He Makes $1M Per Month Selling Peanut Butter on TikTok Live

Post on TikTok. Go live for 9 hours. Make $40-50k.

That’s the playbook Craig Mount is running right now to sell over $1.1M in peanut butter in just 30 days.

Craig, a Hampton member and co-founder of Nerdy Nuts, turned a simple farmers market setup into a $13M peanut butter empire.

In our interview, he doesn’t hold back on how he did it:

• The PR stunt that kick started his journey, making $25k in one day
• The TikTok influencer strategy that took him to $500k a week
• The scarcity strategy he uses right now on TikTok Live

And if you’re looking to get in on the TikTok live shopping wave, he even shares the tools and research methods to find trending product ideas… and the one product idea he swears is the next big thing.

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Yeah, alright. So my name is Craig Mount. I am the current CEO of Nerdy Nuts, and I’m a co-founder with my wife, Erika. We are the Ben and Jerry’s of peanut butter: we take dessert and mix it with peanut butter.

Peanut butter has been sweetened by jelly since 1901, and Nerdy Nuts is a thought experiment: what if peanut butter divorced jelly and went into a “ho phase”? 

What if it started dating around? Sweetened with caramel, milk chocolate, white chocolate, or raspberry sauce? That’s what Nerdy Nuts is: peanut butter plus your favorite dessert. 

Our jars are short with wide mouths at the top so you can scoop it easily [with a spoon]. It’s something you eat while watching Netflix, or sneak it into the theater for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. It’s an indulgence, a treat for yourself. That is Nerdy Nuts.

Last year, we ended at $16 million in revenue. This year, we’re at $13 million. I’m not losing sleep over the dip in revenue. Why? I spent $4 million on a peanut butter cup machine…

Peanut butter cups are the number two candy in the US, right behind regular chocolate.

We made 3,000 advent calendars with 13 different peanut butter cup flavors, and they completely sold out. That tells me this is going to be huge. Even Hershey’s said in their 2024 shareholders report that Reese’s Caramel Big Cup was their fastest-growing product.

So yeah, I could’ve played it safe and hit last year’s revenue. But instead, I made a $4 million bet to play the long game and take on Reese’s. 

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

There’s this book by Harper Lee called To Kill a Mockingbird, where Scout talks about an event having multiple starting points… depending on how you look at it. And with the history of peanut butter, I feel like Nerdy Nuts was the next step in its evolution.

Flavored peanut butter actually started in the ’90s with a company called Peanut Butter & Co., which has been a huge inspiration for me. They’re from New York - of course, everything’s from New York - and they made these flavored peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, like dark chocolate and jelly or Elvis-style with honey, bananas, and bacon. 

I saw that and thought, what if you put it in a jar?

I bought a used grinder on eBay for $800 - brand-new ones were $3,000 - and repaired it myself. I took it apart, cleaned it, replaced parts, and got it running. 

My wife and I were living in Colorado at the time, but we moved back to South Dakota because we were having our second kid. 

That grinder sat in the garage for a while, but when my wife got pregnant, she decided to turn it into a little side hobby.

I called the Black Hills Farmers Market and got us a booth. We became the most popular product there… by far. We’d sell out every week and make about $3,000 on a Saturday. It was wild to see how quickly people loved what we were doing.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product…

I talked to this PR guy, Adrian, and I’m like, hey, I got this flavored nut butter idea. Adrian’s the person who really put together the idea of Nerdy Nuts. 

I told him I wanted to get into PR [to test the idea], and he was like, “I’ll help you, for $1,000 an hour. I said, “hey, Adrian, I don’t have $1,000, but I have $250… can I get 15 minutes of your time?” He thought that was funny. That call completely changed my life.

In 15 minutes, Adrian said, “You’ve got this cute little nut butter thing going on, but you know who you really need to be? The Ben and Jerry’s of peanut butter.” Then he added, “Honestly, dude, I think this is a $20 million company.” 

He suggested borrowing from Airbnb’s playbook… they had released two breakfast cereals as part of a huge PR campaign. He said we should make presidential peanut butter flavors since it was election season. It was 2019, so we were headed right into that.

