They weren't on Amazon at all. Nine months later they were the number two seller in the category.

Where they started

A direct-to-consumer brand with no marketplace at all

Kitty Poo Club had built a working subscription business on their own site. What they did not have was any presence on the marketplace where a large share of their category’s customers start looking — so competitors were taking that demand by default, and there was no revenue to defend because there was nothing there yet.

Two constraints shaped everything. The ad budget was limited, so there was no option to buy rank and sort profitability out later. And disposable litter boxes are a crowded, price-visible category, which means a launch that does not rank organically ends up permanently renting its traffic.

What we did

Rank first, then spend — on a budget that could not carry the launch alone

• Analysed what already worked, reading their direct-to-consumer site performance and existing advertising against brand identity, and fixing the KPIs the account would be judged on: ad spend, revenue, TACoS.
• Keyword research from two directions — their Google Ads data alongside Helium 10 — so the listings were built against demand they could already prove rather than category guesswork.
• SEO into the front-end copy first, with full-funnel PPC launched against listings that were already built to convert.
• Bids raised only once conversion held, with CVR and CTR monitored per campaign so the increase followed evidence.

On a limited budget with no existing rank, the sequencing is not a preference, it is the only affordable route. Paid traffic into unranked listings buys a month of sales and no position; organic rank earned early is what makes the ad spend optional later.

What changed

From nothing to the number two best seller in the category

The first month on Amazon did about $3,000. By January 2025, nine months later, the channel was running past $27,000 a month, and had settled into consistent revenue of more than $20,000 a month after launch. Kitty Poo Club reached #2 in Amazon Best Sellers for disposable cat litter boxes within the first three months and held it.

TACoS fell from 53.8% to 9.6% across the same period, which is the number that separates this from a bought launch. Organic sales rose 32% within the first month and 129.6% by the one-year mark — the rank was doing the work the budget could not.

What we’d flag: a category ranking is a position, not a profit, and #2 in a specific subcategory is a narrower claim than it sounds. The revenue figures also cover the first nine months of a new channel, which is the period where growth percentages look their most dramatic and mean the least.

Why it matters if you're reading this

A limited budget changes the order, not the outcome

The usual advice for launching onto Amazon is to spend heavily early to buy rank. That works if you can afford it and it is ruinous if you cannot, because the moment the spend stops the position goes with it.

This launch went the other way: build the listings against proven demand, earn the organic position, and let the ad spend follow the conversion rather than lead it. A TACoS that falls from 53.8% to 9.6% while revenue multiplies is what that looks like when it works.