4. Momtrepreneur & Founder: Female Owned Company Beaugen & Tu-Hien Le

18 oct. 2020 · The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money

00:45:50

Beaugen

Tu-Hien Le is the Founder & CEO of BeauGen, a mommy lifestyle brand whose mission is to make mommying feel good. Inspired after having her first child, Tu-Hien and her husband started BeauGen to address the pain and struggle of breastfeeding. Since launching into the market in 2016, BeauGen has helped tens of thousands of women find success with their breastfeeding journey. Tu-Hien has a passion for connecting with motivated entrepreneurs and is now coaching business owners how to build, scale, and make money in their own product-based ecommerce business. Tu-Hien lives in Orlando, FL with her husband and daughter. Connect with Tu-Hien via Instagram @tuhien.le and @beaugenmom Watch this conversation on YouTube: [embed] https://youtu.be/jaEFBJOixHY [/embed] Tu-Hien Le 0:00 I've never run a company before. So it was a lot of self doubt of Who am I to think that I can do this? Or I've never done this before. Am I good enough to be able to do this? And once I realized I was thinking that way and like limiting myself before I even tried. I was like, why am I limiting myself? And that's why I really seek out the different coaches and mentors to help me kind of break that mindset and say, you know, why can't you who's to tell you that you cannot reach these big goals that you have? And like, yeah, that's right. Stacy Caprio 0:37 Hi, and welcome to the Hurst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be. Listen along with Stacy each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams. So you can learn how to build your two hand is an incredible businesswoman and we get to talk to her in this episode of the podcast. She started her company Beaugen and has grown it to incredible heights. You'll love this episode, if you've ever been interested in starting your own original idea product based business, especially if you have no idea how you would ever get started to hand shares how she came up with the idea of Beaugen to solve her own problem. And you'll learn how she was able to go from product idea to physical production, how she tested and iterated to get to her final sellable product. Even though she was solving their own problem and was her own target market. She talks about how thorough she has been about market research and making sure she's putting out a product that exactly what her target market wants. In this episode, I was trying to get her to share the one thing she has done to have a successful business. And I'm so grateful, she was quick to call me out and explain. There are so many things that go into having a successful business. It is not just one or two golden nuggets, you'll enjoy this conversation if you want to get into the mind of someone who has built a successful business based on her own idea, not one that was built using one tip or trick, but one that has been built over consistent effort and hard work overtime. Like all successful businesses really are. Let's hear what she has to say. hi to him, thank you so much for coming on. I love your company. And your journey is so inspiring. I was hoping we could start with a quick overview of how you started and your background and why you started Beaugen.

Tu-Hien Le Founder of Beaugen

Tu-Hien Le 2:50 Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the podcast is super exciting. And I would love to share a little bit of my story with you. In 2015, I had my first daughter. And from that I experienced my own personal difficulty and pain from breastfeeding and pumping. And that's the sort of the genesis of Beaugen. And how, in my discovery, I found that I wasn't the only one that felt the same way. And I talked to many other moms and moms could meet in the mom community.

Momtrepreneur Solution

And a lot of us had shared this, this same pain and discomfort and breastfeeding and pumping. And I was like, Well, if I'm not the only one that has this problem, all these other moms have this problem, why can't we do something about it? So my husband and I actually kind of decided to develop something, a product, we didn't even exactly know what it was when we started develop a solution to solve the issues of discomfort and pumping. And we really took a grassroots approach. So instead of us taking the I have a solution, and here it is, I hope everybody loves it. We really actually, you know, spoke with hundreds of moms to really hone in and figure out what was the pain point. And then and then kind of back into salt solution from there. And that's how Beaugen started. And so it's we've always been a very customer centric company. And we always really listened to what our customers wanted and and their pain point and try to solve it from there. Stacy Caprio 4:33 That's awesome. I think many businesses fail because people don't take into consideration the customers and what they really want. So that's really cool to know that you did that. Where did you find that? customers to kind of talk to to figure out their pain points. Tu-Hien Le 4:52 Yeah, so that's a great question. I start off with just talking within my own network, talking to other mom friends and You know, my cousins and my sisters that just recently had babies. I asked them, like, how do you find solutions? Or where do you find information about mom things? And they always said, Oh, try this blog, or that or Facebook community. And it turns out for new moms, Facebook groups are huge. So within these Facebook groups, there would be like, 10 20,000 moms in these different groups, I would just pose the question like, what's the most difficult thing about pumping? Or what is your biggest challenge with breastfeeding? And then they would comment and and I would just really be methodical and documenting what people would say as far as what their pain points are, find like the common denominator, and then really hone in like, okay, it's actually this specific pain. So like, what can we do to solve this? And really just having a lot of open conversations with different moms and their experiences and seeing if we could find like, a common denominator really, and then testing it out? Stacy Caprio 6:01 That's awesome. I am curious to know, what were the first steps you took when creating your prototype? It's something that if I were manufacturing a product, I would have no idea even Where to start?

Starting Her Company & Production Iteration

Tu-Hien Le 6:15 Yeah, that's a really good question. So my background is in finance, so I don't have an engineering or manufacturing background at all. So again, I just googled and started talking to people in my community, in my thing, like the entrepreneurial community, and just ask them like, Okay, if I want to start to develop some sort of product, like, what should I do, I'm not a, I'm not a maker, I'm not an engineer. And so they would point me to these different resources. And one of them is a local maker shop. And that's when we, for your audience who may not know maker shops are where people go, and they'll do like wood work, or like electronics, and robotics and sewing, they do all sorts of tinkering, and invention, inventing of things. So we went to maker shop and ask them like, Okay, this is our constraint, this is a problem we're trying to solve, like, What? What can we do? This is what I think this product will look like. And then kind of brainstorm with them and developing the product. And the the, the product development phase is like really interesting, because I really took into consideration all the information that the different moms have told and shared with me about what their pain points were, and then try to distill that to the maker who was like helping us develop our prototype. So yeah, and it was like a really fun journey. I mean, in our first, the first version of our product, we probably developed over 40 prototypes. And I probably, I think I tested every single one of them. And like each one, it was all about testing and getting a little bit better each time. And then, yeah, and then, you know, we got like a very small set of like 20 or 30, moms who were really wanting to help us find the solution, we and we'd send them the prototype and ask them to try it out and give us feedback. And with each feedback, we just kind of keep refining to get better and better. Stacy Caprio 8:20 Wow, that sounds like a really intensive process. Tu-Hien Le 8:25 Yeah, it's a it is it can be it's also fun. And you like learn so much during the journey too. So you might have a preconceived notion of what you think the solution is and what people want. But then when you give it to put in the hands of the customer, they'll tell you something totally different that maybe you didn't even consider. So then you then you start to, you know, tweak and change your prototype, or maybe even the messaging of your product based on their feedback. So a big thing that I took into consideration when developing, building out our breastbone cushion for Beaugen was, we had a, we had a problem solution fit. But then it was also important to have a solution market fit to we can I mean, we solved a problem, but does the market actually want it? So we really took that into consideration by talking to as many customers as we could. Stacy Caprio 9:24 Awesome. So how did you know like when it was the prototype, like when it was finally ready. Tu-Hien Le 9:31 At that time, we were probably on version like 42. And we had a good set of data from our testers and they gave us a lot of feedback like this is, you know, it really helped with comfort, it really helped with fit. And that's when we knew like those were the two key selling points of our product and that's when we say like okay, now it's time to go to market. And what we actually did was for our first version of the breast pump cushions we did a Kickstarter campaign. And a Kickstarter campaign is a crowdfunding campaign. And so we launched the crowdfunding campaign and said, Okay, if we can raise $20,000, then the market is telling us they want this solution. And if we can't raise that much money, then the market doesn't want the solution that was kind of our test of product market fit. And then, you know, after our Kickstarter, Kickstarter campaign, we we raised a little bit over $24,000, I'm like, okay, so there's something here, the market wants a solution. So let's really build this out. And that's when we took that money from our crowdfunding campaign. And we started going into manufacturing and building our tooling. And, and being able to produce an in mass quantity.

Finding a Manufacturer

Stacy Caprio 10:51 Wow, that's really cool. So did you how did you find your manufacturer? Tu-Hien Le 10:57 So the manufacturing, search is, I must say, it's not easy. It's really just about like, calling around and talking to people. Um, you know, we went to a couple of trade shows where they had, like, different manufacturing and materials, companies, and just having conversation with them and really seeing if they understood, understood our vision, understood our product. And, and then, you know, just trying it from there and seeing who could produce and make our product at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time. Stacy Caprio 11:39 Exactly. That's really cool. So once you started manufacturing, and everything, how did you kind of figure out how much product to make at a time? Mm hmm. And did you that whole process? Tu-Hien Le 11:54 Yeah, that's actually a really good question, too. So we did limited small runs, not knowing how big our market was. So honestly, it was kind of like a guess. Like, we had pre orders from our Kickstarter campaign. So we knew that we have to at least make a certain number of breast pump cushions. But beyond that, we're like, you know, I think that we could sell more if we really ramp up our marketing and advertising campaigns. So it was kind of a guess, like, a lot of it was just trial and error and testing, and seeing how we can penetrate the market and like, increase brand awareness, doing it methodically, and keep testing our audience out. Stacy Caprio 12:41 So how long were you guys profitable? Like, right off the bat? Because you had your Kickstarter? or How long did it take you to hit like when you're finally making profit each month?

Launching on Kickstarter

Tu-Hien Le 12:55 Yeah, I would say for us, the Kickstarter campaign helped. And we probably broke even, like, pretty quickly, just based on our demand, and the cost of fulfilling all the orders, the pre orders that we had, so if we at least broke even from our initial investment. But from there, it was all about Okay, now that we broke even how do we, how do we grow this company? How do we grow Beaugen to like, the next level? And? Yeah, so it took a lot of like, talking, seeking out mentors, seeking out coaches, a lot of reading surrounding myself with other successful entrepreneurs, and asking a lot of questions, asking a lot of questions. what works, what doesn't work? Why didn't work? Why did it work? Being very curious, and then willing to try new strategies as well? Stacy Caprio 13:53 Interesting. Yeah. And I was, I was just listening to your TLC podcast, and you kind of had mentioned a similar kind of mindset shift where you were at five k months, and that you're able to get to the 65 k months. Uh huh. Really awesome. And I was wondering, what was the biggest part of your mindset shift that you think contributed to that? Tu-Hien Le 14:20 Oh, that's such a good question. Um, you know, I really kind of had to look inside myself and think about what was it that was limiting me and I would say, like, my limiting beliefs of what I could and could not do really held me back. For a long time. I was almost like, being very conservative. Like, you know, I didn't have any, I've never run a company before or built a company before. So it was a lot of self doubt of, who am I to think that I can do this or I've never done this before. "Am I good enough to be able to do this and once I realized that I was thinking that way, and like limiting myself before I even tried. I was like, you know, I shouldn't even Why am I limiting myself? And that's why I really seeked out the different coaches and mentors to help me kind of break that mindset and say, you know, why can't you who say that who's to tell you that you cannot reach these big goals that you have? And like, yeah, that's right." So I really just shifted my mindset like, well, let's try, there's nothing wrong with, quote, failure. That's how you learn. So with each failure is just a stepping stone to get better and stronger, faster, smarter, so so I changed my mindset of like, I needed to get it perfect to let me just try and see what happens. And then I just started taking more risks. And then which, with the more risks I took, the more reward I got, but it was all calculated risk. But I was willing to at least, like take that leap and bet on myself and my ability to figure it out. Stacy Caprio 16:08 Awesome. Wow. And do you find Do you have a goal setting process? Or do you kind of play it by ear?

Goal Setting Process

Tu-Hien Le 16:17 Oh, I definitely have a goal setting process in within my company. Within Beaugen, we do our OKRs, which stands for objectives and key results. And we're really a firm believer that you don't improve at things unless you measure them. And one of our big objectives is customer loyalty. And, you know, expanding our market, and then which within each of those objectives, we have key results in KPIs key performance indicators that we can measure to make sure that we're moving in the right direction. And I'm a firm believer in setting goals because you don't have goals. And you never know, when you get there, or even you don't even know where you're going. So it really gives you have good direction on in the progress that you're making. Stacy Caprio 17:12 Awesome. So what do you find, has contributed to increasing your customer loyalty?

Beaugen Customer Service

Tu-Hien Le 17:19 customer loyalty every day, a lot of different factors. At Beaugen Customer service is a huge, huge part of our customer loyalty, we really value the experience that the customers have, when they're interacting with our brand. We really take into consideration how what they think and especially how they feel because our product, isn't it during this very sensitive time for a woman. It's like a big transition time you just gave birth, and now you're feeding a tiny baby, that's depending on you. So yes, so we just want to make sure that we really take into consideration how they feel. And so all the feedback we get from our customers, we really take that and incorporate into our brand and how we how we communicate back with them. So we'll you know, we'll put that in our social media posts and create blog content, video content that addresses how they think and feel. And that hopefully, like creates a stronger bond between our brand and our customers. Stacy Caprio 18:28 Cool. And so what could you kind of describe what marketing channels you currently use for beaugen?

Beaguen Marketing Strategy

Tu-Hien Le 18:38 Yeah, so we take an omni channel approach for Beaugen we have we have a content marketing strategy. So we do a lot of blogging, and we create YouTube videos, we have Pinterest, different social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and we even do a little bit of Tick Tock as well. And we try to be wherever our customers are, and want to be a relatable brand that has fun. Like, you know, we want to have laughs because being a mom, like you have to have a bit of humor in it. That's all like all the sacrifice that we make. And but at the same time, we want to convey that we are at Beaugen we are there to support the moms and show empathy for how they're feeling during this time in their life. Stacy Caprio 19:32 Do you find that you have a lot of mom customers referring other customers to your store? Tu-Hien Le 19:39 Oh yeah, definitely. Beaugen was built on grassroots um, word of mouth organic growth. A lot of it was just within the very active and strong Facebook mom communities just them talking amongst themselves. Moms would ask Hey, I have like that's a really great Painful pumping or I need? Is there a solution for pumping and other moms would say, hey should check out Beaugen. And that's how a lot of our initial traction started. And it's just, you know, almost recently, maybe the beginning of 2019, when we just started seeing a lot more attraction, and that's when we started doing more intentional marketing and the different channels and advertising. Stacy Caprio 20:28 Oh, and what type of ads do you run? And which have you seen the best results from Tu-Hien Le 20:36 you. So we have a pretty detailed ad strategy. But we do all sorts of ads, mostly on Facebook, and a little bit on Pinterest as well. Traffic ads, conversion ads, and then when we run videos, views that helps with our account growth and just brand awareness as well. Yeah, so it all it all definitely helps as far as increasing our brand awareness and helping our account grow. Stacy Caprio 21:04 And what would you say that your biggest marketing success has been? And what have you learned from it? Tu-Hien Le 21:13 Oh, our biggest marketing success. I don't know if I could pinpoint to one thing that's been successful, I can say that for marketing, and it's just been a series of testing, what works and what doesn't. So we would constantly run quick experiments on maybe this copy, or a video instead of images, or on this platform versus, like on Facebook or on Pinterest, and just really constantly refreshing our content that we're advertising. And being very methodical and being intentional. And measuring the results, we're able to see what resonates best with our customers. And then and then kind of doubling down on what's working and then cutting loose what what doesn't work. Stacy Caprio 22:10 Exactly. Testing is huge. And that's great to hear that it's helped you guys really double down on what's working. Tu-Hien Le 22:18 Yeah, totally. Stacy Caprio 22:20 What has there been anything that you've had really high hopes for? And that maybe hasn't worked out in the way that you wanted it to? Tu-Hien Le 22:29 High Hopes? I mean, we've tried so many different, different strategies, I would say that I've never really had like specific high hopes on one thing, it's always just been like taking it small steps and building from there. Like I wouldn't just be so laser focused on one solution and like everything had to work, or else for this one solution, or else everything's going to come crashing down. I feel like that could be a recipe for failure in a way that would might make you like disheartened and might make you quit just taking like small steps to get closer to the right solution. So I would say even like it product development, in marketing, and advertising is all about just taking small steps to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Business Mindset

Stacy Caprio 23:23 That's great advice, because you don't want to get discouraged by one thing, and then just kind of quit right away when it doesn't work. Tu-Hien Le 23:30 Right. So I would say like one of the worst things to do is to spend, like, you know, so much money in so much time building one solution or sticking to one strategy. And then after all that time you realize it doesn't work. I feel like there's definitely faster ways to find indicators and answers of whether that solution or strategy would work. So if you get a little bit of feedback along the journey, you can continue to tweak, get better. And then that way you're not, quote failing in one big firing ball flame, you just have a little bit of feedback and just continue to get better. Stacy Caprio 24:08 So what would be your advice to anyone who's currently struggling with marketing or growing their e-commerce store? Tu-Hien Le 24:20 That's a really good question. As far as struggling, I would ask them to really look within themselves and see and ask what is holding them back? Are they looking for perfection? Because my motto is always progress over perfection. Even if your idea your solution or your marketing campaign might be 70% ready, I would launch it because the faster you can get feedback, the faster you can get, like, tweak it and get better. So I'm always a proponent of just launching your idea launching your campaign, putting out in the market and the market will tell you whether they like it or not. And not to not to strive for perfection, because in my opinion, perfection doesn't exist. Stacy Caprio 25:12 Are you guys still iterating and improving your product as you get more feedback? Or is it kind of said how it is right now? Tu-Hien Le 25:20 Oh, definitely, we are actually constantly improving everything in the business from our marketing campaigns, our content, our product, our product offerings, we're always in tune with what our moms and our customers are saying, and taking that feedback and getting better. So yes, we are currently in more product development, and coming up with new content, and coming up with new marketing, advertising campaigns and everything. So it's like a constant, constant process. Stacy Caprio 25:58 Yeah. Wow. So I also I noticed your site has a few partnership products, it displays a could you kind of talk about how you choose your partners and what the benefits of those partnerships are? Tu-Hien Le 26:14 Yeah. So this, again, kind of came from the feedback we get from our customers, we'd ask them like, what else can we do for you? What? How can we make your your experience with Beaugen better, and people would name like, Oh, I wish you'd offer storage containers or nipple balm, or, you know, these different products. So once customers started telling us this, I would go in and try to source products that might fit that solution. And I was just lucky to be able to find a couple of these companies that were partnered with. So Junobie are the reusable storage bags, tiny human supply makes organic skin products for moms and babies, and bow keys, another like parent started company that helps with breastfeeding solution as well, and add it to our store. And I said, I'm not 100% sure our customers like this stuff. But the only way to find out is to launch it onto our website and see what they say. And so far out to all of them have been a success. The moms love those products. We're happy to continue to offer them. This goes back again to the I don't have the answer to everything, but the market will tell me if they like it or not, and just launch it and see what happens. Stacy Caprio 27:29 Awesome. So is that set up? Where are you wholesaling? Or is it kind of an affiliate partnership? Yeah, we are partnering with them as a wholesaler. Do they also wholesale your products on their site? Tu-Hien Le 27:43 not currently. No. Stacy Caprio 27:45 Do you guys have an affiliate program? Or have you tried the influencer marketing at all?

Beaugen Affiliate Program

Tu-Hien Le 27:51 Yeah, so affiliate program has been really huge for us. And we're actively looking to expand our Beaugen affiliate program. The mom influencers have been amazing, cuz we all know that people love following influencers and seeing what products they like and what they do. And so they've been really been great at driving more brand awareness to our company. Stacy Caprio 28:19 Do you guys track the sales attributed to influencers? Or is it more just a brand awareness campaign? Tu-Hien Le 28:27 Oh, for the affiliates, we have a program that keeps track of all the sales that they influence, and then they get a percentage of the sales that they they influence. Stacy Caprio 28:37 So do you guys just do affiliate for the influencers? Or do you have an affiliate for just regular moms? Tu-Hien Le 28:45 Right now? We're just doing affiliates for influencers, but we are open to for moms as well, that's going to be in the future. Stacy Caprio 28:54 I was interested to get your perspective. When you guys run ads, do you measure success based on break even acquiring a customer based on customer lifetime value? Or how do you measure like whether an ad is a success? Mm hmm. Tu-Hien Le 29:14 So our biggest measurement for any ads on any platform that we run would be our return on investment. So as long as that number makes sense, I would call that us quote success and just continue to run that ad or maybe make tweaks to see if we can improve the performance. Stacy Caprio 29:33 Have you guys seen success using Tik Tok so far?

