Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Ecomm master Gretta van Riel reveals how she made $1M in a day + her proven strategies explained

Transcript

Ecomm master Gretta van Riel reveals how she made $1M in a day + her proven strategies explained · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Episode 6 with Greta Rose Van Riel.
• 0:12
  Today I'm chatting to Greta Rose Van Riel. She's the creator of Skinny Me Tea, the Hey Influences platform, Drop Bottle, The Fifth Watchers, and her latest project, Tomorrow. We talk about how she went from $24 in her bank account to making $1 million in a single day on just one of her businesses, how she approaches solving problems and building businesses, and some of her best strategies and tactics for success. This is Greta for Female Startup Club.
• 0:40
  So, Greta, talk to me. How did you get started? I started in business in 2012. So, it's nearly 2020 right now as we're chatting. So, that's nearly eight years ago now, which seems insane. I'd just finished my degree in media and communications. So, yeah.
• 1:00
  It was a bit more marketing focused. I didn't really do much on the media side. I was never interested in becoming a journalist per se, but I did like writing. And I got a job at an agency just in the city in Melbourne where I live, and it was in digital marketing. And I thought it was like a bit of a dream job right out of uni, like it paid well, but
• 1:24
  It had a lot of room for growth. I was reporting directly to the CEO of this big company. Ticks the boxes. So I was, yeah, I was pretty pumped about it. But very early on when I did start there, I didn't necessarily like the corporate structure of it all. So yeah.
• 1:40
  I realized or learned very, very quickly that my job was basically making my boss look good, not doing my work. So I didn't really like the politics side of all of that. And also I'd worked really, really hard during uni and I worked really hard during high school and I'd finish work at five and be like, okay, cool. Now what? What do I do the rest of my day? Exactly. So I was like, I need like a hobby outside of work that is still applying what I'm learning at work. And so I started writing down all these different... Stimulating you. Exactly.
• 2:09
  I started writing down all these different ideas and I was like, I remember my first ever Instagram account where I sold anything wasn't actually my first brand. It was basically I was using it to sell my clothes through Instagram. I think it was like called shop my wardrobe or something, but I was actually pretty sneaky in the way that I would grow it. So people would go crazy for certain items and.
• 2:34
  So dodgy, actually, that I have no problem talking about it. So what I would do is I would, like, list, like, a Celine bag or something, for example, that I did not own. And I would, like, list it, hashtag everything, tag different accounts, and people would go crazy and comment, like, 200 things. I'd be like, yeah, sorry, that's solved. Yeah.
• 2:53
  So I was building up this big demand. I love that. So I knew that things could easily sell through Instagram. Yeah. Because I'd hold these like little options, basically, like comment options. First to comment kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. And then I'd be like sold. And then I'd put up my like shitty little item, like whatever I was selling, some used shoes or something. Yeah.
• 3:13
  And people would still go crazy because it was like that scarcity and that like exclusivity. And I didn't even realize what I was doing. I just knew that that was what worked. I didn't know that that's because, you know, things like the Instagram algorithm favors engagement for organic reach. So the more engagement a post gets early on in its life cycle, the more organic reach will get. And like the quick engagement as well. Yeah, exactly.
• 3:35
  And the reason that that is, is because basically the way that the Instagram algorithm works is that it shows your post to 3% of your followers. And then how that 3% responds determines how much of the next 3% it will show and so on and so forth. So it's a closed loop.
• 3:52
  But if there is, you know, once it gets up to maybe, you know, the 10 or 20% saturation point, if it's performing exceptionally well still, then it will push it through to like more viral reach. So organic reach is when your followers see your post and viral reach is when people who are not following your post see it. So places like the explore page or into the top posts on hashtags. Exactly.
• 4:17
  So that's totally still the case. So basically I had this big list of ideas and one of them was like an app version. Thank God I didn't do this one because gosh, apps are expensive. But one of them was this app version of what I was doing on Instagram. Maybe it would have been like a Depop type thing, but I'm sure it would not have been a Depop. I would not have known how to execute it in that way for a tech company then with the budget that I had, which was like none.
• 4:42
  At the same time, I had been making these tea blends and I'd started making them for people around the office and we'd all had some pretty big weekends all together. I was 22 by this point and we'd just been, you know, having some large nights. But yeah, so we basically, I was making these blends of tea for people around the office and then their friends started wanting them and then their friends did. And it got to the point where I was making this like tea for everyone and I'm
• 5:11
  I was calling it like a T-Tox. And I was like, And were they buying it? Or you were just giving it to them? I was making it for them. I was just making it. No, they weren't buying it for you? They weren't buying it. Like, I found it very awkward to ask them for money. That is how, like, it's a widely publicized fact that I had $24 in the bank when I first started. Yeah. The reason I had $24 in the bank, well, there were two reasons. One was...
• 5:31
  Cause I had a fortnightly wage as well. It's not like I had $24 in the bank and I was this irresponsible human. I had $24 in the bank. I lived at home with my mom still. Like I didn't necessarily, you know, have high living expenses and I did have my fortnightly wage, like, you know, give it like a week and I probably, you know, would have more. Okay. So I basically spent everything that I had though on money.
• 5:54
  making this yeah yeah and I was like this is so awkward I don't know how to ask people for money like what do I do and so then one night in bed I'm like okay this is not ideal and yeah I was like actually you know I've also been playing with ideas of having like a side business hobby sort of thing yeah that's what I kept telling myself for like the first year I was like this is a hobby and like I didn't even set it up as a real company or anything for the first year I did not have a company structure to the extent that I got hit with this 50% tap
• 6:22
  bill at the end of our first year of trading because I was a sole trader. Oh my God. That's going to happen. Oh no, don't say that. Please look after yourself. And so basically I Googled one night in bed. I was like, how to start an online store or like how to create an online store. I think it was. And Shopify came up and I was like, okay, well, like,
• 6:43
  cool. I can't code. I can't do any of that stuff. I'll go on here. I'll create the store. Let's see how it goes. So I went on, created the store on a Sunday. It took me like about eight hours or something. I think I just kind of sat there with my laptop for the day. Yeah. Like playing around with it. Yeah. It is fun. I know, but the bit that took the longest was like the info page that was like, I basically wrote up this big page of like all the ingredients that were in the tea and why I'd chosen each ingredient, like what the effect was of that ingredient. Yeah.
• 7:13
  With that product as a whole, like once I started really researching it and decided that, you know, this could be my like business side hobby thing. I like I went to the Melbourne Uni library and I was like reading up on the effects of herbs on the body. But I took a kind of reverse approach again, instead of like the ingredients I want to put in the tea.
• 7:30
  because that's how most people would create like a tea. They'd be like, okay, I want green tea. I want this tea. I want this thing. I was like, okay, I know that I want the tea to perform these certain actions. You know, for example, if I want it to be a weight loss tea, I'm going to look up herbs that assist in like the obesity management. Like I would just look up the most like next level, like medical case studies and trials of different herbs like that. Or like if you wanted it to be an appetite suppressant,
• 7:57
  There's a couple of ingredients in the tea that when they're combined, it delays gastric emptying by 50%, which is technically like the amount of, I did biology in high school too, I was pretty into it, and it delays how frequently your stomach empties itself into your intestines, basically. And if the food is kept in your stomach for longer, like 50% longer, you feel fuller for longer.
