Subscription Box Answers

How We Reached Our First 1000 Subscribers!

• Liam Brennan

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On today’s episode of Subscription Box Answers, I’m rolling back the clock and breaking down—step by step—exactly how we got our first 1,000 subscribers.


The tactics may have evolved over time, but the core message hasn’t changed:


 If you want your business to hit a big milestone, you might need to forget about being fancy and drag it there kicking and screaming.


If you’ve got a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post it there.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. On today's episode, we're discussing a very popular topic which will hopefully help a lot of people, and it's all around hitting your first thousand subscribers. In my opinion, from being in this industry for a very long time and from obviously running my own business and from helping so many different people in so many different niches, a thousand subscribers is usually the break point in your business where things get a lot better. Okay, it's usually the point where you have more cash, you're able to pay yourself better, you're able to potentially hire some help to help you. You can be thinking around fulfillment centers. A thousand subscribers is usually that point where everything starts coming together and you start really getting rewarded from all the work and effort you've put into your business.

Speaker 2:

Now, last business, now last year, I recorded a podcast episode. I'm just looking at it here. It was on March 4th 2024 and it was called do this to reach a thousand subscribers. So if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend going back and listening, because I break down in a very tactical way exactly what I would do to reach a thousand subscribers these days. And a few people actually reached out to me and they said they actually used that episode as a guide to launch a new product or to help them scale up to a thousand subscribers. So, yeah, definitely check it out if you want a real tactical breakdown around exactly what to do. I think somebody yeah, they did that was like somebody actually posted about that in the subscription box resources group. I think they said they launched a new subscription product and they took it to a six-figure annual run rate and that episode was one of the resources they used which helped them. So that was pretty cool to see as well. But anyway, on today's episode, we're back talking about hitting your first thousand subscribers, and I'm actually going to share how we did it in BusterBox, because I get people asking me this all the time.

Speaker 2:

So when we started BusterBox, we had very little knowledge around running any kind of paid media online. I did some Google ads back in the day for something completely different, which worked really well, but when it came to meta ads, which were vital for us, we never had much knowledge and we were messing around, trying different things. We were getting a few people signed up here and there, but it was no way consistent at all and if you know me or you've listened to this podcast in the past. I will always say to get anywhere with any kind of business, you need to be able to acquire customers in a repeatable, profitable and scalable way, and we never had that. It was all a game of chance, pretty much. Some people might sign up here and there. You could be going two weeks without somebody signing up. You could be going 10 days without somebody signing up and we felt like prisoners in our own business in a way. We felt very um trapped because we never knew how to get and people signed up in a reliable way, and around this time I found out that I was being made redundant from my job.

Speaker 2:

Now, obviously, we had started busterBox a few months before that, so I was kind of excited at the possibility of being able to do this full time. I'd get paid a redundancy it wasn't much now I can tell you that but I did get paid a redundancy amount and I was very focused around the fact that I was just going to put my head down and literally work on this around the clock and turn it into a proper business. But the fact we couldn't really get people signed up was obviously a problem. You have to be able to get people signed up if you want to go anywhere. Now I was being made redundant around september, I think it was. I think it was the middle of september, might be in the end, I can't remember exactly.

Speaker 2:

But I was in my old job one day and I put a picture up on facebook and it was a collage of really happy dogs with our box. Okay, really, really happy dogs with our box. We we've always been in a very fortunate position where we get a lot of content sent in to us because our customers obviously love taking pictures of their dog and if the box makes the dog happy, they'll take a picture and they'll send it in to us. So I made a collage and I wrote, I posted it on Facebook with a piece of copy, and the copy was something like guess what? We're running our best ever offer. Just comment below to find out what it is. So actually you do see a lot of, I would say, coaches probably do this more than econ brands, but you do see this being done to this day. But this was before anybody um did this, before it became popular.

