4 Focus Areas to Start Your Subscription Box

Have you been putting off starting your subscription box business? Today's episode is from a recent Facebook Live I did. Grab your notebook. I'm breaking down the 4 areas you need to focus your time and energy on first. Come listen.

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

Good morning. It's time for Monday Momentum. This morning we're talking about getting started with your subscription box dreams in 2022. Have you been thinking about it? Have you been putting it off? We're going to start now. I'm going to give you 4 things to think about as you get started on your subscription box business this year. And you might want a notebook this morning. You might want to just jot down a few things because we're going to talk about these things. And then we have some actionable steps that you can take with these 4 different things. I'm going to give you some momentum on what you should be doing this Monday and every Monday from now on to get you started. Let's just be honest and real with ourselves. When we think about starting a subscription box, it's so easy to get kind of caught up in the fun part. And the fun part is products and packaging. And I don't want to discount them at all because you definitely need products and you need packaging. But we get so involved with the products and the packaging that we put the things that we really need to be doing on the back burner. And that can really come to bite us when we're ready to launch. We focused on the products and packaging for months and now we're ready to launch and we haven't done the work that we really need to do. And I want you to start with the products. And that's why we do the Six in Sixty workshop. It is a free workshop that I host. You can take it any time, but it's basically— we're going to lay out what 6 months of boxes could look for you. We're going to talk about the products. We're going to talk about what goes in that box. We're going to also talk about your ideal customer in that workshop. And I want you to do that first because it gives you a long vision of what this could be. And if you can't see what your box would look like with the products in it month after month after month, it's really hard to do these other things. So that's why we start with the 6 in 60 workshop. And if you haven't taken that, I also call it the Post-it Note Challenge. So if you haven't taken that, you can go over to 6in60workshop.com. It's the numbers 6 in 60 workshop dot com. You can take it any time. It's completely free. But that's going to help you like lay out what this could look like for you, for your business. If you're just getting started, all of that. But I don't want you to then get caught up in that. So we do that because it's exciting and fun and we're seeing a vision of our subscription box business. But then you focus on that too much and not these other 4 things that I want you to focus on. So let's talk about the first thing that I want you to focus on. And if you have a notebook, jot some notes, going to give you a little bit of momentum. Let's start doing some things. We can talk about things all the time, but if we don't start doing them, we're not going to get anywhere. Let's start with number one thing that you need to get started with after you do the Six in Sixty workshop, and that's audience building. And it's not fun and glamorous like laying out our products and stuff like that, but it is so important. And we tend to skip over that thinking if we just make this really cute subscription box, people will come, and that's not how it works. And so when we talk about audience building, we should have started yesterday. No matter what your timeline looks like, whether you're going to launch in 30 days, whether you're going to launch in 90 days, whether you're going to launch in 6 months, we should have started yesterday. And it's hard because you're like, okay, well, starting a new Facebook page, starting a new Instagram, looking for my people, it's not easy. It's not easy. But it's necessary and we need to get started yesterday. So if you didn't start yesterday, I need you to start today. I need you to start building your audience today. And I want you to go listen to a couple podcast episodes of mine because they're going to give you some inspiration on really how to audience build when you're unsure. And, and it's okay even if you're not planning to launch your subscription box, maybe for the summer or maybe in the fall. What we do now is going to make a difference when it comes to the launch. Go listen to episode number 33 and number 45. I'm going to tell you about it. Episode number 33 is with Amanda. And what I'm going to tell you is we need to find a way to serve our audience before we sell to them. That's how we start collecting people. We show up, we give value, and we collect them. And then later we're going to, we're going to sell to them. We can't just show up and sell to people on day one, especially if no one's there. So we have to start collecting people, getting people into our world. And so Amanda did a great job with this episode, number 33 of the Launch Your Box podcast. Amanda just started showing up on YouTube, filling out her daily planner, her monthly planner. And she didn't do this because she was going to sell stuff. She did it because she was serving people. She had no intention at that time to sell. Sell stuff. And these are the, these are the best things because she started building a following of people that liked her planner, of people that were watching her. And then later she had a whole pool of people that were very connected with her because all she did was serve them. She showed up, filled