• 8:20
  because your stomach is still sending signals up to the brain being like, I'm still full because the food is still just in your stomach as opposed to, you know, being digested. So created this store, created an Instagram account for it. I already knew, you know, how to grow an Instagram account through growing that wardrobe one. One of the main tactics was honestly like back in the day, just then it was just like sitting down and following a whole ton of different people. And then I would follow like,
• 8:46
  all of my friends and all of their friends and then all of their friends until I felt like I followed like literally every girl in Melbourne. And then I'd be like, okay, who do I know in Sydney? Oh yeah. That girl lives in Sydney. Now I can go fan out from her followers and like follow all of them. So the different pockets. Yeah. So it was just kind of going down that rabbit hole and letting it keep going. And because we were growing on Instagram, once we hit the thousand follower mark,
• 9:09
  people would see that an account with a thousand followers was following them which was a huge account on instagram at that time most people had like 50 followers in 2012 because it was still very much like okay i follow my friends and maybe like one celebrity but they'd be like why did this page with like a thousand followers follow me how cool and then follow it back so we had this like really high refollow rate as well we launched and we sold like four packs of tea on our first night
• 9:33
  cool. And there's that profound moment where you're like, this thrill is like addictive. I need that thrill again and again and again and again and again. Exactly. So like, what do I need to do to keep getting that? And at that time for me, it was just like the further we grew on Instagram, the more sales we'd make. So I think because I didn't really have a background in business at all, I've never read a business book. I'd never heard of T.
• 9:56
  Ferris or like Eric Ries, any of these people, like I literally was just like throwing things against the wall and seeing what's stuck. And if it stuck, I'd be like, cool. I'm going to keep doing that. It was just so obvious to me because that's all I knew. Like it wasn't like, Oh, I should try SEO. I should try email marketing. I should try this channel. I should try YouTube influencers. I should try TikTok influencers. Like, so it was so much more simple because I was just like, okay, I'm onto something. I'm just going to keep repeating that. Like, I think that
• 10:24
  there is this kind of overcomplication of business as a whole. And you do really need to lean in and find the things that are working for your business and just keep doing those until they don't work anymore. So yeah, that's how we started. That's how you got started. So cool. Yeah, no, we grew really, really quickly. We were like selling like 20,000 orders a month at one point. Blimey. Yeah.
• 10:49
  which was crazy. Holy heck. And that was amazing. Yes. That was like within the first six months of the business. So it just like exploded and it was just kind of one of those Instagram first brands. And we won the Shopify business competition. So then I got to meet a whole ton of these mentors who I'd never heard of.
• 11:09
  So like Tim Ferriss. Yeah, you meant Tim Ferriss there, right? Eric Ries was one of mine who wrote the Lean Startup as well. What did you have to do to enter that competition? It was like, well, is it a competition? Yeah, it's a competition. It was like just a really easy entry. Like it was on your Shopify dashboard or something. It was like, do you want to sign up? I was like.
• 11:27
  yeah sure gotta be in it to win it cool and there was a leaderboard and we could see that we were like at the top of the leaderboard for the majority but then they turned the leaderboard off for like the last week so that nobody really knows I'm like are we still gonna do it we did and we got that call and I was in Hong Kong at the time and I remember the call so well and it was just so exciting I ran back into the restaurant was like guys guess what oh my gosh so yeah holy smokes and did you have any fears when you first started skinny meat tea was there anything that
• 11:57
  like about building a big brand when you were so young and just starting out. I was worried about everything. It was just constantly problem solving, constantly putting out fires. Like my biggest fear, I guess, with SMT, and I've spoken about this a little bit before, but like we would be over as quickly as we began. It felt almost like an overnight success in the way that it happened. And I mean, four packs of tea on our first night was success to me at that time. And then it just kept getting relatively bigger and bigger until like my –
• 12:26
  definition of success or like my goalposts for success just kept moving with that. And I was always, you know, really worried that something would happen and I'd have to go back to how everything was before. And I was living in Hong Kong by this point. It was just like a year after we'd
• 12:44
  My life was just so different. And I was like, so scared that it would all go under. And every night I'd go to bed and be like, okay, Greta, you've had a good run. Like you've done well up to this point. But after this, like you're done. And it took until a good friend of mine in Hong Kong, who is also like an incredible business person. He worked for like one of the world's largest turnaround companies. So they were basically turnaround companies that had been like losing hundreds of millions of dollars back into like making millions of dollars. Right, right, right. So...
• 13:14
  He was like, Greta, let's look at this realistically here. It's a Thursday night right now. If everything went under tomorrow, which is Friday, what would you be doing on Monday? And I was like, starting again. And it was just like the most obvious answer to me, but no one had ever asked me that question. I'd never asked myself that. You needed the prompt. Yeah.
• 13:33
  Totally. So that's like one of my favorite quotes, like that quote about, you know, if you do need to start over, you won't be starting from scratch. You'll be starting from a place of experience. And I think that finally kind of relaxed me in that way because I was like, even if the worst happens, like I know what I'm going to be doing now. And I have learned so much and what I'm doing is repeatable. So at the end of the day, that's basically what I did. I repeated it.
• 13:59
  That's amazing. And I want to talk a little bit about why you started Hey Influences, your platform, which is so cool. I love the branding so much. So cute. Tell me about why you started Hey Influences and a little bit about that business. Yeah. So Hey basically started out of my own need. Like I think that a lot of the time the
• 14:21
  best products are always out of a pain point that you felt yourself. Cause it kind of makes you an extremely like authentic person to be solving that problem. If you felt it yourself, of course. Yeah. Even a few times recently I've gotten, this is just the weirdest thing ever. This is just strange to me, but I think cause founder do such a great job with their ads. I've got into a few Ubers and they'd be like, you're Greta. No way. What? Yes. What? And they're always the worst moment to be saying that to where I'm just like dead tired and I've just been at the office and I'm like,
• 14:48
  Oh, yep. Yes, I am. Well, I'm super stressed out, like on my way to the airport or something. I've just like been packing and like other drivers. It was lovely. But he was like, what's an idea? Like, what should I do? And I'm like, oh, like that's the one thing I cannot give you. I really think that it's very important to have felt good.
• 15:06
  That pain yourself and to do something that, of course, you're truly passionate about and utilize your superpower. That's what happened with Hay. I had been running a lot of different influencer campaigns across my brands. We've worked with over 5,000 influencers. So I've definitely been...
• 15:24
  on that side of the market from an influence perspective, but also at the same time, I'd obviously grown a really large following on Instagram for my brands and across my vertical accounts. We had about 16 million followers on Instagram. I think when Hay launched, maybe it was about like 12 or 14 or something like that, but a lot of followers on Insta across different accounts. So I'd kind of seen it from the other side of the market too. And so I just set out a
• 15:48
  to basically scratch my own itch with hay, which I think is always like a great scenario with a product. I was just like, well, if, you know, if this only works for my brands, then so be it. And great. Yeah. What was the process where you're like, yeah, okay, I need to find a developer. I need to find a designer. Or you're like, I know what I want it to look like. I know how it works. We've just done an app for Skinny Me Tea and...
• 16:08
  We worked with an agency out of Melbourne and that app had gone to like the number one in the app store in health and fitness. I called this guy up, Evan, who's a friend of mine as well, and was like, Hey, Evan, I've just had this idea of something I want to do. I don't care how much it costs. Just make it happen for me in a month. I want it in a month. Oh my God. And he was like, um, no, I don't know if we can do that in a month. And also Greta, it's Valentine's day and I'm out to dinner with my wife. So that was Valentine's day, 2014.
• 16:35
  was when I first came up with overall concept for high influencers. And at the time, that was called Nicheify. The biggest difference between an influencer and a traditional celebrity is that celebrities have built up their following around their talent and around a very broad audience. It's them that's...
• 16:56
  the center of everything. But a lot of the time with influencers, it's much more niche because they've built up their audience around a certain style of content or a certain skillset or a certain asset. That was like the core focus of influencers.
