168: 0 to 6 Figures with a $300 Marketing Budget with Huckleberry Gems

What if you only needed $10 a day to grow your business? What if that $10 a day took you to $100,000 in revenue? Join Katie and I as we talk through how she started her business and grew it to over 6 figures in 7 months with only a $300 a month marketing budget. 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 Launch Your Box podcast. I'm excited today because I have one of my mastermind ladies here with me today, and I gotta prep you on how this conversation came to fruition. A few months ago, I was on stage at SUB Summit. I think we were doing maybe a Q&A or something for our members that day, and we were talking about ads and there's lots of, always lots of questions about ads. Ads and budgets and all the things because it's, if you don't know ads, it's a scary unknown thing. You just think money's just flying out there and you don't know if it's really working. Katie made a statement in that workshop that we were in that day about, I went from zero to six figures on a $300 marketing budget and the room just went, what? Tell us more. And so I brought Katie here with me today. We're going to talk about her story, her journey as an entrepreneur and a subscription box owner. And then I'm going to have her break down that $300 marketing budget and how it grew her from zero to six figures for you today. Katie, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you here. Why don't you just start with your business name, what you do, and then we're going to jump into the backstory.

Okay. First of all, I wanted those socks because it was so cold in that room.

That's what they don't know, that if there was like a— I was asking a question or something and I was giving away free socks and they had Launch Your Box logo on them and that room was probably 50 degrees, and everybody wanted those socks, not for the Launch Your Box logo, but because everyone was freezing.

It was so cold in that room. So I still have them, love them, favorite pair of socks. But I'm Katie with Huckleberry Gems, and I sell wood blank craft kits to women. And my big differentiator from everybody else is my kits don't require glue. I have an adhesive backing on them, so it's just a peel and stick adhesive that they just paint, peel, stick, no glue required. So that's what sets me apart from everybody else. Yeah.

So now let's get into how all of this came about because I love your backstory and I love sharing that with people. So talk to me about— you say you've been crafting all your life, but you're also a third generation seamstress. You know, my love for sewing machines just popped right out when I read that.

I don't know, like the generations that listen to the podcast, but if anybody has a JCPenney's near you, that's my mom and my grandmother. It's Bama is what we called her. They used to sew clothes for JCPenney's back in the '60s. And so that was taught to me on an old Kenmore machine with the knee pedal instead of the foot pedal that everybody has today. And it was in a cabinet and I used to have to pop it out and play with it. And then as I expanded, I brought in a serger and my mom had never used a serger. It was always an iron fold hem. And I was like, oh my gosh, Mom, game changer. So I just expanded from there. I love little kids' clothes because it's a fast, quick sew-up. And I love knits because they're very forgiving and they're stretchy, so you don't have to be very precise with sewing versus cotton, hard cotton. Yeah, that's where I started. And then my stepdad who raised me was a general contractor, so that's like a craft in and of itself, like building houses and all that kind of stuff. And so I've just been— I was raised around creatives, and that's just been my life story of just creation all around.

So I do have a JCPenney's in my town. It is closing at the moment. They're liquidating, but it's been in our mall forever. And I think it's so cool to see a corporation like that big and know that like your mom and grandma were seamstresses for JCPenney's. And then on the other side of this, you have a stepdad that's a contractor. So you had really not only creatives, but entrepreneurs in, in your space. And I was talking with someone yesterday. And she was like, "How did you become an entrepreneur? Tell me the story." And for me, I never— like, that was never on my radar. I don't know anyone. Like, I didn't have people around my daily life that were entrepreneurs. So I didn't really understand, like, how to do that or that existed or what that life was like. For me, I've grown up with parents— like, my dad worked in the oil field. My mom was a registered nurse. Like, they worked hard their whole life, blue-collar people. And I thought, okay, I gotta go to school and get an education and I'm going to find a job. And that's just what I did. And it wasn't until I went to work for an entrepreneur that bug hit me. And I was like, I was building this business for this other person. And I was like, I could totally be doing this for myself. And so I think it's cool to really hear about how you get the entrepreneurial spirit and how you find your lane with that. So your mom and grandma were seamstress. Your stepdad was a contractor, and I feel like you've almost merged the two together in your field, right?

