#012 - Julie was able to grow her own subscription box business Sparkle Hustle Grow into a fulltime income in less than nine months. And one of the biggest keys was her pre-launch. In this episode, Julie talks about the 5 key steps in pre-launching your subscription box business idea.
If you're interested in learning more about the subscription box industry and subscription box businesses, head on over to Subscription Box Bootcamp for some free resources.
Links:
Sparkle Hustle Grow
Subscription Box Bootcamp
KingSumo
Get all the details and your ticket at SubSummit.com, THE conference for sub box businesses. We'll see you in Dallas this June!
#012 - Julie was able to grow her own subscription box business Sparkle Hustle Grow into a fulltime income in less than nine months. And one of the biggest keys was her pre-launch. In this episode, Julie talks about the 5 key steps in pre-launching your subscription box business idea.
If you're interested in learning more about the subscription box industry and subscription box businesses, head on over to Subscription Box Bootcamp for some free resources.
Links:
Sparkle Hustle Grow
Subscription Box Bootcamp
KingSumo
Get all the details and your ticket at SubSummit.com, THE conference for sub box businesses. We'll see you in Dallas this June!
So you want to launch a subscription box, don't know where to start? Girl, you are in the right place! I'm Julie Ball, a subscription box coach and your host here at Subscription Box Basics, a podcast for new and aspiring subscription box entrepreneurs that want to avoid overwhelm. So grab a coffee, some pen and paper and let's have some fun! Hey, welcome to Subscription Box Basics! The podcast where we're talking about pre-launching your subscription box business today. Prelaunch is the early phase of launching your box before you have anything actually to sell yet. It's a way to generate buzz and it's a way to start getting the word out there and to actually gather feedback for your upcoming launch. I'm your host Julie Ball, the founder of Sparkle Hustle Grow, which is a monthly subscription box and online community for female entrepreneurs. I was able to grow my own subscription box business into a fulltime income in less than nine months. And one of the biggest keys was my prelaunch. So today we're talking about the five key steps to pre-launching your subscription box idea. Before we dive into those five key steps. Let's just talk really quickly about why you even need a prelaunch. I've mentioned this on a past episode, but it's worth repeating because prelaunch is a step you do not want to miss, so don't skip this. I believe that there's three reasons why you need a prelaunch. So let's dive in. First and foremost, the most important reason to have a prelaunch is to fund your box. So many of us launch a business with a zero dollar budget or even just a small budget, no investors, nothing to help you get launched. But this prelaunch gives you an opportunity to earn some income, some revenue to pay for those first months boxes. When I launched Sparkle Hustle Grow, I used my business credit card to register the business and to get the domain name. But with a successful prelaunch, I was able to raise over$1,500 in just the startup funds. It kinda got me to this place where I could order my custom boxes and then buy the products for that first month's box, that founding members box. The second reason you need a prelaunch is for validation. Have you told anyone your idea yet? Have you talked about it and gotten feedback? So often we think we know what our customers want, but we really need to ask them when we need to listen to them. So often you'll be able to validate your business idea or figure out where you need to tweak it before you put all your eggs in one basket. And the third reason why you need a prelaunch is to build an audience. When you're launching your business, you can't launch to an audience of zero and expect to earn revenue and expect to be successful. So by building an audience in advance, you actually have someone to tell about your progress and tell them that you're launching and all that good stuff. If you don't build that audience, you really can't expect to have a successful launch. So let's dive into those five key steps to having a successful prelaunch. Number one, carve out your concept. You need to spend some time figuring out what your box idea is, who you're going to serve. You need to build your logo. Validate that idea and know what pain point that your box is going to fix. When you're starting a business. You just can't typically come up with an idea and launch in the same day, especially when it comes to product based businesses. There's so many moving parts, so that's why you really need to get clarity on your concept, so that first key step is to carve out that concept. If you haven't done that yet, head over to episode number six where I walk you through my entire process. It's actually fun. I think you'll really like it. The second key step to pre-launching your subscription box idea is to nurture and grow your email list. I just finished telling you that you need to build that audience now. You need to give them value. You need to be authentic with them and share your experience with them to build that loyalty. All right, let's take a step back first. To grow your email list. There's plenty of ways to do it. My favorite go-to expert on this topic is Amy Porterfield. If you haven't already checked out her podcast or signed up for any of her emails, then do that today. I've learned so much from her in terms of growing our email list, things like lead magnets and quizzes where you ask a visitor for