• 17:11
  the platform and also being able to filter by niche and, you know, kind of start to get some of those demographic or psychographic filters sort of in there as well. Basically we built Nicheify and it took on a bit of a life of its own. And I realized pretty quickly that this was something that I was going to need to offer to other brands as well to make it like financially viable. So we ended up going and we raised money from, um,
• 17:36
  Blackbird for our seed round around was led by Blackbird and then a Melfi Capital who one of my like good good friends and mentors Paul Wade is a co-founder of and then there's Tris the other co-founder so they're based out of Melbourne with Paul and San Francisco with Tris. And this was the first time you'd done like investment? All my econ brands are bootstrapped but yeah it was quite a
• 18:04
  I think I found it easier maybe than some in terms of the pitching side because Blackbird are very adamant about backing founders, not necessarily even like, yes, they're interested in like the idea, but like I already had a bit of a track record as a founder. So they knew that I was in a good position to be solving this problem as I'd been on both sides of the market. And I'd already had a lot of skin in the game because I had invested entirely in the niche of my platform up until that point.
• 18:32
  So it wasn't too hard necessarily from that side, but it was still really difficult kind of from those early scrappy sort of startup days. It was hard to get everything, all your ducks sort of in a row. So due diligence took ages, it dragged on. I found it very, very stressful. I just got into one of those states where every single decision felt like it was a life changing decision and the littlest things were stressing me out about making, but yeah,
• 18:58
  We got through that and raised the money. And then you launched another brand. Well, it happens.
• 19:06
  In between all of this, like when I started NishaPy, we started the fifth as well. So that was with my co-founder, who's also my ex-boyfriend sometimes. And the fifth came about during all of this as well. So I'd already started NishaPy. It wasn't Hay Influences yet. It really became Hay Influences when we got that backing from Blackbird. Yeah. Because we kind of came to them with a pitch being like, look, this is what we've learned from NishaPy.
• 19:31
  We also are not happy with our platform. We want to, you know, redevelop the entire platform. And yeah, and we want that to become this new platform. We're even renaming. We're rebranding. We work for Love and Money Agency, who is in this office that we're in right now to do all the branding and UX sort of design wireframes side of the platform. So that's how all of that happened. The fifth kind of happened in between there as well.
• 19:57
  And The Fifth is a really unique brand because it was built on the concept which was different to your other e-commerce product and the platform, obviously. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and tell us more? The Fifth basically came about by accident, to be honest. The brand itself was called The Fifth because…
• 20:16
  Alex was in Melbourne and I was in New York and he called me up and we were discussing the brand and we were trying to come up with a name and I just happened to be on Fifth Avenue at the time and was like what about you know the Fifth that's cool and then we were just playing around with the name a lot and we came up with this like Instagram account concept that was called the Fifth View which was all like views from above down so like
• 20:38
  This was right when flat lays and drone shots were really coming into popularity. So the entire account was just basically flat lays and drone shots of landscapes. And it made sense as well for watches because, you know, a lot of the time you're taking that pick from above, down, onto your wrist of the watch. Yeah. Yeah. So that was kind of the way that the model came about. We ended up getting the watches on like the 3rd of December and we're like,
• 21:03
  oh we're called the fifth wouldn't it be cute if we just launched on the fifth of the month plus it was my co-founder's birthday on the fifth yeah on the fifth of december so we're like what a fun birthday um that's so cool so we basically launched on the fifth of december we've been growing a large audience on instagram which we'll go into i'm sure after this but we'd been growing a large audience i think we had around 70 000 instagram followers at the time and we'd converted a lot of that audience across onto our wait list as well so we had around
• 21:29
  I think 8,800 emails only launched. And we had about 1,200 watches to sell. And we're like, that'll last a month. If it did, incredible, because that's like over $100,000 worth of watches. Like, that'd be a great first month. We sold that on our first day in the end. That's crazy. Oh, my God. And so we sold out more like, oh, crap. Best birthday. Like, yeah.
• 21:50
  there was still another month until watches arrived again because we'd known that, you know, we'd need watches again the following month. So it was another good month until we had more stock coming and more like, oh gosh, like how do we make people not hate us right now? Because they've all been waiting for so long and they're like, when are they coming? When are they coming? Okay. They're here. Great. Well, we did a good job at building the hive, but it was like, it was too good because then we're like,
• 22:16
  The other, you know, the 7,000 people on our wait list, 7,600 people on our wait list that missed out are going to be really angry at us. They're going to be ticked off. One of the things that I've learned through Skinny Meat Tea a lot was that communication is key, but the interesting part is like communication shapes the reality of a brand as well.
• 22:36
  If you're able to kind of communicate something differently, it creates an entirely different perception off the back of that. So we basically, I was like, okay, let's turn this negative into a positive. What can we do? Let's be strategic. We need to pretend that we meant this. I started writing this email and it became like the iconic email of the brand. Like we all read it and we got goosebumps and it was like crazy. And I just sat down and I was like, okay, so...
• 23:00
  Thank you for joining the wait list. You're about to find out just how important that was. The thing is at the fifth, we only sell our range of watches on the fifth of each month for five days or until sold out previously. So see you next month on the fifth. And that became our entire model. It ended up being like the entire value proposition of the whole brand. It was an entire fluke. We just played with what we had, which was our name, the fifth, the fact that we launched on the fifth and we're like, well, clearly five days. It was all fives.
• 23:29
  We already, our first range had five watches in it as well. So we'd already been playing around with the number. And so it just, it all happened quite organically. And we ended up like basically reconstructing our entire brand experience around that model. Okay. So you say you redesigned your entire brand experience around your model. Can you give us an idea of what this looked like during the month versus actually at the launch?
• 23:55
  Yeah. So during the month, our entire brand experience was geared towards signups. So you'd go onto our website instead of add to cart, it would be signup. Like even on our shop all page, you could enter your email straight onto the watch, like straight there through the website. So we kind of changed all of the main call to actions, which are usually the shop now to be based around that.
• 24:19
  And so during the month, all we wanted to do was like get more signups and grow through that because we knew that the more signups that we had during the month, the more customers that we had to sell through to at the end of the month. So then at launch, basically what we do is we would email all the people that have signed up because they're our VIPs and they got first access to the store. So between midnight and 9am, they would get early access and online.
• 24:44
  we would lock the entire store down with a password. So they would have had to have signed up during the month to receive the password. So there was such a reason to sign up as well. Like you have to give people a reason to buy or a reason to perform a certain action. And that was our strong reason. That's why, um,
• 25:01
  A lot of marketing is around seasonality and things like that because even just a Black Friday sale, for example, is a relevant reason to have a sale because people understand that other brands are having that sale and it makes sense. They can rationalize that. So a lot of the time when you are creating a reason to buy, it's all about your consumer being able to rationalize that in their head and be like, okay, I get why that brand's going on sale. It's not just like...
• 25:26
  a desperate ploy for more sales. And they're like, okay, I'm prepared for that day. Like I'm ready for it kind of thing. So that was very much what it was like with the fifth. We would build up as much hype as possible. We would literally get people to set their alarms. Our emails like for the five days leading up to launch were very much like, okay, we launched midnight Australian time. That's X time here. That's X time here. That's X time here all around the world.
• 25:51
  If you need to know, you know, what time it is for you, you can email us through and we'll let you know. But set your alarm and your phone for that time and go on and shop then because we often sold out. Like some of our styles would sell out within the first minute, for example, which was just like, it was really cool too because like, because the model works like it did, it meant that every month, all the people buying our watches, if we sold out each month and we sold out for like every month for like at least the first six months until we could like finally...
• 26:19
  work from getting enough stock we kept forecasting how much we'd need and then we'd end up selling more just smashing through the goals trying not to like live too far outside our means we were just like reinvesting the money from like we were entirely bootstrapped so we were reinvesting the money from the company back into the company again and we didn't really want to have to put additional capital in
• 26:39
  And which is obviously quite an expensive item per unit. So the coolest part was that like every customer that did get one was like our raving fan. Like it was the person that set their alarm, waited up and purchased within like a few minutes. They're going to shout the loudest about it. Exactly. Tell all of their friends and post about it on social. So it was great word of mouth. And people felt like very special for the fact that they were able to get one. So like the way that that model worked as a whole was basically like,
• 27:08
  The limited availability of the watches and the scarcity of the watches created more demand and more hype around the brand. While at the same time, the exclusivities of the fact that there were only so many and, you know, you couldn't get them all throughout the month. You could only get them at that time.
