129: Getting Out of Your Own Way and Gaining 100 Subscribers with Amy and Art Design

Have you ever felt stuck on your subscription box journey? Maybe you've consumed the training and you know what you need to do, but you just can't seem to get it done. This episode is for you. Amy felt stuck for quite a while making slow progress, but once she gave herself permission to just do it her way, she found 100 subscribers quickly. Come join us.

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 Laundry Box Podcast. I have one of my mastermind members here with me today, and we're going to talk about how she went from 0 to 100 subscribers. It feels like overnight, but we're going to go back and we're going to talk through her story because she's got a great story to tell you and just to encourage you not to give up, to keep pushing forward, and that 100 subscriber mark is closer than you think. So Amy, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. Why don't you just start by introducing yourself, your business, and what's in your subscription box, and then I'm going to take you all the way back.

Okay. Hey y'all, I'm Amy Green and yeah, I'm a member of Sarah's Mastermind. I do Tear Trade Decor. I have a laser, I do wood cutouts, and I sell— I have other things in my shop, but my box is tiered tray decor. So if you're not familiar with that, they're like— I call them little tchotchke pieces, and it's DIY. We paint them, and then also they get 5 to 6 mini signs in the box. And then as part of the subscription, I also teach them how to paint, paint their signs and style their trays.

Awesome. Okay, so I want to go back because you have such a good story. And here's what you guys know about whenever I do an interview right here on the podcast is that there's so much that leads into someone being an entrepreneur or someone being a business owner. And it really makes up who we are and the kind of entrepreneur that we become. So I want to go back a little bit and I want them to hear your backstory. Because it's very interesting. And then how are we here today? And then we're going to get into all the subscription stuff. We're going to give you actionable items on how to get to your first 100 subscribers. But Amy, take me back a little bit how this all evolved.

I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I mean, it's just been my— it's in my DNA. For whatever reason, I always loved that. When I was young, I remember like making crafts and selling them. And really my first business that I would classify as a business I owned when I was in my early 20s, I was a teacher. I have a master's in elementary education, but I didn't make enough money teaching, so I started walking dogs. And I grew that pretty quickly. I had over 400 clients and I had 10 ladies working for me. It was a lot of fun.

Wait a minute, Amy. So you were a teacher and you needed to supplement your teacher income because we all know teachers don't make enough money.

Yes.

And you started to walk dogs and you had 400 dog clients. Is this what you're telling me?

Yeah, 400. We had the keys to their house and everything. And I didn't know what I was doing and I was walking around putting flyers on people's doors. And that's how I started and it grew really quickly. It was a lot of fun.

And so then we realized how hard this is to walk dogs all day, every day, 365 days a year, right?

Yeah. So eventually I met Joe, my husband now, and we got married and we wanted to start a family. And we were looking at it and we're like, you know, it's not super conducive to the family life we wanted for us because it's a holiday business. It's a weekend business. And while it was great when I was single, you know, we, it was time to transition. And so I sold that, uh, business and I went back to teaching for a year and I cried on every Sunday. And so every Sunday I would cry and Joe was like, you have to quit. So at the end of the year, I quit and they even called me to come back. And Joe was like, no, you're not going back to work.

You would cry because you didn't want to go to work on Monday?

Yeah, I just, I, I felt trapped. Like, I felt like I loved the kids. I was a great teacher. My kids got great test scores, but I felt trapped in that room all day. You know, like I was stuck. It's an entrepreneur thing. You, you're like this free spirit. You have to be able to do things and you can't be on this and stuck in this room all day long.

Your, your time and your— all these constraints are put around you, right? And when all you want to do is be your own person, do your own thing, and, and you have different goals and dreams. So then what happens now? So you decide to quit the teaching job for the second time. What happened then?