We jumped into gear. I made four presidential peanut butter flavors. Elizabeth Warren loved Homer Simpson donuts, so I created a donut peanut butter. Bernie Sanders loved Raisin Bran, so I made a cinnamon raisin peanut butter. Joe Biden loved chocolate chip ice cream, so I made a chocolate chip ice cream cone peanut butter. And for Donald Trump, who loved Vienna wafers, I made a Vienna wafer peanut butter.

One of the most important decisions was naming Trump’s flavor. People suggested I call it "Trump’s Nuts" for shock value, but I felt that would isolate people. Instead, I named it "Trump’s Triumph."

I pitched the story to 200 news companies… CNN, Wall Street Journal, USA Today. The one that bit was Fox Business. They thought it was funny and put it on their website. Dude, I went from making $3,000 on a Saturday to $25,000 in an hour. I kept refreshing my email, watching the orders pour in. It was insane.

We reinvested that $25,000 into the company. I switched to Shopify for a better checkout system, upgraded the website, improved the jars, and finalized the formulas. We made all these investments into the brand to keep things moving forward.

Since launch, what growth channels have been most effective for you?

I used to be a Product Expert for Google, I’m very familiar with ad platforms, digital marketing, and the numbers game. Let me tell you, when the economy is down, it feels bad watching customer acquisition costs go up. 

That’s why I’ve always loved organic growth. I love trends, word of mouth.

Early on, I used backlink tools like Majestic, Moz, and Ahrefs. I looked at 217 peanut butter companies, analyzing their backlinks and velocity. I noticed a lot of links came from Linktree on Instagram... I’d even buy their products, track delivery times, and figure out how many units they sold. 

That was an inflection point for us, realizing Linktree and Instagram meant high velocity.

We initially focused on Instagram influencers but quickly hit a wall with agents asking for big money. 

My wife Erika, though, had a genius idea. She noticed TikTok was taking off, so we sent peanut butter to a few creators, and it exploded. It dwarfed even what we did with Fox News. We sold $80,000 in two minutes. Isaw my inventory plummeting and traffic on the website soaring. We went from $50,000 a year to $500,000 a week. TikTok was just so authentic in the early days... It felt like walking into Disney World with no one else there.

That became our playbook for years. We had videos hitting 5 million to 25 million views, growing from $50,000 in year one to $16 million by year five. 

But TikTok eventually changed. Videos stopped performing. It felt like TikTok saw too much traffic going to Shopify. So, we pivoted. Now we focus on TikTok Live. We post a video, go live, and boom: sales come through TikTok Shop.

We were also one of Keith Lee’s first brand deals, and now he’s massive. It’s been an ever-evolving channel, and we keep adapting…

Did you ever have an “oh shit” moment where you thought it wouldn’t work?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We had to cut off our entire influencer budget, which was our main distribution channel, because TikTok changed the algorithm. That was scary.

They didn’t announce anything, but overnight things changed. Influencers’ videos stopped performing. Suddenly, everything had to be marked as “Paid Promotion.” Maybe that’s SEC-related, but it felt like TikTok was dampening those signals in the algorithm.

Whatever the reason, influencer campaigns just stopped working, and we were losing too much money. We had to cut off our influencer budget entirely.

We had to find a new way to be interesting.

I was talking to Mike Blumenthal, a mentor of mine at Google, and he compared me to a modern-day Sisyphus. Sisyphus is the Greek tale about the guy pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down, forcing him to do it all over again. 

Mike said, “Instead of a boulder, you’re sitting in front of slot machines, putting in a quarter, pulling the arm, and hoping one pays out. That’s your life right now… you’ve got to figure which one is going to pay next.”

So I started to put myself in TikTok’s shoes and try to understand what they were thinking…

TikTok had its own inflection point. They must’ve looked at companies like Shopify and thought, “We’re sending them all this traffic… look at this Nerdy Nuts kid from South Dakota. Why are we letting that money go to Shopify?” 