Tik Tok Strategy

Tu-Hien Le 29:39 So the funny thing is, I'm the primary content creator on Tik tok, and it's fun, but since Instagram reels has come out, I think Instagram reels is algorithm is really trying to compete with tik tok. So, if I film a video on tik tok, I also upload it reels and actually the views on reels is much higher than on tik tok. So, for example, one video I uploaded on Tick Tock might have had maybe 300 to 500 views. Whereas when I uploaded that same video to Instagram reels it had, you know, 80,000 views. So, I mean, I use both just to see and because it doesn't hurt, I made the same video so I can just upload it on Instagram and on tik tok. And just to see what does the best but right now Instagram real seems to have more views because obviously I think they really want to promote that functionality. But I do enjoy Tik Tok because I think it's fun. Stacy Caprio 30:44 Yeah, cuz Tik Tok. It's actually kind of good that the reels are getting more views, because Tik tok, maybe bought out or even just kind of changed in the US anyway. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I've also personally found like, when you're one of the first to hop on a new platform, it seems to work better too, because they try to promote you. And ads are usually cheaper. Yeah, definitely. Awesome. So I think last question here is, if you were going back to yourself, when you're first starting your business, what would you tell yourself? Tu-Hien Le 31:26 What would I tell myself? I'd probably say, believe in yourself. And don't try to be perfect. Just try and progress over perfection. If you just try. You'll learn so much from that. And you'll continue to progress and get better. Stacy Caprio 31:46 I love that advice. Awesome. So where can listeners connect with you? And find you online? Tu-Hien Le 31:53 Yeah, so you guys can find me on Instagram, my handle is at @tuhien.le. So that's TUHIEN dot Le. And you can also follow my company Beaugenmom, also on Instagram @Beaugenmom Stacy Caprio 32:15 Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed learning from your journey. And I hope to talk again soon. one takeaway from this episode is that to end didn't assume she knew everything she needed to know, to create the perfect product. Even though her solution originated from her own pain point. And she was technically her own target market, she still went out of her way to talk to mom she knew and networked in Facebook groups to figure out how she could provide the absolute best solution that would help not just her, but everybody with a similar problem. This seemed to really help her down the line with her marketing message. And knowing what people were thinking and saying about the problem. So she could present her product solution in the best possible light that would appeal to her ideal customers, and that she would have the best possible product because she had gotten feedback from so many of her ideal target market, and had really tailored the product. So it was exactly what everybody wanted. It's so smart, really, and it seems so basic. But there are so many entrepreneurs, or would be entrepreneurs who skip this step. And don't take the time to truly understand their customer, and figure out how to best serve them. If a business is serving their customers needs and knows exactly what those needs are, as well as how they can best package and present the solution to the customer. That is a business that will stay in business and flourish like two hands. It is when business start to assume that they know what the customer needs that they also start to fail, too. Han was able to double validate her idea by launching the Kickstarter that allowed her to get not just people's word that Oh, I like your product. Yeah, this is a product that I want. But also their money backing their word as well. And it allowed her to truly see her idea was something that people not only wanted, but they were also truly happy to pay for. validating your idea with your market is so important and so often underestimated. And to hand is a great example of someone who really goes above and beyond and who went above and beyond to validate her business's product market fit. Another key takeaway is she didn't let any inexperience or lack of knowledge stop her. Not that she truly had either, but when she wasn't sure about How to develop a product as she had never done that before. She started talking to others and asking how she could go about doing so. Which led her to finding her local maker shop something that to me sounds like it is straight out of a Harry Potter novel. And the local maker shop allowed her to make her first few or really 40 iterations to develop her initial product offering. How many times have you had a really cool business idea, and then stopped thinking about it or working on it? Right when you came to a roadblock of something that you'd never done before, such as develop a product prototype? Probably a lot. If you think about it, at least when I'm thinking about my own experience, that's happened to me quite a bit. An important lesson from two hands journey is that you can always ask those around you for advice and for help. And you can always take steps one at a time to bring the business in your mind to reality that or you can visit your local maker shop, and have them just help you make your first prototype like two handed. It's also important not to get frustrated. If your first prototype isn't perfect, I love how to hand talks about making and trying over 40 prototypes. And then sending all of those prototypes to a group of 20 to 30. Moms, so they could try them and get their feedback, as well as she herself trying every single prototype. Imagine the patience and just the time that would have taken to really get every single person's feedback on 40 different versions of your product, trying 40 different versions yourself and giving feedback, changing the prototype slightly, and then getting a new one and repeating that process 40 times it really shows her dedication, and how focused she was on bringing a product that was really good. And that actually worked really well to market. Thinking about this if you are interested in starting a product based business, just know that there will likely be a lot of trial and error involved and a lot of testing and iterations that you have to go through before you develop your final product. I found it interesting that both Michael asik in episode one and two hand in this episode, both mentioned how they both went to trade shows as a key part of the process that jumpstart did different parts of their business. asac was able to use a tradeshow to find a licensing partner so we could expand his design distribution and to hand went to a trade show to find different manufacturing and material companies to see who would be able to understand her vision and produce her product at a reasonable cost and timeframe. The takeaway I got from this is if you're stuck, or if you need a partner for distribution or production, or any other type of your business, try googling trade shows in your industry area and finding someone to work with at a trade show it's always worth looking into because there are lots of business partners and potential business partners who do go to trade shows that you can connect with at a trade show two hands answer to the mindset shift question of what changed when she was able to jump and grow from her regular five k month months to 65 k a month months, really struck a chord with me. Since she had never run a company before Beaugen, which I pronounce incorrectly the entire episode. Sorry about that, guys. So she had never run a company before Beaugen. And she had an inner voice telling herself Who am I to think that I could do this? Am I even good enough to be able to do this? And this inner voice, which I think we've all had at some point, especially when we're doing something new. It was limiting her from attempting to set bigger goals. And that was limiting her from even attempting the bigger goals. And if you're not trying something, there's no way you're actually going to get there. So it was making it impossible for her to take her company to the next level. She seemed to ask questions to dig into her mindset. As she explains in the episode she asked, Why am I limiting myself and trying to dig into that to really get to the root of it. What really seemed to help her was finding different coaches and mentors that helped her reframe her limiting beliefs in mindset to a more limitless mindset of who is to tell you that you can't reach those big goals you have. And that really allowed her to actually shift her goals from playing small To bigger, which allowed her to actually take the steps to accomplish it. It's crazy how our thoughts, goals and beliefs have the power to create our reality. And it really is true if you don't think something is possible. That is what defines your reality and your upper limits, you're kind of trapping yourself in your own box, it's when you start to expand what you think is truly possible, that you even give yourself the option to get there. I love how to hand talks about becoming comfortable with trying and failure so you can learn and get better and get faster and stronger. She talks about this throughout the conversation, how you should focus on progress over perfection. And this is great advice for anyone starting a company. I love how she talks about if you think your marketing campaign is 70%. Ready, launch it, then. Because then you get faster feedback, and you can make it better and then launch it, as opposed to trying to make it 100% ready, because how will you really know without getting the feedback from the market, that it is actually ready, you won't, you'll just be spending more time getting something that isn't actually much better into the market. So if you're able to launch, get the feedback relaunch, you'll be able to make your product much better, much faster. And this is something to hand has really taken to heart with her company and her products and her marketing. And everything to him sums this up in a great quote when she says you put it out into the market and the market will tell you if they like it or not. Perfection doesn't exist. However, there's the other end of the coin where some entrepreneurs today have started glorifying failure as an achievement in and of itself. And that's not the point of this, you're not just supposed to fail for the sake of failure. And to not emphasizing failure in and of itself, but rather, what she's able to learn each time she fails, and how she can apply that to her next try. So each time she gets better and better. So she's not just failing and failing for failing sake. But she's able to learn from each iteration and keep improving something which is important for all entrepreneurs, similar to her viewpoint on taking risks, it's not worth it to take wild, crazy risks just for the sake of taking risks. Instead, it's about taking calculated careful risks, where you're betting on something that's not a crazy risk, there's actually something in it that you've either seen others be successful with or that you know has a chance of being successful for whatever reason. And you're betting on that and yourself and your ability to figure it out. And you're also going in knowing what the risks and the rewards are to give yourself the best chance for actual success. I think the key with taking risk is not going all in meaning you know that if you fail, it doesn't mean your bank account is wiped out that you have to file for bankruptcy, that your business is wiped out. Instead, you go in knowing that if you fail, you simply get the markets feedback, incorporating that into your next version. And you're able to keep going, not putting all your chips on the table with failure. And that's not what the point is about. The point is to use the potential for failure, or semi failure as a learning experience. And knowing that you have chances to try again, I also liked when two hand explained how if you get laser focused on a single solution, and that comes crashing down, it could be a recipe for failure in a way that would make you disheartened and quit. It's much better to take small steps to get closer to the right solution and figure out what works and what doesn't, then to put all of your chips on one basket again, and hope that the one thing you're doing works, something that two hands company envision really embodies is that your business is never static. She's made so many iterations, she's always changing her product and her messaging, and improving her business and talking to customers. And I think this is representative of any business that wants to stay relevant and keep improving and growing in the market, like her company Beaugen you have to be in tune with your customer, get their feedback, change your messaging, change your product. It's all about getting feedback and getting better. Constantly. I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking myself included at times, that once you have a successful business, it is done and it will be successful forever. But things are constantly changing and evolving. And you can always be testing improving to grow your business and serve your customers more effectively. It's beautiful how to handmade her company to support moms, and how Beaugen does its best have empathy toward customers and support them at every step. Which is likely why her company has been so successful and has so many referrals and her Returning customers. An important takeaway is that businesses who value and support their customers like Beaugen are able to build strong customer relationships and have a lot of returning customers, which at the end of the day, is the lifeblood of a successful business. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Her.CEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you're listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments.

Contact Tu-Hien Le

Instagram @tuhien.le and @beaugenmom Beaugen Site

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Flippa: Blake Hutchison, CEO - Realize The Cash Value of Your Business - Equalizing the Exit
23 sept. 2022· The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money
Blake Hutchison, Flippa CEO talks about Flippa equalizing business sale opportunities for all - extending the opportunity to sell a business to everyone, not just the stereotypical flashy Venture-backed companies.

Many people are not aware they have the opportunity to sell their business, even a small or service-based one - and Flippa gives everyone the option to realize the cash value of the business they own by listing it for sale on the Flippa.com platform. Flippa is working to give the opportunity to all people to be aware they can buy and sell businesses, which many have in a life-changing way. Flippa is hosting the upcoming Her.Future event October 18th at 11am - you can tune in to hear inspiring stories from women who have been there building and selling their own companies and walk away with tips you can use to grow and sell your own business.

Video Notes:
1. Female Owned Businesses Listed

a) The Right Fit is a marketplace connecting leading brands with influencers, models and other creatives. Strong growth. Venture backed. Now for sale here.

