048: I Want to Start a Subscription Box Business - Where Do I Start?

Decided to start a subscription box business, but are paralyzed by all the things you don't know. Today I'm helping you get started with a few items from my beginner's checklist. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back, everybody. Super excited to be here today because We're going to go back to the beginning. We're going to go back to the beginning of starting a business. And it's really important when you're starting a business to set it up the right way because it's kind of painful when you have to fix or change or redo something because you just didn't know what you didn't know. And if you're here listening, you're probably in the stage of wanting to start a subscription box business and you're, they're just overwhelmed by all the things that you are trying to figure out on your own because you don't know what you don't You don't know. And if you just went to the internet and you searched how to start a subscription box business, you will be overwhelmed by all the things that comes up in that search. Most of them are software or product or packaging or people trying to sell you something for your subscription box business, but not really helping you figure out how to start one. And everything in, in that search is going to be, oh, this is the best. This is the number one. This is the latest and greatest, but you don't know. You don't know if that's true or not. And so today we're going to break it down with this first kind of stage of starting a subscription box business. Where do I even start, Sarah? I get this question asked a lot of times and I created a checklist to help people kind of just check the boxes. You always feel good if you check the boxes, but we start in the wrong place a lot of times when we don't know where to start and having had a business for 9 years now. If I were to go back, I would do things a little differently knowing what I know now. So I'm going to share that with you in this episode today, but I'm taking this checklist and I'm going to walk through what stage 1 of this checklist looks like. You can find this checklist on my website. It's just a product that we sell. It's like $10 and we'll put it in the show notes so you can find it easily. If you want to continue on the checklist, I'm going to walk you through stage 1 of the checklist. We have 4 stages in the checklist today. So you're ready, you, you know, you want to do a subscription box. You've not— you don't have an existing business. You want to start a business. Maybe your business is going to have more than just a subscription box. Maybe the whole business is just about your subscription box. And you're hopeful. Like, I call this the hopeful entrepreneur stage. Like, you have this dream. You've probably been dreaming this dream for a while now, um, thinking that it might be out of reach or that It might not be possible because you don't know all the things that you need to do for it. Maybe you have never sold products before. The subscription box might be the very first product that you've ever sold. You're feeling overwhelmed. You're unsure if this is even an option for you, but you're willing to give it a shot. And I call that my hopeful entrepreneur. And so when we start thinking about our subscription box, we might already have these ideas in our head of what we want or what we think we want, what we think our ideal customer is, or maybe we don't even know what to put in it. Maybe we don't know who our is. And the very, very first step that I ask everyone to go through, whether they're brand new to business or they've been in business or they're already an existing subscription box owner, is to go through what I call the Post-it Note Challenge. And I have a free workshop that you can attend this little challenge with. It's called 6in60workshop.com. And what happens during this 1 hour I'm going to help you identify your ideal customer and lay out 6 boxes for yourself, because we can't really name our business, set up our business without a name if we don't know who our ideal customer— and we haven't quite figured out what's going to be in this box yet, because we want our subscription box name to clearly define either our ideal customer or what is in that box. And that is important lesson number 1. Don't just give your box a fancy name that nobody knows what's in that box. It's fun, it's creative, all the things. But what happens is if you can't clearly understand what's in that box by the name of that box, then you're going to constantly be explaining yourself. So what I want you to do is to go through this 6 in 60 workshop with me. Again, it's completely free. 6and60workshop.com. In this workshop, I'm going to help you identify your ideal customer. It's so important. You're going to, you're going to use that ideal customer in every single piece of your business. We have to know who that is. We have to know their traits. We have to know where they hang out. Like, we have to know who that is to be successful. And so I want to help you figure that out during that workshop. I also want to lay out what 6 months of your subscription box could look like so that you have a better understanding of your products, you have a better understanding of what you will name your business and who your business is for. We don't really want to go through all the next steps without doing that, because if you go through the next steps I'm going to explain to you and then you do the Post-it Note Challenge, that 6 in 60 workshop, you, you might change the things that we've already done. And so we don't have to go back and do rework. So that, that is tip number 1: block an hour off from your time, go register for my free webinar at 6in60workshop.com, and let's solidify who our customer is and what these first 6 boxes could look like for your business. Okay, so once we do that, I want you to contact a local SBDC office, and that's Small Business Development Center. Now, the sba.gov is a website, Small