The, the truth is I was really not sure what to do. We were recently married. Joe was traveling a lot. He started traveling. He's traveling 80 to 90%. He would leave on Monday and come back on Friday, and he would be in like 3 cities in 4 days. And he was exhausted when he got home. And I really didn't know what to do with myself. For a while, I really struggled. But then I, I'm not, I don't have celiac disease, but I can't eat wheat or white sugar, just dietary. It causes all kinds of havoc in my body. And so I, I've always liked to cook too. And so I started baking, trying to figure out— because this was back before there was such a thing as like a gluten-free like product or flour. You're talking— we've been married 15 years, so you're talking 15 years ago. So I started baking and it was really bad at first. Like, Joe, I mean, I would make the same thing over and it was just so hard to bake gluten-free. But eventually I got better at it and I started blogging because really I was bored. I didn't have a job. I was at home. My husband was traveling and I needed something to do. We were trying to have kids and that wasn't working out. And my blog actually took off really quickly. Um, this was, you know, way, way back in the day when you started on Blogger. If anyone's listening that knows what Blogger is, everyone was on Blogger.

So you started food blogging?

Food blogging, recipe blogging. I would develop recipes, take pictures, and share that. And this was back when people would like tell stories about their day. If you want to see what someone was up to, you go read their blog. You know, it wasn't like the blogs now, you know, with— I'm just like, please just give me the recipe. I don't, I don't want to know.

We don't have time for that anymore, right? No.

You know, again, it happened, it happened pretty quickly. In 9 months, I had a book deal. I wrote a cookbook and I started doing brand work for different companies. I did recipe development for magazines. I worked for Attune Foods and a company called PB&Co. I worked for Hershey's. They flew us, a bunch of us out to Pennsylvania and we baked in their kitchens. They came to my house and filmed at my house. It was really a lot of fun. It was one of the most fun times in my life. But then my oldest son was born during that period and he had a lot of struggles and we really weren't sure what was going on. My second son was born and then my third son, and we realized that, that my oldest had a lot of developmental delays. And he needed a lot of therapy. Honestly, we were at the doctor's, and this is not an exaggeration, we had 5 to 8 appointments a week. And we live in Prosper, Texas, which is about 45 minutes north of Dallas. And so every day, every day, get up and we'd hop on 75. If you know, you go all the way downtown, do all the appointments, come back up. And the truth is, I was up I had a photo studio up in one of the spare bedrooms in our house. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was working to meet these deadlines I committed to. And I look out the window and Joe's hanging out with our kids. And I was like, you know, it's not worth it anymore. But, you know, Joe, the payoff that I got from doing it was less than the pain that I got from not being able to be with my kids, you know, and have those fun times. Cause we had so many hard times. And so I just decided to like call it a day.

And at this time you had a very large social media following, like you had been food blogging for a while and you had grown your following to what, like 190,000 followers?

Yeah.

Like something crazy ridiculous. So you had this big community that you had built with all the blogging, and now you're like, you know what, I don't want to do it anymore. It's not worth it. My husband's hardly home. When he is home, I can't spend time with him because I'm spending my work days taking my kids to these appointments, and now I'm having to work on the weekends when he's home to take care of them. And this is not why we had kids, right? Like, this is not what we set out to do. This is all great and everything, and it was wonderful while I was single, but now I'm in a different season of life and you had to make a change, right?

Yeah, I did. And it's interesting how life works, Sarah, because we did. I did let it go. And then my husband was in modular construction. He did a lot of government construction, and he was running a company at the time in Texas, and the owner ended up passing away tragically. And the person that inherited the company for lack of a better word, started running that business into the ground. And Joe knew that he could not make enough money to keep up with how fast the new owner was spending the money. And we just kind of decided, we prayed about it for 6 months and he actually spent those 6 months teaching the new owners everything he knew about running that business. He went in every day and taught them everything he knew. Look, this is what you need to, you know, and And so after 6 months, he resigned. We decided to start our own construction company because Joe got job offers from all over the US. But the problem was really more that we had this son with a lot of special needs, and we had a long list of specialists in Dallas, and we knew that taking him out of that environment was going to be damaging. And so we said, hey, we're going to give this a year. We had some money saved. We said we're going to start this company and we're going to give it a year and we're going to see if we can make this go. You know, construction is a very different monster, especially these bigger contracts. It can take 9 months to a year to get a contract. And then in the government world, it can take 9 months to a year and a half to start getting paid. You work on that job before you get paid. And so We were like, let's give it a year and see if we can get some contracts. And we got our first contract within a year. And Joe was never really planning for us to work together, but we realized really quickly it was cheaper to support one household on a limited budget because we didn't have investors. We were doing all of this with our own money and we decided, okay, it's cheaper if we both do this than if we hire someone. And so I learned everything there was to know about the modular industry. And I already knew how to do the books because I'd done my own books before. I didn't have any project management experience per se, but I had a lot of experience from my other businesses in terms of planning, back planning, putting things together. So Joe kind of did all the sales and marketing, and then I did the books and the project management and compiled contracts and all of those things. And we kind of worked together. And we built the company together, like we say, at our kitchen table until we could, we had enough revenue in the company to bring more people on. And we did not take a paycheck from that business for 2 and a half years. We lived off our savings for 2 and a half years, frugally.

