Boom by Cindy Joseph

Ezra Firestone grew up in an alternative lifestyle community and became friends with Cindy Joseph, a makeup artist who became a supermodel in her fifties after advertisers realized baby boomers had substantial discretionary income. When Ezra moved to New York at 18 to pursue online marketing and poker, he convinced Cindy to start a product line together. Out of conversations between a young entrepreneur and a 50-year-old woman about ageism and gender in society emerged Boom's core philosophy: instead of selling women the idea that they lose value as they age (the dominant narrative), Boom would sell the opposite—a pro-age viewpoint celebrating aging.

The company started modestly but grew to $3 million in 2014 with approximately $600,000 in profit. By the time of this interview, Boom had exploded, driven by Ezra's decade of direct response marketing expertise. The business uses a sophisticated pre-sale funnel architecture: traffic flows to content-driven landing pages (like "5 Makeup Tips for Older Women") that engage prospects before directing them to product category pages. Initial average order value sits at $77, with acquisition costs around $45-50 per customer achieved primarily through Facebook ads (90% of spend) plus Instagram, Pinterest, and Google.

Ezra's team discovered critical insights through heat mapping and testing. They initially assumed products needed to be above the fold, but heat maps showed users didn't know where to click. Adding videos throughout the product pages and making them longer produced a 13% lift in conversion rate while concentrating user clicks on video content—creating "FaceTime" and intimacy with prospects. The team operates ad buying manually with dedicated employees, testing wide targeting groups at scale (spending $1,000 daily on single targeting proved better than fragmented $15 daily sets). They found iPad placement works well, right column Facebook placements perform poorly, and Android has rebounded as a good placement.

Boom scaled to between $1.4 and $1.8 million in monthly revenue with approximately 25% margins. With daily ad spend of $15-20K, the front-end conversion at $77 average order value is essentially break-even, but Ezra's post-purchase automation sequences and email cross-selling drive significant back-end revenue. About 15-20% of customers naturally recur, and the company tracks 60-day windows to identify lost customers for win-back sequences. Customer lifetime value currently sits around $120, though Ezra expects it to rise with new product line expansion. At 29 years old, Ezra uses Boom as a content engine for his information marketing business (SmartMarketer, which generated $2.3 million with $1 million profit in 2014) and to fund software development on the Shopify platform.