Business Association, sba.gov. This is where you— it's like the hub for small businesses. All the things that you need, certificates, licenses, um, all the legal things that you need to set up your business, you're going to find at sba.gov. But what I find incredibly challenging is that there's a lot of information there and every state is different. So what applies to me may not apply to someone in the next state. And so when I go to SBA, yes, you can select your state, you can figure out what you need, but what, you know, it's more helpful walking into an office, sitting down in front of somebody at a desk, telling them about your business and letting them help you walk through what you need to do next as far as making your business legal and legitimate. Legit. And so they're called SBDC, Small Business Development Centers, and they're all across America. I don't know if they're in other countries if you're listening from another country, but it's definitely something to look into. And these are offices that help small businesses get started for free. They were a huge help to me when I started my business. I called, I set up an appointment, I walked in, and they walked me through everything that I needed to do. They told me where to file stuff, they helped me fill out the paperwork, to file it. And even as I started my business, um, any times I would have questions about sales tax, or, um, you know, they helped me fill out my LLC paperwork. Like, as my business was growing, they were constantly there advising me and helping me for free. And it's just a huge resource. You don't want to get yourself in trouble with the government as far as taxes and permits and certificates and all of that stuff. So you want to set it up the right way. But why I want you to do the 6 in 60 workshop before you go to the SBA, because you're going to have to decide on a business name because all your paperwork is going to have your business name on it. And so I want you to make sure that you're very clear about your business name and your business name and your box name can be completely different. Now, if your business is just going to be your box, then let's, let's name it the same. But if you're going to do— if you're going to sell things other than your box, we definitely want to have a name that is different for our box and but is also complementary. So we don't want to have two random things, a business name that doesn't, you know, go with our box name, but we want to make sure that we have a good understanding of what we're going to do, who our ideal customer is, and what those products are going to be so that we can name our businesses really efficiently. But once you, once you contact an SBDC, and even if there's not one like in your local town, it's totally worth making a drive a few hours away to a bigger city and sitting down and working with someone. I'm sure almost every office conducts Zoom meetings where they can help you and they can, they can fill stuff out with you and they can pull up stuff and send it to you via email. So Make sure you find one. You can find one at sba.gov, but you're going to need to register your business. You're, you're going to need to get federal and state tax ID numbers. You're going to have to apply for state licensings and permits. So you might need a resale certificate, you might need a sales and use tax permit. Like, there's all these different things that different states require, and you want to make sure you get those set up first. And then what you need to do is you need to open a business bank account. So you can't funnel the income or the revenue or the sales that you're making into a personal bank account. You have to set up a business bank account, but you can't set up a business bank account without filing your paperwork and having that information for the bank. So that's why this is kind of a checklist. It helps you do the things that you need to do first. Before you can take the next steps. You're not spinning your wheels. Um, and again, every state, every country has different requirements, so you must find that info for where you live. So step 1, do the 6 in 60 workshop with me, completely free. Step 2, I want you to make an appointment at SBDC, at any SBDC, Small Business Development Center, to get your business set up correctly. You can find more information about that at sba.gov. You're going to file for your permits, your licenses, and your tax ID numbers, um, and then you're going to set up a business bank account. So that's kind of your first steps there. And now the next thing, once we have the name of our business established— and you want to do this first before we, we do the next step, because if that name is taken, you're going to know then if you can't name your business that because of legal reasons, you're going to know then. Um, you don't want to decide on a name for your business and go set up your social media accounts without having filed all this stuff because you may have to change it. And then you're going to have to go in and change all your social media. So that next step is setting up your social media pages. And I have some advice here for you, but again, I took a deep breath there because I just see it so often. We come up with these very cheeky, fun, creative names for our business that don't tell us anything about our business. And I would really challenge you to make it as simple as possible for one, people to find you, and two, for people to know what you do. We can get fun and creative all the time, but if we're constantly having to explain the name of our business based on what we do with our business, it's going to be a challenge. This is something I wish I could go back and change. but I cannot at this point. Um, so I'm just giving you my life lessons right up front. So we start with one platform. Where are you at? Where's your ideal customer at most of the time? Is that Facebook or Instagram? Maybe it's a little bit of both. You could start both Facebook and Instagram at the