Speaker 2:

So we put, I posted this and I wasn't really thinking much of it and then, out of nowhere, I saw comments come in. You know this was a free post. I saw comments coming in pretty much okay, I'm Going tell me what the offer is. What's the offer? Blah, blah, blah. So I started writing to these people and I was basically like thanks for commenting. What kind of dog do you have? There was a whole sales flow which got better and better as time went on. But out of the first few comments, two people basically ended up signing up straight away. So I was blown away. I was like this is absolutely amazing. But obviously this was a organic post. So the comments slowed down really really quickly.

Speaker 2:

But I had a idea and the idea was obviously to turn it into a paid post. So I boosted it as an engagement post when you're looking for likes, shares, comments, all that stuff, and I put a very low budget on it. Back then we were only serving the Irish market, so target in Ireland. I think it was like 20 euro a day. I put on it, or it might have even been a bit less, and I'd be sitting in my job at the time when you has been made redundant.

Speaker 2:

I was leaving very soon, but I would see comments come in and I would write to people and we started getting a few people signed up every single day from doing this. It was really really, uh, straightforward. It wasn't the big budget, nothing like that but we finally had a way to get people signed up in a reliable, scalable and profitable way. But we we obviously never realized that back then, but we did. We, we had that in place. So then I got made redundant and I was obviously like this is going to be brilliant because I know exactly what I'm going to be doing all day. I'm literally going to be running this post and I'll just be speaking to people all day and I'll be getting them signed up and if I can get a certain amount of people signed up over time, it will all compound and will actually get this business to a place where it needs to go. Obviously, my um business partner at the time he he was actually working full-time, but when he came home, he he was um taking turns with this in the evening time because I'd be on it literally um for the majority the day.

Speaker 2:

Now it went into October and obviously Christmas is coming up it's not too far away. So what I saw happening was a lot of the people coming through wanted a Christmas present for their dog. So so we came up with an offer, okay, and it was like I can't even remember. It was like 20% off a one-month subscription. It was something like that, a rolling one-month subscription. So in the build-up to Christmas, this is all we were doing, pretty much okay, and it was just becoming more and more apparent that people wanted a Christmas present for their dog. That that's why they were commenting, okay, without us even mentioning Christmas, it was moving in that direction. You'd be chatting to people and they'd be asking for, um, christmas presents, pretty much, oh, this would be a great Christmas present for the dog.

Speaker 2:

So we doubled down on this, remembering that we're very fresh at this point. We haven't been running this company long and we think this is absolutely brilliant. We have a small ad budget going and we're mainly selling um, one month subscriptions. We were, we were doing some other stuff as well, but it was mainly one month subscriptions. So we were selling, we were selling, we were selling all the way up to christmas and I think we had like, maybe it was like 300 subscribers going into christmas that year might have been three, maybe a bit more. I can't. I can't really remember, but yeah, it was around the 300 mark.

Speaker 2:

And in the meantime my old job got in touch with me and they asked me would I be interested in going back? They got a different contract and the cash was running low. To be to be honest with you, cash was running low and even though we made a lot of progress with this new system to get people signed up, cash was still running low. So I had to think about that and I said, look, I'll go back. But deep down I knew it was only going to be for a short amount of time, because we had this strategy. We knew how to get people signed up, so it was only a matter of time before we got the business big enough for it to be viable.

Speaker 2:

But then January came and it was a beat down. It was a complete beat down, churning wise. A lot of the people who signed up literally only wanted the dog's Christmas present or a very short subscription for the dog for Christmas. That was literally it. They had no intention of staying around for a very long time. So this obviously wasn't great, but the way we looked at it was Look, we have figured out how to get people signed up, but we need to sell them into the right offer. And that's when we need to sell them Into the right offer and that's when we switched To commitment terms and we absolutely we hounded Subway, to be honest with you At the time and we came up with Stefan very kindly, came up with A way for us to do Commitment terms and we got it implemented Onto the site. Then we went all in on doing this strategy, but this time we were pushing people into six and 12 month subscriptions. So I ended up we all ended up going full-time in the business and what was actually happening was right.