• 27:25
  created obviously a highly increased perceived value because a you're waiting for something and yeah we want everything yesterday as a modern consumer but when you're told to wait it does become that bit more special it's delayed gratification basically there's like this brand that i was reading about the other day called lol surprise toys it's the dumbest name ever it's hilarious but they're like
• 27:48
  In two years or something like that, they've been, I think they're valued at $4 billion. And it's basically this toy for kids where...
• 27:56
  the packaging is basically the product. So horrible for the environment. There's like unboxing videos of these on YouTube with like a million views and stuff. The unboxing is the entire product. So it's like this tiny toy that's wrapped in this giant box of wrapping and you have to keep unwrapping, unwrapping, unwrapping. And it takes like 20 minutes to unwrap this toy. And then by the time you get down to it, you're like, here's the toy.
• 28:19
  But because, you know, everything is so instant, we live in, you know, such a push-button instant gratification society where people just expect something the second that they've done it now. That delayed gratification does really increase the same value. And I think, like, the coolest part with The Fifth was that traditionally –
• 28:40
  In the fashion industry as a whole, especially in jewelry and kind of all designer items, exclusivity has been created by price. So, like, the more expensive something was, the more exclusive it was because not everybody could have it because it's a $5,000 diamond ring. Not everyone can afford that.
• 28:57
  which is completely fair. The cool part with the fifth is we were bringing that exclusivity that was usually associated with that high price tag to the masses because we could have them at accessible price. So whereby most items were exclusive because they're expensive, we were exclusive by time, not by price. So good.
• 29:19
  And so let's talk about like, obviously the model clearly worked and we know the story, but what were the actual results like? What are the actual numbers that you have that you can share? As you know, day one, we did around $100,000 in revenue, which was just like my co-founder's best birthday ever. I remember we were just in shock, to be honest. Were you in this office?
• 29:38
  We weren't in this office. No, we didn't have an office yet. Like it was just us basically. And his younger brother who was doing customer service. And then we hired his cousin who was doing growth for us. And we hired another one of my really, really close friends, Davey Fogarty, who is definitely an entrepreneur to watch. He's doing incredible things. The founder of Calming Blankets. Oh yeah. Right. He has just some incredible brands that he's building like
• 30:06
  he is such an up and coming little star. He's like 24. I'll link this in the show notes so we can check him out. Yeah. You can have a stalk. He'll hate that. He doesn't like to be watched, but sorry, Davey, you're dogged in. So it was, yeah, very much like kept quiet within the family at our friendship circle to begin with. Yeah. So we didn't have an office space. We were doing it out of my house in Paran at this stage and I,
• 30:31
  We used a lot of the members, like, of course, of my SMT team as well. So our graphic designer did all of the, like, initial branding and the Shopify website and stuff. And Ella, my, like, 2IC in everything that I do, organized, like, all of the company documents. And she set everything up tax-wise. And she set everything up, like, right from the start, finally, this time, as opposed to all the mistakes. Yeah, you already knew it. I'd made, well, mostly right. It was right enough. Right enough.
• 31:00
  And I think I read somewhere that you did a crazy number, like $1 million in a single day. What the heck? Yeah. So we did have on our first birthday, which was the 5th of December, we did a million dollars revenue in that day. And the craziest part was like about a quarter of that was in the first minute.
• 31:20
  Oh my God. Which was insane. That's insane. Holy smokes. In one year. That's just like. It was a big one. Incredible. It's like that drug. That drug. That brand. Well, there we go. Throw it in slip. It was like a drug. Like. Yep. You will never get such a hit. You know what it's like. Like sales coming in. You're kind of like. Cool. Cool.
• 31:42
  And like when you do, you know, a big launch event or a sale or whatever, and like more are coming in, you're like, cool. That was just like the highest scale. It was just insane. And had you done anything to tweak your strategy in the lead up to that day? Or was it the same, like building the email list for the 25 days of the month? And then like promoting? It was all about building the email list. So email was everything for us because it was our main way of notifying people that a launch was happening. So like an email list with an alarm in their phone.
• 32:12
  And I think that is underutilized. We just did that for our drop bottle relaunch as well and got people to set alarms in their phone. And you can see right as it goes on to that time, like an influx of sales. People are just instantly in. Yeah. Because they're like, okay, cool. Here's the reminder. I'm in. I bought my thing. Great. Exactly. Oh, cool.
• 32:29
  And because they've already done that, it feels like they've already maybe committed to themselves. Like as a consumer, the consumer is committed to potentially making that sale. And they're more likely to make that because they've already made that small commitment to your brand. So it's like that kind of progress effect where they're like, okay, well, I've done half of it. I may as well just follow through and actually make the sale now halfway there, which was very much what it was like with the fifth too, because once they'd get to our website, we
• 32:55
  wake up, set their alarm, get across to it at like some ridiculous time, like midnight or 7am or 5am or wherever they were in the world. When they would do that, they'd be like, okay, well, you know, I've come this far. I'm going to buy a watch now. Yeah. I'm here. Like I'm here to do it. I'm here to get this watch. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's real, like true commitment. It's just unbelievable. That just shocks me.
• 33:21
  And so can we be a little bit more specific about how you got the emails and like what the actual strategy was? Yeah, definitely. And building those leads. Yeah, because obviously, like I say, email was like our end result. But obviously, we had to keep doing different things to drive that email. And by that point, we had plugged in a bit of paid. It was mostly retargeting.
• 33:43
  So most of the awareness stage was still coming through Instagram and then we'd retarget in more so maybe the consideration stage. Then we'd get their email and convert them through there. So that was kind of our funnel, like social media awareness, like retargeting the consideration and then basically conversion via email.
• 34:03
  the three main ways. And I always do this. I love like my three somethings. Like I have three R's to find an influence. So we might go into those later. Like I have like, so these were like my three eyes for the fifth. So they were basically Instagram influences and incentives. Okay, cool. This is going to get confusing because with the three eyes, I think for like every single one, I have another three. Okay.
• 34:30
  So with Instagram, I always talk about like the three C's of community. Okay. And so their content collaboration and consistency. So I guess we'll do a quick little tip under H1 because. Because why not? Yeah. Because we must have.
• 34:46
  So content wise, I always, I'm all for just giving the people what they want, like identifying your top performing content. So going through, if you have a business account on Instagram, or if you have a creator account, for example, you can go through and you can see your top performing posts and just taking a look at those, seeing what the sorts of trends are on one of our accounts, which is called BeFit Foods, for example, which is just like a big foodie account.
• 35:14
  like strawberries always kill it. Like again and again and again. Don't ask me why. I mean, just like the color pop and I don't know, our followers are just obsessed with strawberries. It's like they just obsessed with strawberries. It's such an obvious tip that I think that,
• 35:30
  just going back to basics. Yeah. Repeating what's working. Exactly. And that was very much the same with me. Like I'd always lent away from really growing like a bit of a personal brand Instagram account. Cause I was always like, no, I'm just focused on my brands. But when I started, Hey, it started to make a lot more sense from kind of more like a business to business growth perspective. So I did start really focusing on my personal brand and then I launched my course with founder. Um, and then it made more and more sense to still, you know, be focusing on personal
• 36:00
  I usually just posted stuff about my life, just like the highlight reel, as we all kind of do a lot of the time. And then I posted like a couple of quotes over time and they just like outperformed all the rest of my content by far. And I just realized that it's because like the people there that are following me are there for like entrepreneurial tips and hacks and like actual tips.
• 36:23
  actionable value. Yeah. So I was like, well, duh, but I hadn't even really thought about it. So now basically every second post, I do like a tweet that's then repurposed to Instagram and or like a quote. You're really good at sharing strategic like tips and tactics. It's amazing.
