102: Sarah’s Strategies to 100 Subscribers and Beyond
In this episode of the Launch Your Box podcast, host Sarah Williams walks subscription‑box founders through practical tactics for hitting the first 100 subscribers and then scaling beyond. She begins by setting realistic expectations, noting that many creators launch with far fewer than 100 subscribers and that audience‑building takes time. Sarah outlines three core pillars—constant curation, relentless marketing, and ongoing retention—that must work together for sustainable growth. She stresses the importance of continuous promotion, urging creators to keep talking about their box every day through a rich library of social‑media ideas. Engagement is highlighted as a two‑way street: creators must be social before and after the sale, fostering community, FOMO, and authentic interaction, preferably in public spaces rather than closed groups. Sarah then discusses the need to create unique value beyond the physical products, emphasizing personalized curation, themed experiences, and brand connection as differentiators from mass‑market boxes like FabFitFun. The episode transitions to scaling strategies, covering metric tracking (traffic sources, conversion, retention), multi‑channel marketing beyond Facebook/Instagram, fulfillment optimization to avoid bottlenecks, and expansion revenue from existing subscribers. Throughout, Sarah promotes her training programs—Launch Your Box and Scale Your Box—offering modules, lessons, checklists, PDFs, and community support, and provides a text‑in CTA and website link for listeners to join. The overall message is that building a subscription box is a marathon requiring consistent effort, strategic engagement, and continual refinement.
Have you launched but feel like you're clawing your way through trying to grow? On today's episode, I'm talking you through what it takes to get to your first 100 subscribers and beyond. Come join me.
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.
Hey y'all, welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. Today I've got a juicy episode for you today. Juicy because it is tactical strategies that you can use to get to 100 subscribers if you're not there yet, or beyond 100. Maybe you've been stuck a little bit. When we launch our subscription box, I mean, it's a huge milestone just to get launched. It takes a lot of work for us to get to the launching stage. And so I wanna make sure that we're celebrating that. You might have launched and had huge success, and you might have launched and not had that much success or might have felt disappointed. And if you've listened to some of my interviews here on the podcast, You know that it's possible to get your first 100 subscribers instantly on a launch, but that's also not the case for everyone. Typically, anyone that launches with over 100 subscribers on their very first launch has been audience building for a long time. They've been showing up consistently. They've been audience building. Maybe they have a business involved with something else and they're adding a subscription box to it. Or they've paid tens of thousands of dollars in ad money to get in front of their customer, and that's why they're launching with over 100 subscribers. But I want to remind you that this takes time, okay? There are so many of us that don't launch with 100 subscribers right out the gate. So having that expectation on your very first launch when you haven't spent time building an audience for months or years in advance, I want to remind yourself that that may not happen for you and it's okay. And I want you to give yourself some grace and time to get there because it's not a race. It's not a race at all. And so what I want to talk about today is how do we get there? How do we get to our first 100 subscribers? Or how do we get beyond that 100 subscriber amount? Inside Launch Your Box, I walk you through what it takes to get your box launched, but there's a lot more to keep it going every single month. It's not a one and done. It takes really 3 things, right? It takes constant curation. As I'm working on my 67th box right now, like, it's constant curation, and there are times that I feel like the creative block. I don't know what to put in another box. Like, I've created 60 7 of these things. Okay. And plus I've created like one-off holiday boxes. I've created a lot of boxes and I feel like I have no ideas left in me some months, but I try to keep up on the trends, the constant curation. You've got to keep up on trends. You've got to be in tune to what your subscribers want every single month. It's constant marketing. You've got to get yourself out there constantly. You have to get yourself in front of new people consistently. All the time. And it's constant retention, y'all. It's constant retention. So many subscription box owners focus on the acquisition part of the business and they lose sight of the subscribers that they already have, the retention. They're so focused on getting more, getting more, getting more that they don't realize they have a leaky bucket and they are just refilling a bucket that has holes in it. So we've gotta constantly focus on retention. It's these 3 elements that should drive your business and create long-term revenue, curation, marketing, and retention. So what happens when we launch and we don't have 100 subscribers right out of the gate? It's okay, first of all, and it's most often because of your audience size. Okay? You just started working on and building that, and it's okay. And I want you to remember Sarah Williams here speaking to you on this podcast started with 44 subscribers and I now have over 3,000 subscribers. So I want to remind you that it's okay not to have 100 subscribers. Don't think that because someone else that you're seeing started out strong like that doesn't mean you're not going to get where you want to be. Okay. I was thrilled with my 44 subscribers. I thought I had just hit the lottery with 44 subscribers. So I just want you to put that into your perspective, where you are, what you're launching to. That might be 10, that might be 20, that might be 50. Remember Sarah only had 44. So I want you to get that in your head and don't see all these people that are launching getting 100 or 300 subscribers right out of the gate. And thinking, oh, I only had 30, so I'm a failure. That's not true. So when I started to think about this podcast, I really wanted to take