Totally, for sure. Of my first— like, I've always had the entrepreneurial spirit. Like, I was the kid on the corner selling the lemonade and brownies, even though half the time I was eating the brownie batter before I was selling it because it was yummy. But I started— my first one was the cloth diaper business. I cloth diapered— we have 5 kids, and I cloth diapered the last 2 because they were born during the housing market crash, and so it was out of necessity that I cloth diapered them. But that was the first business, way back before even Etsy was a big thing. It was Hyena Cart. And then the laws changed for marketing to kids, and there was all this testing because at some point China brought in some lead. And so as a small business then, I couldn't afford to test all of my products every time, so that got shut down then. But then my heart was It was broken because I wasn't able to be in that entrepreneur space. So I went back to school, got my bachelor's, did the thing that my parents told me was the right thing to do. And now I just—

as we all do, right? Right.

Well, now I just have this very expensive piece of paper that I don't even utilize. It's still a passion and I love it, but it's not something that I utilize in my day to day. And I'm like, dang it, that was a mistake, a very expensive mistake. But you live and you learn. Yeah, and it just goes the same.

Tell us what that field was like, and you went to school in what field, in a completely random different field than you talked about at this point?

Criminal justice. So I was actually— I have a bachelor's with criminal justice, and I worked for our state police for a long time, and I was actually going to be— I wanted to be a police officer. But long story short, I was— when Spartan races were big and huge and all of that, I was running those races, and I was having issues with my legs, and I saw saw all kinds of specialists and they were telling me it was just shin splints, keep running your races. So I did. And eventually I kept— I advocated for myself as most entrepreneurs, like they have a voice, they've found their voice. So they're like, hey, hello. But eventually it came to fruition that they were— I was actually running them with broken legs. And it was interesting. It was painful and interesting all at the same time. But it was also another lesson that you can do hard things, right? And you'll still survive. And so they were never diagnosed. I still have no idea to this day why they were breaking. I've probably broken them over a dozen times. And if you ever meet me in person, I have a tattoo on my leg to commemorate that and be like, this is my story. It's part of my story. But yeah, it was just criminal justice was my passion and the broken legs were stopping me from being a police officer. So I worked in the office and that kind of killed my spirit. Like it was, it's a very political field and that's not who I am. And so I left that and got brought into my husband's auto shop for a moment. And then we fast discovered that if we want to continue to be a happy married couple, that we should not work together.

We don't need to work together, right? No.

Done. And so he, that's how this one started is he was like, all right, kids are getting older and you need to find yourself again. And he bought me a laser, an Omtek, an 80-watt Omtek. We researched and we saw like the Glowforges and all that, and we're like, oh no, that's no, not for the— where I want to take the business, that's not going to be feasible for us to do. And so he bought me that, and that's when it all started, is I started in the back. We put up partitions in his auto shop, and I was in the back of the reception area with my little laser and just Started with cutting boards and paint parties and in-person sign parties and just grew from that.

You got your creative spark back after working in the police department. It's a very uncreative job. And so it was like you were coming back and you were, had that creative spark back. So you started with cutting boards and things like that. Then what happens next? Like how do we land with a subscription box?

So it started. I knew ads, like I have a little bit of a background in 2020, just trying to figure out who I was again. And after all, leaving the state police and going to work for the husband, trying to figure out the marketing side of the business, because to me, the whole digital aspect of business was new. And I was like, what is this magic? And so I spent probably 2 years in the vast majority of digital marketing and I landed on Facebook. And so I knew a little bit, I knew enough to be dangerous with my Facebook ads and I knew it was a gamble as well, but I also knew how to see the data and how to turn things off before I lost all the money on what they say the roulette wheel of Facebook ads is. And back when I was learning, it was like, you can grow a business with $5 a day. That's not a thing anymore. So I put $10 a day and I was like, $300 a month will do great. And so I also knew that video is huge. And so those, I merged those two. I merged my video, just like a real something I was making, painting something is what I started with and just put it on Facebook at $10 a day and watched the data and picked my, I had an avatar, so I generalized the audience and I didn't go super broad. I brought it down into general area and just watched the data and took my $10 a day and saw that my ROAS was way above what it needed to be and just grew it from there and kept putting more money and more ads and more diversity into it. And then took that into emails and then just expanded it. And then I think it was March of '23 is when I started the subscription box.