• 36:39
  I think I learned that well through founder, like because we had to sit down and distill like what I'd done across all these different e-commerce brands so that we could then say, okay, here's like my formula or my framework for other brands to be able to do that as well. And then like our start and scale course, um,
• 36:56
  I got good at being like, okay, like why did we do that? Like, how did we do that? Like what's a way? Okay. So if I want to put up like a quote, that's like a bit fluffy or aspirational or like, how do you then create actionability out of that as well? So yeah, the extra value. Yeah. So that's been like my big change in my personal brand account and
• 37:18
  My engagement had been seriously like dwindling because my account is so old now too. Like it takes more and more to keep engagement up over time for older Instagram accounts. So because I've had my personal Instagram account since 2010, like I used to just use it to filter photos in 2010. I was like, cool, a photo filtering app.
• 37:38
  And then I saw that people could like see your photos. They were trying to turn it into a social network. And I was like, how creepy. I don't want people to like see my filtered photos. So they were my original thoughts. How weird. Yeah. Instagram. I don't want people seeing my like private filtered photos. So I put my account on private at that time. I didn't start posting on it until like 2012. So that's content.
• 37:59
  Then the next one is collaboration, which is like collaboration is your biggest growth lever. So collaboration could be influences. It could be collaborating with other brands like to host like a loop giveaway or that cool tactic that you were talking about earlier. Do you want to share that one quickly? Yeah. So we were talking earlier about this tactic that I was listening to on a video. I can't remember the name of the channel, but I'm going to find it and link it in the show notes. We'll credit you, buddy.
• 38:25
  We'll credit who you are, but I can't remember for the life of me. But basically, this guy was talking about this strategy that he has to build an email list from scratch when he has no money and no starting point and no social media. And so what he does is he picks a niche. So, for example, I'm just going to use phishing because that's what he did it in.
• 38:42
  and he goes to like three different brands that compliment each other in the space. And he's like, yep, I'm going to set up this loop giveaway. Are you interested in being involved? And he gets them to donate some product and all they need to do is include a link to the competition in their newsletter. And,
• 39:00
  And so it's linking to an opt-in page where you just opt in with your email and then you're in the chance to win. There's some really cool platforms that you can use to do that. Like we just use, there's one called Gleam, like G-L-E-A-M. Or there's one called Viper, the Y-P-E-R, where you can create like incentivized giveaways as well. So they're really cool. We just used Viper one for our drop bottle relaunch. We did like, we gave away G-E-P-E-R.
• 39:25
  10 bottles, um, and just, you know, generated like a few thousand extra emails and more social followers off the back of that as well. Yeah. Really, really cool. So he goes and pitches the same idea to like three brands, for example, and puts together this really amazing prize pack that obviously everyone wants to enter. And then the brands talk about it in their newsletter and get people to opt in through subscribing. And then he basically comes away with a huge database of like, he's the example that he gave, he managed to get 10,000 emails.
• 39:55
  And then he shares that all with the brands. So, of course, they've got their existing audience that already entered, but then they've got audiences that are relevant to them from the other brands. And he starts his strategy, his email strategy like that. Yeah. So that is like the perfect example of like a co-marketing technique
• 40:11
  So under collaboration, yeah, it could be collaborating with brands, like brand to brand. So more like brands that you would see as like collaborators rather than competition. So like brands that would be within your niche, but not directly competitive to your brand. Like, you know, my drink bottle brand would do one with another drink bottle brand, but we might do it with, you know, like Baraka or something. Exactly. Like a hydration blend brand. Yeah. So those hydration icicles that you have. Yeah. I love those.
• 40:38
  So that's your biggest growth lever because basically you're leveraging other people's pre-existing audiences to grow your own. So that's collaboration. So we've got content, find your top performing content and post more of it. Who would have known? We've got collaboration, leveraging people's pre-existing audiences. And then there's just the final C, which is consistency. So not only does consistency help establish front of mind positioning through your brand through repetition, but it also...
• 41:06
  is favored by the algorithm, for example. So like if you post and you can imagine, like even not from an algorithmic perspective, just from a reach perspective, say you post seven times a week and your post gets 100 people seeing it. So a reach of 100.
• 41:23
  If you post seven times a week, your overall weekly rate is 700. So if you post one time a week, it's just 100. So like by posting daily, you're already increasing the amount of people that see it. And even if it's the same 100 people again and again and again, I'm just giving 100 as an example, it will probably be a little more than that. A thousand could be more than that. Ten thousand.
• 41:45
  If the same 10,000 people are then seeing that post again and again, that's not necessarily a bad thing either because you're like building a relationship with and you're getting your brand in front of them at multiple different touch points. So, and it takes, you know, a few times for a consumer to see your brand a lot of the time to then follow through and make a purchase. Definitely on social media. I think they say, yeah, seven times is like the average. The average. Yeah. So, because social media is not really a direct response platform. Like Instagram, you can tap through and just buy straight from there, but...
• 42:14
  advertising is traditionally a lot more direct response because like you can tap through straight to, you know, like of the Facebook ad straight through to a landing page that it's structured exactly for, you know, that targeted audience. Yeah. So consistency. Good one. And so when you're talking about collaboration in the seas, you obviously have built a whole company centered around collaboration, which is the Hey Influences platform.
• 42:40
  And if there's one word that describes like the power of hey influencers, what would that be for you? Influencer marketing as a whole, I would say that the word would have to be relationships. Like influencer marketing is all about relationships. So whether that is the relationship that.
• 42:56
  your brand has with an influencer, which is really important to build like a personal professional relationship with your influencers, but also the relationship that an influencer has with their audience and the way that they're able to leverage that audience, that preexisting relationship and audience on a brand's behalf. Because at the end of the day, the power of influencers doesn't lie in their reach. Like you can get reached through paid advertising. What it lies in is the relationship they're built with their audience and fundamentally trust.
• 43:25
  And traditionally, it's taken brands years to build trust, to build consumer trust. And now you have access to people who can leverage trust on your brand's behalf instantly. So it's kind of an unprecedented opportunity for brand building in that way because they don't only have their audience's attention. They also have their trust. Yeah.
• 43:44
  That is why we basically structured Hey Influences in the way that we have as well, because it's a relationship management platform. Basically, we call it like an IRM, so Influencer Relationship Management Platform, like a CRM. So and that's why we structured it like a dating app, because there are a lot of marketplace platforms out there. And I don't think that the marketplace...
• 44:07
  mechanic works necessarily when it comes to human beings like they're not a commodity in the same way like a relationship cannot solely be a transaction it works really well for like airbnb and uber for cars and houses but they're things they're not people and at the end of the day you can't make a transaction out of relationships so that's why we went for
• 44:29
  a dating app mechanic because basically that is the fastest building relationship technology available right now. Yeah. So we utilize that. And leveraging like a platform that you already know that mechanic works. So like just basically adapting it to your business. Yeah. And like, it makes it that bit more interesting for our influences and brands as well, because like that dating app mechanic is like, it's kind of gamified. It's very reward centric. So it's fun. Yeah. And so it makes it like a bit more exciting to be on an app that is
• 44:59
  ultimately quite work-based. Yeah. And when you're looking for influencers for your brands in particular, what kind of factors do you look at? I use the three R's formula, which is reach, relevancy and relationships. So reach, I guess, is one of the most prioritized aspects for influencer marketing for a lot of brands. Like they'll look at someone like Kylie Jenner and be like, look at that. Like look at all those eyeballs on her.
• 45:24
  But she's not always going to make the most sense for every brand, obviously. But the thing is that I think that where a lot of brands trip up when it comes to reach is not just over prioritizing reach, but also looking at reach as a static figure. So if you look at an influencer and they have 100,000 followers, but they're dropping 2,000, 3,000 followers a month.