2. Female Owned Businesses That Have Sold

a) CrochetKim is a crochet blog with thousands of free patterns. The site sold for $90,000 within a week of being listed on the platform. b) Karen Boyer was the police officer I referenced. You can hear her story here.
Check out Flippa's upcoming Her.Future event October 18th at 11am here: Flippa Her Future Event
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5. Banish Skincare Founder Daisy Jing: From YouTube to Successful Female Entrepreneur
18 oct. 2020· The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money
Daisy Jing, Founder Banish Skincare
Daisy Jing is the Founder of Banish. She launched her skincare company from her own kitchen and used her platform as an influencer to start making sales, which was not even her goal at first. Once she realized how interested her YouTube followers were in her new products and skincare routine, she got more serious about manufacturing and selling, and created her company Banish. Her YouTube channel now has over 70 million views, and she has a thriving company Banish that has been around for over 6 years. Daisy Jing founded Banish to solve her own skin problems, and ended up sharing her solution with many others in the company she created. In this episode Daisy shares valuable business and manufacturing tips, as well as her own business, marketing and life mindset tips that can inspire you to take action on your own ideas. Watch Daisy and Stacy talk about Daisy's business story and tips: (this is a full video episode, intro video, Zoom conversation video, so let me know in the comments or via email if I should keep doing full video formats or if audio-only is OK as well) [embed] https://youtu.be/TtHSAD8c_hA [/embed] Daisy Jing 0:00 I think the reason why actually most businesses don't remain in business is because they solve something that nobody needs solving. Stacy Caprio 0:08 Hi, and welcome to the Hurst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be.
Daisy Jing
Stacy Caprio 0:21 Listen along with Stacy each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams so you can learn how to build your own. In this episode, we talk to Daisy founder of banish. Daisy was actually the number one person I wanted to have on my podcast when I was conceptualizing starting it. So I was so happy when she jumped at the chance to come on. I had seen her products online and heard her on several business podcasts. And her story is so inspiring to me. Daisy is one of those people who just gets how to start and run a business, she's able to break down complex steps into simple ones. And listening to her talk about her own business is so inspiring. Because it makes you feel like you could also easily break down the steps and start your own. She's also one of the nicest people I've ever met. So I wasn't surprised to learn that she's also from Minnesota, which is where I grew up, and where the nicest people I've ever met live. like to hand in the previous episode, Daisy started her multimillion dollar company to solve her own problem. And then once realizing how her solution could help others, she turned it into an incredibly successful business that has been thriving in its own unique niche for years. If you're looking to start or grow any type of business, you'll love this episode. Daisy has also developed her own products in house and has gone through many testing iteration. And she talks about that, including her product development tips, her sales tips, and how she views business and life and mindset in general. So it's a great episode for anyone interested in starting a business or improving their life mindset. So let's dive right in and hear what Daisy has to say. Hi, Daisy, thank you so much for coming on. I'm so excited to talk to you. And I was hoping we could start with you just going kind of through your background and why you started banished in the first place. Daisy Jing 2:27 Yeah, thank you so much, Stacy for having me on. So my background, I have had acne for forever started at a really young age when I was nine years old. And it just got progressively worse. And it got so bad that, you know, my skin would just start to bleed because the pimples would pop everywhere. And I just go to school and my face was all bloody. And it really affected my self esteem, self confidence, I joke that like people knew me more by the name, pizza face. And by my actual name being the determined person I've always been I wanted to find a solution for my skin. And I tried everything out there, a lot of acne sufferers did and nothing would seem to work in fact, it would actually dry out my skin and make it even worse. And then there was always the promise that it would get better but it just never got better. And I was just trying so many different things. And we went to so many different doctors and everything. And yeah, I just fell in this despair because i've you know had acne for 10 plus years and nothing seemed to work and I kept spending money and I kept like bleaching my skin I kept doing everything to get rid of it. So I documented my struggle on my YouTube channel, which is still there today. It's tasers 89 if you look at some of the older videos, so you can see they asked me through my YouTube channel, I was able to kind of get out of my depression because it gave me a safe space to talk about my journey of hacking and I developed a small but loyal following of people who like to see you know, the real story of someone with acne, I review products etc etc. And then started using more natural ingredients and I became a very, very big stickler for research on different ingredients. So I would go through the skincare labels and just you know pour over medical journals and just like ingredients and stuff like that and really do a lot of research in skincare products and I realized that I was allergic and I would break out towards many of the most popular skincare ingredients. So I eliminated that for my skin I would you know use my own skincare or you know, go to Whole Foods or an herbal food store and just make my own skincare. My skin actually for the first time started to get better, not worse. I was like huh, I'm onto something here. And then I did micro needling which back in 2011 2012 like nobody knew what it was it was super not popular. I was recommended it by a dermatologist, plastic surgeon friend who told me about it. And then I applied vitamin C on top of it and then people need to change I started noticing my skin and they actually asked for my acne scars, like, they're like what happened to your acne scars will happen to her acne like it's all gone. And I didn't really realize it was that like canoodling with the vitamin C. But it actually worked really well for my skin. And then people wanted to try whatever it is I was using. And so that's how banished started. So it was basically me trying to solve my own problem. And other people noticed and they wanted to buy whatever it is I was using. And that's how it started back in 2013. Stacy Caprio 5:35 I love that how organic it was and how you are literally trying to solve your own issue. I think one of the things that drew me to you and your company was actually how vulnerable you were, I'm thinking starting that company, and even in something I think most people are scared to even just talk about. But so many people need your product and have really benefited from it. I was just wondering if you think there's a difference between trying to help people and then selling your product and how you go about both of those things. Daisy Jing 6:10 I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think for any business to be successful, you have to solve a problem that people have. I think the reason why actually most businesses don't remain in business is because they solve something that nobody needs solving, right? So your focus should always be to help people to solve your customers pain point. And then the money will flow after. So I think it's really important that you're always focusing on helping people first and foremost. Because if you're not helping people, then no one's gonna buy what it is you're offering.
Idea to Product
Stacy Caprio 6:44 Yeah, I agree. And you had just talked about how you had pored over medical journals, and we're looking for all the ingredients. So I was wondering, how did you start formulating the products and kind of move from just finding the best ingredients to combine them to getting them professionally made and how that progressed, Daisy Jing 7:07 I would buy actually the raw component of the ingredient, you can buy them from different manufacturers of skincare labs and stuff like that, then you can also go to specialty health food stores and get just the ingredient yourself. I did that and I would put it you know, just it was by myself like I was just putting it in glycerin or water bass and then putting it on my skin but I actually saw really great results. And then the next step is to find a, you know, chemist or a formulator or contract manufacturer, and you can tell them like what you want in your products. And then they can make it for you. But because I kind of did that trial and error thing myself without you know, even thinking it was going to be a business. I think that was really important because I didn't let my perfectionism get the worst to me. It was just like, Oh, I want to solve something for myself. And then just taking it a step further and scaling that.
How to Manufacture Your Own Product
Stacy Caprio 7:58 Awesome. Yeah, I love that products you sent I have them kind of on display here. Oh, great. Actually, yeah, they look I love like your packaging, and they're so easy to hold the the way that the consistency and everything. It just seems like you did really put a lot of thought and effort into that thinking kind of top. has it taken a lot of iterations to get to where they are today or was it pretty quick to get to the Oh, Daisy Jing 8:24 yeah, so I think you know the answer to that it took a long time. I can't even tell you stories. We were dropping the jars for outside on the sidewalk to see like which jars which shatter because there are certain like jar manufacturers they they don't use virgin glass, they use recycled glass and that is more prone to shattering or like why no wire jar shattering you know, like when they're when they're being filled and stuff. I mean, there's all these tiny little details you have to think of right? Even like the font and making sure that the the screen printing on the jar, like doesn't smear or fade or whatnot. You know what machines to fill the products with? Yeah, there was just a lot of different iterations. So it's definitely not an overnight success took I would say, you know, a few years to get to where we are now. Stacy Caprio 9:19 Wow. I love that. And your website is so focused on junkie and full of products, which I think is really great. So it doesn't give people who are searching parallel paralysis. Yeah. When they're trying to purchase something. I was wondering, have you ever tried offering bigger product sizes? Have people ever been interested in that? Or is there a reason you just have smaller sizes across the board? Daisy Jing 9:47 The first part, we don't offer too many products because for me personally, the 10 step you know skincare routine doesn't work for me makes me break out because my skin super sensitive. I just go for the basics. What works What doesn't nothing extra? So we have very limited selection, because we've done a lot of research and testing of, you know, the best products. And then the second part to your question. I'm sorry, what was the second part? Stacy Caprio 10:15 Oh, I think I was just curious if there's tested reason why you offer the smaller sizes, smaller sizes, about doing like a bulk, or like a larger size of someone is on like a long term plan or so yeah. Daisy Jing 10:27 So the reason why we have smaller sizes is that our products are freshly made in small batches. So they actually would, it lasts longer than maybe six months, depending how you store them. So even if we gave you a bigger size, it probably wouldn't be possible to use it up in that time period over six months. And personally, for me, per banish just a little product goes a long way, you'll read our new ingredient list, we don't use too many fillers or extra ingredients, we just have kind of the pure ingredients in there. So you don't need too much product. You know, a lot of skincare companies and brands, they'll add a lot of filler like just things I take up the volume of the product, but doesn't really do much. And I just felt like it was unnecessary. I mean, why pay more for postage? And, you know, for the jar sizes and all that? A little goes a long way?
Perfectionism & Business Mindset
Stacy Caprio 11:16 Yeah, yeah, with but because you use the fresh ingredients. So the expiration dates and everything. So something I thought was really interesting in your story is how you balance the need for perfectionism versus accepting yourself as it in both skin and business. And I was wondering if you could go into more detail there. Daisy Jing 11:36 Yeah, that's a really great question, Stacy. Yeah, that's a really deep question. But I feel like I could go for a while on that one. Yeah, no, that's really like I actually was like, Huh, that's a really great question. So perfectionism is, it gets you to a certain point, but it won't get you out of that box. I think. When you're younger, you're getting A's in school, and you have that 4.0 and you have those great test scores. And, you know, you have all those boxes checked, like that works really well for you in school, and maybe for college. But in the real world, especially when you're starting a business, you can't be a perfectionist, you're gonna go out of business, because business is so messy, chaotic, and it's every day is like this hustle, right? for survival and for growing. And so you have to learn to let things go and not be a perfectionist, and really kind of focus on what matters. Especially when you're starting out from a young, especially when you're just starting out your business. Since we've been around for over seven years, we can be a perfectionist, right? And like really focus in and really hone down but in the beginning, you just have to like do it and realize that Yeah, you might fail. Yeah, this might not work out. Yeah, you might lose like $50,000, or, you know, $100,000 on something, but you just have to go for it and take that risk. perfectionism has helped me so much, but it also has hindered me, the reason why I was so obsessed with my skin was because I was a perfectionist. And I think that if I wasn't a perfectionist, I wouldn't have spent so many years trying to fix my skin. So many products and so much money spent on my skin, but there is a silver lining because that perfectionism in me, got me to find a better solution, the best solution which is banish. But you cannot be a perfectionist if you want to succeed in life and be happy because there's always more more more that you can do. And I think now having the business for seven years and now having my skin clear up, I have noticed that if you're always trying trying to aim for that picture where the life or that perfect life or you know, checking all the boxes and whatever it is that you're doing. It's it's not a very fulfilling life. So I always lean into authenticity, rather than perfectionism. If you're always trying to think of Am I checking all these boxes? And by being perfect all the time? That is not the way to live your life or you know, run your business. Stacy Caprio 14:08 I agree so much. Thank you. Yeah, that's it's such a hard line. I think so many business owners are perfectionist and it's helped us start businesses and everything, but at some point, it's actually better to let go of all the details and just iterate more quickly and everything but I think there is a fine line. I was wondering, do you think as social media has grown in popularity, have you found customers been more obsessed with perfection? And filters on Instagram? And do you think that has affected your business at all?
Perfectionism and Influencer Marketing
Daisy Jing 14:44 So I think what's really cool is banish we've taken the opposite approach. In social media, we actually showcase all of our warriors and customers with their acne. We never Photoshop any of the pictures or blur the skin out. We really showcase The acne, acne scars pours on people's skin. And I think that has actually helped us because people relate to us. And they appreciate that, hey, we're not promoting the standard of perfection. And we're not saying that banish is going to obliterate you know your scars and give you flawless perfect skin because no one skincare product or line can do that. But what's most important is to accept all that part of you accept and accept yourself the way you are. And then let's use good skincare products and good skincare ingredients. remind myself, okay, Daisy, are you trying to do this so that we can post it? Or are you doing this because you genuinely love this, and this is who you are. So please try to not get into that rabbit hole of portraying this perfect image on social media because none of us, none of us have that perfect image, Stacy Caprio 15:52 No matter what it seems like on the feed. Yeah, I think that's so true. None of us are perfect. And when you show that in your marketing, I think people are able to kind of see themselves in it and see that maybe it could actually help them too. So your company is really based on you kind of started from your own youtube viral video. And then you've really used a lot of micro influencers and influencers in your marketing. And I was wondering if you have any fun stories about any influencer campaigns, and any tips for people looking to start an influencer campaign?
YouTube Influencer Marketing
Daisy Jing 16:30 Any fun stories? Well, I feel like the influencers we've worked with, we've always had a long term relationship with them, which has helped, for example, Kelly Kushner, my face, sorry, we worked with her since 2016. And she was a college student, her account was pretty small. But now she's blown into this huge skin positivity influencer. And it's been so great to see the growth of our ambassadors and to keep that long term relationship with them. And we're all about authenticity and working with people on a long term basis. We're not just like, hey, we'll work with you, you know, and here you go. And then post about us, okay, but you know, we, we really want to empower not only our customers, but our influencers and our employees and our brand ambassadors, so we're all about trying to get them to be their best self as well. And in terms of tips on working with influencers, you have to realize that influencers are people at the end of the day, and I think it it's a very, very hard job, and career because I you know, I have a YouTube channel, I would say I was an influencer. And I just know how much work it takes at the end of the day, and how stressful the job is. It's truly a 24, seven, all encompassing kind of career. And so just treating influencers with that respect, and knowing how hard they work, to post content for you, I think is really important. Yeah, because it is a very, very hard, hard job. And yet, always trying to figure out how we can help our influencers to and building that long term relationship with them. And I also think the most important thing is finding influencers that fit with your values and your mission and vision. So if you're not gonna find the right kind of influencer, it doesn't matter how big they're following. It's just not gonna work out. We've had great success with influencers have 1000 followers, right? And so for us, it's not about the number of followers but it's really about do they align with our mission and values? First and foremost,
Customer Service Tips
Stacy Caprio 18:33 I think that's a great way to look at it is more of a relationship and not just a hey, here's our product, and now post a photo, because then it shows their audience that they're really serious about your product, too. And I think it gives you more credibility, but also helps them and it's kind of a win win. How do you view customer service? And is it something that you think has really helped your business long term? Daisy Jing 18:57 Yeah, customer service is so important. I mean, they are the last touch point, before someone decides to purchase the product. I think Customer service is not going away. But you have to think about how your customers are changing. We used to have, for example, live chat. And then we actually got rid of it. And we just focus on our Instagram DM, Facebook chat and stuff. We noticed that our customers, they don't like to email, email. It's just a little bit old school. So like the DMS, you know, it's all go down. So just, yeah, just focusing on where your customer is, and making it as easy as possible for them to get their question resolved. And so we've noticed that the speed of response is even more important than the quality of the response. People just want their question. responded, ASAP. We live in an instantaneous society. So we're constantly having to evolve how we communicate with our customers. Stacy Caprio 19:53 Oh, that's interesting. So do you have a team 24 seven, answering DMS, or is That? Yep. Daisy Jing 20:02 Yeah, yeah, we have, we have a team, and they're really great. A lot of them have been with us for many years, it's really important that you're focusing a lot on giving customers information, especially like micro needling was pretty new, a lot of people didn't know about it. And because our products are so different, just giving our customers the information that they need, so they can make the best choice for their skin. Stacy Caprio 20:24 And is your team. Are they on during work hours nine to five? Or is it around the clock answering? Daisy Jing 20:32 We used to have it around the clock, and then we kind of adjusted the schedule, but it's pretty much we actually measure the metrics of the response time. So that's always measured. Stacy Caprio 20:43 Awesome. Yeah, I think the customer service is important. I never thought whenever I have a question about a brand, I usually email but I think the DM it's so convenient. And when you get a quick response, it's really gratifying. That makes a lot of sense. So I was curious, are you intentional about growth right now? And what are you doing to propel that forward? Or are you just maintaining at this point?
Authenticity in Business
Daisy Jing 21:07 It goes along with the line of authenticity, or am I doing this to check boxes, there was a period where I was doing it to check box, oh, hey, we need to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow great. And I think growth is important, but you need to grow the right way. And you need to be intentional about it. And it needs to make sense for you. So for me, it's not about having the biggest billion dollar company, if it's not authentic to who I am, and who and who vanishes, right, I would much rather have it small, where we are today, if we can be authentic, and control the future than just having it be a huge brand, but almost like a sellout and just being like every other brand out there. To me, it's so important that we stick to our values and mission. And I always say like, if we have to be like everyone else, then I don't want to do it anymore. And so it's really important that we're growing in the right ways. And I think if you always stick to that authenticity, you will grow, and you will grow in the right ways. But yeah, we're not growing just to grow. And I know a lot of companies, they just try to force it. And they'll make I think that really harms your business, and you're gonna make a lot of bad business decisions, because you're forcing something when it's not completely ready yet. Mm hmm. Stacy Caprio 22:25 What would you say your strategy was during your high growth periods. And were there any really good successes or failures that stand out to you Daisy Jing 22:37 a strategy for the high growth period, it was kind of during that peak season of influencer marketing that really helped. But now influencer marketing is a whole another ballgame. And I think a lot of people are kind of tired of it. You always kind of have to pivot and kind of think about new strategies and new ways to kind of pivot it, we still do influencer marketing, but it's not like the way we used to do it before.
Following Your Intuition in Business
Stacy Caprio 23:02 Yeah, that makes sense. I was listening to a few other of your podcasts and a few times you mentioned how you stuck to your intuition, and did something against conventional wisdom. And it really helped. And it made me curious, what would was an example of one of those times. And I also want to say, I resonate with that. And I think it's a really cool thing that you do have a strong enough faith in yourself to follow your intuition and how it's really helped your company so far. Daisy Jing 23:36 Thank you. Well, I'm not perfect in that there are other things I went follow my intuition for that I probably have not. But I do think it's important to not be to really think and not be a sheep almost, and do what everyone else is doing. But one example I would say is like selling on Amazon, so we actually only sell on our website. And many people are very surprised how large of a company we are just selling on our website, because they're like, how do you do that? And everyone told me, like, you need to get an Amazon, you just want Amazon you can make like, you know, five times more revenue and blah, blah, blah. But to me, again, like I'm not after the revenue, I'm after, you know, creating a legacy and helping her customers feel most confident in their skin. So I felt like selling on Amazon wasn't going to serve that purpose. But we could focus more of the time on our website and building our brand. So, you know, I don't know what would have happened if we decided to launch Amazon. I don't know, you know, if if things would have been different or not. But you know, that's just an example of, I wanted to stick to what our purpose is, which is to make all of our customers feel confident in their skin. That's first and foremost. So something like selling on Amazon wasn't really going to help us at that point. I'm not saying it won't in the future. Maybe that is the direction we go. But at that point it wasn't, it didn't feel like the right thing to do. Stacy Caprio 25:04 Yeah, that's a great little story they're selling on Amazon, they actually take like a 15%, commission cut. And then another big thing is, your branding wouldn't be as strong and customers can't really contact you. So it wouldn't have the personal touch, right? Or like the strong branding that you guys have. So I almost think maybe that was a good decision, although it might be a good lead channel to kind of get new leads into the funnel, at some point, if you're looking for some sort of growth, but it's kind of the catch 22 there. So I think doing what you did, and you drove so much traffic via the influencer marketing. So it's probably a smart move to kind of focus on your website anyway. One thing I was wondering, when you see other people doing YouTube and Instagram marketing, do you see any mistakes that people make doing? So Daisy Jing 25:58 it's all about the authenticity, like I'm telling you, like people think, Oh, you know, influencer marketing works. Okay, we have a million dollar budget, let's send these products to these influencers, you know, and let's take them out to Tahiti and all that stuff. But if it's not coming from a genuine, authentic relationship, people can see right through that, I mean, just because, you know, you give, I don't know, like, you pay Kylie Jenner million dollars for a post. I don't know if that works or not, like, we haven't done it that's not in our budget. You know, people think, okay, it's gonna like blow up and blah, blah, blah. And it might, but it might not either. So. Yeah, I think influencer marketing is, is very different than it was five years ago. And it all has to be very authentic. You can't just get people to post about you, there really has to be a story, a relationship consistency, you know, even the influencers, like how they talk about your product, like Do they have that light in their eyes, when they talk about your product, it really makes a difference. So yeah, it's all about that authenticity.
Banish Loyalty Program
Stacy Caprio 27:02 I think a lot of the times when I've heard about people doing influencer marketing, it is like money for product, they don't focus on the relationship or actually making sure the person likes their product that probably makes all the difference in whether their recommendation really resonates. Uh huh. Do you see a lot of returning versus new customers? And do you focus more on one or the other? Daisy Jing 27:24 Right we have a lot of our sales are from returning customers, we do have a very special loyalty program. So we call our you know, our customer soldiers, right? Because having acne is a struggle. And it's a hard it's a hard thing to go live your life when you have acne every day. And then we we call our our loyalty program or banished stars program. And we have different tiers of our loyalty program from general to Captain to soldier. So we do focus a lot on loyalty, but it happens pretty naturally, like people like the product they like to experience and then they'll repurchase again, we've done a couple like freebies with the loyalty. But if people like your product, they're going to come back. So there hasn't been too much of a push on that. Stacy Caprio 28:11 Awesome, that's interesting. You have the loyalty tiers and everything we can close out with if you want to go over explain your products and why they're so good and maybe how they work scientifically, in case anyone's interested in giving them a try.
Banish Products
Daisy Jing 28:28 Our products are hand batched in Pasadena, California. So we have a team that goes in there, you know, early in the morning, they actually make the products fill the products and ship out your orders. Our business model is a little bit different in that we don't do a run of 100,000 units and fill the products the bunch of preservatives and chemicals to maintain the shelf life of the products. And this is why we don't sell in retail stores. We don't sell to Sephora, target whatever because our products are so fresh. So when you order them they will you know be shipped out the next day or the day of and then you'll get them you know a couple days later. And because our ingredients are fresh and we only use like the pure ingredients, there's really not too much negative reaction to the skin so the ingredients really can do what they're best known to do, which is his work. So the problem I had with skincare before was they just put so much into skincare, stuff that you don't need fragrance, artificial colors, the filler part and that made me break out. So because we don't have any of that that's kind of what makes Spanish different arguments are incredibly fresh. I have a video of for example, our banish oil. When you get it it's clear but if you leave it out for a few months it'll turn orange and most vitamin C serums. When you purchase them they're already orange because they already color them because they don't want you to know how long it's been sitting out there for. I could go through every single product and Bori that But that's really what makes Spanish different. And we don't use fragrance. We don't use artificial colors. We don't use synthetic dyes or mineral oils, or petroleum, sulfates or any of that stuff. And that's fine and a lot of skincare products. So you can go on our website, look at the ingredient, let's do research and see if it's something that'll work for you. Stacy Caprio 30:22 Yeah, I was reading your ingredients. And I love that they were so simple, basically a ingredient to hold it together. And then it was really active ingredients with none of the preservatives, which is so rare these days with skincare and banish it's for people. It's a general skincare as well as Yeah, on the screen, too, right? Daisy Jing 30:41 Yes, yep. So people are like, Is it only for people with acne? Well, you're getting acne because your skin isn't reacting well to something whether it's internally or externally. If you have healthy skin, and you treat it with good products, you're not going to get acne. Because I like to treat like the root cause of what's causing instead of like drying out your pimples, right. So it's a skincare product for people of all ages, all skin types. We have a older customer base, too, who loves to use our banisher for collagen production and their skin, but it is a general skincare brand, but it really helps with the acne scarring. Stacy Caprio Exactly. And I noticed the marketing materials are focused on the acne and the acne scarring currently, but it seems like it would it is skincare for all ages and all types of skin. Is that something you ever think you'll expand your marketing on? Or do you like just having the niche that you're currently in,
Banish Product Benefits
Daisy Jing 31:38 I like having the niche most of our products, for example, the Banish kit focuses on collagen production, which is how your scars will lift up and become flatter over time. collagen production is something that we will all need after 20 years old. So I think acne scars, it is nice, but I think it's something that a lot of people have a struggle with. And it's not really some thing that anyone has, or any brand has really focused on. I feel like when I had acne scars, it was more traumatic than the actual acne because it was like, Oh, no, this is forever. And then you look at the alternatives. And it was, you know, like thousands upon thousands of dollars. Oh, yeah, I'm happy with sticking with the acne scar niche, because it is something a lot of people struggle with. And mentally it really affects people more than I think a lot of other skin conditions. Stacy Caprio 32:34 Yeah, that's a great point. Awesome. Thank you so much. This was so educational. I'm sure the listeners are gonna love this and just learning how to grow their e commerce store. You could close out with how can people find you on social and just connect with you if they want to talk further? Yeah, so Daisy Jing 32:52 Our websites: Banish.com and our Instagram handle is at @banishacnescars and at @banish. And then my personal one is at @Daiserz89 Instagram and YouTube Stacy Caprio 33:03 Awesome. And that's your YouTube and your Instagram. Yep. All right, thank you so much. And yeah, see? Thank you. Yeah, Daisy was able to solve her own problem to create her successful business, just like to him. And their examples make it clear how when there is a true customer demand for something, you can turn it into a very successful business. And often that will start with you having a problem solving it, and then turning that into a business.
Solve a Problem That Actually Needs Solving
