped on it realized it just isn’t as easy as it looks from the outside. The advice I got from the HiSmile guys, which I learned the hard way myself, is just you’ve got to, as hard as it is, not put too much attention onto it because it does take away your focus. You do the minimum, like you put your takedowns in, but don’t let it overcome you.

Talk to me about what hasn’t worked and the sacrifices you’ve had to make.

In terms of sacrifices, to me it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice because this is truly what I want to be doing. But my schedule is pretty tight. I don’t have any leisure time weekdays. Maybe I get half a day on a weekend. Leisure is one thing that definitely doesn’t get a whole lot of time. One thing that I don’t even really think about but my friends like to joke about is probably relationships and dating. I’m just so focused on where I want to go. If you want to be super successful, there’s got to be an element of obsession to what you’re doing. We’ve had as many things fail and go wrong as we have go right for us. No one sees the behind the screens, the poor ads that didn’t work, the late nights trying to figure out problems. You have to be prepared for a lot of really long nights. When you’re a business owner, you’re really a firefighter because every day you’re overcoming problems, and the bigger you get, the more problems you have.

What parting words of wisdom would you like to share for anyone that wants to start a business?

The biggest thing that we haven’t really spoken about today, but I truly think it’s my secret weapon, is self-belief. True self-belief in yourself, in the process, in the universe, in God, whatever you want to call it. You need to truly believe that you can achieve your goals, and once I started that, once I figured that out, it changed my life. The biggest tool I use every single day is visualization. I think back to that journey we had in those nine months before we launched, and some of the clearest memories I have are sitting in that park across the road from my mate’s house, talking about what we were going to achieve. When you’re doing your visualization, one thing that’s really going to make it so much more powerful is actually attaching the emotion to it. It’s like when I was thinking about these happy things, I wasn’t just thinking them; I was overcome with joy, sometimes with tears coming out of my eyes. It’s a full-body experience. If you want to be successful in business, there’s a thousand gurus. You can find the information. But if you start with building that mindset and that self-belief, everything will build on top of that.

Dylan Mullan Business Stats

The Dylan Mullan Happy Skin Co success story is built on impressive metrics, showcasing rapid growth from a bootstrap startup to a market leader in the at-home beauty space. Here are some of the key stats that define their journey.

• Annual Revenue: Reached $20 million within 24 months.
• Initial Investment: Bootstrapped with $20,000.
• Year One Revenue: Approximately $10 million.
• Team Size: Started with 2 founders, now around 10 employees.
• Location: Sydney, Australia.

Metric	Value
Started	April 2018
First Year Revenue	~$10,000,000
Second Year Revenue	~$20,000,000
Initial Stock Order	110 Units
Units Sold to Date	100,000+

Dylan Mullan Method

Dylan’s method for building Happy Skin Co was a combination of strategic market analysis, aggressive grassroots marketing, and disciplined reinvestment. He focused on solving a clear problem and executing flawlessly on a simple, scalable plan.

• Identified a service done in salons (laser hair removal) that could be made more convenient and affordable for at-home use.
• Analyzed successful DTC brands like HiSmile to understand the at-home beauty product playbook.
• Sourced and refined an existing product (IPL handset) with a manufacturer instead of starting from scratch.
• Launched with a micro-influencer marketing strategy, gifting products in exchange for posts to prove demand.
• Reinvested 100% of initial profits back into inventory to scale quickly and meet demand.
• Mastered Facebook Ads to fuel hyper-growth after the initial influencer push proved product-market fit.
• Focused on building a brand around one core product before expanding the SKU range.

Dylan Mullan Tools

Dylan utilized a lean but powerful tech stack to manage and scale his ecommerce business. The focus was on tools that were accessible to a startup but could scale with his rapid growth, prioritizing direct control over key marketing functions.

• Shopify: The core ecommerce platform to handle sales, inventory, and order management from day one.
• Facebook & Instagram Ads: The primary driver for paid customer acquisition and scaling revenue after the initial launch phase.
• Instagram: Used extensively for influencer outreach, building brand identity, and connecting with the target audience.
• Email Marketing: A crucial tool for customer retention, communicating delays, and driving repeat purchases.
• SurveyMonkey: A simple tool used for initial market research to validate the product idea.

Key Notes

The journey of Happy Skin Co offers several critical lessons for entrepreneurs. Beyond the marketing tactics, Dylan’s success is deeply rooted in his mindset and strategic decision-making during periods of intense pressure and growth.

• Self-Belief and Visualization: Dylan credits his unwavering self-belief and the practice of emotionally-charged visualization as his secret weapons for overcoming obstacles.
• Start with One Product: Focusing on becoming famous for one single product simplified operations, clarified the brand message, and made capital management more efficient.
• Learn Before You Outsource: Dylan insisted on learning how to run profitable Facebook Ads in-house before ever considering an agency, ensuring he could keep them accountable.
• Don’t Obsess Over Copycats: Instead of fighting competitors, he focused on innovation (launching a Gen 2 product) and letting the market weed out those who couldn’t execute.
• Reinvest for Growth: The decision to not take any money out of the business for the first six months was critical for funding the initial inventory explosion.

Get Started in Just 5 Steps

Inspired by the Dylan Mullan Happy Skin Co success story? Here is a simplified 5-step plan based on his core strategy to help you launch your own ecommerce venture.

• Identify an At-Home Opportunity: Find a service traditionally performed in a salon or clinic (like teeth whitening, tanning, or hair removal) that can be converted into a convenient at-home product.
• Conduct Simple Market Research: Don’t overcomplicate it. Talk to 100-200 people in your target demographic to confirm they experience the problem and would be interested in a solution.
• Find a Manufacturing Partner: Search for manufacturers, often on platforms like Alibaba, who are already producing similar products. Work with them to customize and improve it to your standards.
• Launch with Micro-Influencers: Build a list of 50-100 micro-influencers in your niche. Offer them your product for free in exchange for an honest post. This provides social proof and initial sales momentum with minimal cash outlay.
• Reinvest and Learn Paid Ads: Pour every dollar of profit back into inventory and marketing. Simultaneously, start experimenting with a small budget on Facebook Ads to learn the platform and find winning ad creatives before you need to scale.

Conclusion

The Dylan Mullan Happy Skin Co success story is a powerful testament to what’s possible with a clear vision, relentless execution, and an unshakable belief in oneself. By identifying a universal problem and creating an accessible, at-home solution, Dylan was able to build a multi-million dollar brand from the ground up. His journey underscores the importance of mastering your marketing channels, staying focused on your core product, and building a strong mental foundation to navigate the inevitable challenges of entrepreneurship.