{"id":760756,"date":"2026-04-29T06:52:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T06:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/760756\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T06:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T06:52:15","slug":"dad-solves-a-horrible-smell-problem-builds-a-53m-business-now-on-track-for-100m-a-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/760756\/","title":{"rendered":"Dad Solves A &#8216;Horrible Smell&#8217; Problem \u2014 Builds A $53M Business Now On Track For $100M A Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Serial entrepreneur Scott Dancy capitalised on a business idea that came from his smelly apartment. Dancy, a father of two, was going through a divorce in 2017. Back then, he was living alone in New York and had to deal with a broken washing machine one day.<\/p>\n<p>When a friend offered him tea tree oil with antibacterial properties, Dancy was surprised how the odour-elimination solution did its job. &#8216;It got rid of the smells,&#8217; Dancy said. &#8216;I was like, This is amazing &#8211; how do we market this?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>So, after years of running his own businesses, including staffing companies, an information security software firm, as well as investments in a sand and gravel pit, where he &#8216;lost everything,&#8217; Dancy&#8217;s encounter with the tea tree oil solution reignited his entrepreneurial spirit.<\/p>\n<p>Dancy&#8217;s Journey With Azuna<\/p>\n<p>In a few years&#8217; time, Dancy launched Azuna in 2019 in partnership with his friend who introduced the solution. &#8216;\u200aOther products just mask what the smell with fragrance. While we do have fragrance, the tea tree oil, basically in layman&#8217;s terms, is effective against mold, mildew and bacteria &#8211; and that&#8217;s the source of all your smells,&#8217; Dancy had explained.<\/p>\n<p>With a hands-on approach, Dancy set out to build his business. &#8216;\u200aNo idea what I&#8217;m doing, literally writing the ad copy myself. For three years, I set an alarm every day for two hours to wake up to see if there were things I needed to respond to, whether it was customer service questions or Facebook comments,&#8217; he had stated.<\/p>\n<p>He tracked orders, started collecting products from the warehouse, and shipped them all by his own. His odour-elimination product cost about $10 to make and sold for $20, but including labour costs, margins were &#8216;rough.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Despite challenges, Dancy&#8217;s business brought in $12,000 in April 2020, at the height of the pandemic. However, sales surged to $105,000 next month with people wanting their homes to smell better during the global lockdown.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"mapping-embed imgPhoto\" id=\"i1804343\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/azuna-products-are-effective-against-mold-mildew-bacteria.jpg\" alt=\"Azuna products are effective against mold, mildew and bacteria\" width=\"736\" height=\"322\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Azuna products are effective against mold, mildew and bacteria, founder claims<br \/>\nOfficial website<\/p>\n<p>While Azuna got its own third-party logistics as operation had to keep up with rising demand, Dancy did not hire anyone until he took to business to $3 million in two years.<\/p>\n<p>Hitting $50M Milestone In 2025<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, Azuna&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibtimes.co.uk\/harvard-student-powdered-hummus-startup-1793813\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">sales trajectory showed no sign of slowing down<\/a>. Sales hit $53 million in 2025 and on track to surpass $100 million this year. The bootstrapped business also picked up investments along the way, which remains under $10 million to date.<\/p>\n<p>However, fast growth is seldom without challenges. &#8216;\u200aI&#8217;m not an operations person. I&#8217;m an entrepreneur. They just put up a job description for an executive assistant for me, and someone wrote in there, &#8220;Cleaning up after the Tasmanian devil.&#8221; So that puts it in perspective. That&#8217;s me,&#8217; Dancy stated.<\/p>\n<p>Operational transition is vital when a business grows from half a million dollars to $3 million a month in a short span of four months. At that point, a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ibtimes.co.uk\/harvard-student-powdered-hummus-startup-1793813\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">business owner has to think beyond inventory <\/a>to about business outlook for the next six months.<\/p>\n<p>In all, Dancy plans to sell Azuna when the time is right. The business just began distribution in the Midwest-based grocery chain Fresh Thyme and is exploring collaborations with other popular retailers. One-and-a-half years down the line, he sees thse business generating $20 million in sales a month.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;\u200aMy goal this year is we&#8217;ll probably take on an institutional investment for the first time, but they have to have really good retail experience. Gr\u00fcns [a gummy supplement brand] just sold for $1.2 billion, and they had similar revenues last year to what we&#8217;ll have this year,&#8217; Dancy had mentioned.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;\u200aI&#8217;d like to eventually build a R&amp;D company and a marketing company that shows what we did to bring in the money to then pay for the investments for others. I&#8217;d love to build a community of CPG brands out of Buffalo after I take a little bit of time off,&#8217; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Regarding his advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, Dancy stated: &#8216;Plan for the worst and be delusional a little bit.&#8217;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Serial entrepreneur Scott Dancy capitalised on a business idea that came from his smelly apartment. Dancy, a father&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":760757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[312605,64,115519,607,525,312604,304025,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-760756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-azuna","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurial-journey","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-finance","tag-scott-dancy","tag-tea-tree-oil","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116486678013978297","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}