Gretta van Riel had just finished a media and communications degree at the University of Melbourne and had started her first full time job, as a digital marketing manager at a print company that was moving to digital. She was 22. In her own account of it she had $24 in the bank when she started SkinnyMe Tea in May 2012, and that date is the anchor for everything that follows: she puts the start at May 2012 and says the business was doing $600,000 in monthly revenue within six months of launching, so the milestone here sits at 180 days.

The idea came to her in bed one night when she could not sleep. She was already drinking a lot of tea and already interested in detoxing, and she put the two together into a word that did not exist yet: teatox. Tea plus detox. The product was not a new invention so much as an existing product with one thing changed. She has since described her whole method for coming up with products this way. Take something people already buy and change a single dimension of it: the design, the function, the price, or the time it is available. For SkinnyMe Tea the changed dimension was the program. It was not loose leaf tea, it was a morning blend and a night blend on a 14 or 28 day schedule, which turned a commodity into something with a beginning and an end and a reason to talk about it.

The start was small and manual. Before there was a proper online store she was taking tea orders on the side while still holding down the full time job, and processing them through PayPal. The store moved onto Shopify later that year. There was no audience waiting for her and no budget to buy one, so the whole thing rested on a channel that was still free.

What made the difference was Instagram, at a moment when almost nobody was using it commercially. In 2012 the platform had no advertising and no business accounts, so there was no distribution to buy. Growth came from posting consistently and from putting the product in front of accounts whose followers already cared about tea, fitness and how they looked. By 2013 the SkinnyMe Tea account had 210,000 followers. Van Riel has been blunt about how much of the business rode on that one channel and about what it cost her: that year the account was hacked and deleted while she slept, and the followers were gone overnight. She has called not building an email list sooner her single biggest regret from that period, and across her later brands email became the channel she says she would keep if she could only keep one.

Six months in, the numbers were what she describes as $600,000 in revenue per month. In the same stretch the company won the Shopify Build a Business competition, beating thousands of other stores, and the press that followed put SkinnyMe Tea on Tim Ferriss's blog, Fast Company and Mashable, right as US shipping opened up. That is the part of the story that usually gets told. The part she tells herself is what happened next.

The coverage brought imitators. First a handful, then a flood, until she counted more than 500 teatox companies and stopped counting. They copied the price point, the formulas, the morning and night program, and in some cases the entire website, the tone of the copy and the social posts, sometimes reposting the same content minutes after SkinnyMe Tea had published it. Her first reaction was that it made her physically sick and that she could not look at their sites. Her second reaction, several years later, was that the copycats had saved the company rather than killed it. Before them SkinnyMe Tea was a trending product. After them it was a category with its own demand, and because tea is consumable and gets bought again, customers who wandered off to try a cheaper version often came back. She noted at the time of writing that over half of that month's purchases were repeat purchases.

The other thing she is open about is the fear. She was suddenly making more money than she had ever seen and was convinced it would be gone by morning. What broke the loop was a question from a mentor in Hong Kong: if you lost everything tomorrow, what would you be doing on Monday? Her answer was that she would start again, and realising that the thing she had built was repeatable was what made the fear go away. She did repeat it, with The 5th Watches and Drop Bottle among others. Five years after starting, SkinnyMe Tea had sold more than 11 million cups of tea.