same time. We want to make sure that they match. So I don't want to make my Facebook page be something and my Instagram be something completely different. So we need to do some dual searches. And see if we can get them to closely match. So I'm the same thing on Facebook as I am on Instagram, and that also may be my website too. So we want to do a little legwork before we decide on a name for those pages, the website, the, the social media. That should really all match. It'll make it easier for people to find you on multiple platforms, and they don't have to be so much of a private eye to, you know, follow you, um, on social media or find your website. So you've identified that ideal customer in the 6 in 60 workshop. We're going to start posting consistently. So you've established these and maybe you haven't figured out a launch date. Maybe you haven't started buying product. And I hope that you haven't done that because this is the step that people skip all the time because it's not the fun part. The fun part is curating the boxes. Buying the product, putting it all together, that's the fun part. But what we have to do is we have to build an audience before we can start selling to them. So once you establish your business legally, then we create our social media accounts. We want to start that audience building right away. Don't wait, don't wait until you have the box all figured out. Don't wait till you're ready to start sell something. We need to do that now, and we really need to give ourselves 90 days to do that. So we want to start building our audience. We've got to post consistently. So posting consistently is the number one thing, and we have to speak to that ideal customer. We have to talk in their language. We have to, we have to give them content that they're going to relate to. They're going to share, they're going to engage with. And so if we don't know who that ideal customer is, there's no way we can talk their language. That's why that 6 in 60 workshop is so important as the very first thing that you do, because everything that you learn from that workshop is going to help you build your business and your audience. So we have to start posting consistently. Now, when I say the word go live, everyone freaks out. And don't freak out, but we got to show up. We got to show up. We got to show people that we're a real business. We got to connect with our customers. And going live, there's no faster way to build your audience than going live. Just guaranteed. Short video, going live— those are the things that are, are pushed into our algorithms right now. People are going to connect with you and they're going to start following you. They're going to start engaging with you. And so we need to do that, and we need to do it right away. We don't want to sit on it. Yes, you can build an audience without ever going live. Yes, you can. Yes, but it's going to be slower than the person going live all the time. If I had two entrepreneurs in front of me that were just starting their business, and one of them said, I'm going to go live twice a week. And the other one said, I hate lives. I'm never going to do them. I'm not going to go live. I'm going to build my business just on posts. I'm not going to do videos. I'm not going to go live. I guarantee you the person doing the videos and the person doing the lives is going to have 10 times more growth, maybe even 100 times more growth than the person not. So I just need you to get over yourself, get over yourself right now about the live videos or just doing small videos in general. There's no faster way to build your audience. That person that's going to go live twice a week and do short videos on their pages is going to be ready to launch in 90 days and have a super successful launch. That person that says, I don't need to do that to be successful, will not be ready to launch in 90 days because they won't have a big enough audience. To sell to. And so it's one way to really put the gas on audience building. Just my food for thought. Just my food for thought. I'm not pressuring anyone. I'm not, I'm just, I'm just being real. When I didn't go live, my page was slowly, slowly, slowly growing. My sales would come, they would trickle in. The minute I started to go live, my following doubled, my Sales went through the roof. People want to buy from people they know, like, and trust. It's hard to build the know, like, and trust factor if you never show up. So we got to show up. So we're establishing our social media. Now I would tell you to, to keep it trim in the beginning. So if that's Facebook and IG, that's great. If that's maybe Instagram and TikTok, that's a great combination, but keeping it to 1 or 2 platforms in the beginning will help you be consistent You won't be overwhelmed. And then you can layer on things like you can layer on TikTok later. You can layer on Pinterest later. You can layer on any of those other platforms that your ideal customer hangs, hangs out at. But if we try to do all the platforms at once, we shut down, we give up. It's too hard because it is, it's too much. We have to get that routine built into our system of going live or showing up or posting consistently on one platform before we are able to nail down and just layer it in. I did Facebook forever, just Facebook alone. Finally, a couple of years into my business, I decided this Instagram thing wasn't going to go away and I better get on the Instagram train. So then I did Instagram and I worked that into my social media presence. And then about a year and a half later, I decided I better get on this Pinterest thing because that wasn't going away either. And so we decided to get, get my content on Pinterest. And so that got layered in. And then now it's TikTok. Now I'm on TikTok. And so I didn't try to do all of that at once. I started with one thing and I got consistent with that. And then I layered in other platforms. So I want you to think about that. Don't do too much too early. So we know what our box is going to be about. We