092: One Change Doubled Their Subscription Income with Jane's Agenda

Launching a subscription box doesn't require a fancy photo shoot and having it all figured out. Join me on today's episode as I chat with one Launch Your Box member who doubled her subscription income with one simple tweak.

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 to the Launch Your Box podcast. I have an awesome guest with me today. I have Jane from Jane's Agenda, who also has the Planner Lifestyle subscription box. There's so much more involved in that. We're going to talk about it on this podcast. But Jane, welcome. I am so excited to have you because we just celebrated this month inside Launch Your Box. You crossing over the 500 subscriber mark. And I always love breaking down the journey for everyone. So we're going to do that today. We're going to break down the journey from 0 to 500 subscribers, the ups and downs, the wins, the fails. There's also a little fake it till you make it in there. So we're going to just dive into all of that. And I think it'll be a great topic for our listeners today. Why don't you start, Jane, with a little bit of back story. How did your business come about? What do you do? And then we'll jump into the subscription.

Okay. I, uh, I started my business in 2013. I had a brand new baby and I was working full-time, more than full-time. I was working probably 100 hours a week at a regular job and I needed a planner. I needed to be able to organize my work, my home life. I was suddenly way busier than I had ever been in my entire life. And I couldn't find the kind of planner I needed. And I went online. I'm sure somebody sells it somewhere in the world and they, they didn't. And so I'm like, you know what? I'm smart. I have a computer, I have a printer. I'll do it myself. And so I did. I printed out my first, my first calendar pages and I took it to work and I was right. It was exactly what I needed. Everything started kind of turning around for me. And, um, I started thinking, well, if I needed it, so did other women. And I went on and I put my first calendar pages on Etsy a million years ago and they sold instantly.

Were they digital downloads?

No, I sold, I sold physical copies.

Okay, okay.

That was what was special about it is I was one of the only ones selling the discbound planner style in printed form. No one sold it then. I think there were two other companies, maybe two. I know of at least one that sold the notebook system, but nobody sold calendar pages to go in it. And so it was, it was me and like Martha Stewart, and that was it. If you, you and Martha Stewart.

I love it. Just me and Martha Stewart. We were the only ones doing it. You found this gap in the market, right? So you saw the need because it was something that you were looking for that you couldn't find. And so you found this gap and you're like, you know what? I'm gonna fill the gap and I'm gonna do that easily. I'm gonna go on Etsy. I don't have to build a fancy website. I'm gonna go on Etsy and I'm gonna start selling my things. So then what happened after that?

So we started in August, September, somewhere right there. It's really hazy because I was sleep deprived. By April, I quit my job and went full time. It was quite, quite a whirlwind. It just kept growing from there, and I had to hire my first employee like 2 months later. And, and now, now we have a 5,000-square-foot workshop, and it's just this huge, huge thing that I, that I created with my first planner pages. I took my first pictures. On my bedspread under my ceiling fan. Like, they were not, they were not fancy. I just threw them up there and that worked.

Right. So now, how do we get to the subscription? Because you're selling your, your planner pages on Etsy. Have you built your own website at this point?

We didn't build our first website until 2016 or '17 was when we built our first website. Up until then, we were just on, on Etsy and I think Amazon Handmade. I was one of the first customers one of the first people on Amazon Handmade as well. They reached out to me. It was really an honor to be like, hey, you wanna be on here? But we're, we're no longer on there anymore. But we started our first website 2016, and it didn't really do well as a website for another year or two. But now, now we get the bulk of our business from our own website.

Had to build that audience, right? Your audience was found you on Etsy. And so now you had to send traffic to your own website. It's this thing that, you know, people think like if you build it, they will come. You know, that's, that's one of the chapters in my, book that I'm writing, but you have to send people there. People just don't know it exists. You have to send people there so that you had to spend time sending and teaching your customer base that they, you had a website and that's where they could find you now, right?

Yep. And you know what? It was a really hokey website cuz I built it myself. Never, I didn't know how to do that. And so it just looked terrible. And so what I realized is no one trusted right away. They didn't trust to go put their credit cards in. So I gave them free downloads. The first like month I gave free downloads. You had to put your credit card in, but you got a free thing and that built that trust. And I think that was really important is get their trust without any risk for them.