I genuinely think they decided, “No más. We’re keeping it internal. TikTok Shop is the future.”

That’s when we made a huge discovery. When you go live on TikTok, your videos perform better while you’re live. We realized, if we post a video and then go live for 9 hours, we start making serious money on TikTok Shop. It felt like TikTok was dangling a carrot: “Oh, you figured it out, little hamster? Do it again.”

So, the game changed. Shopify became “bad” on TikTok, and TikTok Shop became “good.” 

So we made a big bet on TikTok Shop. 

We completely changed our business model. No more agents. No more heavy reliance on influencers. 

Now, it’s Nerdy Nuts TV. “Welcome to the SpreadQuarters. I’m Craig, your host.” We had to become excellent at QVC-style lives, and it’s paid off. Some days, TikTok Live crushes the amount of sales on Shopify. 

Can you break down the keys to this business model for us? What makes it work? And What do outsiders typically not understand about your industry?

Yeah, you know, I like this question a lot, because it’s like, can I do this? Is this accessible? And honestly, I believe it is. 

That said, we’ve got a lot of competitors now. You don’t make this kind of splash without someone trying to imitate you. I’ve had billion-dollar companies look at what we’re doing, and suddenly I see it. I mean, look… Target released flavored peanut butters. Costco just came out with layered ones.

But let me tell you, there is no bigger blessing than a competitor. Competitors keep you sharp. They keep you focused. And yeah, you hate them. I really do. But they push you to be better. So, not only can you do this, people are already doing it.

If you’re on the outside looking in, yeah, it might seem as simple as making a product and selling it on TikTok Live. But here’s where I argue we’re different: you can’t imitate being cool. 

Often imitated, never duplicated, right? You just can’t fake it. That’s tough. It’s easy to copy what we’ve done historically, but you can’t predict the next big thing.

I mean, did I know our Dubai Chocolate Bar peanut butter was going to blow up? No. We’re just making educated guesses over here.

So maybe that’s the answer… it’s hard to truly imitate what we do, but you can copy parts of it. Take the playbook, try it in a different category. It works. 

Right now, you make an interesting video on TikTok, go live for nine hours, and you can make $40,000 to $50,000. That’s what’s paying out. 

It’s like sitting at a slot machine. Put in a quarter, see what happens. Until TikTok changes the game, that’s the machine I’m playing. Then, I’ll figure out what’s next. 

What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?

• Kalodata: For TikTok shop analytics and insights. 
• SparkToro: SparkToro is very interesting. It’s another tool made by Rand Fishkin… It’s very good, not utilized enough.
• Ahrefs: I used to use backlink tools… Majestic, Moz, and Ahrefs. What these companies do is they look at a website and see who’s linking to them. I still do this to this day to see velocity… how many units someone’s selling. That’s how we discovered Linktree was a big driver for some peanut butter companies on Instagram. I’d use Ahrefs to see where the backlinks were coming from… then go upstream and figure out their influencer marketing and order numbers. 

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Yeah, you know, your network is number one. For me, network is a distant first. The people you know, your friends, the folks in your Hampton Core group. That, without question, is the best resource.

Second, I love market data. SPINS, dude… I look at SPINS all day. It’s so fascinating, like grocery store data across categories. I’ll organize it by brands, check velocity, and then actually click on the websites, buy from them, and see what’s going on. I’m like, “Dude, why is this company having a moment right now?” But what’s really interesting is when things like Feastables or Prime slow down. Is it normalizing? Or is it something else? SPINS, 100%, is my go-to for information.

And I’ll literally read shareholders' reports. It’s insanely boring, but I’ll sit on my iPad while we’re eating Mexican food, and I’ll dive in. Reese’s, Jif, all of them. I’ll read these reports. It’s nerdy, but I love it.

As for podcasts and books, those are more recreational for me. I like true crime podcasts or stuff that’s just fun. Books? Right now, I’m reading one on generational differences between Gen Alpha and Gen Z. It’s not directly useful, but, you know, my brain gets curious about random things.