a look back at where I was when I had those 44 subscribers and what I did to get to my first 100. Now, my first 100 came quick, and it doesn't always come as quick for other people. So I went back and I looked at some things that I did in the beginning that really drove my success. And I had 100 within the first several months. So let's go back to that. And I went back and looked, and I really feel like the number one thing that stops us from getting 100 subscribers is because we stop talking about it. We have all this momentum going into our launch. We're seeding it, we're talking about it, we're teasing it. We launch, we show up, we do all the launch strategies that I teach you inside Launch Your Box. You get it out there. And then we stop talking about it because, one, we feel like everyone has seen it. They're sick of me talking about it. And it's like, okay, I'm done now. They're just going to come. They know it's out there now. I'm just waiting for them to come. And that's not true. We stop talking about it because we think everyone has seen and heard enough of it. We've got to keep talking about it all month long, every day, every time you turn around, every week, every month. We have to keep putting it in front of them. And inside our Launch Your Box training library, I want you to go over— if you are a member, go over to the marketing module and there is a lesson called Subscription Box Social Media. I want you to go through that lesson. It's a short video. I've got a checklist for you, and I also did a whole PDF of examples for you so you don't even have to think about it. I've thought about it for you. But literally there are enough ideas in that training lesson, in that PDF, that you could post about your subscription box every day for 30 days and it'd be something different. It would be a different post. Okay. So I want you to start there. We've got to talk about it all the time. Okay. And if you're not a member of Launch Your Box and you're listening to my podcast right now, I want you to grab your phone and I want you to send me a text real quick. Go into your— pause right here and get it. We'll get into your phone app real quick. Pause it and then come back. I'm gonna give you the number. It's 940-204-0023. I want you to text me the word launch and I'm gonna send you a link to join the membership. Just pause here. Go send me a text real quick before you forget. And I want you to go in and I want you to dive into that lesson. Because we have to talk about our subscription box all the time. And you might think, well, I sell other things, Sarah, so I don't want to talk about just the subscription box. Hey, listen, I did too. And I realized very early on that if I wanted the subscription box to be the main thing in my business, I had to make it the main thing in my business. Even when I only had 44 subscribers, there were so many other things I was doing that was making more money than those 44 subscribers. But I knew the potential of this, and I knew I wanted to make it the main thing in my business. And if you treat it like the main thing in your business, it will become the main thing in your business. Consistency is king. It trumps everything else. We gotta keep putting it in front of them, so don't stop talking about it. All right, number 2, engage. Let's be social. Social media is not a post it and forget it. Social media is designed for people to be social. We have to be social before the sale and after the sale. Remember we talked about retention a minute ago? It is a huge part of our growth. If you're losing subscribers as fast as you're getting them, your efforts are going to fizzle out. You're going to get defeated, you're going to get burnout, and you're going to stop. We have to focus on engaging. That means engaging people to want to be subscribers and engaging our subscribers to stay. Your excitement about your box each month will be contagious. Okay? If you show up excited, engaged, ready to show them, ready to share, just getting excited about it, they're going to be excited too. We've got to create that FOMO. We've got to create this sense of them wanting to be a part of this. And that's through limited quantities. That's through our excitement. That's for people that are not signed up. So we have to engage with our subscribers and talk to them, and then everybody else that's watching us talk to our subscribers is going to be like, well, I want to be a part of that. We have to create those connections for those that are subscribers and create it like the FOMO for people that are not subscribers. This is why I don't love private Facebook groups for our subscription boxes, and I know many of you have them, and I'm not saying don't have them. But what I'm saying is when we can do these activities front-facing and not behind closed doors of this private group, we are now creating that FOMO for people that are not subscribers. You might be doing a great job of creating connection for your existing subscribers if you have a Facebook group just for subscribers, but you're doing an injustice to yourself and to your marketing because you're not sharing any of that with people that are not subscribers. They want to see what's going on. They want to— let's put some FOMO in front of them. Let's, let's see what they're missing out on every single month. If we only do that behind closed doors, people don't know what they're missing. So we've got to do it in front-facing. All right, we have to show up. We can't just lob it out there thinking that we're talking about enough by posting and sharing some video. We have to engage, engage in the comments, engage in the posts, engage with the subscribers, engage in the email. We have to engage constantly so people feel like they want to be a part of it. If you've been a wallflower holding back, hanging back, just putting your brand, putting your logo, putting the box out there, but you're not really engaging as the person that you are, You're missing a connection. You're missing growth. You're leaving money on the table. All right, so we've got to engage. Number 3, we've got to create value. It is not always about the stuff. Let's just be honest with ourselves for a little bit. Most of what all of us listening sell, people could go find in a big box store near you, right? It's not about the stuff. 