Start and Launch a Subscription Box in 90 Days or Less!

Good morning. Happy Monday, everybody. It is time for our little Monday dose of momentum to get you started for the week. I'm Sarah Williams and I'm super excited to chat with you today. Our little Monday text group is growing rapidly. So if you'd like to get a text from me on Monday mornings before I go live, all you have to do is text me at 940-204-0023. Text the word Monday and I'll send you a text right before I go live every single Monday. Today we're gonna talk about how a product-based business can start a subscription box in 90 days or less. If you've been hanging on, if you have been dragging out your launch, I'm gonna tell you what you actually need to get launched and get going. Good morning everybody. I'd love to say hi to you in the chat if you would just pop a comment over there. Let me know what you're up to on this Monday morning. You can see I'm not in the office today. This is also a little encouragement for you to go live wherever you're at. There's— we can give ourselves excuses about going live and producing content and doing the things. Like, I could say, I'm not at home, I'm not in the office, I'm gonna skip the live today. But I didn't. I didn't. I'm here in Cape Coral, Florida. You can see the palm trees and the water behind me. But I know it's important. It's important to build my audience. It's important to be consistent. And so this is a little encouragement. No matter what you're doing, no matter where you're at, you can show up for your audience and make connections. All right, we're going to jump in. Good morning, Rebecca. Good to see you. I have Jen here with me in the comments. So say hi to Jen in the comments. Good morning, Beth. Good morning, everybody. Hey, Andrea. Good morning, Carrie. You can see that I am live on both Facebook and YouTube. And if you want that little Monday morning reminder, I'm going to pop it back up on the screen real quick. All you have to do is text me the, the word Monday and I'll send you a reminder every Monday. It's, it's fun to see how the little Monday group is growing. So just get the reminder. Good morning, Jocelyn. Hi, Nikki. Good to see you. Okay. So we're going to jump back in. I thought this would be a fun conversation to have this Monday morning and it might help give you some momentum to get launched, give you some momentum on what you should focus on for the week. But let's go back to when Sarah started her subscription and I'm going to take you all the way back there because if I were to start a subscription today, I would probably do the same thing that I did back then. So I want to walk you through those steps. Steps. If you're a note-taker, you might want to just jot this down because we can do this a lot of different ways. We can do this backwards, we can do this out of order, we can do this, um, and then we feel like we're spinning our wheels and we're not making traction, right? So I'm going to take you back to when I started my subscription box. I had a local product-based business. I was mostly making the things that I was selling. I had started to add in a lot of products that I could just personalize. Before that, I was just making the things, right? And so what I was finding from my local customer, I was not selling online when I started my subscription. So if you're like, I'm, I'm not even online, I'm telling you it's doable. Um, but I knew that my local customer, they would see me go live. I was going live back then. They would see the posts on Facebook back then, and And by the time they got to the store, they were gone. They were sold out, they didn't have their size, whatever the case may be, it wasn't there. And that was really, I got to thinking like, how could I create a very special box for my regular customer? And how could I make them feel like the VIP of my business? And that's where the subscription came in. I already had an audience, it wasn't a big audience, I had, it was all local because I wasn't selling online then, but I had about 5,000 Facebook followers. And back in like 2017, 2016, it was easier to build an audience organically than it is today. So all of that was organic. I had just started my business. I was posting regularly. I was sharing my behind the scenes all the time and I grew on Facebook to about 5,000 followers. Today, if I was starting and I didn't have a following, I would really spend the time and I would spend the money to build an audience. Building organically right now takes a lot of time, um, and it's very slow. So if I were building an audience from scratch right now, I would do a lot of things like opt-ins, giveaways, um, I would make sure I had a lot of connection points, but I would also be taking those and I'd be running an ad to something every, every week, something different every week to build my audience. But I had an audience. Lots of us have an audience, whether that's a small 500-person audience or for me, I had a 5,000-person audience at that time. So I needed to step back and kind of figure out what steps did I need to take to launch my subscription box within 90 days. And so the first part was tech. Technically, what did I need? So I want you, I want you to think about this. What do you need technically to start your subscription right