Speaker 2:

We were running these posts from eight o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at night, five days a week. We never did that at the weekend well, sometimes we go on it and the odd weekend, but it was monday to friday, definitely from eight o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at night, and we took shifts doing it. Okay, we took turns. Who was going to be on at night time? We were working in an office at the time we had our first office, but then we would come home and somebody would go on it at night time and the business started ramping up. We literally had these posts out going. Guess what we're running our best ever offer? Just comment below and we'll tell you what it is Like pictures of really, really, really happy dogs. But the funny thing about it was the pictures we were using really influenced how well these posts did, like some collages done absolutely unbelievable. Other collages were really really poor.

Speaker 2:

But around that time we went to the uk. We we opened up to the UK market properly where we were charging in pounds and we had our own pricing for the UK market and then we took the strategy we were doing to the UK market and it exploded. And that's actually what got us to 1,000 subscribers Just speaking to people every day on Facebook, pretty much with these engagement posts. Now the crazy thing about it is I still remember some of the numbers around this and it was like 30 cent a lead and the customer acquisition cost on average was €6.85. So ridiculously cheap. And the reason why it worked so well was we weren't going for the conversion objective, we were going for the engagement objective, so it was working out a bit cheaper and the way Facebook worked back then was a good bit different to how it works now. People seem to be a lot more engaged and stuff.

Speaker 2:

And the way the algorithm worked was if people were commenting on something you put up, the algorithm would pick up steam and it would start like heating up the algorithm pretty much and the post would be shown to more people and more and more people. And it just worked really, really well. And how we actually increased things back then was we sent out more posts. Believe it or not, we actually had multiple posts saying the exact same thing and we set up a chat automation system where all the comments were fed into a crm and multiple people could speak to potential customers at the exact same time. And I remember like we literally went from struggling to get people in and then we actually hit 70 people signed up in one day. Now, since then, we've obviously gone a lot higher than that, but I was literally gobsmacked at the time that we actually found a way to get 70 people signed up in one day. Now we actually used this to go higher than a thousand subscribers. I can't even remember when we stopped doing this, but we did switch over and we went to traditional facebook advertising and that actually took us to the next level.

Speaker 2:

But at the start, when we never had a lot of money or experience. One thing we did have was persistence. We were committed to hitting a thousand subscribers and we pretty much dragged the company to hit that goal. Sometimes in business you will have to do that. You will have to drag your company to a goal. It's not about doing the things you like or being fancy or whatever. It's about staying consistent and maybe doing something you don't like, but having the discipline to repeatedly do that until you hit your goal, no matter how you're feeling on that day. It's about getting up and having the discipline to do the actions which are required to get you to the place you need to go. And that's exactly what we did. We were really committed to this process and we dedicated a lot of time to it.

Speaker 2:

Now, the reason why we stopped doing it was facebook changed engagement dating. They didn't like this for a while. People's behavior on social media changed as well and we stopped doing it and we went to obviously traditional Facebook advertising and that took us to the next level. Now, like I mentioned, I do see some coaches doing this. So maybe Facebook have softened their attitude to engagement baiting and maybe it's okay to do it again, but I don't know, we haven't. We haven't done this in a very long time, but the point of this episode was basically showing you how we hit our first thousand subscribers. It was nothing fancy. We had a process that worked and we just repeated this every single day until we hit our goal.

Speaker 2:

And maybe you have a process in your business that is working well for you, but for some reason you want to shift from the thing which is working well to open, maybe, different channels. My advice to you would be it is important at a certain point to have other channels, but if you have something that's currently working, can you do more of it? Can you maximize it? Can you scale it to be a bigger channel and to give you even greater results? If you can do that, that's probably the easiest way to hit your first thousand subscribers or to reach the next goal you want to reach in your subscription box business.

Speaker 2:

Now I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, and you've been listening a while, would you mind giving me a review on apple or spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts? It doesn't matter, it just helps me get this show out to more people. We'll be back next week at the exact same time and, as always, if you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post your question there. Thanks very much and chat to you next week. Bye-bye.