know who our ideal customer is. We went to a small business development center and we got all of our certificates and licenses and all the things we need to do there. We set up our business bank account. We then set up our social media accounts. Again, don't make them cute, make them searchable. And now we're being consistent with building our audience. We haven't bought one product. We haven't thought about packaging. Like, don't think about the things before we get ourselves established. That is the downfall to most starting business owners. They think about the things that don't matter up front instead of thinking about the things that matter. And what matters is getting setup, knowing who you are and who you're for, and building an audience. Those are the very most important things. We'll get to packaging, we'll get to shipping, we'll get to products, but if we don't have an audience, if we're not building an audience right from the beginning, we will never have anyone to sell those things to. So don't put the cart before the horse. The next thing that we want to think about is having a website, and we want to— even if we're not ready to build that website yet, We want to secure our domain name. And so you can go to godaddy.com. I recommend getting your domain name there, not your website, but your domain name that is your URL. So like mine is launchyourboxwithsarah.com. So that's your URL, that's your domain name. That's not the website. We're going to attach it to a website later. And GoDaddy is not the platform for you to do that on. I don't want you to do that. You can do it there and they're going to suggest that you do it there, but I don't want you to do it there. Just get that domain name. This is our URL. This is where people are going to go to find us. Just grab it. It usually costs less than $5. Um, and again, I try to make it the same thing as my social media. So you can find me at framedbysarah.com. That's my website. IG, framedbysarah. Facebook is Framed. And again, That's because I didn't do what I'm telling you to do in the beginning of my business like I should have. It should be Framed by Sarah on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, website. It should be all over the board. Find a name that you can use consistently, um, and that's what we're going to use for our domain name. So grab that domain name. You don't have to do anything with it. You just have it in your pocket, um, for when you're ready to build a website. But keep building your audience. Now, once we get that domain name, we need to explore our options for our subscription box. And you can, you know, we've talked about this a lot on the podcast and there's different episodes that you could listen to. The main players in the subscription box website platforms are going to be either WordPress with WooCommerce or Shopify. Yes, You can use a lot of different platforms. These are the ones that we recommend because of their ability and their use with subscription boxes. You can have a subscription box on different platforms. It doesn't mean it's the most intuitive and best. That's why we recommend WordPress with WooCommerce or Shopify. You're going to start exploring these. We've got a couple blog pieces you can check out. One's called the top out for tech pieces that you need. They'll help you understand what those tech pieces are that you need. Um, but we have to figure out what we're going to do for our website because that could take 90 days to build. And so while we're building our audience, we can behind the scenes be building our website. And do you notice how I didn't talk about finding vendors or packaging or any of that stuff? These are the first steps you need to take for your business. And the people that take these first steps this way are going to have so much better off launches and sales later because they didn't put the cart before the horse. So let's just review our stage 1 checklist. This is your— I call you the hopeful entrepreneur. You're hopeful about starting a business. You're not selling anything right now. You don't have a website. You don't have a business. You're starting your business with your subscription box. You're feeling overwhelmed because there's a lot of information out there and you're unsure if this is even viable for you, but you want to give it a shot. So if this is you, I call you the hopeful entrepreneur, and this is your checklist. Number 1, complete the 6 in 60 workshop. It's completely free. 6in60workshop.com. Contact the SBA. Gov. That's a website. And set up an appointment with SBDC in your area so you can get federal, state business licenses, tax IDs, all the things that you need. Then you're going to set up your business bank account because you need all those numbers to be able to set up your account. Establish your social media accounts right away and let's start building your audience. It's okay if you don't know what to post. We have lots of resources for you. We just need to start talking to our customers, relating to their pain points and creating solutions, serving them before we sell to them. You want to go ahead and grab your URL. That's your domain. And you're going to start researching which platform you want to be on. And that's the beginning. That is stage 1 of our beginner's checklist. You can check out stage 2, 3, and 4 at, we'll link it in the show notes here, but we got to get started and we need to get started the right way. And sometimes we just don't even know where to start. Here it is. Let's get these things done. We could do all of these in a matter of weeks, and then we're ready. We're ready to start talking logistics. We're ready to start talking packaging. We're ready to start meeting with vendors. But you can't buy anything from anyone if you don't have your, your licenses and your tax permit and all those things. You can't do that. So let's start the right way. Let's get started, and then we'll be ready for Stage 2 very soon. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.