So now we're at a point where we're starting our own business again. You're starting your own business. Beau started his business. You were supportive. You helped him get it going.

Yes.

You helped him run that business for a lot of years.

Yeah.

And now we get into Amy and Art, and that is your business now.

Yeah.

And tell me how that came about.

I had kind of worked myself out of the role at, at our construction company. We slowly started working myself, and I was homeschooling the kids at the time because my kiddo didn't do well in public school. And I bought these pencils. It's so random. For the homeschool moms, they were like engraved pencils. And I got really interested in this, and I showed Joe these videos of how they're engraving the pencils. And like, you know, we could like start something and do like company products because they did a lot of trade shows and stuff like that within the modular industry. I could make like marketing products for people. And so for our anniversary, he bought me a laser one year, and I just Honestly did not engrave a pencil until just like 3 months ago, something like that. But I, I started doing like, okay, I looked at it for a month and a half before I turned it on. I just left it there because I, I was kind of overwhelmed. But then I started making ornaments and it just kind of grew very naturally. I— people saw what I was making, I'd share it and they'd be like, oh, can you make that for me? And so I really started out as like making products and selling them and then, um, slowly Soon after that, I opened a little Etsy store just because it was a lot easier to organize a lot of orders on Etsy than it was to manage like Facebook Messenger. And my dad's name is Art, and I grew up kind of woodworking with him. He was like a master. He just could build anything. And so I spent hours and hours in his woodshop helping him. He was hobby. It was a hobby for him, but he loved it. So Joe told me, when you come with your business name, you really need to include your dad's name in there because he taught you really everything you know about what you're doing. And so that's why it's Amy and Art.

So we start making ornaments, we open an Etsy shop, and then what happened from there? How do we get to having a subscription box?

I, I really think somewhere around the end of 2021. Oh, I found you somehow. I don't remember, but I know you were unboxing the Merry Christmas shirt with, uh, the little, you know, like that, what do you call that? The Chanel patch. Yeah. So I saw you unboxing that and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And I started listening to like your, while I was working, because I was cutting wood all day long to make ornaments. So I like listened to your podcast and I listen to Damon's podcast, and I was like, you know, this is really interesting. And I thought, you know, I need to do this. This would be a lot of fun. But I really didn't know what to do. I ended up in a business group that maybe was not the best fit for me. You were really the person that sparked that interest in doing a subscription box. So I'd been thinking about it since December of 2021.

And so you then joined like a business coaching group.

Yeah.

And you're like, I don't— you didn't make much progress. You told me that, like, I didn't really make much progress. And, and maybe because that wasn't the right fit for you, right?

Yeah, it wasn't the right fit. I made no problem. I made none. Like, it was, it was really— and I felt, honestly, I felt very defeated because it was expensive and I was spending not my business, even, not even my business money. It was just money that out of our savings accounts to be a part of this group. And while I met a lot of great people and, um, some of my best friends now are from that group. I did not get the support or the education I needed in how to grow a business. And it was really defeating. I felt like I'd shortchanged my family. The other thing is, our life is— anyone who has a kid with special needs knows that life is not easy. And I'm not complaining, but it's just you have more challenges in a day than if you've typically developing kids. And so I felt like I was adding a layer of difficulty on top of a really hard life when I didn't necessarily have to do it. It wasn't like we were in a position that we needed the money. We had honestly gone through COVID, and construction was difficult during COVID And one of the reasons that we decided I joined this business group was because we thought if we ever go through a time like that again, it would be great to have a second stream of income.

