The Idea

In 2018, Garrett Yamasaki was an electrical engineer with a nine-to-five and a losing streak. He'd worked at Texas Instruments, then Broadcom, then Google, where he shipped on Google Assistant and YouTube. He'd also been studying SEO since 2012 and had built nine or ten websites, every one of which failed.

Then his wife decided she wanted a Goldendoodle.

Yamasaki spent hours searching for reliable information on the breed and found almost none. The reason was structural: a Goldendoodle is a crossbreed, and the big authorities like the American Kennel Club won't publish on mutts. A dog breed exploding in popularity had no credible publisher covering it.

He registered a domain and started writing. Up at 7am for an outline and 500 words before work, the rest of the article after dinner, publish before bed. He was not a good writer at the time. He was simply the only person bothering to cover the topic.

This was the beginning of We Love Doodles.

The Execution

• 2018: Yamasaki wrote close to 100 articles in three months, targeting keywords with a difficulty score of five and around 50 monthly searches. Traffic went exponential in months four to six.
• 2019: He reinvested every pound the site earned plus his own savings, and ended the year with 10 writers, one editor and one VA. At peak the site was publishing 500,000 words a month.
• 2021: Amazon affiliate income hit roughly $10,000 a month. At a 2-3% commission, that meant he was shifting $200,000 to $300,000 of other people's dog products a year and keeping almost none of it.
• 2022: After 11 months of development he launched a private-label slicker brush, sourced off Alibaba and inserted into the articles already ranking number one. It did just over $1M in its first year on one product. He quit his job at the end of that year.
• 2023: The whole thing sat on one channel. Yamasaki was blunt about it: a content business is one penalty awayfrom losing half its traffic, and 2023 brought his first real setback. He also sold out of the brush two or three times, which torches your Amazon bestseller rating, and started stockpiling inventory in his garage as insurance.
• 2023: Revenue hit $4M on Amazon FBA at 20-30% margins, against 5,000 published articles and roughly $500,000 a year in display ad income across his site portfolio.
• August 2026: The catalogue passed 150 SKUs, the brand took Grooming Product of the Year at the Pet Innovation Awards, and it had served over two million customers with 35,000+ Amazon reviews.
• 2026: We Love Doodles landed at No. 837 on the Inc. 5000 after 412% three-year growth, top 17% of the list.
• Today: The business has crossed eight figures, still bootstrapped, still run by four people. Yamasaki took the ceiling question to the Operators podcast: go deeper into one dog breed, or wider into all of them.

The lesson?

Yamasaki didn't do market research. He downloaded his Amazon affiliate report and read it as a product roadmap. He was already selling a quarter of a million dollars of someone else's dog brushes for a 3% cut, which meant demand was proven, the traffic was owned, and the only missing piece was the brand on the box. Most founders hunt for a market. The best ones notice they're already serving one for free.