Stacy Caprio 33:40 I love Daisy's quote at the start of the episode when she said, I think the reason most businesses don't remain in business is they solve something that doesn't need solving. That's the one great part about launching on Kickstarter, like two handed in the previous episode, because it allows you to truly validate that people are willing to pay for your product before you spend money developing and launching it. And there are other ways to validate this as well. But when you have money backing people's support, you can truly see if it's something they're interested in. And it's another benefit of starting a business that fills your own personal need, because you already know that you would personally pay for it. And so you have the validation that at least one person aka you would be willing to pay for your product. The worst thing would be to pay for develop and launch something and then realize that no one actually wanted to buy it. Daisy was able to develop her very first product iterations on her own. without hiring a maker shop or a prototype developer. She was very resourceful and simply bought the raw components of her ingredients from skincare labs and specialty health food stores. And then she used them to make her first product batches to ship out to her first customers and YouTube followers. A key takeaway here is you don't always need a budget, or to launch a fundraising or Kickstarter campaign to get started, you can be thrifty and work with what you have to make your first prototypes, which is inspiring to be aware of a common theme. Among the two product based entrepreneurs we've had on so far, Daisy and to him is they both have a ton of trial and error. To talk about when they were developing their first products. Daisy talks about having to drop different jar materials on the ground to see which would shatter and which wouldn't, and about how she even had to test tons of fonts, and even different screen printing types on product jars. As well as testing, what machines would work best to fill the products with so much goes into creating a product that we as consumers don't usually think about as we all get access to the final product that has taken dozens or more iterations to get where it is before it lands in our hands. But we just assume it was always that way and that the person was just able to create it perfectly before it reached us. I love Daisy's approach to marketing and messaging for her skincare brand, where they don't use filters or try to blur anything, or make everything look perfect. Instead, they strive to show people with real imperfect skin, who are using banish to take care of and improve their skin. And this allows viewers to really trust her brand. And to relate to the products and models. I'm often skeptical when I see airbrushed skincare products faces, or even the skincare brand models using people who already have perfect skin. When it is so apparent that the model already had perfect skin before he or she started using the skincare brand. It doesn't engender a feeling of trust or making me want to buy these types of products. And Daisy's brand takes the opposite approach to show real people using their products in getting improvements without trying to promote an image of airbrushed perfection, or models who never needed any skincare to get their perfect skin, which is the exact opposite of the marketing approach that 99% of skincare and brands out there use, who usually seemed to be trying to promote an image of perfection associated with their products. I love Daisy's mindset. And I tried to draw her into a philosophical discussion about perfectionism, life and business. And she played along and made a great point that perfectionism gets you to a certain point, it helps you get A's in school, good test scores, and even do well in college. But if you stay there, you get trapped in a box. Once you get out to the real world, especially when you're branching out and starting a business. Because business is messy. And if you try to make everything perfect, you'll end up going out of business. She talks about you have to learn to accept things as they are and work with where you are in business. Business is messy, and it's chaotic. And every day there are new challenges, you're striving for growth, and you have to learn to let things go. I think her message is so spot on. That it's easy. And it's even helpful to be a perfectionist. When you are playing inside someone else's carefully laid out rulebook, such as inside of a school environment where everybody in all the teachers, they already know the answers and everything is laid out just so. So in that type of environment, you can have the perfect answers and get 100 on all your tests and be a good little perfectionist, and have that be a positive quality in that specific environment. However, when you get out into the real world, no one has all the answers like teachers did in school, there are no clearly laid out rules and boundaries. You're the one who has to set the boundaries and the goals. And when you're interacting in business, you'll encounter a lot of nose, a lot of failures, and a lot of the unknown. And if you're trying to make everything perfect, and if you're striving to only get yeses and never ask questions that you don't know the answer to or to never venture into unknown territory, such as creating your friends. Product prototype. If it's something you've never done before, then you'll be stuck. Because you'll be waiting for somebody else to set the rules to tell you what to do to give you your homework book and direct you and give you the perfect lines to color inside. I think that's why it is so hard for some people to go out on their own and start a business because they are used to having someone else hold their hand and help them do their work in a perfect simulation. Whereas when you're building a business, you're the one creating the coloring book, not the one coloring inside of the lines. So it can get messy. And Daisy's mindset is spot on where you really do have to be okay with where you are. And with everything not being perfect. When you own a business, Daisy launched banish as an influencer from her own YouTube channel. And the company was built partnering with influencers. I love her perspective on having a long term relationship with influencers, and how she tries to find smaller influencers who fit her exact brand values, her niche, and then to support them, and watch them grow with time. She's had some influencers start out really small, she saw something in them, gives them the banished products and supports them. And then has grown with them, which allows her brand to grow along with the influencer, which ends up being a better value for her brand and also a great opportunity for the influencers that she's able to partner with. So it's really creating a win win relationship with influencers. That is the best way to help your business grow over time. She talks about how important the authenticity is in the influencer marketing. And if the influencer recommendation is not coming from a genuine, authentic relationship, that how people can see right through that. Stacy 42:03 And how it's important for her to make sure that you can see the light in the influencers eyes when they talk about your product. I think this is so important and so true. Especially today with so many influencers who overdo brand promotion because they're trying to make a living. And I find my eyes glazing over on an Instagram feed when I see promoted products, because I know they're promoted. And I really don't trust that they're actually good. The only time this is different is when the person talks about how they were using the brand before they became a sponsor, or when they seem genuinely excited and in love with the brand they're talking about. And I've actually purchased some types of products from people who are genuinely excited about them, who seem to genuinely love the product. But I try to avoid products that are purely ads and that the people don't connect with. So I see exactly why it's important to find the authentic influencers when you're doing the influencer marketing. Daisy talks about how as a business owner, it is really important to think and not be a sheep and do what everyone else is doing. Something I really resonate with. In my own experience. One particular moment that really resonated with this is when I followed my gut, when every other person in my life was telling me not to was when I left my stable nine to five job to go out on my own and live with my grandma to start my own company, which was four years ago, I was breaking every societal norm doing this. And even my dad was telling me not to until I was making more on the side. When I left my corporate job, I was only making one k a month on the side from some t shirt sales, and some from the first website I had invested in. So I had to make my own decision. That was very strongly against the advice of every single person I talked to about it. But it ended up being the best thing I've ever done. I do have to say my mom and grandma were the main two people supporting my decision. And my grandma has always encouraged her kids and her grandkids aka me and the others to do what they love in life. She loves music, and grew up singing in a band and traveling on the road. And she was always wanting to follow her own heart and encourage others to do so as well. However, I do have to put the caveat here that I do not recommend anyone leave a job or start something when they don't yet have enough to live on. At the end of the day, you have to make your own decisions in every area of life. But you also have to be willing to understand and face the consequences of your decisions, no matter what they are. In business, I've also found that China follow the crowd in any type of growth technique, or production technique usually doesn't work as well, because by the time that the crowd is already talking about something, it's already there, the market is usually oversaturated. I can illustrate this with the example of by the time everyone else is talking about how great a print on demand t shirt company is, and how great the product is. And then everyone starts selling the same t shirt from the same print on demand company with slightly different designs. At the same price point. It just floods the market. And it's not successful for the majority of people at that point, because it's overcrowded. Same thing with trying to jump on the Facebook ad train, when everyone and even your non ad or tech savvy friends are talking about Facebook ads. That's the point where the market is likely oversaturated, the competition is too high, the cost is too high. I found personally that the key is to hop on the new ad platforms and even the new print on demand platforms or products. Just as an example before every single person that you know is doing that, because once every single person is doing something, it's usually not as effective, especially in terms of a competitive market, or business growth landscape. Stacy 46:47 So being the first one to hop on certain platforms, and products and techniques, etc, is usually the best way to approach that type of thing. For many reasons, I agree with Daisy that it is so important to be able to think for yourself as a business owner, and be able to listen to and follow your own intuition. Because you know, your customer base and product better than anyone, meaning you can make better decisions than an outsider can. And obviously, you can rely on statistics data as well as following your gut and analyzing the decision before you make it. But at the end of the day, you have to be able to make your own decisions. And that is what is really going to help you be able to take your business to the next level. So thank you, Daisy, I learned so much. And I hope everyone else was able to take away a few special nuggets from this interview as well. After invited Daisy on this podcast, she was so thoughtful. And she actually sent me a box of her products to try. And it was so kind. And actually perfect timing. Even though I wasn't expecting to receive anything at all, all I wanted was to really talk to her and get insight into how she built her business. And her mindset. Because I've been so inspired. I've seen her on other podcasts and learning about how she had built her business from the ground up. So the last year, I worked a corporate nine to five job, my skin actually got really bad in terms of acne, worse than it's ever been before with like large cystic bumps that I think were probably caused by stress from two personal things I was going through at the time, as well as kind of feeling stuck in my nine to five in the sense that I really wanted to be doing my own thing at this point, not from stress from the job or anything just from wanting to be able to have the freedom and be running my own business at that point, even though I wasn't quite there with my side income. So it was a little bit frustrating. And to have to be sitting in the office all day knowing that I wanted to be doing something else, as well as the personal things. So I think my emotions are kind of triggering those skin changes. And like Daisy has talked about your skin changes are usually trying to tell you something. So if your skin changes and you get more acne or something else, it's probably because you're not eating right, you're not putting the right products on your face, or you have emotional things that are triggering your skin and your hormones. So I had that really bad acne for probably a few months or even a year likely due to the hormone at that time I entered the showing in my skin and the effects of that actually stayed for years after the acne on my skin cleared up. As Daisy mentioned, the after effects of acne can often be worse reminders than the acne itself. sense they tend to last for longer if you don't do Anything to help them improve. Before the year my acne got really bad. The extent of my skincare routine was moisturizer and the occasional SPF. However, since then, like Daisy, I've researched and tried a ton of skincare products to try to even out my skin and help it get back to normal. This past year, I found a few products that have really helped my skin improve to where I feel it's almost back to normal, with copper peptides being one of my favorite new finds. One unfortunate thing from all of this is I realized how important it is to take care of your skin, even when it looks great already, because skincare makes a huge difference even on technically perfect skin because everyone ages and is affected by their environment. Anyway, I read all skincare and incidentally food ingredient lists methodically. And my opinion is that most skincare products are overpriced and don't have effective ingredients. Even some that actively damage your outer skin barrier. Even though they have temporary positive, superficial effects such as hyaluronic acid, which makes your skin appear smooth and moisturize. But it isn't actually good for your skin because it breaks down your outer barrier. Of course, I read all the ingredient labels on the products Daisy scent. And her products have such natural pure ingredients that are packed to the brim with effective ingredients that actually work. I want to preface this by saying this is not a paid ad. It's not a sponsored ad, Daisy isn't even expecting this, I just really enjoyed her products and I saw huge improvements in my skin. So I just wanted to go over kind of what I saw and what I look for in skincare because I think it's important for everyone to take care of their skin and their bodies. And this is just my experience with this particular situation. And with Daisy's products. Daisy's products are different in that they're made to work because she wanted to make them work for her own skin when she was having bad acne scarring issues. They're not made like a normal skincare product, which is one that is just made to look nice. So people will buy it in fancy packages. So a marketing team can justify high prices. And where they just try to put filler ingredients preservatives so the last longer and make products that it doesn't really matter if they make a difference because people will buy them anyway because they're not sure if they're making a difference or not. Especially if your skin is already normal, you don't really know if a product is working or not. Because you think oh well my skin looks the same. Or maybe it looks slightly better right after I put this on. So this must be working. Stacy 52:49 It's really easy to sell skincare products that aren't effective because it's it's not an easy thing for an individual person to determine if a skincare product is specifically working or not. So daisies products are made to work because she needed gentle products that would also drastically improve her sensitive skin some textural and color issues at the time. So she made sure to really research and make sure the products that she was using were actually effective and that actually had a difference in improving skin. This is why it is so important to do your own research, reading scientific journals, and studies and finding what products and active skincare ingredients actually work with skin to improve it visibly and get results. Because companies with huge marketing budgets aren't going to be doing the research to find those pure ingredients that actually work. They're going to be packaging nice products, putting preservatives so they can stay on shelves longer. And making sure that right when you put the product on there's a small superficial result and then putting the fillers in the things that don't really make a difference so they can sell these products at a higher price point. Anyway, the weeks leading up to the interview with Daisy I had been having some redness and texture issues. And right when I tried her vitamin C serum and cream, I saw my skin really brighten and the texture was smoothed out instantly. And especially as I slept overnight, her products are gentler on my skin than others I've used so it doesn't cause the redness and irritation that some effective products can also cause and I found her products to be really effective and actually helping my skin look really glowy and smooth out the imperfections. Her products are gentle they're on my skin so they don't really irritate it and I really saw great effects from using it. I've never used vitamin C based products before. And using her products made me realize how the content untreated and fresh vitamin C really does help the skin look glowy and super healthy. 55:08 Her products were really good and effective top notch skincare that I really saw give great results, especially for some of the redness and texture issues I was having. So I am planning to keep incorporating some of her products, as well as some type of vitamin C into my skincare routine. Even as my skin is getting a lot healthier and has been really glowing recently, due to some of the other products I've been using and Daisy's vitamin C based products. I'm actually really happy with where my skin is right now. And I think I can help it keep getting better and just feel healthy and glowing. I really don't take any amount of healthy skin for granted now. And really do my best to try to take care of it when I do have it. I guess that's the benefit of losing something, you tend to value it more when you have it back in any capacity, and are also then better equipped to take care of it for the future. Like Daisy says it's not worth obsessing over perfection in your skin appearance or business. And instead, it's best to appreciate where you are currently. And the things that you do have. I agree that you won't find happiness in superficial things. And even with the people who only want to be around you for superficial reasons. It's almost better to be imperfect so you can find situations and people who will want to be with you and support you. No matter what you look like, or how perfect or imperfect you are. That's my philosophical TED talk for the day. Thanks for coming, everyone. I hope you enjoyed learning about business mindset, and even some skincare advice mixed in with this episode with the founder of banish Daisy. Thank you again, Daisy for coming on. I learned so much and appreciate the way you look at business and life. Also, listeners, let me know in the comments or email [email protected] and tell me if you prefer all video episodes, or episodes with video intros. Or if you're listening to the whole thing on a podcast app and don't care about the video. I'm deciding what to do for future episodes and I'll keep your comments in mind when I record episodes in the future. Thank you for listening to this episode of The her SEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you're listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments at [email protected] that's [email protected]. Thanks again.
Contact Daisy Jing
Website: Banish.com Instagram: Banish company handle is at @banishacnescars and at @banish. Her personal one is at @Daiserz89 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/daiserz89
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18 oct. 2020· The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money
Beaugen
Tu-Hien Le is the Founder & CEO of BeauGen, a mommy lifestyle brand whose mission is to make mommying feel good. Inspired after having her first child, Tu-Hien and her husband started BeauGen to address the pain and struggle of breastfeeding. Since launching into the market in 2016, BeauGen has helped tens of thousands of women find success with their breastfeeding journey. Tu-Hien has a passion for connecting with motivated entrepreneurs and is now coaching business owners how to build, scale, and make money in their own product-based ecommerce business. Tu-Hien lives in Orlando, FL with her husband and daughter. Connect with Tu-Hien via Instagram @tuhien.le and @beaugenmom Watch this conversation on YouTube: [embed] https://youtu.be/jaEFBJOixHY [/embed] Tu-Hien Le 0:00 I've never run a company before. So it was a lot of self doubt of Who am I to think that I can do this? Or I've never done this before. Am I good enough to be able to do this? And once I realized I was thinking that way and like limiting myself before I even tried. I was like, why am I limiting myself? And that's why I really seek out the different coaches and mentors to help me kind of break that mindset and say, you know, why can't you who's to tell you that you cannot reach these big goals that you have? And like, yeah, that's right. Stacy Caprio 0:37 Hi, and welcome to the Hurst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be. Listen along with Stacy each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams. So you can learn how to build your two hand is an incredible businesswoman and we get to talk to her in this episode of the podcast. She started her company Beaugen and has grown it to incredible heights. You'll love this episode, if you've ever been interested in starting your own original idea product based business, especially if you have no idea how you would ever get started to hand shares how she came up with the idea of Beaugen to solve her own problem. And you'll learn how she was able to go from product idea to physical production, how she tested and iterated to get to her final sellable product. Even though she was solving their own problem and was her own target market. She talks about how thorough she has been about market research and making sure she's putting out a product that exactly what her target market wants. In this episode, I was trying to get her to share the one thing she has done to have a successful business. And I'm so grateful, she was quick to call me out and explain. There are so many things that go into having a successful business. It is not just one or two golden nuggets, you'll enjoy this conversation if you want to get into the mind of someone who has built a successful business based on her own idea, not one that was built using one tip or trick, but one that has been built over consistent effort and hard work overtime. Like all successful businesses really are. Let's hear what she has to say. hi to him, thank you so much for coming on. I love your company. And your journey is so inspiring. I was hoping we could start with a quick overview of how you started and your background and why you started Beaugen.
Tu-Hien Le Founder of Beaugen
Tu-Hien Le 2:50 Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the podcast is super exciting. And I would love to share a little bit of my story with you. In 2015, I had my first daughter. And from that I experienced my own personal difficulty and pain from breastfeeding and pumping. And that's the sort of the genesis of Beaugen. And how, in my discovery, I found that I wasn't the only one that felt the same way. And I talked to many other moms and moms could meet in the mom community.
Momtrepreneur Solution
And a lot of us had shared this, this same pain and discomfort and breastfeeding and pumping. And I was like, Well, if I'm not the only one that has this problem, all these other moms have this problem, why can't we do something about it? So my husband and I actually kind of decided to develop something, a product, we didn't even exactly know what it was when we started develop a solution to solve the issues of discomfort and pumping. And we really took a grassroots approach. So instead of us taking the I have a solution, and here it is, I hope everybody loves it. We really actually, you know, spoke with hundreds of moms to really hone in and figure out what was the pain point. And then and then kind of back into salt solution from there. And that's how Beaugen started. And so it's we've always been a very customer centric company. And we always really listened to what our customers wanted and and their pain point and try to solve it from there. Stacy Caprio 4:33 That's awesome. I think many businesses fail because people don't take into consideration the customers and what they really want. So that's really cool to know that you did that. Where did you find that? customers to kind of talk to to figure out their pain points. Tu-Hien Le 4:52 Yeah, so that's a great question. I start off with just talking within my own network, talking to other mom friends and You know, my cousins and my sisters that just recently had babies. I asked them, like, how do you find solutions? Or where do you find information about mom things? And they always said, Oh, try this blog, or that or Facebook community. And it turns out for new moms, Facebook groups are huge. So within these Facebook groups, there would be like, 10 20,000 moms in these different groups, I would just pose the question like, what's the most difficult thing about pumping? Or what is your biggest challenge with breastfeeding? And then they would comment and and I would just really be methodical and documenting what people would say as far as what their pain points are, find like the common denominator, and then really hone in like, okay, it's actually this specific pain. So like, what can we do to solve this? And really just having a lot of open conversations with different moms and their experiences and seeing if we could find like, a common denominator really, and then testing it out? Stacy Caprio 6:01 That's awesome. I am curious to know, what were the first steps you took when creating your prototype? It's something that if I were manufacturing a product, I would have no idea even Where to start?
Starting Her Company & Production Iteration
Tu-Hien Le 6:15 Yeah, that's a really good question. So my background is in finance, so I don't have an engineering or manufacturing background at all. So again, I just googled and started talking to people in my community, in my thing, like the entrepreneurial community, and just ask them like, Okay, if I want to start to develop some sort of product, like, what should I do, I'm not a, I'm not a maker, I'm not an engineer. And so they would point me to these different resources. And one of them is a local maker shop. And that's when we, for your audience who may not know maker shops are where people go, and they'll do like wood work, or like electronics, and robotics and sewing, they do all sorts of tinkering, and invention, inventing of things. So we went to maker shop and ask them like, Okay, this is our constraint, this is a problem we're trying to solve, like, What? What can we do? This is what I think this product will look like. And then kind of brainstorm with them and developing the product. And the the, the product development phase is like really interesting, because I really took into consideration all the information that the different moms have told and shared with me about what their pain points were, and then try to distill that to the maker who was like helping us develop our prototype. So yeah, and it was like a really fun journey. I mean, in our first, the first version of our product, we probably developed over 40 prototypes. And I probably, I think I tested every single one of them. And like each one, it was all about testing and getting a little bit better each time. And then, yeah, and then, you know, we got like a very small set of like 20 or 30, moms who were really wanting to help us find the solution, we and we'd send them the prototype and ask them to try it out and give us feedback. And with each feedback, we just kind of keep refining to get better and better. Stacy Caprio 8:20 Wow, that sounds like a really intensive process. Tu-Hien Le 8:25 Yeah, it's a it is it can be it's also fun. And you like learn so much during the journey too. So you might have a preconceived notion of what you think the solution is and what people want. But then when you give it to put in the hands of the customer, they'll tell you something totally different that maybe you didn't even consider. So then you then you start to, you know, tweak and change your prototype, or maybe even the messaging of your product based on their feedback. So a big thing that I took into consideration when developing, building out our breastbone cushion for Beaugen was, we had a, we had a problem solution fit. But then it was also important to have a solution market fit to we can I mean, we solved a problem, but does the market actually want it? So we really took that into consideration by talking to as many customers as we could. Stacy Caprio 9:24 Awesome. So how did you know like when it was the prototype, like when it was finally ready. Tu-Hien Le 9:31 At that time, we were probably on version like 42. And we had a good set of data from our testers and they gave us a lot of feedback like this is, you know, it really helped with comfort, it really helped with fit. And that's when we knew like those were the two key selling points of our product and that's when we say like okay, now it's time to go to market. And what we actually did was for our first version of the breast pump cushions we did a Kickstarter campaign. And a Kickstarter campaign is a crowdfunding campaign. And so we launched the crowdfunding campaign and said, Okay, if we can raise $20,000, then the market is telling us they want this solution. And if we can't raise that much money, then the market doesn't want the solution that was kind of our test of product market fit. And then, you know, after our Kickstarter, Kickstarter campaign, we we raised a little bit over $24,000, I'm like, okay, so there's something here, the market wants a solution. So let's really build this out. And that's when we took that money from our crowdfunding campaign. And we started going into manufacturing and building our tooling. And, and being able to produce an in mass quantity.
Finding a Manufacturer
Stacy Caprio 10:51 Wow, that's really cool. So did you how did you find your manufacturer? Tu-Hien Le 10:57 So the manufacturing, search is, I must say, it's not easy. It's really just about like, calling around and talking to people. Um, you know, we went to a couple of trade shows where they had, like, different manufacturing and materials, companies, and just having conversation with them and really seeing if they understood, understood our vision, understood our product. And, and then, you know, just trying it from there and seeing who could produce and make our product at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time. Stacy Caprio 11:39 Exactly. That's really cool. So once you started manufacturing, and everything, how did you kind of figure out how much product to make at a time? Mm hmm. And did you that whole process? Tu-Hien Le 11:54 Yeah, that's actually a really good question, too. So we did limited small runs, not knowing how big our market was. So honestly, it was kind of like a guess. Like, we had pre orders from our Kickstarter campaign. So we knew that we have to at least make a certain number of breast pump cushions. But beyond that, we're like, you know, I think that we could sell more if we really ramp up our marketing and advertising campaigns. So it was kind of a guess, like, a lot of it was just trial and error and testing, and seeing how we can penetrate the market and like, increase brand awareness, doing it methodically, and keep testing our audience out. Stacy Caprio 12:41 So how long were you guys profitable? Like, right off the bat? Because you had your Kickstarter? or How long did it take you to hit like when you're finally making profit each month?
Launching on Kickstarter
Tu-Hien Le 12:55 Yeah, I would say for us, the Kickstarter campaign helped. And we probably broke even, like, pretty quickly, just based on our demand, and the cost of fulfilling all the orders, the pre orders that we had, so if we at least broke even from our initial investment. But from there, it was all about Okay, now that we broke even how do we, how do we grow this company? How do we grow Beaugen to like, the next level? And? Yeah, so it took a lot of like, talking, seeking out mentors, seeking out coaches, a lot of reading surrounding myself with other successful entrepreneurs, and asking a lot of questions, asking a lot of questions. what works, what doesn't work? Why didn't work? Why did it work? Being very curious, and then willing to try new strategies as well? Stacy Caprio 13:53 Interesting. Yeah. And I was, I was just listening to your TLC podcast, and you kind of had mentioned a similar kind of mindset shift where you were at five k months, and that you're able to get to the 65 k months. Uh huh. Really awesome. And I was wondering, what was the biggest part of your mindset shift that you think contributed to that? Tu-Hien Le 14:20 Oh, that's such a good question. Um, you know, I really kind of had to look inside myself and think about what was it that was limiting me and I would say, like, my limiting beliefs of what I could and could not do really held me back. For a long time. I was almost like, being very conservative. Like, you know, I didn't have any, I've never run a company before or built a company before. So it was a lot of self doubt of, who am I to think that I can do this or I've never done this before. "Am I good enough to be able to do this and once I realized that I was thinking that way, and like limiting myself before I even tried. I was like, you know, I shouldn't even Why am I limiting myself? And that's why I really seeked out the different coaches and mentors to help me kind of break that mindset and say, you know, why can't you who say that who's to tell you that you cannot reach these big goals that you have? And like, yeah, that's right." So I really just shifted my mindset like, well, let's try, there's nothing wrong with, quote, failure. That's how you learn. So with each failure is just a stepping stone to get better and stronger, faster, smarter, so so I changed my mindset of like, I needed to get it perfect to let me just try and see what happens. And then I just started taking more risks. And then which, with the more risks I took, the more reward I got, but it was all calculated risk. But I was willing to at least, like take that leap and bet on myself and my ability to figure it out. Stacy Caprio 16:08 Awesome. Wow. And do you find Do you have a goal setting process? Or do you kind of play it by ear?