9 times out of 10, it is not about the stuff. Sure, having great stuff, curating a great box draws people in, but people stay because they feel like they're part of something that's bigger than themselves. What makes us different and unique? Why would somebody shop from you versus going into Target? We're curating an experience, we're creating convenience, and we're doing something that big box stores can't do, even other big box subscriptions. I ask myself this all the time, like, why would somebody buy from me versus FabFitFun? They have the same great items. They have cute bags, they have cups, they have some of the similar things that I do. What makes me unique and different? Why would somebody subscribe to my box over FabFitFun? They're gonna get more products than FabFitFun. but they're not gonna get what I give them in FabFitFun. For me, it's about personalizing. I create a very personalized subscription box, and as much as I hate it some months because it takes so much time to create, it's what makes me different. Also, my careful curation of each box makes me different. The color pattern, the theme, the cohesiveness of the products. When you get a box from FabFitFun, it's a box of random stuff. Could be a little bit of makeup, could be some, you know, other materials. Nothing goes together, nothing matches. It's just the box of stuff. I'm curating an experience, an unboxing experience. And so I want you to think about the value that you're creating with your subscription box, and a lot of the value that I'm creating Goes back to engaging, goes back to number 2. I show up for my subscribers. Who owns FabFitFun? Have we ever seen their face? Are we buying from them? No, we're buying from a brand that we don't even know. People know me because I show up for them, and they, they would pay more money for my box because they feel connected to me than they would pay less money for FabFitFun, getting more products. They're not connected to that. That's an easy cancellation. That's an easy pass. That's an easy no thanks. People feel connected to me, my community, my subscribers. I feel deeply connected to them, and that is our difference. Okay, yes, FabFitFun has more subscribers, probably 100,000 more subscribers than I do. And I don't care about that. I care about the thousands of people that subscribe to my box that provide an amazing income stream for my business that allows me to employ 16 people, that allows me to live comfortably and, and do all the things that I want to do. That's what I care about. I built a business that I love, and it doesn't need 100,000 subscribers in it. Okay, that's what I'm encouraging you. We've got to show up. We've got to be consistent. We've got to create, show the value that we've created. You all have created value with your subscription box, but we're not sharing it enough. We've got to show up in a way that's authentic and meaningful for us because our customers will see that. Everybody can do these simple things. Once you get launched, it's really only the beginning. I created this course called Scale Your Box last year, and it is truly the most comprehensive training I have ever created, and I am so proud of it. There is so much more to scaling your box. There's so much more. There's just— and a lot of times it's just little tweaks, like little small tweaks you can make to your existing business that will truly help you grow in a manageable and profitable way. We could all grow really fast if we wanted to. It doesn't mean that we have profits. Do you know how shocked I am sometimes when I, I have friends that are— have these gigantic businesses and I realize how little profit they actually have? We don't want that. That's not what we're building here. We're building a long-lasting, stable business. Tweaking some of these numbers. Okay, when you think about knowing your numbers, sometimes we just know enough to get our dang thing launched and we really don't know what we should be tracking. So part of Scale Your Box is knowing your numbers. Where's your traffic coming from? How is it converting? What does your retention look like? Tweaking those numbers by even 1% can have a lasting impact on your business. Developing a multi-channel marketing plan is crucial. Facebook can only do so much for your business, all right? But there is so much more to marketing your business than just Facebook and Instagram. We have to develop this really wide base, wide marketing channel so that we can continue to capture new people. Optimizing and streamlining your fulfillment. When you start growing, you get to a point where things start to bottleneck in your business. We've got to be more efficient with our systems and processes, or you won't be able to keep up with it. And then what happens? You get in the weeds. I talk about it all the time, get in the weeds, and then you start to get burnout and shut down because you can't keep up with it. So we have to optimize and streamline our fulfillment and inventory processes. And I'm going to go back to retention strategies. We've got to make sure that we have our eyes on our retention. We also want to maximize the value of our existing subscribers. I call it expansion revenue. These all play a vital role in growing and scaling our subscription boxes. I go into depth with all these topics inside Scale Your Box. It is 8 modules It has 6 to 10 lessons in each module, and there are bonuses on scaling your ads and learning about trademarks and such. And you get lifetime access to all of this because once we get it out there, we've done a lot of hard work, but there's so many things that we don't know, we don't know. And so me putting together this Scale Your Box course was all the knowledge that I've gained in growing and scaling my subscription box. Put into a very easy-to-follow comprehensive course called Scale Your Box. And I, I'm here because I created this course because so many of you have had success with Launch Your Box. The learning, the training, the community is amazing. And you're like, Sarah, how do I grow even more? What's the next step? And after months and months of people saying, I want more, what's the next thing? Tell me more. I put together this course. Let's go make 2023 our best year yet. If you want to go deep with me into the new year, I want you to head over to joinsyb.com. It's joinsyb.com. I'll put it in the show notes, but it's time. Let's take your subscription box to the next level. 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.
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