Sarah Williams grew a mystery box subscription service from 44 initial subscribers in 2016 to a multi-million-dollar business. She capped growth deliberately at first, then used closed-cart quarterly launches to jump from 350 to 700 subscribers in five days. Organic tactics like Facebook Lives and word-of-mouth drove nearly all growth over seven years.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Sarah Williams, subscription box owner and subscription box coach. I want to tell you how I started my multi-million dollar subscription box business with 44 subscribers and grew it to thousands. So back in the day, I had a brick-and-mortar store. It was a small gift shop. Um, mostly women would come and purchase things for themselves or gifts for somebody else. I had regular customers. I was in a small town, not a big metroplex, just a nice medium-sized town. I would I would see these regular customers, and I really wanted to create a VIP experience for them, but I didn't know quite how to do that. I saw this subscription box business really starting to bloom in 2016, and I started to follow it, and I really wanted to create my own subscription box. And this is how I was going to create a VIP experience for my best customer. So after a few months of planning, I launched my subscription box to my local customers. My goal was to have 50 subscribers during that first launch, and I sold 44, and I was over the moon about that. I thought that was great. Here was something that was different than I've ever done. You didn't see small businesses doing it back in 2016, and I had 44 people jump in and commit to this recurring payment with me. And basically, I hadn't shown them anything because it was a mystery box, and I wanted to keep it a mystery. So that's why I went after my existing customer that would come in my store, and the word, the promise was, if you loved my things store, you were going to love this subscription box. It was going to be exclusive only to our members and the first 50 people that signed up could get in. I was creating urgency. I was creating scarcity and I was creating exclusivity with the launch of my subscription box. I had this big lofty goal in mind when I started this to get 100 subscribers and it doesn't seem like much now, but back then 100 subscribers meant that my overhead at my brick and mortar store was paid for and my one employee. So the overhead of my building and my one employee would be covered by 100 subscribers. And then anything that I made in the store, good days or bad days, that would be cherry on top. So that was what I set out to do. I set out to get my first 100 subscribers. When I launched the first box and I got my 44, I did a box reveal and within minutes the other 6 boxes sold like that. So I now had 6 more subscribers and I met my 50. Quota. And that created this frenzy of, how do I get on the list? How do I get into the next month? How can I get in? So I had created this urgency. And so then I started my waitlist, and I have a whole waitlist strategy on how I did this and how I continued this after. But every month from that point, I increased my box numbers by 25 to 50, um, boxes. So I had this like steady increase of subscribers month after month. This was all new to me. I had never even shipped anything at this point, so I had to figure out fulfillment and shipping and I was going to manage the logistics of this. So I did not want to grow too fast. And so for the next 8 months, every month I added in 25 to 50 subscribers and I had now 350 subscribers. And that was amazing to me. I had stabilized my retail business. I had not only exceeded my 100 subscriber goal, but now I had 3x that. And so I was really bringing in income that was changing my life at that point. I had this recurring revenue that was hitting my bank account every single month. And I thought I was unstoppable. I continued to project a 50% growth month after month, and then I plateaued. I plateaued early into the next year, and I got a little bit panicked because I plateaued and then it started to trail down. I wasn't filling my spots. I wasn't getting new subscribers in, and I was at about 350 subscribers at my peak at that point, and now it was trickling down. But I had planned months and months out to be increasing, so I had to do something different. So I ran a closed cart launch, and what that means is basically I was saying this was the last time that you could get in. I was gonna shut down the numbers because here's what was happening. I was projecting growth and I didn't have growth, so I had all this inventory laying down. It was really strapping my cash flow. And so I said, nope, I need to know my numbers. And this was the summer of that next year, and I'm gonna cap it with whatever we end up with at the end of this launch for the rest of the year. So I was gonna take the next 6 months, kind of even myself out because I had so much money invested in this inventory that I wasn't selling. I needed to figure out what that number was and leave it there and not, not have any more growth just to see what happened. And my goal at that time was just to fill— I had 60 spots that were open at that time, and my hope was I could sell those 60 spots and then I would cap it right there and I wouldn't keep increasing it for the rest of the year. Just sell the 60 spots, So I didn't have extra inventory laying around, and that was the goal. And I closed that launch nearly doubling my numbers. So I went from 350 to almost 700 subscribers in 5 days. And that taught me a lot about creating urgency, scarcity, and exclusivity in your business and what that can do to help grow your business. After that launch, I ran 3 launches a year in that same manner where I increased from hundreds to thousands of subscribers. Every time I launched, I was increasing my numbers and then I was using my waitlist strategy in between the launches. And I did all of this with very little ad spend. I don't even know if I was spending money on ads at this time. Mostly organic traffic through posting and social media. And I was doing regular Facebook Lives at this time and I still do. And really word of mouth. Um, we could see the little subscription pockets growing across the country. First, there was a little pocket in Colorado Springs. I had one subscriber there, and then that turned into 5, and then that turned into 11. Same thing happened in Utah. So where my audience had always been local, now this word of mouth, this one person that became a subscriber because they found me or saw me on the internet, they were sharing it with their friends. They loved my subscription box. And now I have these little pockets of people all across the country that were subscribing to my subscription box. And that's how I grew it from 44 subscribers my very first launch to now 7 years later, I have thousands of subscribers all over the country. If you're ready to start and grow your subscription box, I'd love for you to subscribe to my channel and check out some of my other videos.