So you started to build up trust with them and now we're thinking about starting a subscription box with this, right? Tell me your thoughts as you were going through this.

So 2020 pandemic hit, people stopped buying calendars. What, what are they planning? They're stuck at home, right? What do you, what do you put in a calendar when you can't go anywhere? And we were trying think of a way to give some joy back to the planner community so that they could enjoy these, these things that they'd spent so much money and love and attention on, and they're just sitting there getting dusty. And, and we thought, you know, it'd be really nice if we could give them unique and creative ways to use their planner each month that they could depend on at a great value. And unfortunately, selling stuff one at a time, you can't offer the same value as you can in a subscription box with being able to batch and bulk order. So we created that as a way that they could, they could get that value and have new and creative ways that they hadn't thought of being able to use their planner before.

I love the irony of let's start a planner subscription in a pandemic when we don't even know what we're doing from day to day. Like everything was shifting from day to day in our lives. Like, are we going back to work? Are our kids going back to school? Everything's been canceled. I don't even know what we're doing the rest of the day, let alone next week. So I love, I love the fact that this Subscription was kind of built in that mindset where we were inside the pandemic. And let's talk about this launch of this subscription box because, you know, you told me that it was, it was, it's such a great story. And I think that our listeners are gonna resonate with it because you didn't have all the fancy bells and whistles, right?

No, I didn't have anything fancy. We didn't have anything designed or ready or on order when we, when we talked about this. We started with if we could come up with 12 months worth of ideas, if we could just kind of brainstorm that and come up with 12 months, then maybe we could make this work. Maybe we could come up with enough ideas to keep this going monthly. And it only took about 15 minutes and we were able to come up with an entire year's worth of ideas. So we're like, okay, well, let's, let's jump right in. I've never launched a subscription like this before. And so we just kind of, we, well, we wing it. I ordered a sample box. I had a custom box designed, but I ordered one. It cost me like $30, you know, for one sample box. And we had that shipped and we used that in, in all of our marketing, just that one empty sample box with nothing in it. I think the first waitlist we had, we turned it on with a, there was a photo of a woman holding a phone and she just looked so excited looking at her phone. And that was how we started our waitlist. Like there was, there was nothing to show them. I just told them we were launching and opened a waitlist.

And so you just use a stock photo of some random woman, right? Yep. It wouldn't be you, right?

No, no, definitely not me. And, uh, and, and it worked and we got quite a few people on our waitlist. At least it felt like quite a few people in retrospect. I wish we'd had more because we're very lucky that it went as well as it did. But that empty box was crazy. I put an empty box on a doormat in front of a door in our office. It's just an interior door. I put a doormat that said like welcome or something like that. We took photos of it and put it online and that's how we sold our first subscription box is just this empty sample box with nothing in it.

Let's just recap this for everybody listening that's sitting there overcomplicating everything in their business right now. Grab a stock photo and buy one sample box for $30. That's all you need to get your subscription box launched according to Jane right here. So you don't overcomplicate it. You don't have to go get your hair and makeup done and do a photo shoot. You don't have to go buy 1,000 boxes and fold them all and stack them up on a wall. Like, literally, it was a stock photo and an empty box. That was your marketing campaign for your launch of your subscription box, right?

Yep. And then we used the waitlist to decide about how many, you know, items to order, how many things to make, and how many original boxes to actually order. We didn't have any idea how well this was going to do, especially in the middle of 2020. And so we kind of used that waitlist to gauge quantity, and, and we didn't spend any real money or any real labor until we got that waitlist going.

And so what happened during that first launch?

Well, we had talked about that if, if we got 50 subscribers that first month, that we would feel like a success, that it would be worth our time and energy. We launched and I wanna say within like the first 5 minutes we hit over 100. And then by the end of the launch, we were well over 250 subscribers.

Oh my goodness. Were you freaking out?

It was a weird mix of, of joy and being terrified of what had we just jumped into, cuz 50 is a whole lot different than 250. So, so big challenge.

Were you producing all the product at that point? Were you making it or were you ordering it from like a print shop or having it made somewhere?

Most of it we made. We ordered a couple of little things, like I got a tote bag made by a company, little, little small stuff. But most of the stuff was made in-house, which, which meant it was, it was a much bigger deal for us.