out her planner with them every month. It was fun. She connected with them and that's how she built her audience. I want you to listen to her story. Then I want you to listen to episode number 45. That's with Christy, with Christy's Craft Room. Now, Christy knew she wanted to sell things in the future, but she knew how important audience building was. And so when she started showing up, she didn't have anything to sell. So she was just serving her audience. So she would show up, she would go live, she would do a craft with them. And that's how she served her audience. And she did this week after week after week. More people would come. The first live was a little low and then more people would come and more people would come. And she was posting things that would relate to her audience. And that's how she started collecting people. Then later she started to sell to them. But if we don't start building an audience now, it's going to be hard to sell to them later. So what can you do that would let you serve your ideal customer. Who's that ideal customer? If you don't know, I want you to go over to the Six in 60 workshop and work that out. Work that out with me in the workshop. But I want you to think about producing content that would inform people of information, educate them, entertains them. You want to form content that would draw people in, even if no one's there right now. What pieces of content are shareable? What pieces of content are engaging? What pieces of content can you provide that would bring people to your page? That's what I want you to start thinking about. I want you to go listen to these two episodes. If you are kind of stuck with that, get— just listen to how they did it. And I want you to get some ideas because everybody builds their audience in a different way. I built mine locally. I had a local brick-and-mortar store. People would come in, I would get to know them. Everybody builds their audience in a different way, and you just have to to find what's comfortable for you, what's going to draw people into you and to your business and to what you're building. So audience building, start yesterday. Number one, marketing is number two. Once you start building your audience and you start collecting people, and that could be 100 people, that could be 1,000 people, that could be 5,000 people. Once you start collecting your audience and there's no number, like people ask me all the time, like, how big should my audience be before I launch my subscription box? There's no magic number. It's like it doesn't exist. Even if you have 100,000 followers, you might not have the right followers. You might not have engaged followers. You might not have the followers that are going to buy your subscription box. So I don't want you to get tripped up on the numbers. Okay? When you listen to Amanda's podcast, episode number 33, she only had 600 people that had subscribed to her YouTube channel and she launched with 100 subscribers. Because those 600 people were the right people. She didn't need 6,000 people. She didn't need 60,000 people. She had 600 of the right people in her audience that she was able to launch to. And if she would have had more boxes, she probably would have sold more. So anyway, go back and listen to that episode. It's, it's such a good one. But let's start talking about marketing after we start building some people. And I would probably say you need at least 100 people in your following before you start marketing. But marketing is really just creating awareness of what you have to sell. Okay, what, who you are, what you have to sell. And we can do that by post. We can do it with stories. We can do it with short video. We can do it with lives. We can do it with ads. We can do it with emails. We can do it with texts. So we've been audience building. Now it's time to market them. And I know that a lot of us get in our own head and we think, oh, I've posted that twice. Oh, I've posted that 4 times. Everybody knows I have that. They're sick of me showing this. In reality, people haven't seen it. So in our minds, we think we're, we're marketing it too much, but we're really doing a disservice to ourselves and our business because we're not marketing it enough. We had this conversation during our box openings inside Launch Your Box about not posting, not sharing enough about our subscription box. In our mind, everybody knows about it and they're just not buying. But in reality, people don't know about it. And if we don't share it, people are not going to know about it. We have to market our products. We have to market our business. We have to market it. And that is emails, that is text, that is ads, that is post, that is all the things. Okay. So even you've been audience building, you're serving, you're serving, you're serving. But now we have to sell. At some point we have to sell. We have to tell them about what we have to offer. And we can do that in a lot of different ways. But marketing is number 2. And I think for whatever reason, we're afraid to do that. Don't be afraid to do it. People are following you because they like you. People are following you because they like what you have to say. They like what you have to offer. You like what you have to give. And during your audience building. Now those are the people that are going to show up and buy. Okay, so we have to market. And this— okay, so that's number 2. Audience building is number 1. You have to do it. If you don't want to do audience building, let's just pack it in, call it a day, go get a 9-to-5 job, or just, you know, get another one, stay where you're at, because you're not going to be successful if you cannot audience build. You're not going to be able