Okay.

Because I was like, I need the recurring revenue. The one-off sales are amazing, but it's not enough to give me that foundation of a business to keep it going. And so on a whim, I hadn't heard of you yet. On a whim, I was like, I'm just going to do this because it's a thing like Ipsy and all these other whatever boxes are out there, the big guys. And I'm like, I'm going to try this, see if it works. And I launched with, I think it was what, 43, 46, something like that. And then a customer came to me and was like, are you in Sarah Williams' program? I was like, no, who is she? And so I went and looked you up.

I love this. Shout out to that customer. Hello.

So I went and looked you up and that's, I think you had open cart then with Launch Your Box. And so I had joined Launch Your Box and just took it from there and went from there and then joined Scale Your Box and then approached you about the mastermind because I heard in the background that you were running it and I was like, I want to be a part of that because these are my people. Like this is where I want to be. So that's how it came up in a short story, condensed story.

Let's go back just a little bit because you were making like cutting boards and things like that and then you were teaching the paint parties. How did we settle on this tier tray kind of subscription? Had you been selling like tier tray pieces before this? How did this all come to fruition?

A little bit. So cutting boards, it was when the whole charcuterie thing was exploded. And cutting boards were huge. They still are, but it wasn't creative enough for me. And so it was just like a load an SVG file that I could find on Creative Fabrica or whatever and put it on a cutting board and sell that to a realtor. That didn't, it still wasn't enough of a creative juice of the design of the painting of all of it. So I dropped that, let it go, quit advertising it and was doing the sign parties, like in-person sign parties with the tiered tray pieces. And so I was like, you know what, I'm going to make an avatar because they tell you in Business 101, make an avatar. I just made one up literally out of thin air, just guessed and took it from there and decided that she was a registered nurse from Illinois and she has disposable income and she likes to craft with her friends and create home decor that is not in Hobby Lobby. And so that's where it went from there. I marketed to her, talked to her on Facebook, talked to her in my emails, and it— there she was. She came to me literally.

Is this when you started the $10 a day? Like you were looking for this person? So if you're listening right now, basically she identified her ideal customer. She's calling it an avatar. I call it an ideal customer. Same thing. She identified who this was going to be. And then started to market towards her. And that's where this $10 a day comes in, because when we're starting a business, it doesn't matter any kind of business, like, we have to get visible. We have to get visible in the beginning. We got to stay visible as we grow, or we're not going to grow. And so what Katie's talking about is how she knew the importance of those Facebook ads. Like, she needed to do that, and whether she could do that at $5 a day or $10 a day, and you can still do that at $10 a day in this time period, but she knew that was going to help her get visible. And she went from $0 to her first $100K within 7 months of, of starting. And so you can't do that unless you get visible. So she talked about spending $10 a day. Was it one ad, one video ad was $10 a day, or were you doing multiple?

No, at that point it was just one. I was just running conversion ads. And so I wasn't even running the lead magnet. I wasn't running any of it. It was just a straight conversion ad. I wanted sales.

Yeah. And so you were attracting the right person because you were painting these things on your video. And so anyone interested in that was coming to follow you. And we can see that all we have to do is get ourselves out there. It doesn't have to be complicated. Katie didn't make it complicated. You can overthink Facebook ads. You can overcomplicate everything. You can listen to 100 million different different Facebook ad gurus that tell you you need 7 creatives and this much and this static and video and blah, blah, blah, and you need to do all these things, but you just need to get started. And Katie's a great example of just doing one thing, doing it well, understanding what she's doing, and then taking the data from that one thing and growing from there. So after you started running the $10 a day and you saw you were getting traction from that, Tell me then how that changed your ad makeup as you were growing and moving forward.

Then we'll go back to the whole digital marketing of learning on all that stuff. I knew that email was important, and so taking that, I was like, I better start getting emails because how else am I going to talk to these people? Like, sure, ads are great, and I will never downplay ads ever. But email's better.

Yeah. Email's having that list, owning that list is king.