• 45:46
  then they're clearly not maybe going to have the same influence as somebody who is growing to 3,000 or growing 10,000 influences a month. Yeah. So if you could lock an influencer, a high growth influencer into maybe like a three month contract, that's what we were really successful at doing at the fifth. We locked in some like super successful influencers, like Jay Alvarez and Lexus Ren when they were like super high growth. And we locked them in at,
• 46:11
  their kind of current rate, even though by up to three months, their rate had significantly changed. Some of the influencers would even come back and be like, look, this is my rate now. And we'd be like, sorry, we already paid in advance. So that is like a really good tactic to kind of lock influencers in for a longer term if they're really high growth or lock them in for like multiple posts or for a longer term to kind of get the price per collaboration down because it's kind of like a bundle.
• 46:38
  I think it's better to work with influencers that way versus like a one-off, just random thing where it feels a bit icky. Yeah, totally. Like they don't really, truly love the brand. No, yeah. It feels like they are obviously just pushing it for the cash money. Yeah, exactly. What's one mistake that you see brands making again and again when it comes to influencer marketing?
• 47:03
  I would say that one of the big ones is just basically not optimizing their social media profile, the conversions. Like you need to remember that if you're running an Instagram influencer collaboration and that profile isn't optimized for like conversions, that that Instagram account is like your landing page for that campaign. So when an influencer...
• 47:27
  posts on your brand, the next action in that sequence will be that they tap through to your handle, which is in the influencers caption, and they'll land on your profile. If they get to your profile and they can't tell what your brand does, they don't know what the next call to action is, the aesthetic of your account is entirely different to the types of influencers they're working with, and it makes no sense, then like, obviously, they're going to be far less likely to convert in different ways. So like, one of the ways obviously to convert would be to follow your brand,
• 47:57
  build a relationship from there. So if the aesthetic is really different, they're going to be less likely to follow your brand. Another conversion would be if they tap through to your website from your bio, but if there's nothing, you know, describing what your brand is or why there's a reason to tap through right now, like putting like a little bit of urgency around that or creating, you know, a great reason for them to tap through being like,
• 48:20
  tap through for a free gift with purchase, for example. I would say that optimizing your social profile, so making sure that your link in your bio is working as hard for you as possible. Yeah. That is really obvious, like, what your brand is and what makes it different. So having basically, like, your unique belt. Yeah. Your UVP or USP in your bio, making it obvious for people that have just landed on your page and have never seen you before. And also making sure that you're collaborating with people whose content
• 48:49
  matches your own as much as possible. Yeah. The style and the aesthetic of the brand. Even if you know that a big influencer collaboration is going to go live, you can repost one of their old photos to your feed. Like if you don't have their content yet, and also you don't want to ruin the surprise, you could just repost one of their lifestyle shots and credit them. Cause then when their followers going there, they're like, Oh look, they post about this person that I follow or I'm obsessed with as well.
• 49:15
  Is there any kind of like influencer kind of campaign that you're loving at the moment? Like what your favorite kind of influencer? Yeah, I think like a really underutilized one is the Facebook ads takeover. Okay. I feel like your very soon future husband would be really into it.
• 49:34
  What is it? He's like an ads genius. So it's basically whereby, and I'm sure you've seen it happen before, but I think a lot of brands aren't taking enough advantage of it, whereby, for example, Founder will run ads through my own personal Facebook account.
• 49:50
  So, for example, this agency that one of my good friends, Nick Shackleford, used to work for, he's just gone off and started his own. He's incredible. Anyone that's interested in Facebook ads should check him out for sure. He's, yeah, on Insta, Nick Shackleford. He worked for an agency called Common Thread Collective.
• 50:10
  They basically worked with the same influencer who was one of the big, big, big names. They're not allowed to say exactly who. She has 70 million followers on Instagram at the time. We can imagine who she probably is. So basically they ran one paid campaign that was like a $500,000 budget to post like basically just one post through to her Instagram.
• 50:34
  And that converted like well enough. It was fine. But then they ran another campaign through taking over her Facebook ads. So getting advertiser access to her Facebook ads and that absolutely killed the other campaign. So basically it cost $250,000 to get her to create the content for the brand, which is like, I think like a product review video. And then they boosted that through her ad account.
• 51:00
  And the good thing is she's also really big on Facebook as well. So they could advertise to her Facebook followers. They could advertise to her Facebook engages. They could advertise to her Instagram followers as well through there. And the cool part is they're a U S based brand and half of her followers are outside of the U S so they could target through that as well and just get U S based followers in the mix. Like,
• 51:23
  they could stack her audience with their own. They could add all these lookalikes and that kind of thing. Yeah. So it was just like, I feel like every brand should be giving that a go right now. It doesn't obviously have to be anywhere near that scale, but it could just be in terms of an influencer that you're already working with, who's already created great content.
• 51:42
  They may not even have that large, like they don't need to really have a Facebook following per se does work a little bit better when they are a verified Facebook profile. Founder got my page, like my Greta page on Facebook verified and it does help just that kind of like tick of verification there. So that's a really interesting tactic. I'm definitely going to give that a try. I feel like I need to start doing a few things like that with my Kings influences because we have so many girls that love the brand and I'm sure that by
• 52:11
  kind of taking the partnership to the next level could be like a really interesting thing to start testing. Yeah, definitely. And see what kind of results it brings. And let's just quickly talk about the last point we were speaking about a bit earlier, which is the incentives and what you recommend around that. Incentives basically just implies rewarded action. So it's giving somebody like a strong incentive or a strong reason for,
• 52:35
  to click through, make a purchase or like perform a certain action on behalf of your brand. It might be review our product in return for 10% off, or it might be click through from our Instagram via this link and you'll get a free gift with purchase or something like that. Yeah. I really like the whole free gift with purchase thing. Same. I'm always like, give it, give it to me. Give me the gift. I have to find the Shopify app for you guys, but there's this app that we use that, um,
• 53:04
  automatically applies the gift with purchase to your cart as well. So it'll add it in and it will add the value of the gift and then have it marked out, like crossed out and be at zero. So say it's like a pearl ring or something with kinks. It'll be like, well, this ring is usually like 50 or a hundred dollars and it's crossed out now at zero for you. So that's like a cool thing because they can automatically see that in their cart. And then that obviously increases the,
• 53:31
  conversion rates. Yeah. It kind of goes through. It's any kind of incentive that you can offer that's going to help get that person through to the next level. It might be signing up to your email list. So it might be those on-site pop-ups that come up and say like, enter your email to unlock this discount code or this free piece of content or a guide or a recipe or something like that. Do you do recipes with Dropbottle? Exactly.
• 53:56
  We do do recipes. Yeah. That has been quite a successful one in the past. A lot of the time we do find that like just the generic discount code works even better than a recipe. So just like $5 off or 5% off or $10 off or 10% off. If you're able to offer dollars off because you have like basically a relatively single SKU product.
• 54:16
  that's always going to be the most successful because people automatically understand that's $10, like 10%. They may not know what your price is yet. And you don't haven't worked that out. Like it's not an instant understanding. $10 is just that kind of static figure that you're like, yeah, cool.
• 54:31
  Yeah. So I would always recommend offering like dollars off if you can. It's worked better for me with a dollar off versus a discount. Yeah. I think as well, like people don't care about 10%. They care about $10. Yeah. If it's in that price point. It could be the exact same thing. It's the psychology, I guess, behind the buying. Yeah. People don't have time to work things out. Like,
• 54:53
  just making your user experience and customer experience as frictionless as possible. Like the two main things that I always think are people do not have the time and people don't care, to be honest, like people really don't care about,
• 55:08
  like they care to an extent, obviously, that on our website, whatever, but they don't necessarily care that much about our brand, for example. Like when I'm doing an email, I always add like a summary kind of banner at the top of the email. Like we try to get to the point as quickly as possible for the people that are just skim reading. And then for the people that do really care, they can read down through all the info. But I always just think like, get to the point, no one cares. That's a good one. Get to the point, no one cares. Yeah, great. What a motivational, aspirational thought to finish on. Thought to finish on.