now? Okay, I needed a way to sell online and I needed a way to set up recurring payments. It's that simple. We like to overcomplicate everything. I had a website. I was not selling anything. It was purely an informational website. It was on WordPress. And so the easiest road for me starting the subscription was to get WooCommerce and to get WooCommerce subscriptions. And then I connected Stripe to my WooCommerce subscriptions. So now I had a way to sell my product online. I had a way to take recurring payments. There's lots of options these days. If you're already on Shopify, you can get an app to do your subscriptions. If you're on a different platform, there's a lot of ways that you can go ahead and start selling subscriptions. But you just need to ask yourself basically, What tech do I need to start my subscription box? I needed a way to sell online and I needed a way to take recurring payments. That's what had to be figured out. Aside from all the other things that you think you might need, that's the bottom line, okay? Then once I figured that out and I got somebody working on that, and I think that's an important part, I didn't do that myself, that was out of my wheelhouse, I didn't wanna mess anything up. Yes, I said Stripe, That's how I take my payments on WooCommerce, Andrea. I, I wasn't confident in my tech ability, so I hired someone to do that for me. They said it'll take a couple of months. I said, great, I have to figure the rest of this out. So once the tech started to go into work, I had to get to work. What would I put in my box? This was the next step for me. Okay, so I want you to think about this. Once you figure out technically what you need to sell online, Then let's talk about what would I put in my box? And this is where sometimes we get way ahead of ourselves and we start doing all of this work first when we're not actually getting ourselves set up to sell online. So if you have a business like I did, there's— this is such an— you already have research built in your business. You are like 20 steps ahead of someone starting from scratch. So I looked at my business, my existing business that I had, and I said, What are my top categories in my business? There was, there was one thing that was number one. I'm not going to tell you what that is. And then there were graphic tees, beverage tumblers, bags of all kinds, and accessories. So this was like my top 5. My number 1 category was something that I handmade. And when I looked at that, I said, that's not scalable for me. I can't hand paint all of these items if I have 100 subscribers, if I have 500 subscribers, if I get 1,000 subscribers. I can't do that. So that product was immediately eliminated. It wasn't scalable for me. But when I looked at graphic tees, beverage tumblers, bags of all kinds, and accessories, I'm like, I could put together a very simple subscription box with my top 4 4 categories here and this would help me create this VIP experience for my existing customers. Okay, so when I said, okay, these are the, this is how I'm gonna, these are the categories that I'm gonna put in my subscription box. Now the next thought was how do I price this? Because I don't wanna plan these subscription boxes when I haven't even figured out the pricing of this, right? So this is where I think we kinda get backwards on things. We're like, I've planned all the things and now I've looked, I'm gonna have to charge $200 for my subscription box. We're doing things backwards. We're doing things the hard way. Okay. And so I thought, okay, how will I price this subscription box? What will my customer pay for this box? It's very easy when you have a business because you have something called an average order value. It's an AOV. So when I looked at my retail store and I looked at the average order value, it was $40. $41 at that time. This was 2017, okay? $41 was my average order value. I priced my box at $40. So now I've like, okay, I gotta— I need a website and a payment processor. I got that. I've hired someone, they're working on that. In the meantime, okay, these are the categories, this is what my box is going to be built around, and I'm going to price it at $40. So now I've developed the foundation for my subscription box, and I think that what we tend to do is the fun stuff. We wanna design the packaging and shop for products, but we haven't built a foundation for what this looks like before we just go off and do the fun stuff. And so this is what I'm gonna caution you on. We have to do things in a logical order or we're going to make costly mistakes. So now I figured out my categories. Now I figured out my price. I got the website developer working on the tech part of it. I needed to sit down and visualize what this looked like for the next 6 months. If I was gonna do this, I had to be prepared to have something in the pipeline for the next month and the next month and the next month, right? So this is where I created the Post-it Note Challenge. Many of you know it today as the 6 in 60 workshop that is in our library of Launch Your Box. So it's in the training library. It's called the 6 in 60 workshop. This was a workshop that I developed back then when I started to look at what I wanted to put in these boxes. And Antoinette, I understand what you're saying for makers, but