100%. Because I learned that last year, the day after Cyber Monday, I got hacked and lost my ads account. So I was like, oh my gosh, where's all that money and time that I spent building those ads? I lost it in like seconds.

Yeah.

And so it was like, that was super scary. And the prime time of the season, I lost my ability to be visible in a big way, but I had my email. And so I was still able to take my email and talk to these people afterwards. So when I started getting traction with the Facebook ads, I started running lead magnets and bringing that in to grow that email and talk to these people. And the Facebook group was big too. I would put that in and be like, come join my Facebook group. And that was a question in there was give me your email address so I can market to you was another way. So I was just gathering emails. Because I knew that there was, there's lots of little puzzle pieces, but I would focus on one, get that started, and then turn my other focus to another. But if you do the outside of the puzzle first, that was my Facebook ads, right? And then I started laying all the centerpieces in with my emails and all that kind of stuff. And I just grew from there. I went, like you said, from the zero to six figures in seven months. And then I doubled that in the next five. So last year I ended with multiple six figures.

So if you're listening to Katie right now, one thing at a time. Facebook ads, everyone should have a $300 budget in their advertising. You gotta make money to grow. I got asked by my PR company, some finance money points that I'd like to make. And one of those was you can't grow a business without money. It takes money to build and grow a business. And there's a lot of things we can do organically, but even $300, if you're not willing to spend $300 a month on your business, it's a hobby. And we have to recognize that about ourselves. Do I want a hobby business where I can make a few bucks? Great. That's fine. You don't have to put a bunch of money into that. If you have a community where you're selling a few things here and there and you're making some extra money, 100%, I'm all for that. But if you're expecting your hobby to replace your income and you're not willing to invest in it, it's never going to be a business. And so Katie started with that $10 a day. When she got traction from that, she increased that to $20 a day or whatever she increased it to. Then that was going, that was working. She's okay, I need to be building my email list. I'm building my following. I need to be building my email list. That came in two different ways. She created a lead magnet, which we've talked about before. It's just you're giving something in exchange for their email. That could be a freebie, that could be a video, that could be a PDF, that could be so many digital things. You're giving away something to collect someone's email. And I'm sure she was running an ad to that once she figured out the ads were working. Okay, now I just, I need to start collecting emails. And so she's doing that, knowing community of crafters, her ideal customer, wants to feel part of a group. They don't want to craft by themselves all the time. She created a community for them, a free community for them, and that was in the form of a free Facebook group. And she's collecting their email upon entry of that group again so that she could market to them and build their list, build her list. So if you look at these 3 things, they're so simple, yet so many of us are not doing any of them. We're not running ads. We don't have a lead magnet. We're not collecting people in a group. And I'm not saying everybody has to have a group. I don't have a free group, but I'm saying it's an opportunity for you if you're not growing, if you want to build your following and build your list. These are 3 very easy, tangible ways to do that. And Katie's proven the formula. She started her business, she changed her ideal customer after she was in business to something that she wanted to do, and she built an audience around that in a very short period of time by doing those 3 things. And you don't have to complicate it. It's not complicated, right, Katie? If you were to go back to when you started that and give yourself like your own, like, piece of advice, maybe somebody listening is, I've started my business. I think I know my ideal customer, but I just can't get any traction. What would you say to someone listening that feels that way?

For me, it was taking the action, right? It was staying the focus. And not dividing my attention into different things. Because as a creative, that's what we do. We see shiny coins all the time, right?

I call it the squirrel. Yeah, over here, we're squirreled over here because we can do all the things, or yeah, we're gonna figure out how to do the thing, right? Because we're interested in it, but it distracts us.

It does. And then so for somebody new just starting out, it's focus and be super laser focused And when you get that traction on that laser focus, then broaden it, then branch out, then find that shiny coin that maybe you can bring in, but build your business first. And I want to go back to like when you were saying that people don't want to spend the money on the ads budget. I had quite a few people approach me in DMs and be like, how are you doing it? And I would say it's $10 a day in ads. And they would tell me, oh my gosh, I don't have that kind of money to spend. 100%. If you don't have that kind of money, it's okay to have a hobby business. It's okay to have something fun to fuel your fire or your paint supply or whatever it is. But if you want to be serious with it, $300 a month is nothing. It's nothing when you want to build a big business.