Okay. So we use a stock photo and an empty box and we get 250 subscribers on our very first launch. And then what happened? Let's talk through, because we're talking about the beginning of the pandemic here, right? And so you're, you're faced with a lot of challenges over the next probably year, maybe even the next 2 years, but you're faced with a lot of challenges as you just exploded this subscription box, right?

Well, you know, I wish I could have foreseen what was coming because we could have been a little better prepared, I'm sure. But You know, everybody had kind of the same challenges. If you were in the business world, you had issues with shipping and product shortages, material shortages. We had labor problems because, you know, people couldn't work. There was a time when we had to work split shifts because we weren't allowed to all work at the same time. I remember working till like 3 in the morning one week because I couldn't work at the same time as any of my employees, so I took the worst shift. And then like my paper that I used got discontinued. They no longer ship it to the western United States, and that's a huge deal for a planner company that prints on paper. So all sorts of challenges. I'm very lucky we have a, we have a great team, and we just, as soon as a problem comes up, we all pull our planners out and brainstorm. How can we fix this? What can we do?

So I know that we just celebrated you crossing over the 500 subscriber mark, and so I want to talk about like more recently. I know you made some changes to your subscription. So when you started it, you had one option, correct? And tell me what that option was.

So we had, it was $49.95 a month and you got somewhere between 12 and 15 items in your box that all related around planning, desk accessories, things that you would use with your planner. We kind of stalled our subscription growth at about a year and a half. It just kind of stopped. We, we'd reached the end of our audience. I feel like they, if they were going to subscribe, they were going to subscribe. Like they, that was it. And we were having a hard time growing past that. We were losing people as fast as we were gaining people, and that's not really a good business model. And I was listening to, I don't know, one of your podcasts, Sarah, or something you did on Facebook. I'm all over your stuff. You were talking about having a smaller option. I can't remember the words you used. And I started thinking, how could we offer a smaller subscription box? Because there's two reasons that my subscribers unsubscribe. They either have too much planner product or it's too expensive. And I thought, well, if I could give them a smaller option that would fix both of those for some people. But then when we started thinking about it, it would be real easy to offer them the regular box and the smaller one combined. And so we went ahead and made a deluxe version too, and we, we did a full relaunch.

So you hit, you hit a plateau, and I think every subscription box owner goes through this. For me, it was about 9 or 10 months into my subscription where I'd kind of hit that plateau, and it it started to slowly dwindle. And I was like, no, because I had planned all this growth, right? We have to order products so much earlier. And so I was like panicking. And that's, you know, when I decided to shift and change what I was doing. And then it, you know, 10x'd itself over the next year. But you saw that plateau and you saw that you were losing as many as you were gaining each month. And we— something had to change there. So the smaller option, which is, you know, the smaller offer, which is perfect for almost anyone. There's typically someone, if you're doing, you know, a fully curated subscription box, there's usually one thing a month that is the staple piece of that, that we could offer, you know, our subscribers as just the one item of the month at a lower dollar value. And that hopefully will help us keep them. And so you started, you did the lower end and what was that monthly option for you?

So it's 3 items. We gave them, just kind of the decorative stuff that goes on the planner, nothing functional, no desk accessories. It's just a cover, the cardstock that goes under it, and a page finder. And it just kind of gives them a new outfit for their planner each month. But it's 3 smaller items, so I can ship it in a flat mailer instead of a box, which saves me on shipping. And we started that at $29.95.

Okay, and then you still had the main subscription, which was— was it still $49.95?

Yes.

Okay. And so then you thought, well, I can combine these two and create kind of this ultimate subscription. And was that one, how, what was that price? $69?

Yeah, $69.95, which saved them like $10 by getting both together. And you know, what was really surprising to me is I thought that we were gonna lose a ton of people to go to the lower option. And, and how it all kind of developed was really crazy. I didn't understand. And now, now I'm very excited that we did it.

And did you have more people people do the upgrade then?

So, so what most— what, what we realize is most people who are brand new join that lower option to start out with, like, to test the waters. But all of my regular subscribers, at least most of them, have switched to the Deluxe. They went and gave me more money.