• 55:38
  Okay, you've been listening to us for a while now, but stick with us. At the end of every episode, I ask the same six quick questions to get more tactical advice directly from the founders. If you want to see the filmed interviews, you can find them on my Instagram at Doon Roisin.
• 55:55
  Where can people find you? Where are people directed to see you online? The best place is going to be Instagram if you have it, because all of my different links are then in my bio there. So that runs through to like my LinkedIn. It links to all my different brands. It links to my course with Founder. It links to my free course with Shopify. Yeah. So my Insta is really pretty simple. It's just Greta, G-R-E-T-T-A.
• 56:21
  and we will link it in the show notes. All right. Thank you so much. Amazing. Thank you. Bye. Now we're doing the six cues. So Greta, what's your why? What's the purpose of what you're doing? I think it's taken me a while to establish now. I always kind of wondered what motivated me. And I did this like...
• 56:43
  I think it was like a psychometric test or something with Blackbird when they were looking to invest in my platform, Hey Influences. And it basically covers a lot of the commonalities of successful founders. And you don't know, obviously, what you're going to get as a result for that test. But everything came back really good. All was well, except this one thing. They were like, we're a little concerned that you don't seem to care about money.
• 57:13
  And I was like, which I totally get. That's a valid concern when someone's giving you money. You're like, do you care that we're, you know, do you care on what you're going to spend it on? Like, it seems concerning to us. But I think just ultimately I've realized over time, like obviously like money comes and goes and that's a great thing and it's more than fine. But sometimes.
• 57:34
  what really, really excites me every day is ideas and solving big problems. So like, I think my earlier startups, yes, they've always been like quite problem and solution focused, but I think as I progress as a founder now,
• 57:50
  I'm going to kind of be able to get into solving like bigger and bigger problems. So with Dropbottle, you know, it's a large problem. Like hydration is a huge problem and being able to kind of, you know, create a product that doesn't only kind of look good, but does good as well for the world and kind of leave the world in a better place than we found it. So like our goal with Dropbottle is kind of twofold, leave the world in a better place than we found it and leave people in a better place than when they found, before they found us.
• 58:20
  I love that. So that's really nice. So I think if I just keep that as a goal across my brands from now on and just work on solving larger and larger problems. Yeah. The next problem I'm really, really interested in as a space is like sleep and mental health. So and the connection between sleep and mental health. And you can talk all about that.
• 58:42
  I need all of that. I need lots of sleep and lots of mental health. I need all the mental health. I need it all. Give me the tablet. Yeah, wow. That's a really cool, like, inside. And I guess, like, what you're building, having that impact is something that, like, gets you out of bed in the morning, gives you, like, the drive to...
• 58:59
  And I think that is part of it too. And the other part is with people that I love. Like I think a really great quote is, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. So I really love that as well. So I think it's just for me, it's about solving big problems, getting to like do the fun stuff that I love every day, like come up with like lots of fun ideas and work with like amazing people that I love.
• 59:26
  And get excited to go into the office every day to see. You're inspired by them and what they're doing in their own right kind of thing. Totally. Oh, that's really nice. Okay, so question number two, as per the format, is what's the thing that made your business pop? And so obviously you have multiple businesses, so you can choose wherever you want to go with that one. And yeah, what was the main thing? I think collaboration.
• 59:52
  has always been the central key with my businesses. I think like you could say social media, but behind the social media, again, like behind Instagram, the way that we've always grown on Instagram has been through collaboration. So leveraging someone's preexisting audience to build your own. So whether that's how we spoke about in the podcast with like leveraging that,
• 1:00:13
  to build your email list or it could be, you know, via Instagram influences to build your Insta following or it could be collaborating with like another brand on Instagram that is like not a competitive brand, but more a collaborative brand, because basically that is your growth lever in business. So that is the number one way to kind of.
• 1:00:33
  mutually engage with each other to unlock like free opportunities within business. And leap ahead in bounds versus like small kind of increments. Exactly. And there was a pretty big collaboration that you were telling me about earlier that you had.
• 1:00:46
  with Dropbottle. Do you want to talk about that? Oh, yeah. The big one. The big one. This one came about basically by accident. So we had grown a lot on social and Oprah came across our social. Oh, my gosh. So crazy. And their team ended up picking us as one of their favorite things, and that was on the front page of Amazon for a week, which just absolutely exploded our brand. So crazy.
• 1:01:13
  especially in the US market. So even still today, we have more US-based customers than Australian now, for example, even though we're an Australian brand. So that kind of really pushed us out there in the US. But I think, again, it's leveraging every opportunity as far as you possibly can. So the way that we're still able to...
• 1:01:35
  kind of you know include in you know our social proof videos and like on our website saying like the bottle loved by oprah or like including her kind of um the quote about the product yeah so it's a handy little thing to have so like it's not just about like when these things happen like it being you know
• 1:01:58
  like things pick up, it's about kind of the longevity of that as well. Like how long can you like keep this up for? I reckon you can keep that for a pretty long time. Yeah, I'll be glad. That one's not going anywhere. I love Oprah. Oh my gosh. Question number three is about how do you win the day? And this is all centered around the mindset and the rituals that you like incorporate for yourself to help you succeed in like your businesses and in your life. And yeah.
• 1:02:22
  I think there's like a lot of different things that we can all talk about here that like my number one, number one, number one tip is breath work. Like basically we all have within us the capacity to instantly change the way that we feel through the power of breath.
• 1:02:41
  If you are feeling stressed or anxious or if you're kind of in that fight or flight mode, which a lot of us are in day to day within business, it's just about being more mindful, slowing down, doing a breathing exercise. It can be as simple as one of my favorite exercises is called box breathing, where you're going to be more mindful of your breathing.
• 1:03:01
  Basically, it forms a box as well. So you breathe in for five, then you hold for five, then you breathe out for five, and then you hold for five. And how many times a day would you do that? Well, and then you repeat that four times. Oh, okay.
• 1:03:17
  That one I do a couple of times throughout the day, ideally. But tell me, we were talking about one earlier that your partner does. My partner does, his strategy is also around breathing. It's just one conscious breath a day. And he does it multiple times a day, but he thinks like he just takes a moment, takes one conscious breath and wishes...
• 1:03:38
  happiness and kindness onto complete strangers. And by doing that, he just takes a moment to pause and reflect and, you know, be grateful for himself and his life. And it's nice feeling to be wishing good things to other people. Yeah. I love that. I forget to do it, but I'm going to start. I'm really going to start. Lucas is calling. Hey, Lucas. Hey, Lucas. You can't come in on our call. Sorry. Hi. We love you though. Love ya. Number four is where do you hang out to get smarter?
• 1:04:08
  a lot of places, but
• 1:04:09
  My favorite one right now would have to be this newsletter that I subscribe to. It's called Lean Lux. I'm sure we can link it through. Lean Lux, we're going to link it. It's basically a newsletter on all things direct to consumer. So kind of breaking down and summarizing a lot of that with like a lot of links through. So it's a newsletter that then links out to like a whole ton of different publications, definitely not just their own. They're basically like they curate the information and then print it.
• 1:04:38
  provide it to you in like a really, really great, really thought provoking way as well. And the cool part with Leanlux, this is a really cool tactic that I haven't seen many brands do before either, is we've spoken out podcast about like rewarded actions and incentivized actions.
• 1:04:54
  And basically with LeanLux, if you've had over, I think it's like over maybe, is it 50 or 80% open rate over the first three months that you've been subscribed, then you have the ability to apply to join their private Slack community.