And you got to get real honest with yourself. If you're sitting here listening to this and you don't have an advertising budget and you're struggling to figure out how you can make this your full-time gig, You got to get— you got to really question yourself of whether you're willing to do the work to make it your full-time gig. And just like Katie said, it's fine to have a side hustle. It's fine to have a hobby business. Totally great. But stop kidding yourself to think that one day it's magically going to poof into this great big business where you can quit your full-time job or you can make full-time income when you're not willing to invest in getting visible. And it's so much harder now than it used to be to get visible. And so I think one of the important things that we have to figure out is we got to get smart with our money. We can still do a $10 a day budget. We can still have that and make traction. I see people making traction on that all the time. You don't have to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars a day to make any progress, but you have to start somewhere. And we talk about that in Launch Your Box. We talk about starting with a page like ad, very minimal, starting with a video, doing behind the scenes or painting or teaching or whatever it is that you do in your subscription box. It could just be loading the subscription box, like packaging it. That video will be so watched. Start it with $10 a day and see what happens and then tweak it, learn. And yes, Facebook ads are scary and getting behind there and not knowing what to click and what you got to figure it out. You do. That's what we do in business. We figure things out. It's the same, like, when we started our businesses, Katie, we didn't know. We didn't know all the things. We didn't know how to build a website. We didn't know how to go online. We didn't know how to do the things, but we figured them out a little bit at a time. And that's what makes us entrepreneurs, is that we're willing to problem solve. And so I love Katie's story so much because She started at zero like all of us. We all start at zero. And she made progress in a very short amount of time. Katie, what does life look like in the future for you?

It depends on what portion of my life you want to look at. But for me—

what day we're talking about. Changes daily. Yeah.

For my business, I want it to be— I want— it's community for me. It truly is community. I want to play. I want to enjoy. I want to have fun. And if for me that means sharing my product and then sharing the behind the scenes of painting with these women and just enjoying spending time with each other, because I think we lost a lot of that as we get older and we don't— like, for me, my youngest will be 13 next month. And so it's time for me again, right? So I'm not focused on the little stages of wrapped up in the toddler stages. I'm not in that. So I'm trying to find that community who are trying to find themselves as women again. And that's what my focus for the business is all about, is creating that community of women who have lost themselves in motherhood or parenthood and want the friendship and the connection.

Yeah, because what we have been taught since the epic 2020 is that people need connection in their lives more than anything. And the stuff doesn't matter. It's the connection that we create with our audience. And that's That's why we're successful and that's how we can create retention and that's how we create loyal raving fans of what we do that come back and buy again and again. And so I love that that's your focus with your business. And it's not always just for them, it's for us too as women. And there are men out there and I hate to generalize it, but most women entrepreneurs want to feel connected to their business. They want to feel passionate about what they do. There's purpose behind being an entrepreneur. It's not transactional. For us. And I think that is great to recognize so that you can find the connection in your own business as you grow, and you can make it what you want to be. For this episode, what I want you to learn, everyone that's listening, is that we all start from zero. It's what you make of it that makes or breaks your business. You can go from zero to six figures just like Katie did. With $10 a day and a lot of heart. I'm sorry, my voice is getting raspy. I'm not crying anymore. I'm not crying. But you, a lot of heart, you got to put into it, but you got to start and you got to be able to read your data and you got to continue to learn and grow, build your following, build your list, go from zero to six figures just like Katie did. Katie, where can they find you if they want to check out what you're doing?

They can find me at Huckleberry Gems, and gem is like the diamond gem, not like workout gym. It's, it's an Idaho thing. So that's where I'm based out. And if you are in Idaho, and you'll understand the phrase behind it. But yeah, that's where I am across all platforms, Huckleberry Gems.

Okay, we'll put her links in the show notes. Katie, thank you so much. It was such an honor to get to talk with you today.

Thank you. I appreciate being here.

Thanks for joining us on the Launch Your Box podcast. If you're looking to grow your audience, head over to launchyourbox.com and grab the 10 Steps to Help You Start Building Your Audience guide. It's packed with practical tips to help you connect with your future subscribers. Until next time, keep launching and growing on your subscription box journey.