So I love that you said this because this is exactly what happened when I introduced my t-shirt club. So that was my lower— I just had the box and I was putting a t-shirt in that box once a quarter, and they just kept telling me, I want more t-shirts. So then I started the t-shirt club, which was my offer. And I was worried too. I had that like same fear that you had, that I was going to take my $45 subscribers and they were all going to jump down to the $20 subscriber because all they really wanted was that t-shirt anyway. But when I made the decision to say, okay, I'm going to combine this and you're going to get it cheaper, just the way you did, I had not only over half of my subscribers upgrade their subscription to get the shirt every month, but then I added hundreds of brand new subscribers that wanted to try it out at the $20 a month option, just the t-shirt. So it just exploded it on both levels. I'm sure the same way it did for you.

Yep, it's pretty much exactly the same. More than half of them upgraded to that deluxe version. What's, what's interesting, I was looking at the numbers yesterday and I have the same number of box subscribers that I had before, but they're paying me more because they're getting the deluxe. And so they're getting, they're getting more value, but I'm getting more dollars. So that's a win. And then on top of that, I have the lower price option, which is what pushed us got us well over the 500 subscriber mark so quickly.

So when did you launch this? So did you just— did you plan— because you're open all the time, so you don't have a closed cart. So did you just plan like a special promotional week that you were going to show up and tell them about the new options and lob them out there into the world and see what happened? Or how did you plan your launch around this?

We were coming up on 2 years with the box. I think we, we were at like box 22, like I listened to, to, to you talk about that. And I came in and I told my team, this is what we're doing. And we immediately ordered a custom flat mailer and a new custom box. And just for the sample, again, I only, I only got the sample and we started getting our waitlist going and we sent notifications to everybody that the subscription was changing, that it was, it was gonna be a much higher value with less quantity and that they were gonna have options. And I was kind of vague about it cuz we still weren't 100% sure what we were doing, but I just kind of wanted to warn everybody. Everybody, this is coming. Join the waitlist if this interests you. If you'd like to join this monthly cover club, this lower-priced option, join our waitlist. And that's how we, we snuck it to everybody. Again, I didn't show them anything. My, my box is a secret for the most part, and so I can't, I can't show them everything, which would be really nice to be able to do that, but it, it doesn't go with our model. So what we did is we took some old planner product and we laid it out in boxes and made it look like it was going to be a deluxe. Xbox or made it look like it was gonna be this lower priced option and just kind of faked it out. And that's what we put on the website. Like they weren't real product.

I love that even 2 years later from the first Fake It Till You Make It launch, you did, you like, this worked last time, so let's just do this again this time. So I love that you did that too. Because it just simplifies everything. Like, gosh, we overcomplicate stuff, don't we?

You know, I, I grew up in restaurants and my mom always had this saying that nobody wants to eat at an empty restaurant. When you see there's nobody in the parking lot, you think it's closed or that it's not good or whatever, and so you don't go eat there. And I think it's the same for everything else. No one wants to buy planner product from a company nobody else is buying planner product from. So I always like, look, look at how good it looks. Like, even if you can't see, look, look, it looks great. You need this.

Yes, I love it. So we tipped over the 500 subscriber mark, and I— it's a big deal. Like, that's a really big deal for a small business. To have 500 recurring payments come through their bank account every single month. Tell me what you're feeling in this moment. Like, tell me what this means for your business.

For us, that growth to go from, I think we were at like 370 to go to 370 to 500 doesn't feel like that much, but it doubled our dollars each month. This launch doubled our, our income, which the difference that it paid, paid for my entire staff. Like it paid for all of my labor, which is amazing. Like we're still kind of feeling the aftermath of the pandemic in a lot of ways. And to have that kind of security that my employees are paid for, that I don't have to worry about paying, paying their labor each week, that's a huge relief on me.

Yeah.

Very thankful.

It takes that pressure off, right? Like that pre— that it's kind of like that constant hustle mentality. Like if I don't show up and sell something today, I'm not gonna be able to pay all the bills of the business. So having that, reoccurring coming into your business that you can count on every single month just takes the pressure off of you. Us as business owners, you know, we get to be a little bit more creative, we get to have a little bit more freedoms, and we get to think bigger instead of just these tactical things that I have to show up and do every day to keep my business running. We get to think big picture, and I think it just allows an open space for us to continue to grow our businesses in the way that we want to.