Goal Setting Process
Tu-Hien Le 16:17 Oh, I definitely have a goal setting process in within my company. Within Beaugen, we do our OKRs, which stands for objectives and key results. And we're really a firm believer that you don't improve at things unless you measure them. And one of our big objectives is customer loyalty. And, you know, expanding our market, and then which within each of those objectives, we have key results in KPIs key performance indicators that we can measure to make sure that we're moving in the right direction. And I'm a firm believer in setting goals because you don't have goals. And you never know, when you get there, or even you don't even know where you're going. So it really gives you have good direction on in the progress that you're making. Stacy Caprio 17:12 Awesome. So what do you find, has contributed to increasing your customer loyalty?
Beaugen Customer Service
Tu-Hien Le 17:19 customer loyalty every day, a lot of different factors. At Beaugen Customer service is a huge, huge part of our customer loyalty, we really value the experience that the customers have, when they're interacting with our brand. We really take into consideration how what they think and especially how they feel because our product, isn't it during this very sensitive time for a woman. It's like a big transition time you just gave birth, and now you're feeding a tiny baby, that's depending on you. So yes, so we just want to make sure that we really take into consideration how they feel. And so all the feedback we get from our customers, we really take that and incorporate into our brand and how we how we communicate back with them. So we'll you know, we'll put that in our social media posts and create blog content, video content that addresses how they think and feel. And that hopefully, like creates a stronger bond between our brand and our customers. Stacy Caprio 18:28 Cool. And so what could you kind of describe what marketing channels you currently use for beaugen?
Beaguen Marketing Strategy
Tu-Hien Le 18:38 Yeah, so we take an omni channel approach for Beaugen we have we have a content marketing strategy. So we do a lot of blogging, and we create YouTube videos, we have Pinterest, different social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and we even do a little bit of Tick Tock as well. And we try to be wherever our customers are, and want to be a relatable brand that has fun. Like, you know, we want to have laughs because being a mom, like you have to have a bit of humor in it. That's all like all the sacrifice that we make. And but at the same time, we want to convey that we are at Beaugen we are there to support the moms and show empathy for how they're feeling during this time in their life. Stacy Caprio 19:32 Do you find that you have a lot of mom customers referring other customers to your store? Tu-Hien Le 19:39 Oh yeah, definitely. Beaugen was built on grassroots um, word of mouth organic growth. A lot of it was just within the very active and strong Facebook mom communities just them talking amongst themselves. Moms would ask Hey, I have like that's a really great Painful pumping or I need? Is there a solution for pumping and other moms would say, hey should check out Beaugen. And that's how a lot of our initial traction started. And it's just, you know, almost recently, maybe the beginning of 2019, when we just started seeing a lot more attraction, and that's when we started doing more intentional marketing and the different channels and advertising. Stacy Caprio 20:28 Oh, and what type of ads do you run? And which have you seen the best results from Tu-Hien Le 20:36 you. So we have a pretty detailed ad strategy. But we do all sorts of ads, mostly on Facebook, and a little bit on Pinterest as well. Traffic ads, conversion ads, and then when we run videos, views that helps with our account growth and just brand awareness as well. Yeah, so it all it all definitely helps as far as increasing our brand awareness and helping our account grow. Stacy Caprio 21:04 And what would you say that your biggest marketing success has been? And what have you learned from it? Tu-Hien Le 21:13 Oh, our biggest marketing success. I don't know if I could pinpoint to one thing that's been successful, I can say that for marketing, and it's just been a series of testing, what works and what doesn't. So we would constantly run quick experiments on maybe this copy, or a video instead of images, or on this platform versus, like on Facebook or on Pinterest, and just really constantly refreshing our content that we're advertising. And being very methodical and being intentional. And measuring the results, we're able to see what resonates best with our customers. And then and then kind of doubling down on what's working and then cutting loose what what doesn't work. Stacy Caprio 22:10 Exactly. Testing is huge. And that's great to hear that it's helped you guys really double down on what's working. Tu-Hien Le 22:18 Yeah, totally. Stacy Caprio 22:20 What has there been anything that you've had really high hopes for? And that maybe hasn't worked out in the way that you wanted it to? Tu-Hien Le 22:29 High Hopes? I mean, we've tried so many different, different strategies, I would say that I've never really had like specific high hopes on one thing, it's always just been like taking it small steps and building from there. Like I wouldn't just be so laser focused on one solution and like everything had to work, or else for this one solution, or else everything's going to come crashing down. I feel like that could be a recipe for failure in a way that would might make you like disheartened and might make you quit just taking like small steps to get closer to the right solution. So I would say even like it product development, in marketing, and advertising is all about just taking small steps to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Business Mindset
Stacy Caprio 23:23 That's great advice, because you don't want to get discouraged by one thing, and then just kind of quit right away when it doesn't work. Tu-Hien Le 23:30 Right. So I would say like one of the worst things to do is to spend, like, you know, so much money in so much time building one solution or sticking to one strategy. And then after all that time you realize it doesn't work. I feel like there's definitely faster ways to find indicators and answers of whether that solution or strategy would work. So if you get a little bit of feedback along the journey, you can continue to tweak, get better. And then that way you're not, quote failing in one big firing ball flame, you just have a little bit of feedback and just continue to get better. Stacy Caprio 24:08 So what would be your advice to anyone who's currently struggling with marketing or growing their e-commerce store? Tu-Hien Le 24:20 That's a really good question. As far as struggling, I would ask them to really look within themselves and see and ask what is holding them back? Are they looking for perfection? Because my motto is always progress over perfection. Even if your idea your solution or your marketing campaign might be 70% ready, I would launch it because the faster you can get feedback, the faster you can get, like, tweak it and get better. So I'm always a proponent of just launching your idea launching your campaign, putting out in the market and the market will tell you whether they like it or not. And not to not to strive for perfection, because in my opinion, perfection doesn't exist. Stacy Caprio 25:12 Are you guys still iterating and improving your product as you get more feedback? Or is it kind of said how it is right now? Tu-Hien Le 25:20 Oh, definitely, we are actually constantly improving everything in the business from our marketing campaigns, our content, our product, our product offerings, we're always in tune with what our moms and our customers are saying, and taking that feedback and getting better. So yes, we are currently in more product development, and coming up with new content, and coming up with new marketing, advertising campaigns and everything. So it's like a constant, constant process. Stacy Caprio 25:58 Yeah. Wow. So I also I noticed your site has a few partnership products, it displays a could you kind of talk about how you choose your partners and what the benefits of those partnerships are? Tu-Hien Le 26:14 Yeah. So this, again, kind of came from the feedback we get from our customers, we'd ask them like, what else can we do for you? What? How can we make your your experience with Beaugen better, and people would name like, Oh, I wish you'd offer storage containers or nipple balm, or, you know, these different products. So once customers started telling us this, I would go in and try to source products that might fit that solution. And I was just lucky to be able to find a couple of these companies that were partnered with. So Junobie are the reusable storage bags, tiny human supply makes organic skin products for moms and babies, and bow keys, another like parent started company that helps with breastfeeding solution as well, and add it to our store. And I said, I'm not 100% sure our customers like this stuff. But the only way to find out is to launch it onto our website and see what they say. And so far out to all of them have been a success. The moms love those products. We're happy to continue to offer them. This goes back again to the I don't have the answer to everything, but the market will tell me if they like it or not, and just launch it and see what happens. Stacy Caprio 27:29 Awesome. So is that set up? Where are you wholesaling? Or is it kind of an affiliate partnership? Yeah, we are partnering with them as a wholesaler. Do they also wholesale your products on their site? Tu-Hien Le 27:43 not currently. No. Stacy Caprio 27:45 Do you guys have an affiliate program? Or have you tried the influencer marketing at all?
Beaugen Affiliate Program
Tu-Hien Le 27:51 Yeah, so affiliate program has been really huge for us. And we're actively looking to expand our Beaugen affiliate program. The mom influencers have been amazing, cuz we all know that people love following influencers and seeing what products they like and what they do. And so they've been really been great at driving more brand awareness to our company. Stacy Caprio 28:19 Do you guys track the sales attributed to influencers? Or is it more just a brand awareness campaign? Tu-Hien Le 28:27 Oh, for the affiliates, we have a program that keeps track of all the sales that they influence, and then they get a percentage of the sales that they they influence. Stacy Caprio 28:37 So do you guys just do affiliate for the influencers? Or do you have an affiliate for just regular moms? Tu-Hien Le 28:45 Right now? We're just doing affiliates for influencers, but we are open to for moms as well, that's going to be in the future. Stacy Caprio 28:54 I was interested to get your perspective. When you guys run ads, do you measure success based on break even acquiring a customer based on customer lifetime value? Or how do you measure like whether an ad is a success? Mm hmm. Tu-Hien Le 29:14 So our biggest measurement for any ads on any platform that we run would be our return on investment. So as long as that number makes sense, I would call that us quote success and just continue to run that ad or maybe make tweaks to see if we can improve the performance. Stacy Caprio 29:33 Have you guys seen success using Tik Tok so far?
Tik Tok Strategy
Tu-Hien Le 29:39 So the funny thing is, I'm the primary content creator on Tik tok, and it's fun, but since Instagram reels has come out, I think Instagram reels is algorithm is really trying to compete with tik tok. So, if I film a video on tik tok, I also upload it reels and actually the views on reels is much higher than on tik tok. So, for example, one video I uploaded on Tick Tock might have had maybe 300 to 500 views. Whereas when I uploaded that same video to Instagram reels it had, you know, 80,000 views. So, I mean, I use both just to see and because it doesn't hurt, I made the same video so I can just upload it on Instagram and on tik tok. And just to see what does the best but right now Instagram real seems to have more views because obviously I think they really want to promote that functionality. But I do enjoy Tik Tok because I think it's fun. Stacy Caprio 30:44 Yeah, cuz Tik Tok. It's actually kind of good that the reels are getting more views, because Tik tok, maybe bought out or even just kind of changed in the US anyway. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I've also personally found like, when you're one of the first to hop on a new platform, it seems to work better too, because they try to promote you. And ads are usually cheaper. Yeah, definitely. Awesome. So I think last question here is, if you were going back to yourself, when you're first starting your business, what would you tell yourself? Tu-Hien Le 31:26 What would I tell myself? I'd probably say, believe in yourself. And don't try to be perfect. Just try and progress over perfection. If you just try. You'll learn so much from that. And you'll continue to progress and get better. Stacy Caprio 31:46 I love that advice. Awesome. So where can listeners connect with you? And find you online? Tu-Hien Le 31:53 Yeah, so you guys can find me on Instagram, my handle is at @tuhien.le. So that's TUHIEN dot Le. And you can also follow my company Beaugenmom, also on Instagram @Beaugenmom Stacy Caprio 32:15 Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed learning from your journey. And I hope to talk again soon. one takeaway from this episode is that to end didn't assume she knew everything she needed to know, to create the perfect product. Even though her solution originated from her own pain point. And she was technically her own target market, she still went out of her way to talk to mom she knew and networked in Facebook groups to figure out how she could provide the absolute best solution that would help not just her, but everybody with a similar problem. This seemed to really help her down the line with her marketing message. And knowing what people were thinking and saying about the problem. So she could present her product solution in the best possible light that would appeal to her ideal customers, and that she would have the best possible product because she had gotten feedback from so many of her ideal target market, and had really tailored the product. So it was exactly what everybody wanted. It's so smart, really, and it seems so basic. But there are so many entrepreneurs, or would be entrepreneurs who skip this step. And don't take the time to truly understand their customer, and figure out how to best serve them. If a business is serving their customers needs and knows exactly what those needs are, as well as how they can best package and present the solution to the customer. That is a business that will stay in business and flourish like two hands. It is when business start to assume that they know what the customer needs that they also start to fail, too. Han was able to double validate her idea by launching the Kickstarter that allowed her to get not just people's word that Oh, I like your product. Yeah, this is a product that I want. But also their money backing their word as well. And it allowed her to truly see her idea was something that people not only wanted, but they were also truly happy to pay for. validating your idea with your market is so important and so often underestimated. And to hand is a great example of someone who really goes above and beyond and who went above and beyond to validate her business's product market fit. Another key takeaway is she didn't let any inexperience or lack of knowledge stop her. Not that she truly had either, but when she wasn't sure about How to develop a product as she had never done that before. She started talking to others and asking how she could go about doing so. Which led her to finding her local maker shop something that to me sounds like it is straight out of a Harry Potter novel. And the local maker shop allowed her to make her first few or really 40 iterations to develop her initial product offering. How many times have you had a really cool business idea, and then stopped thinking about it or working on it? Right when you came to a roadblock of something that you'd never done before, such as develop a product prototype? Probably a lot. If you think about it, at least when I'm thinking about my own experience, that's happened to me quite a bit. An important lesson from two hands journey is that you can always ask those around you for advice and for help. And you can always take steps one at a time to bring the business in your mind to reality that or you can visit your local maker shop, and have them just help you make your first prototype like two handed. It's also important not to get frustrated. If your first prototype isn't perfect, I love how to hand talks about making and trying over 40 prototypes. And then sending all of those prototypes to a group of 20 to 30. Moms, so they could try them and get their feedback, as well as she herself trying every single prototype. Imagine the patience and just the time that would have taken to really get every single person's feedback on 40 different versions of your product, trying 40 different versions yourself and giving feedback, changing the prototype slightly, and then getting a new one and repeating that process 40 times it really shows her dedication, and how focused she was on bringing a product that was really good. And that actually worked really well to market. Thinking about this if you are interested in starting a product based business, just know that there will likely be a lot of trial and error involved and a lot of testing and iterations that you have to go through before you develop your final product. I found it interesting that both Michael asik in episode one and two hand in this episode, both mentioned how they both went to trade shows as a key part of the process that jumpstart did different parts of their business. asac was able to use a tradeshow to find a licensing partner so we could expand his design distribution and to hand went to a trade show to find different manufacturing and material companies to see who would be able to understand her vision and produce her product at a reasonable cost and timeframe. The takeaway I got from this is if you're stuck, or if you need a partner for distribution or production, or any other type of your business, try googling trade shows in your industry area and finding someone to work with at a trade show it's always worth looking into because there are lots of business partners and potential business partners who do go to trade shows that you can connect with at a trade show two hands answer to the mindset shift question of what changed when she was able to jump and grow from her regular five k month months to 65 k a month months, really struck a chord with me. Since she had never run a company before Beaugen, which I pronounce incorrectly the entire episode. Sorry about that, guys. So she had never run a company before Beaugen. And she had an inner voice telling herself Who am I to think that I could do this? Am I even good enough to be able to do this? And this inner voice, which I think we've all had at some point, especially when we're doing something new. It was limiting her from attempting to set bigger goals. And that was limiting her from even attempting the bigger goals. And if you're not trying something, there's no way you're actually going to get there. So it was making it impossible for her to take her company to the next level. She seemed to ask questions to dig into her mindset. As she explains in the episode she asked, Why am I limiting myself and trying to dig into that to really get to the root of it. What really seemed to help her was finding different coaches and mentors that helped her reframe her limiting beliefs in mindset to a more limitless mindset of who is to tell you that you can't reach those big goals you have. And that really allowed her to actually shift her goals from playing small To bigger, which allowed her to actually take the steps to accomplish it. It's crazy how our thoughts, goals and beliefs have the power to create our reality. And it really is true if you don't think something is possible. That is what defines your reality and your upper limits, you're kind of trapping yourself in your own box, it's when you start to expand what you think is truly possible, that you even give yourself the option to get there. I love how to hand talks about becoming comfortable with trying and failure so you can learn and get better and get faster and stronger. She talks about this throughout the conversation, how you should focus on progress over perfection. And this is great advice for anyone starting a company. I love how she talks about if you think your marketing campaign is 70%. Ready, launch it, then. Because then you get faster feedback, and you can make it better and then launch it, as opposed to trying to make it 100% ready, because how will you really know without getting the feedback from the market, that it is actually ready, you won't, you'll just be spending more time getting something that isn't actually much better into the market. So if you're able to launch, get the feedback relaunch, you'll be able to make your product much better, much faster. And this is something to hand has really taken to heart with her company and her products and her marketing. And everything to him sums this up in a great quote when she says you put it out into the market and the market will tell you if they like it or not. Perfection doesn't exist. However, there's the other end of the coin where some entrepreneurs today have started glorifying failure as an achievement in and of itself. And that's not the point of this, you're not just supposed to fail for the sake of failure. And to not emphasizing failure in and of itself, but rather, what she's able to learn each time she fails, and how she can apply that to her next try. So each time she gets better and better. So she's not just failing and failing for failing sake. But she's able to learn from each iteration and keep improving something which is important for all entrepreneurs, similar to her viewpoint on taking risks, it's not worth it to take wild, crazy risks just for the sake of taking risks. Instead, it's about taking calculated careful risks, where you're betting on something that's not a crazy risk, there's actually something in it that you've either seen others be successful with or that you know has a chance of being successful for whatever reason. And you're betting on that and yourself and your ability to figure it out. And you're also going in knowing what the risks and the rewards are to give yourself the best chance for actual success. I think the key with taking risk is not going all in meaning you know that if you fail, it doesn't mean your bank account is wiped out that you have to file for bankruptcy, that your business is wiped out. Instead, you go in knowing that if you fail, you simply get the markets feedback, incorporating that into your next version. And you're able to keep going, not putting all your chips on the table with failure. And that's not what the point is about. The point is to use the potential for failure, or semi failure as a learning experience. And knowing that you have chances to try again, I also liked when two hand explained how if you get laser focused on a single solution, and that comes crashing down, it could be a recipe for failure in a way that would make you disheartened and quit. It's much better to take small steps to get closer to the right solution and figure out what works and what doesn't, then to put all of your chips on one basket again, and hope that the one thing you're doing works, something that two hands company envision really embodies is that your business is never static. She's made so many iterations, she's always changing her product and her messaging, and improving her business and talking to customers. And I think this is representative of any business that wants to stay relevant and keep improving and growing in the market, like her company Beaugen you have to be in tune with your customer, get their feedback, change your messaging, change your product. It's all about getting feedback and getting better. Constantly. I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking myself included at times, that once you have a successful business, it is done and it will be successful forever. But things are constantly changing and evolving. And you can always be testing improving to grow your business and serve your customers more effectively. It's beautiful how to handmade her company to support moms, and how Beaugen does its best have empathy toward customers and support them at every step. Which is likely why her company has been so successful and has so many referrals and her Returning customers. An important takeaway is that businesses who value and support their customers like Beaugen are able to build strong customer relationships and have a lot of returning customers, which at the end of the day, is the lifeblood of a successful business. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Her.CEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you're listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments.
Contact Tu-Hien Le
Instagram @tuhien.le and @beaugenmom Beaugen Site
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3. How to Create a Podcast: How I Started My Own Podcast & The Tools I Use
18 oct. 2020· The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money
How to Create a Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWZbHx_wPgo
Podcast Transcription Tool
I decided to use Otter.ai to create my podcast video transcripts because it works (pretty much) flawlessly, and is only $10/month that you can use when you need on a monthly on and off basis, so I got it for this month to transcribe all 6 of my episodes. You can also use it for free for small audio files, and that's how I tried it and saw how amazing it was so I had to get premium which is something I don't usually do. You literally upload an audio file to Otter, it takes a few minutes to process it, and then gives you a perfectly transcribed text version ready to copy paste, with all punctuation, amazing spelling, and speaker names and timestamps. I couldn't believe how perfectly it worked, especially because I'd been playing around with Google's Demo transcription tools, which had so much trouble getting punctuation right, among other issues. If you use my referral link to sign up all I get is another month of Otter.ai free, no affiliate money or anything like that, and I love it so feel free to send the free months my way because I'm sure you'll love it as well.
My Podcasting Story
Because it was my own rule that I didn't listen to podcasts, I thought they were a waste of time. And things that could be summarized in much shorter bullet points. I just really disliked podcasts, which is so funny because now, I obviously have a podcast. Hi, and welcome to the Hearst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be. Listen along with Stacy each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams so you can learn how to build your own. Welcome to the episode where I'm going to walk you guys through my podcast story. Starting with why I ended up starting my podcast to what tools I use for each step. And to make it easy for anyone thinking about starting a podcast to get started. Or if you're just curious about the behind the scenes of how podcasts are made and what goes into it, then this will be a fun episode to listen to. I've been thinking about starting my her SEO podcast for over six months, from six months ago from now. And I kept pushing it to the bottom of my to do list. Because it was such a daunting task with so many variables and moving parts. First, I'd have to decide exactly what guests I wanted on, then I'd have to email them and see if they were interested, then workout scheduling, and then eventually choose times to record put that in my calendar, then I'd have to have all the proper equipment. And what type of recording software would I use? Choose the type of recording software, choose the hosting for the podcast, which I didn't even know was a thing until I really started researching it, I'd have to edit every single episode, or hire someone to do it. And I have to say, editing podcast episode takes so much time. I only interviewed guests for 30 minutes apiece, but it took me hours to edit each episode. I keep getting better as I go along. But editing podcast episodes is a very very dull, dull task. And it takes a long time. It's the same with editing YouTube videos, it takes so long to really do a good job. And it's not my favorite activity, which is my least favorite part about starting this podcast is editing the episodes. And it's actually the one reason that I might not film as many episodes in the future unless at some point, if the podcast does start making money, and I can hire someone to edit. It's very, if you ever have edited a YouTube video or a podcast video, you'll understand what I'm talking about. But before you actually do it yourself. I don't think you'll ever understand what I mean when I say it's a very difficult task, it's not something you want to do and it takes a lot of time. Anyway, the editing the episodes you have to either do it or hire someone to do it. Then there's the keyword research for YouTube keyword research for blog posts, keyword research for the podcast name, the podcast description, then there's figuring out how to post it on the different podcast networks and getting to rank for organic search, you've got to transcribe the episodes, you have to record the audio, video and video intros and outros. Record the actual audio of the sessions and use a tool to do so. And then you have to figure out how to post the podcast and promote it. You also have to make sure you have a good branding, figure out what images you want to use, maybe have a mini little photo shoot or other things and make sure you're setting up a brand for long term success. So much goes into each episode. And for me, it was daunting to think about, so I just kept pushing it to the bottom of my to do list. Since I wasn't sure when starting my podcast this month, I decided to finally dive into it. I wasn't sure if it would or ever will make any money at all. Or if I even will enjoy it enough to keep doing it past a few episodes. My goal was to keep my costs as low as possible. That's also my philosophy with everything I do even when something is making money. I tend to keep my costs pretty low or at least try to because anything can happen at any time and it's always better to have higher profit margins. Maybe that's something I take away from my days running ads for companies in my nine to five. But my goal is always to keep costs pretty low, but also to use tools that are very high quality. And I will spend money on things if they do work better than the free tools. So let's dive in the goal of my podcast. However, it was never an isn't really to make money from it. It's been able to talk to people who have done things that I admire, and to use the podcast as a learning opportunity that will help me and others listening, grow their own businesses, and really get inside the heads of people who are successful and have done things that I want to do personally or I simply want to understand how their mind works, and get takeaways that I can use in my own life in business. First, I want to give a huge shout out to Nick Loper the owner of the Side Hustle Nation Podcast, which you should all go listen to that really I'm going to be talking about Nick and his podcast quite a bit in this episode, because he's had a huge influence. He's pretty much the inspiration for me starting a podcast and I'll kind of go into why that is. Before Nick a few years ago. I never listened to any podcasts ever. I would always listen to music instead, if I ever had any downtime. If I was on a bus or at the airport or just walking or getting groceries, I would either have silence or music. I had been on next email list for a few years the side hustle nation email list. And at first, I never listened to any of his podcasts. Because it was my own rule that I didn't listen to podcasts, I thought they were a waste of time, and things that could be summarized in much shorter bullet points. However, I always read all of Nick's PDF podcast summaries, because they were so interesting with great side hustle case studies and tips. I never listened to the audio, but I would read all of his summaries and I love getting his emails. One day, he asked readers to reply to an email if they had an interesting story, because he was working on a secret project. I was intrigued and replied with my her co website investing story. He replied back and said it wasn't a fit for the project, but that he'd love to talk more. And feature me on the side hustle podcast if it was a fit. At the time I wasn't looking to go on any podcasts, but I felt pulled to say yes, for some reason.
Tips For Starting a Podcast