Yeah, for sure.

And it just didn't work. I felt like a failure. I felt like, you know, maybe I should just chuck it. And this online selling stuff is not for me is really how I felt.

So then what changed?

One of my friends joined your group, the Launch Your Box group. I was going to say LYBSYB, Elevate. I was running through all the names in my head. So they started Launch Your Box and she was like, you really need to go in there and check it out. And you need to get on her waitlist and just join the group. She was also in this other coaching group I was in. Just join and just see what you think. She's like, it's a lot of good stuff. She was like, actually, this is more than we get. She's like, what?

You get the higher paid thing? Yes.

She's like, you get so much in here. And I said, okay. So I joined the group and I was like, this is really good. And I saw you on one of your lives talking about the mastermind. And I was like, because I know a lot about running a business. I've done really hard stuff in our construction company. You know, I went out on the job site, I closed the jobs out, I negotiated the contracts. You know, I know a lot about running a business. What was getting me was this online selling thing. I just could not figure it out. And even with my following, I mean, that's the other thing I have. I have a big following and I could not sell anything. It was, it was really defeating and I didn't have the right following, but I have a big I have a big following and so I want people to know that there's a lot of factors and there's not just one thing that makes you successful. It's like a variety of different things that you do over time. But I got into Launch Your Box and then I saw you on that live and you were talking about your mastermind and I messaged you and I was like, I want to join your mastermind.

We laugh about it now.

Because, because when you asked me like, how much did you make last year? It was funny because you asked me how much I made and it was pitiful. And you did a really good job. We were on a video call. You did a very good job of keeping your face like straight and not like, what in the— you know, you did not make an ugly face.

You were like, okay, well, let me jump in here because anyone listening, there is qualifiers to be in the mastermind. Just FYI, what I saw in Amy was I saw this giant following. And I thought anybody that has created this following knows how to use social media, knows how to engage, knows how to build a business. And we talked a lot about her food blogging on that Zoom interview that we did about her joining the mastermind. And I thought she's done this once. All we have to do is rinse and repeat it with a different audience and a different a different way. We're not blogging anymore. We're going to sell subscription boxes. She's going to be an e-commerce seller now. But she's already built an incredible business one time. I have no doubt that she has the wherewithal, the know-how, and she just needs some direction on how to build this e-commerce business. And that's why you were a right fit for my mastermind. It wasn't because of the pitiful income that you made the month before, which they can laugh about now. It was about your potential. And that's what I wanted. I want, still want you to see, because sometimes I think you doubt yourself a lot, but you had all the pieces in place. We just had to rinse and repeat it. We had to figure out how many of those 190,000 people would actually care about what you do now versus what you did then. And we had to work through that a little bit. And we, and it's still a process. It's going to be a process for a little while. You're over 200,000 followers now. But we're starting to get the right followers. Into the mix. And so you joined in January, and I know one of the pivotal things that you did in the early part of this year was that you moved from Etsy to Shopify. You want to talk to me about that a little bit?

Oh, it was the biggest. So it was the best. I should have done it from the beginning. And the big difference is you own your customers. On Etsy, you don't own your customers. On Etsy. I, I think that, um, a lot of Etsy— it's the right platform for certain people, it really is. What happens is you go and you have your product here, and then there's a bunch of stuff underneath that's like, you can also buy this. And the only way that you can add them to your email list is through this weird AWeber process, and you don't own your people. But I was scared because I was making some money on Etsy, I was afraid to let go of it altogether. And so I started Shopify and I had Etsy. And then one day I looked at Joe and I was still getting, um, I don't do any finished products anymore. I do wood cutouts. It's all DIY. And I was still getting these finished product orders from Etsy because I had stuff that sold really, really well. And I looked at Joe and I said, this is, the Etsy orders are just they're wasting my time. I'm not— it's like I have to stop and I have to shift gears. And I said, I think I'm just going to close the whole store off. I'm going to just shut it down. And he was like, yeah, just shut it down. I mean, what's— and we talked about it a little bit. We talked through it, but I shut it down. It was the best decision I made because—

Now you could focus on the blanks that were easy. You could cut them, you could ship them, you were done.