what product is the most scalable for you? That's what I want you to think about. What is the most scalable as a maker? Because you're going to have to tweak your offering to make this work. You can't go into this hand-making every single piece of what you do. So what is the most scalable? That's where a lot of our makers come in with kits and they start teaching how to make it. They can't physically hand-make 1,000 things. They can teach you one-on-one to make the thing and send out 1,000 kits. You have to think about what is the most scalable for your business if you're a maker. Okay, so I sat down and I did the Six in Sixty workshop, and I did the whole brainstorming session that I teach you in the workshop. And at the end of this hour, I had planned out 6 months worth of subscription boxes. Now I could visualize what was going to happen over the next 6 months with this subscription. When we plan out 1 month or 2 months, that's great in your head, but I need you to see what this is going to look like long term for you. And so doing this workshop was so important, and it's something that I rinse and repeat every 6 months. I sit down, I take the hour, I brainstorm, and I put it in my Asana board. Now I used to put it on Post-it notes, but now I put it in my Asana board for my whole team to see, but you've got to figure out what this looks like long-term, not just the first and second box. Once I visualize this, once I said, okay, okay, this is what this looked like, and I know products well enough because I have a business and I sell products, I know what I can fit in this box to make my $40 price point. Right? I know enough about— and that's the thing, when we don't come up with a price before we start curating, we're gonna get ourself way off track. You've got to figure out the price of your subscription box before you start to curate those boxes. So price was really important for me to decide before I started to work on the monthly curation. Now I had it laid out, now I knew exactly what I needed to do, and it was time to determine a launch date and put it out there. And I think this is where we get stuck. Let me know, let me know in the chat if you like, okay, I figured out what tech I need. Okay, I figured out what I'm going to put in my boxes. I figured out how to price it. I've done the 6 and 60, and now I'm frozen. I'm paralyzed. Just put paralyzed in the chat if you made it to this stage and now you're paralyzed with before you start to launch and you haven't moved forward. And this is what I want you to do. I want you to think you've done the brainstorming, you've done the work here. Now we have to get it on the calendar and we have to quit shifting it around, okay? Because I could have very easily said when I woke up this morning, I'm not going to go live. I'm out of town this week and I got other things I'm doing today and it's a different time zone and there's other other people in the house with me and I could have given myself a lot of excuses not to go live today. And I think that's what we tend to do when we're launching. Oh, I don't know when I'm going to launch. I'll figure that out later. I'll work on the other things. I don't— oh, I was going to launch in March but now March is here and I'm not quite ready. And so I'll launch in April and that turns into June and now it's fall and I still haven't launched my subscription box. Does that sound like you? Say guilty in the chat if that sounds like you. Okay. When I laid out what this looked like for 6 months, it was now time for me to determine a launch date. And the best way to motivate you and to keep you on track is to put your launch date out in the world. I promise. So now I figured it out. I'm planning 45 to 60 days out because I've got to order product, I've got to build a waitlist, I've got to do some other things, and I need to determine a date. So I did. I determined a date 60 days later. I thought, okay, that's going to give me enough time to do everything I need. It's going to give me enough time to build up some momentum to the launch, and I'm going to announce this launch date today so that I don't back out, everybody knows it's coming, and it gives me accountability. Okay, so I announced my launch date. It's now 60 days from today. I'm building up excitement with the announce of that launch date. I had set up a waitlist on my site to capture people's names, so when I'm announcing this I've also had this waitlist build up. If you're interested in this brand new subscription box, drop your email onto this list and you will have this first opportunity to purchase. Okay? So that's how we started to build a waitlist. And that first initial post announcing your date of your subscription box, announcing that this is coming, is gonna create a lot of buzz and a lot of excitement. And then you need to capture those people. You need to start collecting those people that are excited with you. So that's why we have to start building our waitlist with that announcement. And then what I did over the next 60 days, every week I was building up momentum to that launch. Every week I had a planned post, a planned campaign in email to build that waitlist so that when I launched, I had the most excited people. So that would have been behind the scenes if I was working on