And to this day, I feel incredibly lucky or blessed to have gone on his podcast before I went on any other podcasts, simply because next process is so simple and amazing. And I've modeled many of my tools and own podcasting process after his. He has a pre-podcast interview where he hops on a call with each guest to learn more for 30 minutes or so, a few weeks before the actual podcast call. I don't do this with my podcast guests. But I think it's a smart move because it allows him to dig deeper into the person's business model and their thought processes so he can craft the best possible questions before hopping on the actual podcast recording call. Then, and this is an incredible part that has really inspired my podcasting to this day. He has each previous guest mail the next guest a professional quality ATR 2100 audio recording microphone when he mentioned this to me on the pre call. I remember thinking "Do I really need this?" I think I even said something along the lines of "I do I need that I'm not sure that that is really something that will make a difference." And I was super skeptical thinking he was being too perfectionist he However, having that microphone on my first podcast allowed the audio quality to be insanely crisp and perfect. This is so much more important than you might think initially. And a side note he mentioned on the podcast intro how I have a quiet voice. But he must have adjusted the audio and I have to adjust my own audio actually I do have a quiet voice. But you can't tell when listening because the audio on first podcast. It sounds impeccable. And right after that podcast and hearing it live, I was stunned at the difference a quality microphone made. I went out to Amazon, I bought my own ATR 2100 microphone, and I have used it on every podcast I've been featured on every podcast I record for her co having the professional quality microphone elevates the audio quality and the whole podcast experience for listeners. There have been some great podcasts I've listened to, that I've had to turn off. Because even though the content is so good, the audio is so scratchy and hard to listen to. Even though the content is great. It's safe to say I no longer think that Nick's request to male microphones to each guest is unreasonable or perfectionist like instead, I recognize it as a way to make the podcast audio, incredibly high quality, elevating the production value in the experience for all listeners, making people want to come back and listen to more because they know you'll have great content, but also great audio that won't hurt their ears or be hard to listen to. So far, I've had guests on that have all done podcasts before or even have their own podcast. So they've had high quality audio, and microphones in their own collection already. But I am considering a male out microphone option for future guests. If they start to fall into the computer only microphone category. Something I've taken away from Nick also is that he asked the best question I've ever heard on a podcast. And he comes at each topic with the mind of an entrepreneur who is interested in knowing the details of the business and starting the business himself. Which is unique from a lot of podcasters who sometimes will ask questions for the benefit of their audience instead of from the perspective of if I was doing this, what would I want to know. So this allows the episodes to be very educational, where you can learn actual tips to start the side hustles yourself and dive deeply into the subject matter, as opposed to surface skimming or stat spouting. His podcast is my favorite side hustle, entrepreneur podcast. And it's the podcast that inspired me to start listening to more podcasts. After I listened to my episode, I started listening to more of his episodes. And I started listening to a few of the other entrepreneurs I follow podcasts in. I especially do this during downtime if I'm doing a repetitive task, if I'm walking somewhere and don't want to be in silence if I'm at the airport, just any time when I have downtime I put in the podcast. And it's actually really nice to listen to. Sometimes you don't need to read a summary bullet point and you get to hear conversation and you get to hear stories and experiences. And it's a different way to learn that I had completely dismissed before being on Nick's podcast and then listening to more of his podcast. So if you are listening to this Thank you, Nick, because you definitely changed my life in the sense of podcasting and listening to podcasts. So since then, I've developed a handful of favorite podcasts that I listened to semi regularly. And I've grown to really enjoy the Nick side hustle nation episode featuring me, the Financial Independence Episode, that I'll put in the show notes so you can all check it out if you want to. Ended up being his second most downloaded for the year with over 60k downloads and it drove hundreds day of and thousands over time site visitors to her.co. And hundreds of people emailed me after it released. And for the next year after the release every single week. I'd get handfuls of emails from his listeners. I still get emails from his listeners. And it also gave me credibility. And it was a huge jumpstart for the her SEO brand. I was able to use that podcast episode on my resume and feature it in my applications to start speaking at a few events as an example of my experience and expertise. In addition to a few blog posts I'd written Podcasts can be a great way to showcase your expertise and show that you do have credibility on a certain subject. They can be a really great tool, either on your resume on your link Or even if you're just submitting to be on a different podcast, if you're submitting to write a blog post, if you're submitting to speaking event, they're a really great tool, even just being featured on a podcast can have a huge impact on your credibility. And if you're looking to become an expert in an area, I would say, gain the experience and then try to get on a few podcasts because other people will see you as more of an expert if you're featured on a podcast talking about that. So it can be a great tool to build your credibility in certain areas, even if you're not starting a podcast yourself. Simply being featured can be enough to give you the credibility, you need to reach your goals in a specific area. The quality of next questions and the high production value of the podcast, as well as his huge audience. And listeners look very loyal listeners made going on that podcast incredibly valuable to me over the next year. Even though it's not something I'd been looking for, I hadn't been looking to go on a podcast. And because of my view, pre site, hustle nation on podcasts, which was very anti podcast, I never would have actually searched one out. Regardless of all the benefits it has. I never really thought about the benefits. And I just really disliked podcasts, which is so funny because now I obviously have a podcast. So my views have changed quite a bit. But the huge benefits from going on Nick's podcasts would never have happened if I'd gone on any other podcast as my first podcast. Because I've been on a few other podcasts. And Nick's has such a large and loyal audience compared to the eyes I've been on, combined with his really good questions, and his perfect audio and great production value, all kind of wrapped together to make it a really valuable experience for launching the her co brand. And for providing a really credible, great piece of content that I was able to have in my resume toolkit. His podcast was able to launch her SEO brand into a bigger space for those reasons. And if I'd started on any other podcast, I don't think that would have happened. And I probably would have maintained my view that podcasts are a waste of time, and not good tools. So it's interesting how your experience with specific podcasts and types of podcasts can kind of shape your future experience. And I'm really grateful that my first experience was on the side hustle nation podcast, which is so well produced, and has such a loyal audience, that my experience was really good. And it catapulted me into the podcast world in a really positive way. It took me a while to build up the courage to start my podcast and I wasn't even thinking about starting one.
How to Start a Podcast
Right after my episode with Nick it more than a year after I it never even crossed my mind until recently. Because there were so many variables involved and so many things I had never done that I'd have to learn how to do. And it's just it is a big undertaking. And you really want to be sure it's something you want to do before you start it. What helped me actually start was just starting it trusting and taking it step by step. So before I had everything figured out, I started emailing a handful of my dream guests. Before I knew all the technical details or even how I was going to record, I emailed a few of my dream guests and my first email was actually a yes. from Michael asik, who we hear from in episode one. I invited him by replying to one of his daily email newsletters about t shirt sales. And he replied asking for more info. And then he said yes and wanted to be on the podcast. Once I had that confirmation and the first recording booked in my schedule, it was so much easier to figure out the next steps, which was for me to write a rough outline of the questions I wanted to ask and then figure out how I was going to record the episode and then taking it step by step from there, which I will go through below. I decided to use Nick from side hustle nation's microphone brand to record the one that I had already purchased that ATR 2100 microphone which I do highly recommend if you're looking for a microphone.
Best Podcast Recording Software
And then I also used the same recording software that Nick had used when he interviewed me for side hustle nation which is called Zencaster, Z and c a s tr at Zen caster.com. It has a free plan, and also has a paid plan but it's been free throughout the corona pandemic so far, no matter how many episodes you record, I love Zencaster, because it really does have the best audio recording out there. The quality is better than the Zoom recordings I've done. And it also has to track audio recording. So you can easily edit out coughs or heavy breathing from one person while the other is talking. This means it gives you two different tracks one for each person. So you can just cut out parts from the other person while the other person is talking. And zoom for example, gives you one audio track. So if someone coughs while the other person's talking, it's pretty much in audio and you can't really take it out. However, Zencaster is also right now it's audio only, but they have a video beta and it's launching soon. So there will be opportunities to record using Zen caster and using the video in the near future. I will also leave a link to all the tools I used in the show notes for this episode, so you guys can check them out. If you are interested in starting a podcast, next philosophy with podcasting and something he told me on the right before we started recording the episode is that his goal is to make you look like a genius to make his guests look like they are geniuses. And that is something I have taken away from his podcasting philosophy and aspire to in my own podcast. Because for a few reasons, because it's the best way to build lasting relationships with guests and make them happy they were on the show. It's also the best way to make guests want to share the podcast. And it's the best way to make listeners want to keep listening to your podcast. Because if the guests sound like they're smart and know what they're talking about, which they obviously do, they'll want to listen to the episode so they can learn from the guest. No one wants to listen to someone if they don't know what they're talking about, or they don't have any experience in the area. So if any of the guests sound bad, it's not their fault. It's obviously my questions. And my goal is to make everyone look as good as possible. Which is also a reason that the editing is so dangerous for me because I try to cut out filler words and other things and to make to make the gas to look good, but also to make the experience more seamless for listeners. So you don't have to be listening to really long pauses or arms. So I have to go through every podcast and edit out small things, which is something that I don't think every podcast host does. But I'm trying to make the best experience for both guests and listeners, which is part of the reason why the editing process takes such a long time for me after recording each episode with the guests. Next, I took each step one at a time. And I had to figure out how I was going to edit the audio and the video that I had recorded. It ended up being simple. I uploaded them into iMovie, which is free and comes on all Macs, I have a Mac and I already used iMovie to edit a handful of YouTube videos I've made over the years and published. So I already knew how to use it. And it's very intuitive and user friendly. And that's how I edited the audio and the video. When I was recording the intros and the outros. I used GarageBand on my local computer as opposed to Zen caster and would upload that into iMovie as well to kind of edit. Then I had to figure out how to make the intro music. I ended up using blubrry.com blubry.com and listening to a few tracks before deciding on an upbeat, happy one that felt like a great fit. It cost $44.95 one time fee and I can use it on all my podcasts. It's a one time buyout license fee, you have to be super careful because there is no fair use on copyrighted music on podcast. You can't use a song for 10 seconds and then say Oh, it's okay. You have to either use completely copyright free Creative Commons type music or pay for a one time buyout license. You can also buy license where you have to pay monthly or pay per use. So you have to be very careful about making sure that you purchase the right license or the right licensed music and you also have to make sure if you're using the free music, that it is actually copyright free, because you can get into quite a bit of trouble if you do that incorrectly. That was actually the most expensive purchase I made for the podcast was getting the music, I wanted it to be good. And I wanted it to be something that I could use legally. So I did spend the $44.95 on the podcast music, it's also urging me to record more episodes so I can get more out of that investment. Next, after recording and editing everything, and taking the pictures, making the intro videos getting all of that set up, I had to decide on a podcast host for podcast hosting. In the episode with Logan, he mentioned both Libsyn and the free anchor FM hosts, I decided to look into each but I was originally thinking I would use the free anchor FM because I thought, well, it's free, I should just use that one because I don't even know if I'm going to be continuing this podcast. And if it's free, why not just use that and then I don't have to pay for it. However, I'm glad I did more research first to figure out that anchor FM comes with quite a bit of baggage. After a quick Google search, I found out if you use the free anchor FM, it's free because you're technically the product, which is something people say often about free tech products. You're the product if it's free, like Gmail, Google stuff, they run ads on you, Facebook, it's free, they run ads, and you are the product. I don't mind people running ads on social things I do like Facebook and Gmail and that type of thing. But with a podcast, I'm not really looking to be the product. This means Anchor runs ads on your content. They also publish the content under their own ID, meaning it's not technically your own. And they also hide stats from specific podcast platforms, statistics and knowing exactly how many people are listening to my podcast are very important to me. Even as I'm starting out, actually, especially as I'm starting out, and having someone else run ads on my podcast is not something I want, it's not good for the brand. And if I do this long term, I would want to have the option to run ads not have someone else run the ads. And I also want to fully own my podcast and have full statistical transparency and control and the ability to potentially monetize it down the road. If I keep going that far, so anchor FM. After learning more about it, it did not seem like the host I was looking for, even though it was free. So I started to look into the paid podcast hosts, including Logan's recommendation of Libsyn. I did a Google search, I found out that Libsyn is one of the most cost competitive host options it starts at $5 a month for the basic plan, and $7 a month if you want to see statistics, while other hosts for 15 a month or more for their most basic plan. before committing, I decided to do a quick check to find what my current top four podcasts that I listened to regularly use as their host. To check what someone is using as their host. You can look at their podcast on site player and see if they use their hosts branded player. You can also view the source code on their website page, which you can do by right clicking on the page, selecting view page source code and then searching the HTML code that comes up for the unique words and symbols that are near their podcast player header if their podcast player is not branded, and then that will allow you to find the branding of their podcast player. So pretty much if they don't use a branded podcast player. If you look at the pages HTML code, you can find the brand of their podcast player, if that makes sense. Shout out to my people who are slightly more technical. They're shout out to my current favorite for podcasts to listen to when I have downtime currently, which is Nick's side hustle nation podcast, the boss babe podcast, Tim Ferriss podcast, and the Invest Like a Boss podcast. Every single one of these podcasts that I listened to regularly, we're using the podcast host Libsyn, except for Tim Ferriss, who happens to be using a very expensive high end player and host one that was so expensive. If they didn't even display their prices online, instead, they displayed a Contact us to learn more form, which is code for our prices are very high. So you can contact us to learn how high they are. And I did not contact them to learn more, as this podcast is making zero dollars a month, not $50k per episode like Tim, even if I was making $50k per episode like Tim, have a feeling I would still use a very low cost hosts such as Libsyn, which I then googled to make sure that libsyn was a good host. And at that point, I was 100% sold on using it as my own host. I also searched for a coupon and was able to get the first two months of Libsyn free. So this month and next month, free Libsyn hosting. The only expense I had to pay for this month was the 4495 Intro Music cost. And if I decide to keep going with the podcast, I'll have to start paying five to $7 a month, starting in two months. However, I pay much more than that, for my current website hosting and audio files are quite large. So it's not hard for me to justify seven a month for podcast hosting, if it ends up being an activity I end up enjoying. And if it does allow me to get great content for the her SEO website and YouTube which are two of my goals for her SEO right now. Starting a podcast was definitely overwhelming for me at first. But once I modeled my podcast creation after my original, amazing podcasting experience and favorite podcaster Nick Loper's podcasting process at side hustle nation, it became much easier for the gaps, I didn't have insight into how he did things. I simply broke down the steps and did each one at a time. So it became manageable. I will also put in the show notes, Nick, at side hustle nation also has a great podcast starting checklist where he goes through the things that he uses in his podcast and all those tools. So I'm going to put those in the show notes, so you guys can take a look at that. So we have Logan at sweet fish media's podcast launch checklist. We have Nick Loper his podcast launch checklist. And we have the tools that I use in my podcast launch experience. In this episode, hopefully those three things you can kind of look at and take away your favorites from each if you're looking to start a podcast To cobble together your own tools and what you think will work the best for you. And if it does get overwhelming, remember to just take it one step at a time, focus on what you need to do in that moment. And then once you complete that move on to the next step. That's how I was able to break it down into a manageable process that wasn't overwhelming. And that allowed me to take action and actually launch this podcast. I hope this was helpful. And you can let me know if you currently have a podcast or if you're starting one by emailing me Stacy at her dot CEO. And if this was helpful for you and learning more about what really goes on when someone is producing and putting out a podcast, the behind the scenes and what tools can be used when starting a podcast? Let me know your thoughts and looking forward to hearing from you guys. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hearst SEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you're listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments at [email protected] that's [email protected]. Thanks again. Recommended Tools: Audio Recording: Zencastr.com (free & paid plans, all free during COVID currently) Video Recording: Zoom.com (free & paid plans, I only use free options) Microphone: ATR-2100 Microphone Transcription: Otter.ai (free & paid plans, caution if you try the free you'll 100% get the $10/month plan because it's so good) Hosting: Anchor.fm (free but not really recommended), Libsyn (not free but recommended for serious podcasters), and using your current website host + free PowerPress WordPress plugin (what I'm using currently and is 100% the best option for me currently). Blubrry.com: Podcast music (not free but allows you to get "copyright-free" music you can use once purchased) Nick Loper's Podcast Checklist Sweet Fish Media Podcast Checklist My first podcast episode on Side Hustle Nation w/ Nick Loper: https://www.sidehustlenation.com/stacy Affiliate Disclaimer: I have a few affiliate links in here & if you use them they may slightly help me, even if the Otter one just give me free Otter months, I love it enough to enjoy as many free months as I can get.
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2. B2B Podcasting with Logan Lyles: Podcasting Tips From a Podcast Production Company
18 oct. 2020· The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money
B2B Podcasting
Logan Lyles, director at Sweet Fish Media, a podcast production company, also produces the company's top 100 Marketing Podcast the B2B Growth Show. Logan shares his unique podcasting tips that can a help a business generate new sales, customers, content and more. He also shares unique ways to organically promote your podcast through how you set it up and structure it. Watch Logan and Stacy talk about B2B podcast production tips: [embed] https://youtu.be/hnfguVcvWYo [/embed]
Logan Lyles & Sweet Fish Media
Logan Lyles 0:00 Other people find that getting up to the mic is way easier than staring at the blank screen with the blinking cursor and trying to create written content from scratch. So podcasting can kind of grease the wheels and help you create more content that then you can turn into written content and video content, short form LinkedIn posts, long form blog posts, those sorts of things. Stacy Caprio 0:23 Hi, and welcome to the Hurst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be. Listen along with Stacey each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams so you can learn how to build your own. In this episode, we get to talk to Logan of sweet fish media. Logan not only directs a full service podcast production company called Sweet fish media, and is the host of the b2b growth show podcast. He's an incredible podcaster and the most strategically thoughtful podcaster I've ever met, the way he structured everything from his podcast names to the thumbnails to the marketing and promotion are so thoughtful in a way that will not only bring more podcast listeners, but also increase sales for the company running the podcast. I've never spoken to anyone so strategic and good at aligning running a podcast and actually getting business results from it. In this episode, we get to hear all his juicy podcast tips. And we get a behind the scenes peek of what has worked for his own podcasts. And his many successful suite media client podcasts. He's the most qualified podcaster I know of. And I'm very happy. I was able to have him on the show before I officially launched this podcast because I was able to structure things differently. And plan my promotion and production strategy for the best possible results after learning how the best of the best in the podcasting business, aka Logan, and sweet fish do it. Hi, Logan, thank you so much for coming on today. And I was hoping we could start going over your background how you got into podcasting, sweet fish media and how your company helps podcasts and businesses. Logan Lyles 2:27 Yeah, absolutely. Stacy, thank you so much for having me on today. It was great to meet you via LinkedIn and I love making LinkedIn friends, friends in real life as as much as we can be in real life these days. And and podcasting is a great way to do that. My name is Logan Lyles. I'm the director of partnerships at sweet fish media. We are a podcast agency for b2b brands. So we help companies that sell business to business, develop and continue production have a podcast that they use for both their content marketing efforts as well as a creative way to engage decision makers at Target accounts that their sales teams are trying to reach. I kind of had a winding road getting into my current role in b2b marketing and in podcasting in particular. So I actually graduated college in 2008. With a journalism degree which I always tell the story, you know, it was a great time to graduate college and hit the job market during the Great Recession and also a great time to hit the job market with a journalism degree when the news industry was going through all sorts of convergence and newspapers were closing their doors, left and right all over the country. I quickly sold my way into my first sales job, and did that for about 10 years, I actually sold locally and regionally b2b office equipment. And for anyone who you've ever heard say, Oh, it was in the office equipment industry or I sold office equipment. That's code for I sold copiers and printers. So anyway, I did that very fun job for about 10 years. And then I came across sweet fish media by getting to know James Carberry, our founder and CEO Now, a few years back through LinkedIn, and we became friends and I was eventually the first sales hire at sweet fish. And so for the last two years, I've been heading up sales for our podcast agency, being the serving as one of the primary co hosts of our flagship show b2b growth, where we interview b2b Marketing Leaders every single day. And I also do some other hosting and content creation on the team as well. I'm a host for some of the shows that we produce for our clients. Stacy Caprio 4:34 Awesome, thank you. Yeah, that's a really interesting background. And one question I have is, what are the benefits you've seen for businesses who you've helped have podcasts as well as your own podcast?
Benefits of a Podcast
Logan Lyles 4:49 Yeah, there's really three primary benefits I think about when it comes to podcasting, especially in b2b and I think the first two are fairly obvious to folks. One is It's brand awareness, I literally hopped off a sales call earlier today, probably 30 minutes ago. And that person on the other end of the line said, I feel like I already know you. And this was the literally the first time we had spoken live or been on a zoom call, because they've been listening to our podcast very regularly. And podcasting is such an intimate medium. So creating brand awareness and helping people get to know you before they actually know you would be number one. Number two is that you know, a lot of people find that getting up to the mic is way easier than staring at the blank screen with a blinking cursor and trying to create written content from scratch. So podcasting can kind of grease the wheels and help you create more content that then you can turn into written content and video content, short form, LinkedIn posts, long form, blog posts, those sorts of things. So most people I talked to, they understand the brand awareness, and the faster content creation that can come from having a podcast. The third one that I think has been the biggest benefit, and has really changed my sales career that a lot of people aren't thinking about is a strategy that we call in our CEOs book is titled, content based networking. So a lot of people understand content marketing, you create content for the people that you want to sell to. And then they will become educated and or entertained by your content. And then you will be top of mind when they're ready to buy your product or service. content based networking says don't just create content for those folks create it with them. So in our case, on b2b growth, there's a reason that I head up sales for sweet fish. And I'm also the primary host of our podcast. And that is, I interview people who fit our buyer persona. So instead of just hoping that VP of Marketing at b2b tech companies who are our typical buyer persona, find our podcast, listen, and then find out more about sweet fish, which definitely happens. But the the other side of it is, I interview people who regularly can buy from us and it opens up the door to a new relationship that wouldn't have been there otherwise. So we actually look at our podcast in it as driving revenue for our business. But not just the audience. It's the guests as well. And a lot of people skip over that. But it was from that that I kind of sold my way into my first sales job. I spent about 10 years doing office equipment sales copiers and printers in local b2b sales in different regions. And I got to know the founder of sweet fish through LinkedIn. So, link, I'm a big proponent of LinkedIn as a content channel. But also just in my own career journey. LinkedIn played a huge role in allowing me to connect with one of my best friends. And now my current boss James Carberry, who's the founder and CEO at sweet fish. And so now I head up sales for sweet fish. I've been doing that for about two years. And as I mentioned, we we are a podcast agency for b2b brands, I head up sales, and I also am the primary host of our daily show for b2b marketing and sales professionals b2b growth. And that's what I'm doing today. And I kind of love it, because it's this mixture of sales, marketing and journalism that I get to kind of wear all three hats at once in my current role, and I drawn draw from, you know, each part of those different pieces my background every day, so it's a ton of fun. Stacy Caprio 8:28 Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Interesting. You say that about LinkedIn. James had actually reached out to me on LinkedIn after hearing about the website investing, and suggested I reached out to you and I mentioned the podcast, so small world, how we all get connected through that. Yeah, Logan Lyles 8:45 exactly. And LinkedIn plays a big part of that, at least for me these days. Stacy Caprio 8:49 Me too. And I always read every connection request. So I think it's a great tool for people doing sales and outreach as well. Logan Lyles 8:57 For sure. Stacy Caprio 8:58 So that's an awesome background. What would you say, to any business who's hesitating to start a podcast? What are the benefits they can gain from having one?
Long Term Benefits of a Podcast
Logan Lyles 9:10 Yeah, absolutely. I would say there's really long term benefit. But then there's also short term benefit, you know, businesses that hesitate to invest in, you know, what I think of as top of the funnel marketing, brand awareness, thought leadership, things that don't necessarily lead to this conversion equals this sale. Sometimes folks hesitate to invest in that sort of marketing and and podcasting, or organic LinkedIn content, they fit into that bucket. But the way that we approach podcasting is not meant to just provide your brand with more thought leadership content. If you think about a podcast, it's usually an interview, just like this one that we're doing right now. And what does an interview need an interview needs a guest and what we found out a long time ago, five years ago, and when James Founded sweet fish media is that when you invite people who fit your buyer persona to be guests on your podcast, you're not only playing the long game of creating content that other people who fit that persona will learn from, and then be aware of your brand and then maybe buy from you. That person who is the guest, if they fit your buyer persona, guess what they could buy from you directly, or they could refer a friend directly to you. And so a lot of folks, just think about the content marketing benefit of a podcast. And we're all about that we help our customers take raw interviews on Zen caster or zoom, turn them into video clips, turn them into LinkedIn content, turn them into finished podcast episodes. So I don't want to downplay the content marketing benefits of a podcast. But the other side of it kind of the other side of the double edged sword, as I often put it, is what we call content based networking, the way that you can network the way that you can build new relationships through content collaboration. And so if your brand has a podcast, instead of just having your CEO or your marketing leader, talk about your product, or service, or even the industry that you serve, have the majority, or at least a good portion of the interviews that you do with your podcast, feature people who fit your buyer persona, because then you're playing the long game of content marketing, but you're taking the shortcut to through what we call content based networking, where you're building relationships that can map to revenue and can lead to legitimate business results that are very easy to track.
Can B2C Businesses Benefit From a Podcast?
Stacy Caprio 11:36 That's awesome. And do you think that an e commerce business should also have a podcast to build the connection like that? Or is it only for businesses that are more sales focused? Logan Lyles 11:52 Yeah, I would say, you know, if you are a direct to consumer brand, and you're an e commerce business, the the benefit of content based networking might not be as direct as maybe a company that is sells b2b. And sells, you know, one to one, they have a sales team that sells, you know, one to one face to face, or at least face to face over zoom these days, you might not get the relationship benefits, but an e commerce business, there are probably folks in your space that are that would be good partners for you to have that might be some sort of distribution partner or someone else who is trying to reach the same the same audience that you're trying to reach. So having a podcast and featuring them and cross promoting each other's content, you can still build key relationships, they might just not be directly with the end consumers of your product if you're an e commerce business, but pretty much any business is driven forward by some sort of relationships. And so thinking about how can I invest in relationships and content at the same time? I think if you think about it that way, an e commerce brand still could definitely benefit from a podcast. Stacy Caprio 13:04 Awesome. Have Do you have any favorite examples of sales relationships or relationships that have really blossomed or that you've directly seen benefit from an originate from a podcast? Logan Lyles 13:21 Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the short story is, I interview VPS of marketing at b2b tech companies with 50 plus employees every single day on our podcast and a lot of them that the reason I'm able to spout off those demographics so easily is because that's our buyer persona that is most often the demographics and and the look and feel of someone and the type of company that would usually buy our podcast production service. And oftentimes I'm talking with them. And after post interview, after we conduct a podcast interview, they bring up to me Wait, you guys don't just produce this show. you produce podcasts. We've been thinking about that for a long time. I didn't even know there were specifically a podcast agency, let alone a podcast agency, just for b2b brands that can help us out. And then we we have a conversation. And so it was within the first 60 days of starting to be a regular co host on b2b growth. Then I closed the deal with actually an SEO agency that hired us to be their podcast production company. You know, one of my favorite stories is actually how I became an employee of sweet fish. And so this story actually relates to a podcast guest becoming a customer but also recruiting new employees. So several years back, my wife and I and our two kids were living in Texas and we were looking to relocate back to Colorado where most of our family lives. And I was looking at companies that were doing cool things out in Colorado not sure what my next move was going to be. And I started following this company on LinkedIn called Bom Bom. Bom Bom is a video Sending platform, they let you record and send one to one personal videos via email and text so that you can get face to face when you're not face to face. And I thought was a really cool company. So I started following them on LinkedIn. And then I saw that they promoted this virtual summit that was going on. And it was sweetish media that was putting it on. And so I signed up for it, I got access to some of the videos that were being released on demand. And one of the people who's being interviewed was at that time their VP of Marketing Ethan Butte, and he was doing an interview with the CEO of sweet fish James Carberry. And that was great content, I got on the email list of sweet fish. And it was actually through that that then I met, I connected with James on LinkedIn, we became friends, we started engaging with each other's content. And eventually James hired me to be the first full time sales hire at sweet fish. The really cool part about the story I think, is not only did that content collaboration lead to my becoming a an employee of sweet fish, but about a year after joining sweet fish, maybe within eight months, Ethan from bom bom who had been featured as a guest on that content summit with with James reached out to me and said, Hey, we're thinking about starting a podcast, we'd like to see if sweet fish might, you know, be the right fit to help. And Ethan and the team at bom bom became a customer so that content collaboration reached me. And I ended up becoming a customer of sweet fish. And Ethan, who was not the audience, but he was the guest in that content collaboration scenario, later became a customer after I joined as as a salesperson at sweet fish. And so it just kind of came full circle, just seeing the power of the content, the power of the relationships and the relationships in a variety of different ways in both recruiting and gaining customers. So I tell that story a lot, because I can remember when that happened, it just it brought it full circle for me to see the benefits of what James talks about in his book, The strategy that we call content based networking. Stacy Caprio 17:08 That's awesome. Yeah, it sounds like you've made a lot of connections that way. And it's a podcast is really such a great connector and business tool. My next question would be, what are the biggest mistakes you've seen when people start a podcast? Or even just ongoing that hurts their podcast, in the short and long term?