It's also I think a mistake a lot of people make, and I obviously made this, is they have their eggs in too many baskets and you can't grow 6 things well at once. They try and start 6. I see people do it. They try and start like 6 subscriptions and they've got subscriptions all over the place. I mean, you're, you grew one thing and then you grew another thing, but you've got to grow that first thing before you can really grow the next thing because otherwise you just have these like mediocre things. You're not really making any money, you're not making any progress. And, um, we talked about that. We talked about going all in on this until I got it to where I wanted it to be, and then we talk about the next thing.

And so we— you plan for a launch for March, and you're in the Mastermind, so I'm close to you, I know what's going on, I know what you're working on. And here's the big thing You know what a launch is like in my world. You know all the pieces and parts that I want you to put together. And you're thinking, that's great, Sarah, but you forget I have these special needs kids and I don't have the capacity to do the launch in the way that you want me to do it. And if I wait until I have the capacity, it might not happen for a while. And so you recognize that about yourself. And you're like, okay, I'm gonna do a launch and I'm gonna do it with the bandwidth that I have. And you set yourself up to, and for us it was, for you and I, this conversation was like, let's just get it out there. Whatever we have to do, let's just make that first step. And I think that's the biggest lesson that I want you to hear as you're listening to this podcast today is that we think we have to get it perfect on day one. And yes, there is a launch plan that I outlined for you inside Launch Your Box, and it is amazing, and it will give you— it will give you the results that you want. But if you don't have the capacity to do that launch plan from, you know, point 1 to point 10, it's okay. I would rather you do a launch in your capacity, messy, and then we'll clean it up as we go. We'll get better as we go. We'll layer in some of the other things that I want you to do. The next time. It doesn't always have to be perfect. You don't have to hit every bullet point every single time. When I first launched my subscription, it was such a work in progress. I can laugh about it now. It was such a terrible launch, but I got better as I go. And that is what you see now in my launch plan. It's the perfected launch plan that I built over 3 or 4 years. It wasn't the first time I launched. I did a messy terrible, never done a launch before kind of launch, didn't have a coach to teach me how to launch, and got 44 subscribers. And I figured it out along the way. But for Amy, she doesn't have the capacity to do all the things in that launch, especially for the first launch. Like, we're building the business from scratch, we're building the launch from scratch. And that's the beautiful thing, because then in the next launch we've already built some of the assets. We've hopefully built the sales page, we've hopefully built some launch emails. So now we can use those and then, okay, I'm going to do a live or I'm going to do this because now I'm not building all the assets that I had to build for the first launch. Right?

Yeah. And you have to have 1 subscriber before you can have 10. And I remember you saying to me in our Voxer thread, you were like, I can tell you're scared to death, but you have to do something. So even if you just send an email and say, hey, you know, join my group. Because for me, I, I just, I really just didn't want to fail and disappoint my husband again because I felt like he wasn't disappointed in me at all. He's never. But for me, I felt like I was, you know, not— I was spending all this money and not producing any results, and I just did not want to fail. I was so scared of failing, and I really was pretty sure that no one was going to join. I thought there's no way anyone's gonna do this. They're just not gonna do it. But I did it anyway.

Tell everybody how that launch looked like. Let's talk through the action steps that you did. So somebody's thinking right now, okay, this is why I haven't launched because I don't feel like I have the capacity. Let's talk them through what you did on that first launch. You weren't even gonna go live, right?

No, I, I really just had some socials together, some social media posts and the emails. And I was like, I really honestly didn't have the capacity to go live. You know, in my head I had to get myself to like, okay, these are the things I can do.

And if I can do extra, I will, you know, and you created some social media posts and you wrote some emails and we were just going to do like an easy email launch. We were just going to throw it out there. You had been building your email list and we were just going to throw it out to the email list. Easy peasy, let's get something started that we can build on, right?

Yep. And, and that's— I did end up going live, not, I don't know, several times. It was— and it got, you know, after I had the first, like, at the first day, I think I got 20, 19 or 20 people.