to sell anything. So we just have to get out of our heads. Okay? You either say you're going to do it or you're just not going to pack it in and call it a day. We can do this. I have seen introverted people do this. I have seen people that do not want to be on camera do this. I have seen people build audiences in incredible ways that didn't think that they were capable or able to do it. So number 3 is tech. I let the tech trip me up for over a year. I wanted to do this subscription box for over a year, and I kept telling myself, I can't figure out the tech, I can't do it. And I stopped myself for over a year. I laid in bed at night dreaming about my subscription box. I bet I had a whole year's worth of boxes planned out in my head. I, I wanted to do it so badly, and I kept telling myself I couldn't do it because of the tech. And I want you to say that we can't leave that when we start this. If we're going to have subscription box dreams in 2022, if we're going to launch this thing, we have to get a handle on the tech right away. So we started audience building yesterday, and once we build a little bit of an audience, we're going to start marketing to them. But also, I need you to get a handle on the tech sooner rather than later. Okay. And there's 4 pieces of tech that I'm going to talk about. There's 4 pieces. There's— you could add all kinds of tech to your subscription box business, but there's really 4 pieces that we need to have a successful subscription box business. And the sooner we, the sooner we start with the tech, the more comfortable we're going to get with the tech. the easier it is going to be for us to continue with it, and we're going to be ready to launch sooner. What I see is that we put the tech on the back burner because it's not fun. We don't like it. We're not techie. We're scared of it. We do the products, we work out the packaging, we start audience building, but now we don't have a website and we want to launch in a few weeks, and we can't just throw a website together like that. So number 1 is you need a website. Now there are platforms like Cratejoy that you can just— they're kind of like Etsy where you can put your subscription box up there. But I highly recommend, I highly recommend you having your own website and we can do that in Shopify. We can do that in WordPress. We can do that in Subly. There's lots of platforms, but we've got to dig into the tech right away because it's going to take some time. So while your audience building or you're getting your marketing together, We also need to get tech together. And here's the other thing that I learned early on. For a year, I let it stop me from moving forward. And when I finally decided that this is— I needed to do this, I reached out to someone to build it for me because I knew that if it was up to me, I'd probably be sitting there another year letting all this time go by because I was afraid to do the tech. Now, that was a long time ago. That was 2016. 2016. Tech has come a long way since then. I probably would feel a lot more comfortable doing it on my own now than I did then. But if it's not your jam and if it's going to stress you out, I highly recommend you hiring someone. Yes, it's going to take an investment. Yes, it's going to take dollars up front to do that. But if you were to invest in something that would get you going with less stress and easier and have someone in the background helping you with the tech would you get launched sooner? Could you start making money sooner? Could you then work off that debt with, with your subscription box versus fumbling along trying to figure out the tech yourself for weeks or months? I mean, you got it. You got to do it. We can't build a business without tech. We got to have tech. So let's talk about the 4 tech pieces. Forget about all the crap that people think you need. There are 4 tech pieces that you need to get started. A website. You need a website. You need a payment processor. Now, if you use Shopify, they have a payment processor built in. If you use, say, WordPress WooCommerce, that's what I'm on. I use Stripe. Stripe is my payment processor. You need shipping software. So I believe also Shopify, you're going to get built-in shipping software there. For me, I use ShipStation and I highly recommend ShipStation even if you have Shopify. Because it allows you to do a lot of things within the platform that make it easier and more efficient for you to ship, you know, a lot of subscription boxes. I have a lot of subscription boxes. There's a lot of people here that have hundreds or even thousands of subscription boxes. So having a platform like ShipStation is important and you're going to have to have it if you don't have like a Shopify site. I have to have it for my, my WordPress WooCommerce site. And then the other thing that we all need, no matter what platform we're on, is a CRM. And CRM is just customer relationship management, and that is your email platform. It's not Gmail, it's not Yahoo. It is a platform that you can market to and you can communicate to. And so you need to have an email CRM, and we recommend Klaviyo hands down over anything else. And there are other things— there are Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, AWeber. There's all kinds of stuff and you can pick any of those. But we recommend Klaviyo because of its powerful e-commerce abilities that you don't find in a lot of different places. And so website, payment processor, shipping platform, and an email CRM, that's all you need. Your website is the biggest deal. So that's what you want to get started on right away. And then you can connect ShipStation to it. Piece of cake. You can connect a payment processor to it if you