Podcast Marketing Tips & Mistakes
Logan Lyles 17:35 Yeah, I think one of the biggest mistakes that brands make with their podcast is something early on. And it is a pretty crucial decision because it affects whether you're going to get the right guests, it affects the search ability and the discoverability of your podcast. And that is the name of your show. I see companies go wrong in really two main areas, they name the show after their company, which no one is searching Apple podcasts for your company name when they're looking for a new podcast to subscribe to. So you're not doing yourself any favors. And plus, you know, if we had the sweet fish media podcast, that to me would be like putting LinkedIn thought leader in my LinkedIn headline, I don't think it's something that you should ascribe to yourself, you should let others call you a thought leader. And I think naming your podcast after your company. It's kind of right in line with that. So naming your podcast after your company, I think is a bad move. The other that I think you could get wrong is naming the podcast around your expertise. So a lot of folks think about this. And they're like, well, we want to be a thought leader in podcasting, or sales or HR, whatever it is, and they name their podcast around their expertise. And here's a scenario and why that would not work out well. If we at Sui fish had the b2b podcasting podcast. You know, it's not the Swedish media show, but it is about our expertise in podcasting. I wouldn't be able to invite marketing leaders who could buy from us to be guests on the show. If because most often, they would say, well, we haven't done a podcast yet. I don't have anything to add a value to the b2b podcasting podcast. Now, what we did is we reverse engineered the name of our show, so that it was crystal clear for our guests that they could come on and be a featured Rockstar guest the name of our show is b2b growth. When we invite b2b marketing and sales leaders on they can talk about how they're driving growth for their organizations. And guess what we can do a how to podcast episode we can do an episode on podcasting within that show. But going one level away from your expertise, and branding your show around your ideal buyer and their expertise is going to help you create better content, get the guests that you want to get on and be able to be found by more listeners. The other area just from a discoverability point I'll point out is a pitfall naming your show to pun heavy, you know something that isn't really apparent, it might be kind of a fun branding thing. It might be a fun play on words. But again, it's not going to be, it's not going to do you any favors to help your podcast be found by potential listeners. One of the reasons b2b growth has become a top 100 marketing podcast in Apple podcasts is that people commonly searched the term b2b. And so we are one of the top shows that comes up both in Apple podcasts. And on Google, if you search b2b Marketing Podcast. And so I think, again, naming your show around your ideal buyer and thinking about what are they going to be searching for when they're looking for a new podcast to subscribe to. So naming your show the right way, cannot be overstated, because it can have some really great impact. And it can have some really negative effects if you get it wrong. Stacy Caprio 20:54 That's really interesting. I'd actually never thought of that. And I assumed that most people name it after their company. But I think that's a great tip. Are there any other ways that you recommend either optimizing your podcast listing so more people can find it in search, or just generally promoting it, some more people get to listen to it?
Podcast Title Optimization
Logan Lyles 21:17 Yeah, I think there's a couple of things your podcast in addition to the name, you can put a tagline. And so with b2b growth, we put a tagline after the name of the show that says your daily b2b Marketing Podcast. And because we don't have the term marketing in the name of our show, since it is in the tagline, then we show up more in search for b2b marketing, which is a key term that we want to be found for. So give some thought to the name of the show, as well as the tagline as well as the description in iTunes or Apple podcasts. This is one of those things that you have to you have to have, you know, kind of a summary of your show to submit to all the different directories once you set it up for syndication into Apple, and Google and Spotify. So put some thought into the keyword that you want to have there. And then on promoting your show and gaining more listeners, we've got a roundup on our blog with 14 of our top audience growth strategies. I'll share that with you, Stacy, we could share that link along with this recording. But one of the key things I see people get wrong is they focus on promoting their podcast on social. So whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, whatever social media channel makes sense for your brand. And what we think about is not promoting your podcast on those other channels, but repurposing content for those other channels. Now it sounds like it sounds counterintuitive, right? Because don't just want to promote the show and get more listeners. And it also sounds like Well, what's the difference? promoting on or repurposing for? For instance, an example of promoting on LinkedIn would be Hey, this episode, Wednesday's episode is live on b2b growth and posting that to LinkedIn. And just here's the link repurposing content for LinkedIn, which will eventually lead to more listeners, but also more exposure on LinkedIn would be breaking down what the guest shared on that Wednesday episode and sharing the top three things and not just teasing them, like, listen to this episode. And you'll learn this, this and this, but actually sharing what was this, this and this, and then linking to that episode, maybe in the comments, because LinkedIn posts don't. LinkedIn algorithm doesn't like when you put a link in the in the post itself. So that's a that's an example. Take your podcast and think of it as a pillar piece of content that you can create micro pieces of content from. And that will lead to more listeners of the show. But it will also help you reach people in other channels, they might not be a podcast listener. But if it's helping you create content for your blog or for LinkedIn, then it's still a win. You're increasing your awareness on LinkedIn, and you're driving more traffic to your blog, and you're gaining more subscribers to the podcast. So focus on delivering value with every piece of content, not always just trying to drive someone from one channel to another. Stacy Caprio 24:16 That's a great point, I think thank you for sharing. I was wondering, what tech tools do you use and recommend for podcasters? And do you think free tools are okay or do you need to pay for some types of your tools?
Podcasting Tools
Logan Lyles 24:35 Yeah, I think there is a lot that you can do with very low cost and even free tools. You can use a free zoom account, you can use Zen caster. We often use zoom for recording our podcast because we like the ability to get audio and video even though zoom isn't specifically a tool that's been made for podcasting. There are some tools like Zen caster I know video is in beta squad cast. So any of those, I think the reason we go with zoom right now is it's a low cost option. But also we can capture audio and video all at once. You don't have to get too fancy with the microphone either I use a microphone that costs less than $100. And since I've been a host for a long time now I have, you know, a shock mount and a boom arm that connects to my ass, but all told, it's like $250 worth of equipment, and you don't even need all of that, in order to get started. Libsyn is a very low cost podcast host platform that we use. But you can also use a free one like anchor, and a few other tools that are either free or low cost that we use, there's one called Descript. If you go to descript.com, Descript, it allows you to transcribe your audio, and then edit the transcribed text. And that actually edits the audio, it's like, it works automatically, as I like to say, I sound like a infomercial for those guys, but they have a free offering. They have a premium offering as well, but very low cost for the cool stuff that you can do with that. And then another tool that we use very frequently, it is paid but very affordable is called v lead. It's veed.io. So it kind of spells out veed.io. When you look at the domain, we use this to create micro video clips from our podcast recordings. Even if you're just recording via zoom with a webcam, you can create video that will perform really well on social if you use a tool like feed, to put a cap, put captions, put a progress bar at the bottom, put a branded frame around your video and optimize it for social. So those are some of the tools that we use, and you don't need a 10 $20,000 podcast studio to have a successful podcast. Stacy Caprio 26:46 That's awesome. I really want to try out the transcribing tool you mentioned. So I'll definitely take a look at that. I was wondering if you could give maybe a tip for experienced podcasters. I know we went over that tip for the beginner podcaster and how you format your title and description. But maybe set give us a tip for people who have already been podcasting have everything set up and kind of want to grow. Logan Lyles 27:17 Yeah, I would say you know, focus on capturing video alongside your audio, and look at ways to repurpose that. The video tool that we use Veed.io, we create micro video clips out of those, and we repurpose those for organic content on LinkedIn. And we'll push that out through personal profiles rather than through our company page. If you go to sweet fish media, on LinkedIn, you won't see a lot of content. But if you check out my profile, you can easily find me at Logan Lyles, I think I'm the only Logan Lyles on on LinkedIn that I found anyway, you'll see some how we use these video clips for organic content on LinkedIn. What you can also do is if you create these micro video clips, you can repurpose them into retargeting ads, or Facebook ads, because they look like organic content. And so many people are running ads for their product or service. But they're not running ads for their podcast or their video show. And you know, it takes some commitment to the long game, right, because you're spending money to get people there. And that's kind of top of funnel. So it takes some commitment. But when everyone else is zigging, if you zag sometimes there's some tremendous opportunity that you can take advantage of. So I would say, you know, look at creating micro video clips, and then running ads for your show. I was literally just talking with our CEO about a customer who's doing this. And the ads for their podcasts are performing and converting at a much higher rate than any of the social media ads that they've run for their product before. So that would that would be one way. If you are not doing it now, I would highly suggest you automate or you find a system to regularly do this, have two follow up emails, go to every guest, make sure that you send an email to your guest when their episode goes live. put a link in that email that they can share and link back to that where you post the episode on your website, as well as where they can find the episode on on Apple podcasts and share that as well. And then a lot of people don't think about doing this. But it's something that's driven a lot of reviews for our podcast and reviews as much as downloads, help you climb in the charts in the category that you're trying to rank for in Apple podcasts. So what we do is send another email to guests about two or three days after that go live notification. And it's something like this. If Stacy you were a guest on b2b growth, it might say something like, Hey Stacy, hope you had a chance to listen to your episode. Again. It was fantastic. If you wouldn't mind giving the show five stars on Apple podcasts. It's going to help more people find the show, including your episode. So it's a way to go back to the guest and remind them that their episode was great. Remind them of the value that they got. By being a guest on the show, and if they leave a review, they're incentivized to do that, because it's going to help people find their content. And it's going to benefit you as the podcast publisher at the same time. Stacy Caprio 30:11 Oh, that's a great tip. I never would have thought to ask podcast guests to leave reviews as well. That's great to think about. So when we're wrapping up right now, I wanted to ask, are there any offers that sweet fish media or you currently have that you'd like to promote to listeners and let them know how they can work with you? Logan Lyles 30:33 Yes, you can find us at sweetfishmedia.com. If you look me up on LinkedIn, you can connect with me there on LinkedIn, let me know that you heard me here. Or you can send me an email Logan at sweet fish media.com. Those are three easy ways to get in touch with me. We have those 14 audience growth strategies in a blog posts that we can share with listeners as well. And the last thing I'll mention, if you check out our website, we don't have a lot of pop ups a lot of gated content. But one thing we do have there is our 26 step guide to launching a podcast. So if you go to sweet fish media.com, you'll see my face in the chat window that pops up. But you'll also see an option to download our 26 step guide that will really walk you through what we would do to help you launch your own podcast. But if you want to do it yourself, there's all the content there for the taking, you can easily download it in in that PDF. They're Stacy Caprio 31:30 awesome. And I can vouch for it is a wonderful guide. I downloaded it when I was kind of reading up on sweet fish media and using it as I've been launching my own podcast. So thanks for that valuable info. Logan Lyles 31:44 Awesome. Thanks for the endorsement, endorsement. Stacy Caprio 31:48 Of course. So yeah, thank you so much. This is packed with great info. And I'm definitely going to listen to this again after just for my own kind of reminders and help. So thank you again, so much, Logan. And looking forward to talking again soon. Logan Lyles 32:03 Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Stacy Caprio 32:05 I loved hearing how Logan got his current job at sweet fish media through LinkedIn. Which is also ironic because Logan and I also connected on a roundabout way through LinkedIn, through his bosses outreach to me about website investing in a LinkedIn message. And then my introduction to Logan, when I brought up the her SEO podcast in my response. This is another example of the importance of meeting new people, and how it can foster growth and new content in your business, which you can easily do nowadays through platforms like LinkedIn. And using podcasts for relationship building, which Logan did a great job of talking about the benefits of in this episode. It's interesting how Logan regularly uses and recommends using podcasts as a way to network and create new relationships, especially how he recommends using podcast interviews as a way for b2b companies to build new relationships, specifically with sales prospects. His company sweet fish media, coined this term called content based networking, which essentially means building new relationships through podcasting, while creating new content at the same time, for both podcasters brands, this is something I had never thought about before he had never even crossed my mind until talking to Logan. So I'm so happy that I was able to talk to him and get his perspective on this because it's completely flipped the way that I view podcasting and even the value proposition of podcasting. He's the only person I've ever even heard, consider inviting your ideal client onto your podcast to help start a long term relationship. But if you think about it, why aren't more people doing this? This is a really smart business move. And I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more. have other b2b companies not thought of it. That's the only thing I can think of. And maybe if they learn about it. For them this podcast if you know any b2b companies that could benefit from learning about this, because maybe if they learn about it, they'll start doing it, and it'll start helping more companies grow. It's an undeniably unique and effective way to build relationships with potential clients, business contacts, employees, really anyone your business wants to build a relationship with. And having a podcast is a great way to facilitate that. Logan very articulately outlines the Benefits of businesses hosting podcasts. And it's more than just relationship building. Doing so is a great way to build thought leadership and brand awareness, which are both to have podcasting is more obvious long term value propositions, and also why people often hesitate to start a podcast, because they see only the long term value. And don't see that starting a podcast can have a ton of short term value and wins as well. I'd never thought of the short term wins, as Logan pointed out, building relationships with your ideal clients by inviting them on your podcast, where they could become a customer in the future. Or they'll refer people to you because they know what your company does and what you're good at the huge benefit that he also mentions, which is a huge reason I started this her SEO podcast is because a podcast allows you to create new content that you can repurpose, and post, not just on your podcast, but also in video format, on YouTube, on your blog, on emails on social including LinkedIn, Twitter, your other profiles, and get high quality content that is created by experts in the field. So you're not just relying on your own expertise, but you're getting someone who's a specialist to actually help you create the content, so it's easier to create it. It's more reliable content that's really founded in expertise. And it's a great short and long term win for your brand. I've personally been super slow creating new content for her SEO. So sorry to all the listeners, but I'm doing a little better now creating the content, it just hasn't been a priority for me. So these five episodes have allowed me to create a ton of new written audio and visual content that will help me restart the blog to get a little bit more organic traffic, which is a focus for the site right now. I like that Logan really expanded on the idea that any business can benefit from having a podcast because all businesses are driven by relationships and by content. So he explained that even an e commerce business can benefit from having a podcast when I asked him that question. And it really made sense because any business, if your business needs a supplier or a new employee, or to build a relationship with a manufacturer, or to build relationships with any type of new business partner, you can invite those types of people on your podcast. And you'll start a really personal relationship with them that is really founded in something genuine, in real. And you'll be able to build new branded content at the same time down the line, you can use them to help you do your manufacturing or hire them as an employee or partner with them on something. And you'll have a really solid relationship and something to reach out on. So hosting a podcast, it can even allow you to connect with new marketing partners or people you can promote on your podcast and they can promote you on theirs. You can grow your audience, any type of business relationship, and even if you aren't a b2b company. And even if you're selling a product, it's interesting to think you really could benefit in some way likely from launching a podcast if you're very intentional about who you invite on the podcast, and what type of content you're creating on the podcast. What surprised me the most when talking to Logan, was when he mentioned that you should not name your podcast your company's name, and instead, name it what your ideal customer is searching for online. That blew my mind in a really great way. I completely agree with him, that you're not doing yourself any favors if you name your podcast after your company name. Unless your company name is already your ideal clients favorite search term. Or if you're a huge brand already, or if you're including it only as part of your name, not the full name. I thought it was funny how he compared naming your podcast after your company to calling yourself a thought leader and your LinkedIn bio. Both not really something you want to do. It's funny because a true thought leader obviously would never call themselves a thought leader on any type of bio page that they wrote. Especially their LinkedIn It would just be something that you assume by looking. When you look at their accomplishment section, when you read, they're incredibly detailed and content with great expertise. And when you hear other people talk about them as a thought leader, then you know, they're a thought leader, not when they say I am a thought leader on their bio. And it's kind of similar to your podcast name, which can be named after the content, your ideal client is actively consuming. And that's the way that you can provide the most value to your client and to your own podcast. And then people will be able to see similarly, that you have great content, that you're a great fit for them. And then they'll see that the podcast is produced by your company, whether or not the company name is the podcast name, and they'll know that it's your company's podcast, but it really benefits you so much more. To not, there's no reason to name it, just your company name really. Unless, as I was saying, your company name is already your ideal client search term, which, honestly, if you if you're just starting a small company, that could also be a good thing to try to name your company, what your clients are searching for, because it will help you when you're doing SEO and all of that, at the same time, you want to choose the name that is good. And using your podcast name as a keyword tool is a very powerful lesson from this episode. And it's also the only reason that I put entrepreneur in the name of my podcast, the her CEO entrepreneur podcast, because my ideal listener would be searching podcast tools, and Google for entrepreneur tips and entrepreneur stories. Another caveat he mentioned is to not name the podcast around your expertise either, which was another interesting point. So pretty much just focus, what is your ideal client, looking for it, and name the podcast that don't try to get creative with the name, don't try to name it around your expertise. As he mentioned, the sweet fish media b2b podcasting podcast, if they had named it that their target market would automatically exclude themselves as a guest, because their target market has never done a podcast before. So that's why it was more important to name it. The b2b growth podcast because it's what their target market is searching for in their target market feels they're fit for the show, so they're not automatically excluded. So to really get the benefit of this, you can just sit down and brainstorm a list of what your ideal client is searching for on different platforms, and then play around with incorporating that into your podcast name. To see more organic traffic to your podcast. It may take a little extra thought, but this is an important way that you can definitely get more organic podcast listeners, Logan's own podcast, the b2b growth podcast is a top 100 marketing podcasts and Apple podcasts for this very reason, because their ideal client is searching their podcast name, unintentionally. And then they find Logan's podcast through the podcast search tools, which is pretty cool. So they're a prime example of how really choosing your podcast name intentionally to be what your ideal client is searching for can really help your podcast grow and get more listeners without having to spend money on ads or any of that. I also love that Logan talked about not promoting your podcast using teasers or having an entire post that tells people where they can watch your podcast and when. Instead, in this really makes more sense, you'll get more traction in views by repurposing actually valuable content that contains valuable messaging, not teasers from each episode, and promoting this content on your social channels on your other channels. But not as a teaser, as something that is valuable. In and of itself this is a way to really engage your audience, give them something they actually want to see on their newsfeed the posts. When you do it this way, we'll get more likes comments engagement, which will give them more exposure. And doing this will actually drive more traffic indirectly to your podcast and more engagement on your social pages at the same time. This seems a little bit like common sense. But I'm surprised at how many people do simply post watch my podcast at this link. And then not many people are engaging with it because it's not a valuable post. It's just telling people to go somewhere else to find something and people want to find something where they are. They want to see the value where they are and if they see that value, it's going to motivate them to do go to another place to get more value like your podcast. So I'm really glad that this was hammered into my mind and that I learned this before launching this podcast. So I will be able to focus on delivering value with every piece of quote unquote promotional content that I'm posting on other channels, as opposed to only trying to like use every post to drive people from my social channels to my podcast, because that's not what it's about. It's about providing value on every channel. And then when you do that, people will actively seek out your other channels so they can get even more value. This has also made me think of each podcast episode as its own pillar piece of content that I can create micro pieces of content from, for every channel. And I can drive brand growth and engagement in different ways through my podcast, my blog, and my YouTube channel, specifically, as the channels that I'm going to focus on for this growth, when people like one piece of content that they see on one channel, they'll naturally gravitate to my other channels, which is what I do when I like someone's content. I'll check out their other channels and see what else do they have to offer. And it's not something I'm going to try to force people to do because not only is that not fun for me or for those people, it's also simply not effective. I'll quickly go over some of the recommended tools that will also be in the show notes that Logan talked about. d script.com is a tool that helps you transcribe your audio. Logan talked about the low cost free and premium options. I personally want to try to script because I want transcripts of all my episodes posted on my website so her SEO can start getting Google traffic from the podcast posts. Veed.io is the other tool he mentioned. His company uses this to create micro video clips from podcast recordings. And you can use it to create video that will perform well on social including adding captions, a little progress bar in a branded frame, which Logan has recommended when you're creating video clips to share on social, something I've never used. And I only recorded small bits of video, and one full episode on video. So I'm not going to be using veed.io for this podcast, episode or even this handful of podcasts. But if I do start including more full video episodes in the future, it is something I will check out. Logan talks about Libsyn and Anchor.FM as two hosting tools you can use for your podcast. Anchor.FM is free. And Libsyn has low cost and higher cost options depending on your podcasting needs. You can also view the sweet fish media podcast launch checklist in the show notes that Logan and I were talking about. I referenced it a lot when I was starting this podcast. And it's really helpful for anyone who's looking to launch a podcast and wants to kind of go through things step by step and make sure they don't miss anything and they know what they need to do. I also created a mini podcast episode that goes into my story from when I used to hate listening to podcasts. So I just didn't it was kind of my own rule. And if I was super interested in any type of podcast or even any type of educational video, I would simply skim read the transcript to save time. It goes through my view on podcasts from when I really disliked them and did not listen to them to when I was featured on a podcast, which changed my whole podcast perspective. Even to the point I started listening to podcasts for the first time to why I decided to start my own podcast How I found the tools I used to do so which tools I chose to use and why the spoiler alert is I chose most because they were free or low cost and or the best version of the free or low cost options. I'm hoping my how and why I started a podcast mini episode will help you and anyone who feels overwhelmed or confused about why or how to start a podcast and wants a little bit more help and insight into how to do so. Feel free to listen to my mini podcast episode, which should be the next episode after this one. If you'd like to know more about why I started my own podcast and what tools I use so you can use the same to start your own. Thank you for listening to this episode of The her SEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you're listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments at [email protected] that's [email protected] Thanks again. Logan's Contact Info: Linkedin: Logan on Linkedin Email: [email protected] Check out the B2B Growth Show Podcast Sweet Fish's 14 Ways to Grow your Podcast article
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1. Michael Essek - T-Shirt Side Hustle to T-Shirt Business Success Story
18 oct. 2020· The Her.CEO Entrepreneur Podcast: Learn to Grow Your Business & Make Money
Michael Essek's T Shirt Side Hustle to T-Shirt Business Success
Michael Essek talks about his successful online T-Shirt company, his own marketing and sales tips, and how to go about starting your own print on demand T-Shirt company. Michael Essek helps designers and illustrators come up with creative T-Shirt ideas, create better designs, and grow a long-term business from their art. Michael has been designing and selling T-Shirts online since 2013, primarily through Print on Demand sites like Redbubble, Merch by Amazon and Teepublic, and using Print on Demand companies like Printful. To start improving your ideas today - visit MichaelEssek.com [embed] https://youtu.be/FnESOm2ZokY [/embed]
T Shirt Sales Marketing Tip
Michael Essek 0:00 A lot of times people will buy a shirt as a kind of afterthought. They'll be like, Oh, that's funny. I'm gonna buy that and click click, click and they've bought it without really going through a process of That's amazing. Wow, I really need that you know data and then thinking about it for days or anything like that. So anyway, you can kind of make the T shirt fit that mold if you like fit that pathway, so that someone notices it thinks it's cool goes looking for it, finds it and buys it without you know, making too big a deal of it. Stacy Caprio 0:30 Hi, and welcome to the Her.CEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be listed along with Stacey tweak to learn from those who have already built their dreams so you can learn how to build your own. Today we get to talk to Michael Essek who sells t shirts online. I followed Michael's t shirt selling journey for over six years. Ever since I started my own Etsy and print on demand shop and was looking for tips and help to get better designs and more sales. His 10k plus a month income reports were one of the things that inspired me to originally get into t shirt sales, currently selling on Etsy still, but it's much harder than it looks. And when I focused on T shirts solely. I've had some pretty good multi thousand income supporting months, but nothing compared to Michael. His idea structures, which he shares and almost daily emails and brainstorming idea output are incredibly prolific. I recommend hopping on his email list if you're looking to learn new structures you can use to brainstorm ideas in any niche or in any business sector. Or if you're looking to grow as a print on demand apparel seller, and stay up to date on the new trends and updates on print on demand and T shirt news. In this episode, Michael shares some great marketing and sales tips. A surprising perspective on how to do more effective influencer marketing the different ways he is now selling his shirts, including different platforms licensing and more, and his own experiences and growth in the T shirt sales arena. This is a great episode for you if you're interested in diving into any type of trendy e commerce or t shirt sales niches, or just learning how to think of new ideas and market and sell products online. I'll go into some of my favorite takeaways from this episode at the end. So hang around for that. Without further ado, let's hear Michael story and learn his t shirt selling tips. Hi, Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. I followed your T shirt, emails and blog for a while now. And I was thinking that you could start by giving the listeners some background, how you got into the T shirt design space, and an overview of how you've progressed since starting.