Okay, you got 20 subscribers the first day from your emails, which you were hoping for what, like 10? It was such a small number.

I know. I was like, if I get 10, I, I will I just didn't know. And it's scary because I've been thinking about this for over a year and I had been discouraged, honestly, by another coach of going this route. And I really just, again, was so scared to fail. But I got 19 on the first day and then it got to be fun. I was like, wait, hold on. This is what I really—

You're excited. You're like, yes, this could be a thing. Okay, I'm going to go live. Okay, put my hair up. I'm going to go live. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm gonna pull out a project and I'm just gonna go live and talk to people. And you had fun with it. And that's what I love so much about it. And you went live for a few days and you're like, oh, I can do this. And it wasn't like you did these long drawn out lives. You did a quick little project and you talked to people and you got them to engage with you. And then you went from 19 subscribers to 32. So you got 32 subscribers on your very first, I'm just going to put myself out there, throw a couple emails and some posts out launch. And you ended up doing a couple of lives which were short and sweet, which I'm really proud of you for doing because I know that was a challenge for you. But you ended up with 32 people on your easy peasy, I'm just going to lob it out there launch. And that set that tone for you. Right? Like, okay, people do want this. Okay, I do have an audience that wants this from me. Okay, this could turn into something. I mean, you got 32 subscribers on your first launch, I got 44. We're like neck and neck on our very first launches here, and you know how many subscribers I have now. So you're like, okay, I can do this.

Yeah.

Could be a thing. And this is the first thing for you that actually was like, this is successful, this is what I've been working on for a year, and now I have the energy and the encouragement to forge that path forward on what it is I do want, right?

Yeah, it's— you start to see that, wait, hold on, I, I, I have this little group of people that We're really having fun together. They're engaged and we have a private Facebook group to share their projects and where we have links to the videos and all the things and they're having fun and they're super excited about the projects every month and just organically the first month everyone started posting pictures of their box when it came. Like they're excited. And the other thing you mentioned, like connecting with people and I think for, for a business like mine, where I'm teaching people how to craft and showing them how to paint and how to put things together, it's super important to build that community and connect with the people. But the other, the other piece is you want to make them feel seen and heard and valued because, and I try and do that so that they know, I heard someone, there's, there's like a person, there's a real person that's getting that box every month, you know, and you talk about the surprise and delight, but making them feel special when they get those boxes is, is so important. And I wanted to mention the messaging because I was— the messaging kind of stressed me out because I wasn't really sure what my messaging was. And I kind of worked that out during the first launch. And really, when I talk to people about my box, I talk about how I really can't decorate. I'm not a great decorator. It's, it's a struggle for me, but I can put stuff on a tier tray and it looks I mean, my trays look amazing and I've got 3 boys and it's clean when our housekeeper leaves and then as soon as they come home, it's a disaster again. But my trays always look good. And so, and I think people resonate with that because even if you don't have kids, your house is never perfect all the time. But they love that idea of one space in their house looking really good. And I kind of worked that messaging out during that first launch.

And so here we are 4 months after that first launch and you're over 100 subscribers.

Yes.

And all it really took, Amy, and I think this is the message I want everyone to hear, was just getting it out there the first time. Because then you relaunched in June and you were much more prepared. You layered in some more things and you built your waitlist and you keep growing and you're feeling spots. And that's how we start our business. And that's how we continue to grow our business. And it wasn't that any of it was a challenge. And it wasn't because Amy had 190,000 people following her because they were following for food recipes. Okay. So we had to completely build a business here from scratch. And I think that you say something in your notes to me of what helped you grow. And I would love for you to run through those? Like, what helped you not only do this initial launch, but now to get past 100 subscribers?

It's been really the actionable steps to take and having, okay, we're going to do these things. And when I do them, they might look a little different than when you do them. But we're going to take these steps and we're going to see what progress we get, and then we're going to tweak and do it again. You know, and that was really that building my email list has been pivotal. I mean, having the actionable stuff, building an email list and really connecting with my community. Like I said, things like I say, no perfect people allowed. Like I am a hot mess. I spill things on my lives. I knock stuff over. I mean, I've drank paint water on my— I mean, just all kinds of things that— and I tell them, like, if you're perfect, please don't come to my page because you're going to make me look bad. And so it's It's funny because they'll say that during— they're like, oh, no perfect people allowed. You're only allowed here if you're imperfect. Because in making them feel real and human and being real with them about life, I actually have a lot of people who get my box who have a child or a grandchild with special needs. So I talk about that.

