Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / 1 resource, a cheeky non-alc update and a HUGE favour to ask you (let's get to know eachother)
Transcript
- 0:00Hey, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today is a bit of a blend with a resource, a big favor, and a pretty cool update on the Non-Alk Wine Company. So let's get straight into it. This is me for Female Startup Club.
- 0:17Hello and welcome back to the show. I hope you're tuning in with some chill, relaxing Saturday vibes happening in your life right now. This weekend I'm laying low and I'm finishing off a few projects that have been forever in the making and I am so close to being able to share them with all of you which is just so exciting and I can't wait.
- 0:41But first, an update carrying over from last week. Something I told you about was a company I came across called Sprout Law. And it was sent to me by two women, Melissa in Hype Club and from Clara on Instagram. Thank you so much, by the way. And this week I had my free consultation, which was super interesting to get the cost breakdown of trademarking in the U.S.,
- 1:07and an idea of when I can finally start shouting about our non-alc wine company name. Basically, the fees work out to be $59 for the initial trademark search, then it's $255 per class, and we're doing two classes, and then it's $1,200 in the flat legal fee, which
- 1:32I don't have any experience in this, but to me it kind of sounds expensive. But, you know, I'm new to all this legal fee stuff, so maybe this is normal. It comes to $1,769 or $1,769. And then after the filing, there are some additional fees when you submit for the proof of use or extensions to a timeline, because I think you have a certain amount of time that you need to sell into the U.S. And they are...
- 1:59from memory, $200 or $250 for each of those. So I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this. I'd love to hear from any other small business owners who live outside of the US and needed to trademark in the US to understand what your experience was like trying to process that trademark. Is just this the bottom line? Is this the definite cost I'm looking at?
- 2:24Can it be done on a lower budget? I don't know. Anyway, would love to hear from you. Would love to hear from anyone who has an idea. I'm still just, I don't know, legal fees are expensive. Gosh. But moving on, let me tell you about a resource that I learned about this week. Again, from Instagram. Instagram.
- 2:44I've just forgotten who sent it to me, but I am so grateful. Thank you so much. It's a company called Smart Copy. And they must have just been acquired or rebranded because the original name and URL is snazzy.ai. And what they are is a super simple tool to create interesting content that's AI-powered for your brand. And it's super helpful for e-commerce brands. Well, it's actually helpful for any brand.
- 3:14But e-commerce, I think in particular, because it can help you with the wording you need on your landing page or your Google ads or for a tagline, for example. I was just poking around on their website. I signed up and it was free. And I quickly put in some super basic info that took me two seconds to test it. And I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. I think if I actually spent some proper time adding things in,
- 3:40with a bit more intention and a bit more care and letting it do its thing. This could actually be so useful for things like blog posts or ad copy or, you know, whatever it is. And they have these different sections where they can tell you what they do. So like you can click, Hey, yes, I need something for a landing page or, Hey, I need it to be optimized for X, Y, or Z. So love this. I'm going to play around with it this week. Check it out. Let me know what you think. It's
- 4:08snazzy.ai, but the company name is actually Smart Copy. I think it's called like Smart Copy by Unbounce from memory. But anyway, snazzy.ai and it redirects you. If you know something super cool that would be super useful for everyone else to know about, and it's one of the lesser known products out there, do pop into my inbox and let me know, because I'd love to share it in one of these Saturday episodes.
- 4:34Okay, resources done. Let's get to the juicy part of this episode for a small but hugely massive update that I am so excited to share with you.
- 4:45Last week, we had another tasting in London following on from our European tasting, well, European R&D lab day, whatever you want to call it, for the non-alc wine company. And out of our top three samples, we had a very, very clear favorite, which is just all sorts of wild. And so to backtrack, to give you a little bit of context, if you didn't hear the last episode, we went to Europe, we spent some time with our...
- 5:13production facility or a lab, whatever you want to call it. And we tasted so many different iterations of our formulations. But by the end of the day, we were just zonked, basically, like my palate. I couldn't tell you what I liked and what I didn't like at the end of the day. So we had what we thought were our top favorites sent to us.
- 5:35Last week, we tried them and we just had a very, very clear favorite, something that we really, really enjoyed. We benchmarked it against different products that are currently on the market for non-alc. We benchmarked it against champagne, which is so wild to taste alcohol drinks versus a non-alcohol drink. But yeah, it's super, super cool. From our side, we really love
- 6:05So we're going to go through another round of samples and create a little focus group of our ideal target market who aren't within our immediate circle of friends to try the product and get some additional non-bias feedback before we press go. And I think that's super important because obviously, you know, our friends want the best for us. Our friends probably don't have the, you know, ability to tell us if something's actually shit. Yeah.
- 6:31So we're going to try and find some people who are, you know, friends of friends or friends of friends of friends to give us some honest opinions about what they think, whether they would buy it, and if it's something that they would buy again. And we're going to basically look for people who are truly our target market.
- 6:52For example, I would say right now I'm not 100% the target market because I can drink or, you know, I – well, that's not true actually. I am the target market, but I would like to mix, like have an elk drink and then a non-elk, for example. But we want to speak to people who is in our first kind of group of target market.
- 7:14Customers, and that's women who are pregnant, women who cannot drink for any particular reason, whether that's because they're on medication, whether that's because they actually stopped drinking alcohol altogether, or whether it's because, you know, they're pregnant or breastfeeding mums, basically, new mums.
- 7:31So with all that in mind, and also keeping in mind that the first order is 42K, which is a bit gut-wrenching, we are putting the word out. If you know anyone who happens to be pregnant, loves wine, can't drink for whatever reason right now, send them my way. I would love to have them join our tiny focus group in London today.
- 7:55You know, we'll make a really fun night out of it and get some feedback, see whether we should launch this thing to market or if we need to go back to the lab and do some more samples. Either way, I am so stoked that we're just getting those tiny bits closer to the final, final product after almost a year of R&D. But that's not the favor that I have to ask you. There's actually something else. Last but not least...
- 8:24We have something to ask you. Well, I have something to ask you and something to give you in return. I've put together a five-minute survey for our female startup club crew so I can get to know you better. There's been a lot of new people joining us who are listening in now. And so I did a round of research interviews. I think it might have even been at the start of this year or end of last year, but I think
- 8:49There's been so many more people joining us since then. So I want to get to know you better. I want to know what you do, what you enjoy, what you're up to, where you work, what your business is, so that coming into 2022, we can keep improving on our products and services and get a really good understanding of our listener demographics. Yeah.
- 9:08And in return, I've put together five female startup club merch packs that money can't buy to give you back. It's basically a giveaway. At the end of the month, we will ship them out to five of you. You can find the survey in the show notes or if you're signed up to our newsletter, you'll receive it directly to your inbox there.
- 9:30If you want to sign up to the newsletter, I'm sure you've heard me say this before. Go to femalestartupclub.com. You can pop your email in and then you'll be getting all of our updates for as long as you want to. That's pretty much it. Quick episode. Enjoy the rest of your Saturday. Take some time for deep breathing. I'm going to pop on my positive affirmations that Lulu Liang sent me and recommended and cruise on into the afternoon. See you next week. Bye.
- 10:13Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
- 10:38And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
- 11:00As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show, and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.