• 1:05:10
  which is like a group of founders that are all talking at these topics in more detail, networking, like some incredible direct-to-consumer founders. I love that. So I think that is like a really, really cool added bonus of that. And I think like that's thought-provoking too because like how could you leverage something like that on your brand's behalf? Like maybe, you know, if they had a 50% open rate, you know, you could give them some other kind of incentive. It could work really well for female startup clients.
• 1:05:39
  It could really work quite well. I would join a female startup club Slack channel. I'm 100% going to do that. Well, now there's two of us on the Slack channel, so anyone else that wants to get on... Anyone want to join our Slack channel? Open our emails.
• 1:05:51
  Open the emails. And there was another one you were telling me about, which I'm also just about to download. Oh yeah, that one. The other gem of information that you gave me. So basically, we all have the biggest reading list, I'm sure. There's so many books. You're like, I need to read the new Ben Horowitz book, like the one about culture. We are what we've become, or whatever. We've become what we do, or whatever it's called. Sorry, Ben.
• 1:06:17
  Um, but so we all have like a really large reading list all the time and only so many hours in the day. Um, I use this app called Blinkist. So, um, we'll link through. I always spell everything out because I just assume that it's confusing to understand what people are saying, especially if maybe you're not from Australia and my accent is really confusing to you.
• 1:06:40
  Um, so Blinkist basically summarizes books into really actionable bite-sized pieces. So it summarizes it into 15 minutes of reading, or you can listen to it via audio. And what I do is I do both at the same time, because then I'm listening out loud and I'm taking it in from that component. I'm also reading it at the same time. A lot of the time I pause it.
• 1:07:02
  And the reason that I love this is because you can read an entire business book, but because it is long and there's a lot to get through, you don't really stop at every point to action that. So basically with blinkers at the end of each blink.
• 1:07:16
  they're called a blink, like each section of the book. At the end of each blink, I write down three different ways that I can action that blink across my business. So it's about like intentional reading, like you're reading that with the intent to action it because obviously at the end of the day, ideas and learning are all very well, but like if you don't take it on, exactly, like if you don't execute it, it's nothing. Like if you didn't track it, you didn't do it.
• 1:07:44
  I'm so into it. I'm going to download it today because I'm going to use it on the flight home. And I will give you guys a bit of a snapshot of some of the books that I'm reading as well. We're going to put some screenshots of the books that you've got in your Blinkist app, which I love. I often ask people, like, just in their reading list. Yeah, what's on their reading list. I put their recommendations into my notes and who recommended it. So when I read it, I can go back to them and be like, oh, I just finished the book that you recommended. Totally. And I...
• 1:08:08
  If there's like one book that I think that everyone should read that's in marketing about like persuasion is Influence by Robert Cialdini, which is like a classic and it's like the psychology of persuasion. He basically has seven different principles.
• 1:08:23
  including like obviously like things like scarcity or things like unity or things like likeness. And I read a really good Shopify article that breaks that down really, really well and links it back to e-commerce as well. And how to like use reciprocity within your business with like a free gift for purchase or use scarcity with countdown time and some things like that. So I will link that as well. And we can put that in the notes. Put it in the Slack channel maybe. Oh yeah. It's in our secret Slack. That Slack that you're going to join. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:08:53
  Number five is around the concept of failure. And when you do fail, do you have a specific approach that you're kind of like, okay, this is what I need to do to move forward? Or is there a specific example that you can share of what happened and what you learned from it? I think like my number one,
• 1:09:12
  thought when it comes to failure is that like to mitigate failing overall, it's about failing as fast as you can in the micro to not fail in the macro. So like the faster, like fail fast is like one of my favorite quotes to live by. So like the quicker that you can admit that you made a mistake, that something's gone wrong without an ego, without placing blame, because there's no use of placing blame because as a founder, the solution, like the
• 1:09:40
  problem to be solved falls on you. You need to solve that. And, you know, if it was one of your team members, ultimately still, what's your fault? You should have, you know, managed them better or let them better. So I just know that, like, I need to not blame anyone else, just understand that something has gone wrong and now it's time to fix it. Of course I need to grieve the loss. Like I will cry that I'm really great. Like once I have a cry about something, it's like this, like –
• 1:10:07
  I think like resilience is like got to, it has to be, if you can't handle stress, you're never going to be able to handle success because success is extremely stressful because obviously you're out of your comfort zone a lot. You're having to constantly push yourself, solve problems. Be prepared to fail. Exactly. Um, so I would say that that would be kind of my number one tip when it comes to failure, just fail fast.
• 1:10:35
  like grieve your loss, but once you're over it, like find a solution. Yeah. So it's like, actually, if you look at the definition of resilience, it's like the speed at which we can overcome adversities. And like that speed is the most important part because as a founder, every single day, there's going to be problems. There's going to be losses, but if you can't get over them quickly and you keep getting stuck on ones in the past and can't move past those and move forward from there,
• 1:11:01
  Like that's why I love to be decisive because then you have that closure and it's just done. Yeah. As opposed to those things that linger on, that are out of your control that you, you know, they're always the worst things in life. Yeah. Great. And last question, number six, it's more of a gimmicky question. It's around if you had only $1,000 left in your business bank account, where would you spend it? And it's kind of referring to like what your main sales drivers are and where you place the most importance in your business budget.
• 1:11:31
  Yeah, it's a hard one, of course, because across our business, like every channel works in tandem with all of the other channels. It's very hard to have a standalone channel, like even Facebook ads, which is what I'm going to answer. Even Facebook ads, you don't understand the interplay between or like a lot of founders don't or like even we don't a lot of the time.
• 1:11:53
  because you can't attribute everything, but you don't always understand that kind of interplay between social media driving the top end of your funnel or email marketing driving the consideration stage of the funnel. Email's a little easier to track sometimes than social, especially Instagram.
• 1:12:09
  or influencer collaborations driving the top end awareness stage. So I am going to have to say Facebook ads because it is still kind of the most plug and play marketing channel. It's still the most direct response marketing channel. People are most used to using Facebook as a platform to shop through.
• 1:12:31
  It is quite a direct response channel. So I think I would invest that there because it is so easy to attribute as well. You can see, you can start with like $5, $10 budgets and then start scaling it up from there. And you can pull the money the second that, you know, it's not profitable. But a lot of the time, you know, you'll be seeing like...
• 1:12:49
  at least three plus return on ad spend on a successful campaign where a lot of the time, I mean, it's hard to determine a successful campaign. We could go on about this for a long time, but like, it's a combination of obviously like,
• 1:13:03
  your creative assets, your copy, the ad structuring itself. So like what your partner does from a like structural perspective, like placing the ads, layering audiences, choosing, targeting, all of that sort of side. And then the final one,
• 1:13:20
  would be like your offer ultimately to the strength of your offer. And it's always balancing the strength of your offer or the size of your offer with what your cost per acquisition is really. So say you have a $30 cost per acquisition for a product, but you want to offer $10 off, then you can only really have a $20 cost per acquisition to still be profitable because you've offered that $10 off. But you actually might find that because you do have that $10,
• 1:13:46
  offer and that reason or incentive to buy that you are able to achieve like a $20 cost per acquisition because the offer is stronger. So it's always balancing all of those things. It's like, so your content
• 1:14:00
  So like your creative and content, the copy for the ad, like the copywriting, what you've written, the caption of the ad or whatever we call that, then your offer and also the actual placement and targeting of the ad itself. So it's getting all of those things right together, which sounds complicated. It sounds complicated. When there are a lot of different variables there,
• 1:14:24
  It's kind of a good thing because if you just keep putting them together in different ways and testing and testing and testing, you will come across the winning result. You just scale that. Scale it. Grow that brand.
• 1:14:40
  Hey, 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.
• 1:15:05
  And 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.
• 1:15:27
  As 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.
• 1:15:44
  Hey, 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.
• 1:16:08
  And 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.
• 1:16:31
  As 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.