You know, I, I'm in a calendar business, so we had a huge slow season. Like, we would go from, I don't know, $50,000-$60,000 in December to like $12,000 in March. Like, that's a huge slow season, and it caused a lot of issues trying to keep employees, you know, working, trying to keep the right materials on hand. It caused cash flow problems. And because we have the subscription box, it really leveled us out. We really don't have a slow season anymore, and there's a relief in that too.

Yeah, I can't even imagine. I didn't even think about that, having the, you know, it's a very seasonal business. Even though we use a planner year-round, we only buy it once a year, right? We only buy the things when we need them in that moment. So being able to turn that and shift people's mindset into having this show up for them every single month is really, really awesome. When you think about, when you think about the future of your subscription box and you think about the future of your business, What do you think about?

Well, the subscription box has caused some, some different challenges with my regular shop because they kind of compete from time to time. And so we're, we're currently trying to balance how that looks for the customer, how to still see the value in the subscription box if we offer similar products in our shop. And we're working through that unique opportunity. So we're trying to figure out ways to offer them core pieces in our shop that tie in with the subscription box so that it makes sense. You're not feeling like you're missing out by picking one or the other. You don't have to pick one or the other. They work together. You can pick both because we did have— we have a regular shop that we've had for, for now 9 years. And so I don't want our regular customers who don't participate to feel left out either. It's, it's been interesting, but I think that as we continue along this journey, we're going to see more of that core set of products develop and And the subscription box stay the, the fun side of things is really how it looks right now.

I love that. I love that perspective on it. Jane, what kind of advice would you give for anyone that's listening right now that's, you know, in their, in their head about it? They want to start their subscription. Maybe they haven't started it yet. What advice would you give them on just getting going?

You know, the first thing I did was I kind of came up with a timeline. At what time do we have to be able to do this, to do that? That really helped because it calmed me down. I'm a worrier. And when I realized that if I, if I opened my waitlist on this date, it still gave me 2 months to come up with everything else, like before I had to ship it, or even 3 months. It was quite a while before I had to ship it. Thinking, thinking in terms of you don't have to have everything day 1 of your waitlist. You can, you can start where you are and build on it because you will have time. But also if I had waited till I was ready, we would I'm never ready. Like, who's, who's ever perfectly ready? So I just did. I'm always like, good is good enough. Let's go.

Yeah. So from the planner lady, she's telling you to plan it, put it on your calendar. If you don't have a calendar, she's got a few you can buy. But that's the thing. I, and I think I was talking with someone, one of my mastermind members the other day, and we were talking about how we feel like we're in a state of chaos all the time. But when we have a plan and we can put things on a calendar and we can put things in a time block section that we really feel more in control of what we're doing and we feel more ready than if we never put that date down, if we never put a plan together. So if you're, you're listening and you still haven't put your plan together of when and how you're going to launch, now's the time to just sit down, pull the calendar out and say, if I launch a waitlist tomorrow, you can launch a waitlist. With an empty box and a stock photo. Okay, we just heard Jane do that. If I launch a waitlist now, can I give myself 2 months, 90 days, whatever that looks like to, to work on the rest of it? And then you're not launching your waitlist until you're ready to launch. You really need time to build that waitlist, just like Jane's telling you here. So get a plan together so that you feel more confident and in control of what you have to do next.

Yep. And you know, the only other thing that I've had to learn along the way is to go forth confidently. I feel like the customers can smell fear. If you're worried, if you are not confident, they can smell it and they avoid you. And so you design and you create this thing with love and heart and you put it out there without worrying about it and they will feel that. It's that, that has been huge for us.

I love that. I'm gonna, I'm writing that down. Your customers can smell fear. It's just like a shark, right? Like they know they're circling, they can feel it. So advice is to get going, be confident, make a plan, and anyone can launch a subscription box. Anyone can do this. You've heard, you've heard story after story on the podcast about it. Jane, I wanna thank you for sharing your launch story with us. I loved your subscription box. I got to open it. Was that last month or the month before during our box opening? It is a beautiful, amazing box. Launch Your Box. If someone's listening and they are like, I need a plan and I need Jane's planner, where would you send them?

We have a website, janeagenda.com, and everything is on there. That's, that's our whole world.

Okay, so go over and visit Jane's website. We've got that also linked in the show notes today, and we'll be back next week for another episode. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box Talks 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.