They relate to you.

They do. And I got a letter the other day from from one of my members or my subscription box members just telling me what a blessing my box is to her. And that's the other thing I want people to hear is I started this because I wanted to start a business. And yeah, I was thinking about blessing people, but I wasn't thinking about this. It's been a life-changing impact to have this delivered to her home every month. And so you get to serve people in these really big beautiful ways. And I wouldn't have been able to do it if I didn't get over myself and just try and be willing to only get 10 if that's all I got. But to be willing to do what I knew in my heart I was supposed to be doing.

And so for you, you said that was the actionable and measurable steps, that was the accountability of being part of the group and being around other subscription box owners that were making progress as well, because that accountability is important. We talked about list building. That's the reason you shifted from Etsy to Shopify, and it's so important the way that that converts, and it always converts higher than our social media. So having a list building plan and implementing that on a regular ongoing basis, super important. And I know that you listed collaborations, and that's been really important, and that is the people A lot of that is the people that you've met in the, in the mastermind or the coaching groups or the Launch Your Box or these people you've met along the way and collaborating with them and you guys working together because we're so much better together than we are apart. And I think that one of the biggest benefits for you is the connections with your subscribers because you are at home all day taking care of kids. Your husband was traveling a ton. And let me just give a shout out to Joe for being like the most supportive husband on the planet, because he has supported you through everything. And sometimes we need people in our lives that believe in us a little bit more than we believe in ourselves. And when we have that person in our lives, there's so much we can do just by having someone that believes in what we're capable of. And I think that's important. And the main point of this today is to not overthink it, to not get in your head about it, to just put it out there. Let it be messy. Let it be imperfect. Amy said herself, if you're perfect, you get off my page. Let it be imperfect. Just gotta get it out there because if you don't, you don't have any other way to keep growing. You're not growing if you haven't started. And that's why I wanted to bring Amy here to you, because she's been trying to start something for a long time. And it just took a little bit of push from me to get it out there and to do it on your own terms. You don't have to do it on Sarah's terms. Do it on Amy's terms. And once you did that, you said something to me. I think it was last week. You said, I'm having the time of my life.

I am.

And I just could hear it in your voice that you're just loving this business that you've built and the community that you're building along with it. And I just want you to give anybody listening a piece of advice. If you've been staying stuck, if you've been working on things and you're just not making progress in the way that you wanted to, what advice would you give them, Amy?

You have to be around people who are also doing the deal. One of the— being around other people who are working to be successful because there's a different mindset there. It's— you have to get in that crowd that's in, in Launch Your Box. There's people who are— will show up and support you, right? They'll be— and it changes your mindset and realize that it's easy to look at someone and think, oh, you know, somebody else just blew it off, blew the doors off, and they magically did it. I didn't— this is not magic. I've been doing businesses for a long time. I have a lot of business background, a lot of business ownership, a lot of customer service knowledge. But being around those people, it's like they say, steel sharpens steel. It just really helps you get in that mindset where I'm going to do this no matter what, you know, I'm going to do it no matter what. And there's people in Launch Your Box that do it. There's people like that in Scale Your Box and obviously in your mastermind. And when you're around those people, it's so inspirational. And you also are able to find solutions because sometimes just by yourself you don't see the solution, but you ask someone else and they're like, oh, hey, wait, do this. And so you save time that way too. So you're getting better and you're saving time and growing faster, I guess, than you would alone.

Yeah. Um, Amy, if there are imperfect people listening to us right now that love crafting and want to come hang out with you, where would they find you?

Um, Amy and Art Designs on all the platforms.

Yep, go check out Amy. She's got the cutest tier trays. She's killing it, and I cannot wait to watch her get her next 100 subscribers. We'll be back next week for another episode of the Launch Your Box podcast.