designs, if I was working on color palettes, if I was working on packaging. All of those things were posts to get people excited about what was coming and to keep the energy going for that 60 days. I can't just announce it and then go about my business for 60 days and then come back and launch my subscription box. I had to build in the momentum going to that launch for those 60 days. And now what I was doing in the 60-day time period, now that I could see what I was putting in my boxes for the next 6 months, I could work on packaging. You can't work on packaging until you know what's going in your box. And that's where we get this backwards, and that's where we spend a lot of money frivolously because we don't even know if the stuff's going to fit in our box. We haven't even worked on our concept enough to know what kind of packaging I need. And so now that I have this listed out for 6 months, I know what kind of packaging that I need for 6 months. I could buy it in bulk if I can afford to, or I can buy it a month at a time until I can build up, you know, revenue to buy in bulk. But now I can work on packaging and I have 60 days to do that. Now I can start shopping for the product. I've laid it out. Let me get month 1 figured out. Let me start looking for month 2. And now I can start working on the product while I'm building that wait list, while I'm building momentum, while I'm building excitement, excitement. And all I have to do before launching now is kind of finish the website and test it. I need to test what does this look like for a subscriber. I need to go in and become a subscriber and go through the checkout process, right? And I don't want to do that the day before I launch. You're just creating a lot of stress on yourself if you do that. I want to do that the week before I launch so I can work out any bugs that are happening before I'm launching. And now I'm here. It's been 90 days since I thought about starting my subscription box. I've done the steps that I need to do. It's not fancy. I don't have investors. I haven't created a luxury custom box. I'm making it work. I'm launching it and getting it out in the world. And then every month I have the opportunity to tweak it, to get better at it, and to keep increasing my subscribers and my experience that I'm delivering every single month. If you've been sitting on your heels waiting for the perfect time to start your subscription box, you're wasting time. Ask yourself, what would have happened if I would have launched my subscription box 6 months ago? How would things be different right now for me? We keep waiting and pushing things off and telling ourselves that we have more time. I'll do it later. I'll do it when things are better. I'll do it when things are perfect. It's never going to be perfect. It wasn't perfect when I started my subscription box. I had a brown box that put some stamps on. I planned for 50 subscribers. I got 44 of those filled, and within 3 months I had 100 subscribers just with my brown box and my imperfect plan. And I just did it. And every month that I did it again, I got better and I got better and I got better. And so if we're waiting to be the best that we can be before we launch, we're doing ourselves a disservice because by doing it you get better, not by overthinking it while you're laying in bed at night, not by planning and then saying, "I'm not ready yet." We have to just do it and get better and better and better. Shereen says, "What happened to Trello?" I started on Trello, it's a great place to start. As my team grew, my project management system needed to grow. And so I shifted to Trello a couple years ago. I mean, I shifted from Trello to Asana because I have a large team of people. So that's what happened. Trello's still great. Shannon says, how many times a year should you launch? I'm still unsure of how to do this with an open cart model. Wondering if I should change to a closed cart model. You know, in the beginning, Shannon, I launched almost monthly when I started my subscription box. Every month was a new launch, every month was a new sneak peek, every month I had more subscriptions. I was building in like 25 a month, okay? I had started with 50, and then the second month I added in 25, and I had 75 subscribers, and then I went to 100, and I was like this slow little growth because I was scared. I was scared about ordering too much product. I didn't have a bunch of funds to just order a bunch of product all at once. But I just slow-stepped my growth. And then when I could see those 25 were selling out every month, then I bumped it to 50 in the next month that I was ordering for. And so those were my— so I was having these little mini launches almost monthly. When I did that first box reveal live, it sent like a huge massive amount of people to my website. And I just kept building that waitlist. I was selling out every month and I was building that momentum for the next month. I was creating that urgency, that scarcity, that exclusivity. And so I was launching almost monthly because I had more spots. Now, after I kind of grew into the thousands, um, I started to launch like 3 times a year. So I would launch 3 times a year, then that went to 2 times a year, then I got real tired and only launched 1 time a year, and I realized that's