their email address in exchange for participating in the quiz or they're downloading the lead magnet. One of my favorite ways to grow our list is giveaways. Maybe I'll cover how we use giveaways to grow our email list on a future episode, but real quick from time to time we launched giveaways using software called King Sumo. It's a software that helps your giveaway go viral. In other words, reach more people. Basically they do that through the actions that the visitor can take. For example, visitors can earn extra entries by sharing the link on Facebook or they can earn extra entries by following you on Instagram. It's a really cool, affordable and easy to use software that we absolutely love and recommend. And then the last thing on growing your list with giveaways is to make sure that your prize is super specific to your ideal target audience. Don't make it an Amazon gift card because everyone wants that. You want it to draw in only your target audience. There's no use to growing an email list of people who just want to win prizes and aren't even likely to turn into your end customer. So now we've talked about growing your email list, but what's all this you say about nurturing them? What does that even mean? Well, as you nurture your email list, you're going to be building this anticipation, this excitement behind the scenes so t here'll be ready and willing to convert when you l aunch to the public. Some ways to nurture your email list include sending them updates on your progress, show them when the logo is finalized because that's a really exciting part of your business. Show them when your first set of boxes come in. You can share product pictures, asking them to hit reply and to vote for what they'd like to see in future boxes. It's just really simple. Just keep that conversation going so they stay engaged and excited about being one of your founding members. The third key step to prelaunch, your subscription box idea is product development. Not only do you have to determine your product pricing, but you need to figure out what's actually going to go in that first m onth's box. So just go out to stores, buy some products and put them in a mockup box. Then use pictures of that box in your marketing. Don't worry, it doesn't have to be what your first month's boxes. You just have to start somewhere. But giving your audience a good idea of why it might be in that box. Kind of like the product assortment. They can really help start your marketing in your prelaunch and get people excited and if you're not sure to where to start with this one, head over to episode number eight where I talk about product sourcing. That's a good place for you to start. The fourth key step to prelaunch your subscription box business idea is tech time. Inevitably you are going to have to get familiar with some software. You need to build your landing page to collect email addresses and eventually you'll need to build your website where you can accept orders and you need a third party processor like Stripe or PayPal to actually collect the money. So to have a successful launch, you need to carve out some time and get into that technology. Don't stress though a lot of it is actually simpler than you think and I'm not going to get into all the tech here because back in episode number 10, I dish on all the tech we use. That should definitely help you with decision fatigue. I just remember that it took me a ton of time researching and testing out software before we landed on our systems. So go check that episode out. And the last key step to prelaunch, your subscription box is a presale. Not everyone does this, but it was so valuable to me in launching Sparkle Hustle Grow. So that's why I included. As I mentioned before, many of you will start on a very small budget and that's okay. That's what the presale is for. You've nurtured your email list and you'll, you will have built anticipation and they're super excited and they say,"Take my money, please". So are you ready for it? A presale in my eyes is an exclusive opportunity for your VIPs to be the first to jump onboard. So when you accept the presale orders, you're generating revenue to launch your business. You already have some money in the bank when you're ready to launch to the public. Let me give you an example. So you could open up your founding members box for one to two weeks to your VIP list. So maybe that's your email list before you launch to the public. Think of it like an early bird or a fast action takers sale. These extra weeks will turn your first month into maybe like a five or six weeks sales cycle instead of your standard four week or one month sales cycle. With that extra time, you can rack up your first sales to put some money in the bank to buy your first products. That again, that presale was so impactful for me when I launched Sparkle Hustle Grow, and I was able to generate about$1,500 in revenue in that first sales cycle, and I used it to buy products and custom boxes. Can you imagine what that feels like to actually have some money in the bank when you launched to the public? Do a presale. So if you've listened this far and you're interested in learning more about the subscription box industry and subscription box businesses, head on over to SubscriptionBoxBootcamp.com for some free resources and to get on our VIP list for special deals and opportunities when we open Subscription Box Bootcamp again for enrollment in early March 2020. I hope to see you there. Head on over to Subscription Box Bootcamp to join that list. Thanks for hanging out with me today as always, and I'll see you in the next episode.
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