don't use Shop Pay within Shopify. And then we want to connect Klaviyo sooner than later because we want to start a waitlist and we do that through our email CRM. Klaviyo is K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. And all of these platforms have free trials. Shopify does, ShipStation does. All of them have free trials so you can test them out. And here's, here's the spelling. Patrice just jumped in. Super easy. Conversion went up. I know when I switched from MailChimp to Klaviyo years ago, it was a huge difference. Like, I don't think you know what you're missing if you don't have Klaviyo, but you need a website, okay? You need a payment. You need to be able to take payments. You need to be able to create shipping labels, and you need to be able to manage your customer base with an email CRM. Those are the 4 pieces of tech that you need, and it might feel scary if you don't know what any of those are, but it's going to come together, and that's why I want you to start on it sooner than later. So number 3, tech. Number 1, audience building. 2, marketing. 3, tech. Okay, we need to be working on this. Number 4, and it, it might be the most important, honestly, and it's, it's usually the one that people don't see in the beginning, but it's the most important, and that's your mindset. I'm not going to get all woo-woo on you or anything like that, but we tell ourselves we can't do something more than we tell ourselves we can. We tell ourselves we're not good enough. We tell ourselves, oh, that's too hard, I can't do it. We tell ourselves all kinds of crazy things. And you know what? If you tell yourself that, you're going to believe it. Henry Ford has this great quote that I love to use. It says whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. Whatever you're telling yourself is likely that that's going to happen. So if you're telling yourself that you can't get through the tech, you're not going to. If you tell yourself that you can't audience build, you're not going to. If you tell yourself all these things, you're not going to. We have to flip the script. We have to start telling ourselves we can do this and we totally can do this. Any one of you watching, you can do this no matter what your circumstances, no matter if you're just starting or you've been in business for a long time. We have to train ourselves and talk positive to ourselves because we talk negative to ourselves way too much. I believe that mindset means having abundance. And that means that, yes, there are a lot of subscription boxes in the world, but I truly believe that we live in a land of abundance where there is enough for everyone. There's enough business for everyone. There is enough niche opportunities for everyone. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean you can't. I believe that mindset is embracing your perfections, and that held me back for a long time too. I felt like I wasn't young enough. I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't skinny enough. I wasn't smart enough. We tell ourselves those things, but that's not the reality. People will relate to you because of who you are. Embrace your imperfections because I guarantee there's someone on the other side of your video, on your camera, on your Facebook page that relates to that. And that's going to connect people with you. And then really the last thing that I believe about mindset is that you need to operate with a glass half full. Now, there are going to be challenges. There are going to be things thrown in your way that you wouldn't believe. And if you operate with the woe is me, I can't do this, you won't. But if I told myself it's too hard every time something like that was thrown in my way, every time a hurdle was just thrown up in my path, then I wouldn't be here. And none of the people here that have subscription boxes that are successful, if they let every hurdle that popped up in front of their walk get in their way, they wouldn't do it. Because I'm going to tell you, it's not easy. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. But if you continue to push through those blocks, if you continue to work on this inner, inner self of who you are, it's— it takes time. It's not something that's going to happen overnight. We got to keep telling ourselves we can do this because we can. And if you need some reinforcements that you can go listen to some of the episodes where I interview people with their boxes, they're going to inspire you. You're going to see someone in, in those episodes that you can relate to. If you can't relate to me, you're going to find someone you can relate to. And you're going to say, if Jenny can do it, I can do it. If Amanda can do it, I can do it. If Christy can do it, I can do it. You can do it. We can all do this and we're going to do it together. So 4 things. If you're ready to start your subscription box in 2022, we got to start audience building right now. We got to start. We got to produce content that is going to draw people in. Okay. Once we get those people, we got to start marketing to them. We got to get on board with tech. I know it's hard. I know it's not fun. We got to do the tech. Okay, so let's not put that off to the last minute because it's just going to stress us out if we do. And number 4, we got to get out of our head and we got to tell ourselves that we can do this and we can push through the hard things. We got to start on these 4 things. Okay. All right. Here's your momentum. Let's go. Let's start the week. Let's do some things. Go watch the webinar, the 6 in 60 workshop. Lay out your plan and let's start taking action. Start audience building, marketing, get on our tech, and let's get out of our head.