not enough. So I'm going back to launching twice a year this year. The last 2 years I've only launched once a year. It's not enough. It wasn't, it wasn't keeping the growth going. It was leaving me a little bit stagnant. I was just refilling what I had lost throughout the, the last year that I hadn't launched. So I've got to launch more frequently. So it really depends, Shannon, on what stage you're in of your business, because if you're in the beginning, you may want to do a mini launch, do a big launch, In the beginning, like we teach in the Launch Your Box Library, we have the whole launch module that outlines your emails, your social media, your schedule, all the plan is all in there for you step by step. But you might need to do more of a mini launch version each month in the beginning to get growth right off the bat. So that might mean you wanna start with 50 subscribers and add 10 in for month 2 and add 10 more in for the next month, whatever your audience size is, whatever your waitlist tells you that you need. That's why the waitlist is so important. It's gonna give you a lot of data on what you need to launch with and what you need to keep on growing with. So when you get to the point where you're not having to launch so much, I had built such a big waitlist that I went a couple years without launching at all. I didn't launch at all in 2019 and I didn't launch at all in 2020 'cause I had built such a big waitlist that every time I had openings, they would be filled from an email. And that's where you want to be, okay? It doesn't necessarily mean you have to close your cart because almost you're just, every month is a new beginning. Every month you have something different if you're a monthly subscription. It might look like quarterly if you have a quarterly subscription. Maybe you're launching every quarter. If you're bimonthly, you're launching every 2 months because you have something new to offer every month. That's the best thing about a subscription box. Is that I have something new every single month to get you excited about. It's different with a membership. You know, with Launch Your Box, I have new training every month, but it's not this big new surprise every month, right? And so that's why the subscription box is so great because it's new every single month. You have something new to offer. So if you're not where you want to be, you might have to launch more often. What I want you to get out of this going into this week: where am I at in this stage that I've laid out for you from start to 90 days? Where am I at as a business owner in this stage? Technically, have I figured out what I need and is that going? If not, that's your first thing, right? If you haven't built an audience, that's actually the ground zero, but I'm, I'm assuming you've built an audience. And if you haven't built a big enough audience or it's just not growing fast enough, it might be time to put some paid ads behind it. It is time to put some paid ads. You can only grow organically so much, and I'm a big proponent on organic growth, but when it's slow and you're ready to go, we have to do something with that. I'm working on growing my YouTube channel and I've done all organically for the last, I don't know how long I've been on there, 18 months? That's everything I have on there has been organic. It's time to put some gas on the fire, okay? And that's what I'm doing next. I'm putting some gas on the YouTube fire so that I can grow that audience quicker. You might be there. Tech, what's going on with tech? What needs to be done? What are the top categories in my business? How am I going to price it? Once I figure those two things out, now I can take the 6 in 60 workshop and I can start laying out what this looks like for 6 months. Once I have that figured out, it's time to determine a launch date. If you're at this stage and you have not determined a launch date, get on it. No excuses in 2025. No excuses. I'm showing up live with palm trees and sunshine in the back— in the backyard. There's no excuses for 2025. We're doing it. Then you build a waitlist, you keep the momentum going, you build up the momentum and the excitement, you order your product and packaging, and you launch the dang thing. Whether that's 5, that's 50, or that's 500 subscribers, it's time to stop sitting on your ideas and getting them out in the world. That's what we're doing this year. We're making moves. All right, so if you're ready to launch your subscription box, just put I'm ready to launch in the chat. It's time to stop overthinking everything, make a plan, and get it out there. I want you to make money. I want you to make recurring revenue. It is the best thing for your business, and we got to stop overthinking every move of this and just get it done. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be perfect, but it's time to make the move to start getting better. All right, that's your Monday pep talk for this week. Let me know in the chat when your launch date is. I'd love to be able to support you, um, in our community. So y'all have a great Monday. I'm just gonna go enjoy some sunshine today, um, because I've I got my work done. Get your work done early in the morning and you can enjoy your afternoon. All right, I'll talk to you guys soon. Have a great day.