Where do you see untapped opportunity in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

One thing I didn’t mention is the drops. We do drops. I’d even say we popularized them. Now, that might be my little Kanye West moment, grabbing the mic from Taylor Swift, but honestly, I didn’t see a lot about drops before we started doing them. Maybe it was just inertia, like the market was headed that way, but we dropped peanut butter the same way Kanye dropped sneakers or Supreme drops t-shirts. We did that with food: peanut butter drops.

Every Sunday at 7 EST, we drop a new peanut butter. Sundays at 7, baby. Set your alarms. 

The idea behind it is simple: from a labor standpoint, we make the product fresh throughout the week, drop it on Sunday, and people go nuts (pun intended) buying it Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. If it’s a flavor like Dubai Chocolate Bar peanut butter, it might sell out in 32 seconds on Sunday. Then the chaos starts… someone brags, “I scored three jars,” and everyone else is like, “You selfish piece of sh*t!” It’s wild. We’ve got a private Facebook group with 37,000 people, and it gets toxic fast. You live by social media, you die by it.

After the drop, fulfillment kicks in. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we’re slammed, but by Thursday or Friday, it slows down. That kind of uneven schedule makes it hard to keep full-time staff. 

And then there’s the influencer side. You might get three great posts, maybe a fourth if it’s a hit, but after that, it’s done. The audience gets saturated. It’s like, “Alright, we’ve tried it, it was cute, but we’re moving on.”

So we’ve got two problems: uneven fulfillment and influencers burning out fast. 

What’s the solution? Have another cool product in the pipeline. I started looking at SPINS data, analyzing categories ripe for innovation, and one stood out: flavored coffee. 

I’m not talking about dumping sugar into coffee. I mean naturally flavored coffee. Forget your basic 100% Arabica roast. What about cinnamon roll coffee, vanilla rum coffee, or butterscotch coffee? 

Some companies are dabbling in this, but they’re missing key demographics. Like, why are you only marketing to men? You’re ignoring half the market!

Coffee is huge. 80% of people drink it. There’s room for a Ben & Jerry’s of coffee.

Smaller sample sizes, viral TikTok drops… it’s all there. I even started a company called Toasty Coffee Co. with a completely different vibe from Nerdy Nuts. Nerdy Nuts is watercolor, Winnie the Pooh vibes. Toasty Coffee Co. is sleek, sexy photography with bold art. I partnered with a small-town coffee company in South Dakota for small-batch, naturally flavored coffee.

I’ve invested $100K into it, and I’ve seen the potential. 

This market is ripe for disruption. The big players are snoozing. They don’t market right, and they’re losing customers. I already know how to make this work. It’s the same playbook I’ve used before. It’s just waiting to blow up.

What are some strong opinions you have about leadership, and how do you actually put those into practice in your company?

The more I look at Steve Jobs as a person - super cutthroat, kind of a jerk - you start to think, “Wow, I don’t really love how he ran things.” Emotional, erratic, you know? But then you have a moment of reflection, like, “Alright, I kinda do this too.” I’m very driven toward a vision.

For me, it’s all about getting my team on that vision. It’s like, “Are you drinking the Kool-Aid or not?” We’re going here, and I want people who are all in. 

A-players love working with A-players. Classic Steve Jobs-ism. I think about that all the time. My team? A-players, dude. These are the people you want in a foxhole. They’ll get you out of it. 

High performers don’t want to work with people who don’t pull their weight. That actually frustrates them. We’re all grinders, and we love what we do.

Team chemistry is everything. You need good-spirited, good-natured people because this stuff gets stressful. Sometimes you’re getting death threats, and you need your production manager to be like, “Yeah, we’ll find a way,” not, “What the f*ck, man, I just made this.” That’s the kind of team we have.

I trust people to run their departments. Mistakes happen, they cost me a lot of money, but we don’t dwell. We just solve it and move forward. 

That’s how we run things: find high performers who love what they do, who can put in the work when needed, and who you can rely on.

Where can we go to learn more?

• Instagram
• Nerdy Nuts TikTok