Michael Essek
Michael Essek 3:00 Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Stacy, it's a pleasure to be to be here with you today. So I started I think around 2013 2014, I had a small website, a blog that I was running, which I sold to someone. And what I didn't realize in the selling process was that I was going to lose the income from that blog that I was getting on a monthly basis. So I quite soon set out to find another way to get some some income in. And one of the things I stumbled across was people selling illustrations and stuff on on online on T shirts or on prints and stuff. So I decided I would try and teach myself to be better. At the illustration side, I've always kind of been pretty good at art and design. But I didn't know how to use Adobe Illustrator very well. And I saw that a lot of these guys were using Adobe Illustrator and stuff. So I saw it as a kind of learning opportunity and a project for me to work on a kind of side hustle at the time while I had a full time job. So I created some designs started uploading them to or I would say offering them to, at the time what were known as sure today sites like t fury, and others and these were sites that would sell a design for 24 hours and then they would take it down. So yeah, after maybe a couple of months, I think of trial and error. I eventually got a design accepted by one of these sites, made a few hundred dollars in the 24 hours and that kind of hooked me and and I thought okay, this is possible. There's a lot of these websites, there's a lot of places to sell my work. And if I just put in the work and have enough designs, then eventually this could be you know, a full time full time gig. But it took a long time to get there. It was maybe two two or three years later, before I really grew the income to to what was matching my my job income at the time. And that was right around the time that Amazon launched a service called merged by Amazon where they would Print and ship t shirts. And you could upload designs directly to Amazon, they would do everything else. And that really was a godsend for me that was came at just the right time, I had lots of designs, I was able to get them up very quickly on Amazon. And basically why ride a wave of popularity, your early sales and momentum in that space. And that really allowed me to, to Yeah, to quit my job go full time on T shirts. And I've been doing that ever since. Stacy Caprio 5:32 Wow, that's awesome. So I have to ask, I'm curious, what was the website you sold originally? What was the niche? Michael Essek 5:42 Yeah, it was, it was actually like a hyperlocal blog to where I was living at the time. So it wasn't, it wasn't ever making lots of money or anything, but it was just a super local news site. And I was just kind of gathering, you know, interesting stories and, and sharing them online. And it got a bit of a following. And it got it was kind of just as Twitter was taken off. So I'd quite an active Twitter account as well. So yeah, I just kind of lost interest in the project and sold it. So it wasn't ever a big thing for me. But I guess it just shows up. I've always been interested in I don't know, getting things set up online and growing an audience and things like that. Stacy Caprio 6:20 Yeah, that must have kind of helped you transition more seamlessly into the T shirt, online selling space. So that's really cool. The next thing I want to ask was, which marketing channels and platforms do list on today? Do you focus mostly on March? or what have you found to be effective?
Sell T Shirts Online
Michael Essek 6:42 Yeah, good question. So I started off getting sales through sites like red bubble and tee public, you know, several years ago, and those are still bringing in, you know, good income for me every month, obviously, merch by Amazon was the one that came along and really took off. And that's still still going strong. And previously, I've sold and still have a Shopify site where I sell some stuff, but I don't really promote that much anymore. So those are the kind of the main channels and then Etsy has been a big one. And that's, that's picked up quite significantly in the past few months, along with almost everything else actually apart from obviously merge by Amazon, which has been down for a while, I'd say in terms of like the ones that are the biggest, in a usual month, when we aren't in the middle of a global pandemic, then it would be much by Amazon, then probably redbubble, then teepublic, and then Etsy, somewhere in the mix there as well. And then there's a whole series of other smaller websites. So I still have designs on like society, six, designed by humans and several others like that. And the other route through which I kind of make money from my art is offline licensing. So we have an agent for my business, who basically promotes my work to various manufacturers and retailers, usually in the offline arena. And, and yeah, we make royalties through that as well, the harder to track, you don't get notifications on sales, you know, in real time, like you do with lots of online sources, but we still, you know, make a significant income from that. And that tends to be growing every year very steadily, because it's not as wide open to issues and copycats and things like that. And it's more of a long term business play, if you like. So we have that going as well. Stacy Caprio 8:29 Oh, that's awesome. How did you find out about licensing or connect with your agent?
T Shirt Business Success
Michael Essek 8:37 I think a couple of years into maybe new t shirt business, if you like that i i set up and started once it was once I was going full time on T shirts, I kind of realized, you know, we had at least hundreds if not thousands of designs at that time. And I thought, you know, we got all these designs, and obviously we put them up online and we sell them through various places. And that's great. But there's there seems to me that there would be other other channels, and one of them was offline. So that the problem was how do we how do we find those people? You know, how does how does that side of the business work? So what I did was was put together my designs in a big, big catalog, like an a three, like ring binder catalog, we had like a few of these printed and we went down to a licensing show in London, there's a licensing Expo every year. There's also one in in Las Vegas every year which is run by the same organization. And this is really where a lot of big brands, cutting their work Warner Brothers, these kind of you know, mega brands will go and conduct their licensing business where they'll go in and talk to potential manufacturers and retailers who wants to be able to sell whatever it is Peppa Pig lunchboxes or you know, Dexter's lab, socks or whatever it is. So they'll go and meet those people at this at this licensing show. And we had a little booth there. Me and my you know, little tiny booth, it was a fraction of the size of, of the big guys, but they didn't have kind of a section that was suitable for like, artists and illustrators and more, you know, independent businesses. So we were there. And it was a show for the most part, but we did meet, you know, I don't know, five or six people that were really good connections over the course of the three days. And one of them was, was our now licensing agent, I think he was, I don't know whether he'd stumbled across us before he actually attended the show. Because usually, you know, on trade shows, they publish a list of who's going to be there and what, who's at what stalls and stuff like that. So I think he actually reached out before the show, but then I met him at the show, you know, he looked over our stuff, it was a good fit for him. He was just losing an artist who was who was no longer going to be licensing with him. So he was looking for someone to fill the space. And yeah, it was a good it was a good fit. He had obviously a lot of connections with retailers across the United States, mainly, but but worldwide as well. So yeah, that's, that's how we got that connection and got that ball rolling. And it's been a slow burner, but it's been a good an additional leg of our business, if you like. Stacy Caprio 11:06 Yeah, that's really great. Is is the fee for that? Is it based on percentage of sales? Or is it simply just like a flat fee for each design he Commission's Michael Essek 11:21 know that so it's usually based on sales as a percentage of the sales that the retailer or the manufacturer generates through your design. So in that way, it's not it's not dissimilar to the system that works online with most of your your print on demand site to read bubbles and such. But it is different in the sense that, like I said, you don't get real time feedback on this stuff, you're usually entering into an arrangement for at least 12 months, if not more. And every retailer manufacturer is different. They all have different kind of needs and areas that they serve. We have a calendar deal kind of going on right now. So we've we've I think we did a 2020 calendar, we've got a 2021 calendar, and then we're working now on the 2022 calendar. So it's a good, you know, kind of long term business plan. Well, once you get established with one of these retailers, if they sell your work, and then they like it, then they'll recommission it. And you could be looking at, you know, pretty steady income and sales for for years rather than just, you know, weeks or months and stuff. Stacy Caprio 12:23 Yeah, that's really cool. I think most t shirt designers that I know simply list on different platforms. So to have a licensing contract could be really cool for long term revenue. Like you said, I was wondering, do you use any ads on any of your platforms? Or do you rely on just organic and word of mouth
T Shirt Ads
Michael Essek 12:49 the for the most part, it is purely organic. I have experimented with ads, I've never really done ads on Amazon or I don't know where else you can go could like Etsy, you can do ads there and I think they're actually now compulsory with with our store that Etsy will show ads to our stuff. And then we have to pay a percentage to Etsy, if we make a sale through one of their ads or whatever, in terms of me running ads and stuff. I've never done it at scale and never really done it that successfully. You know, I've played around with Facebook ads I played around with with Instagram and stuff never really cracked it, I've always found it quite difficult to sell t shirts through ads like that. The only place where I've had probably the best success is doing sponsored posts on Instagram. A few years ago, I was regularly doing sponsored posts with with certain Instagram accounts and influencers in in my niche, I guess you could call it and that was was profitable and quite quite successful. And I would just reach out to these people and say, you know, I have these t shirts, I think they're a good fit, would you like to pick a design to promote and then I'll pay you to, you know, to promote it and mention it or something. And usually we'd work back and forth you know, for quite a while to actually get the get the creative rights we'd usually like format into some kind of meme or joke or, or something like that. So it wasn't just a flat picture of a T shirt or something, you know, really boring like that that people are used to seeing and yeah, that's that's been successful for me and I think the the only reason I've kind of slowed down on that is because we were doing so well with organic based stuff that it was kind of draining it was quite time consuming to do that. But I would definitely recommend that to people as a as a relatively low cost way of dipping your foot in to advertising and without having to learn all the you know the ins and outs of click through rates and all the kind of technicalities that come with Facebook ads and stuff like that. Stacy Caprio 14:49 Oh, that's awesome. Did so when you use the influencer marketing? Do you drive them to your Shopify or Etsy or which channel Michael Essek 15:00 Yeah, so usually the the Instagram account would put my the link to my Shopify store in the in their bio. And when we do it that way, I would always drive them to my Shopify store, never to a print on demand site or anything like that, because that's, you're, obviously you're not making as much profit if you're driving through a print on demand site. And if you have your own Shopify store, and you're using a print on demand company like printful, or printer fi, then your profits can be much higher per order. And obviously, that's something that's very helpful when you're trying to do advertising. Stacy Caprio 15:34 Yeah. And did you ever use an influencer, where you saw it didn't produce positive sales? Or did they all pretty much drive some level of traffic?
T Shirt Influencer Marketing
Michael Essek 15:49 I think that they all did drive traffic, there were certainly influences I used and campaigns I did that were not profitable. But in the long run, what I would recommend people do and what I did, which worked was to never just do one of anything, you know, never do one. You know, let's try it. Let's do one and leave it there, I would always do a campaign with these guys where I'd run, you know, sponsored post every other day for like a week or something like that. So it'd be like five posts or seven posts in total. And then obviously, some of them would would bomb, some of them would be okay. And then usually you'd have one, maybe two that would do quite well, and then taken in the round, you know, it would usually work out profitably in total. I mean, it didn't always work with every influencer, I used obviously, is kind of hit and miss. But if you can do that, and you can kind of scale that, which I think is probably easier today than it was three or four years ago, then then yeah, I think that's a good way of doing it. If you make sure that you don't ever put all your eggs in one basket and you treat it as a learning experience, you know, you're going to go in and see what works and find out what this audience responds to and users are kind of tool to help you see, okay, this design doesn't really fit. But this one did really well. Look at the comments on this, look at the comments on that. And it just kind of helps you, you know, find your way forward, which I think is the is the ideal way to think about it rather than just, Oh, that one didn't work. This whole thing doesn't work. It's never going to work and giving up. Stacy Caprio 17:19 Yeah, that's a good way to think about it, just testing and trying new things. Do you have any tips when choosing an influencer? Anything you noticed that made those campaigns more successful? Michael Essek 17:34 Yeah, I think it really comes down to knowing your audience and stuff. I was certainly very involved at the time with with Instagram and stuff. So I was always on Instagram, I was very familiar with, you know, the audience, I was trying to target. I was following a lot of these accounts. I knew them, you know, innately almost. So when I reached out, it was easy to have those conversations, we were on the same level. What I was, you know, talking about was not confusing, you know, they understood the jokes that were on my T shirts, I was usually asking them to pick which designs they'd like to promote, so that they weren't just, you know, I wasn't saying promote this design that I was letting them, you know, pick, I was saying, Hey, here's 20 new designs we've just created, do any of them, you know, which ones would you like to go with and stuff like that, definitely making it more of a interaction and a partnership, really, rather than just I'm buying ad space on your Instagram account. The other thing is that it's so important to tell a story in your marketing beyond just, hey, look at this product. And that's it, you know, the ones the posts that were the most successful for me, the sponsored posts that really did well was when the the account was doing something funny, usually stuff, like they'd be doing some kind of joke and they just be wearing my T shirt and it kind of be in the background or something like that. So anything where you can kind of not make it about the shirt, but make the shirt kind of secondary, you know, something in the background, something that people might notice, but it's not you know, making it this big thing about the T shirt because T shirts are $25 you know, they are impulse purchases, especially when they're related to some kind of trend or something like that. So I think that's where a lot of people trip up is they they try to make it all about the shirt and people aren't really emotionally depends on the design and the niche of course but a lot of times people will buy a shirt as a kind of afterthought they'll be like, Oh, that's funny. I'm gonna buy that and click click click and they bought it without really going through a process of That's amazing. Wow, I really need that you know data and then thinking about it for days or anything like that. So anyway, you can kind of make the T shirt fit that that mold if you like fit that pathway so that someone notices it thinks it's cool goes looking for it finds it and buys it without you know, making too big a deal of it. I think anything like that where you can tell a story you can make even post it Done, where we didn't have a T shirt graphic or anything like that we just had made a story or a joke around a particular phrase or something. And then what would happen is people would go and search for the phrase, and then they'd find the T shirt, and they'd buy the T shirt and stuff. So, yeah, there's lots of ways to approach it. And I would definitely say it's, it's best to think outside the box and do stuff, you know, not just like what everyone's doing, which is take a design, user, place it markup, whack it on Instagram, hope for the best. Stacy Caprio 20:32 Do you focus more on the keyword research? Or do you focus more on the design? And the image? And what do you think is more important when you are creating designs?
T Shirt Keyword Research: A Good Idea?
Michael Essek 20:48 Yeah, that's a good question. I think for me, personally, I can only really speak for myself. And I know that there are people who do this, in many different ways, you know, have success using many different methods. Me personally, I've always created, I guess, from the perspective that I'm going to create something that I'm, I'm interested in, and I like, and I think is funny. And when I think back to the early days of when I was getting started, it was kind of that motivation that that did it for me, it was, hey, that's a cool idea, no one's done it, I'm gonna do it, maybe someone will find it, maybe someone will buy it, there was no research, there was no keyword data, there was no BSR, or anything like that, it was just me going I think that's funny, maybe other people will find it funny, and almost trusting the internet to, to, you know, allow people to make those connections. In fact, I remember quite vividly creating my, one of my first stores, which was a WooCommerce store, not a Shopify store. So the first time I'd kind of done my own brand, and sold stuff through printful, and things like that, the day I published it live, I literally, you know, made it public on Google or whatever, you know, allowed people allowed the search engines to index it and stuff like that. The next day, I had an order, and I couldn't, I couldn't believe this, I can, you know, make heads or tails of it. But Google had index my site overnight, someone had found this design, I hadn't promoted it and link to any link to anywhere. And yeah, someone just found it and bought it. And I was kind of dumbfounded that that could happen so quickly. But it was just the power of Google and people, you know, searching for, for stuff. And someone happens to be searching for something very similar to the design I had on my site. So that was kind of my, my initial motivation. As I grew, and the business grew, I did. And I and I do, you know, obviously, become more aware of the data that's available out there and things like trend data, whether it's Google Trends, or BSR, on Amazon, or whatever. So yeah, I did begin to, you know, make decisions a little bit like, Oh, this is a good idea. But has it already been done? Or is it very competitive? Or is there no indication that anyone would like anything like this, you know, so basically, it became a filtering process is still very, you know, have ideas have lots and lots of ideas, hundreds, maybe even thousands of ideas that have not been turned into designs yet. And so usually, it's a, it's a process of, okay, is that in a space that's really competitive or not competitive enough, and it's trying to find those ideas and designs that are in the middle and create those and turn them into designs. So that's, that's my approach. It's more about the design. And hopefully, the kind of gold standard is, you know, someone sees your design or someone is searching for that specific design. But there's also, you know, a lot of people who will search for generically or even won't search for a T shirt, they might be searching for a particular joke or a meme or something. And then they will find that there's a very appropriate t shirt for that, and then they'll go and buy it. So it's, yeah, it's not so much for me, I don't think that often in terms of like, you know, what's popular right now or anything like that, I tend to just kind of be led by the ideas. I have an almost trust that hey, if I like it, someone else might like it. And, and kind of follow my heart if you like in that way. Mm hmm. Stacy Caprio 24:11 Do you find Google still drives traffic today? To your designs?
Online T-Shirt Sales & Google
Michael Essek 24:18 Yeah, definitely. I think there's a lot of traffic coming from Google. And that is not you know, that comes from Google to Red Bull that comes from Google to teepublic. It comes from Google to Amazon. And then if you have a decent website as well and you know what you're doing then you can also get some of that traffic to your own website. I do think obviously, Amazon is now I don't know where it ranks in terms of search engines, but it's obviously a search engine in itself. And a lot of people will go to Amazon and just search on there when they want to buy something. But not everyone and there is a you know a lot of the world and certainly a lot of people in the world who don't have any Amazon Prime or don't think that way and they will search online. And they will use Google images to look for what they're looking for. They'll go on Google Shopping or something like that, or people will simply browse through a shopping app or something like that, to find things and, and not necessarily be searching something out. So yeah, I think Google is still a big part of, of the the whole process, and especially about the way I think about things I always think in terms of is this a design that people can search for, you know, sometimes designs are so difficult to describe or something, you know, if a design can't be described with a couple of keywords, then it's probably going to be difficult for people to find it via Google, and even if it's a great design, so that does factor into my thinking is like, well, how are people going to find it? What're the words they're going to use? And if you can't really define that, you know, sometimes that's hard, especially with, like, designs, the, I don't know, more illustrative or aesthetic based, you know, it's not really about the design, it's more about the feel of the design or the style of the design, then it's often hard to describe those designs in, in a few key words. So yeah, I think Google is still very, very important. And it still factors into my thinking a lot. Stacy Caprio 26:14 Have you found the keywords to be less important, as you've started building a brand? Or how does that fit into your strategy, Michael Essek 26:24 I think it still kind of boils down to designs, as in, people can search on Google, and they can find your design, whether that's on redbubble, or on your own website or something like that. So obviously, keywords is still a big important part, especially in my business, where we are still making the majority of our income through organic traffic, and through organic searches, whether those searches start on Amazon or on Google or wherever. So yeah, that still plays a big part in, in, in making decisions about what kind of designs to create. But at the same time, I don't let it become the be all and end all, you know, because we have these other channels where we license our work. I don't allow myself to be completely hindered by keywords, for example, you know, we create designs all the time where there is no, you know, you can search for the keyword of the design, but you're not going to find anything because no one's created anything like this, it's completely original and new. And it doesn't really, you know, no one would search for that design. So we have to then you know, but we can go and license that to offline licensed partners and stuff. And they'll take, take one look at it and go, I love it. It's funny, it's great. It's on trend, data darts, all these things. But it's not something people are going to be searching for. But if it's shown to people in hot topic or wherever, then they'll look at it and go, Whoa, that's funny, and whatever and share it with their friends and stuff. So, so yeah, it's all those kind of different factors that come into it, especially if you're in the early stages you are trying to sell online primarily. And you're trying to sell through through organic reach. And then you do need to find ways to describe your designs so that they can get in front of the right people. And I think usually that boils down to do you know, the customers you're going after and the audience's you're going after, in which case, it's usually quite should be quite easy to understand what keywords to use and stuff like that. And, and also not being too, too obsessed and too confused about keywords, people do get really heads up. And they think that if I don't use this keyword, it won't work or there's magic keywords or anything like that. And that's obviously not the case, the more you think like a customer and just, you know, use natural words and things like they would then you know, you've pretty much got it cracked or you've got it as cracked as you can. Because a lot of this is based on volume and scale. A lot of it is, you know, I'm going to create 10 designs, eight of them are going to do very little, but two of them will sell very well. And I don't know which two they're going to be so I just keep on creating new stuff and putting it out there. And kind of iterating and improving my processes as I go. Stacy Caprio 28:57 Awesome. Like what would be your number one tip for someone looking to build their own t shirt? brand?
Starting a TShirt Business & Brand
Michael Essek 29:07 Great question. I think I would almost think of it this way if if the person is anything like me, which is to say they're kind of a creative, designer minded person in the first place, then I would probably say that I would take a long hard look at the possibility of doing something which is to which t shirts will be secondary. So for example, you know, a lot of the best selling t shirts and stuff, of course around the world are connected to the biggest brands in the world, the biggest IP so there'll be Star Wars t shirts or Disney t shirts or whatever. And a lot of the top selling designs you see on redbubble or teepublic or Amazon a lot of the times there'll be something to do with an influencer like a YouTuber or something like this. So I think if you can create something to which you know, the T shirts and the merchandise are going to be secondary, whether that's like maybe it's a webcomic maybe it's some Funny Twitter account, maybe it's an Instagram account where you, you post certain artwork or something like that, I think that's something a lot of people should really spend more time kind of considering. Because if you can create a brand like that, that's really about the arts or it's about your personality, or it's about, I don't know, a particular topic or a niche that you're going to be, you know, sharing about and getting people excited about, then, once you've got that selling merchant stuff kind of comes naturally and comes a lot easier. And what you, what a lot of people kind of fall into is this route of I'm going to create t shirts, designs, okay, great. And then they go out and they create, I don't know, 10 different designs for 10 different niches, and then the some of the myself, but they just keep on creating lots of crazy different designs across loads of different topics. And then they throw all those designs together and into a Shopify store. And then they think they've got a brand, and they don't understand, or they don't know why people aren't buying or why people don't seem to want to follow them on Instagram or something. But they've got this brand, which is just, you know, so broad, it covers so many niches, and there's no personality, there's just a collection of random designs, that it makes it very hard for people and customers to connect with that, I think, if people can kind of avoid that trap, and instead, you know, think long and hard about the other side of it, how could I create something that people really get into. And you can do that around a clothing brand, and around a T shirt brand. But it takes quite a bit of discipline. And it takes time to build that up. Because it's relatively easy to see some sales, if you throw your net very wide, you cast a very wide net, across lots of different niches, your chances of making some sales increase, of course, because you've got a lot of designs across a lot of niches. Whereas if you go, you know, really deep on a particular single topic, what often happens is, you can make sales, but it's going to be a while before you really gain traction, and you gain kind of a following or something around that thing that you've created. So yeah, I would say designers should should think about that. And think about, you know, it could just be that you have a whatever instagram and twitter account for you your personal accounts, and you just share your artwork. And hopefully your artwork is you know, similar style. So everything. So someone who follows you would be like Oh, really like that style. So I'm going to follow them. And then you just kind of build it up that way, it could be as simple as that. And there's, there's quite a few examples of artists who have, you know, built really solid brands off that, that kind of approach and using red bubble tea public and these other sites to help them you know, bring in some income and stuff. While they do that certainly say, think think brand, you know, think about how this could be a brand, what you're doing now could be some kind of brand within a year or two years or something like that. And don't just kind of be so focused on the here. And now because it is, you know, it's relatively easy to make the short sale online these days, it's quite hard to build something that in three years is going to be you know, sustainable, and something that you actually have value in that you could, I don't know, sell or whatever it is, but something that you you could really place a value on, instead of just, I have a lot of random t shirt designs, and they make me a few hundred dollars a month or whatever. Stacy Caprio 33:14 Hmm, that's a great tip, I fell into that trap of just creating as many designs for keywords when I first started on merge a few years ago. And I think that's a really good point about building kind of a unified type of brand and having it so people want to keep coming back and purchasing from you when you're doing your T shirt work and design work in terms of and marketing everything. In terms of the 8020 principle. Do you see what do you see from your business as driving the majority of all your results versus the kind of maybe the busy work that you don't see producing the results? Michael Essek 34:01 So good. A good question. I think, having been in the space for so long. Now we do have those designs that have been in, in the market if you like they've been available online for for several years now. So those are obviously our best sellers. And they are established within whatever niches they're in. So you know, it's I don't hesitate to kind of say, Oh, you know, our best selling designs are like this nice in this niche, because they're not really, you know, so focused like that. Instead, we just have some designs that happens to get embedded. For example, we got like a kid's birthday show, which is just really popular. And it just seems to be at a no, it's been on Amazon for years. And no one seems to be able to shake it from its spot. It's still just there and it just make sales every day. But that's not what I tend to do. That just happens to be a random design that we did, you know, in the early days and it just is established there. So a lot of what's worked for me has been stuff that's been quite focused around a particular community but it's been an original No joke or an idea that really appeals to that community and it happened to take off and do well. And obviously, there's a lot of cases where I thought this was a funny joke, I thought this was a great design, and it never did take off. But certainly those designs that have done the best over the long term tend to be things that that are original that no one's done before. Or if they've been done before, they've been done quite badly. And we've taken a concept and reworked it or improved it somehow and made it you know, a lot better, with a much better design a much better concepts overall or something. We've found all these up and coming niches that we hopped on to it's more that we've, we've understood certain communities and certain markets, and we created designs that really fit for them. And then they just kind of take on a life of their own, especially if they happen to be in a in a niche or topic where it you know, it was growing. So some of our best designs have been stuff which I don't know, four or five years ago, you'd be like, well, that's not really a market, there is no market there. But now we look and we're like, oh, yeah, that was clearly a trend that was beginning back then. We didn't really know it, we obviously had some kind of inkling about the topic. But, you know, we couldn't have predicted that it would be here, you know, now or whatever. It's like, I don't know, if you were making Bernie Sanders t shirts back in the year 2010, when no one knew who Bernie Sanders was. Obviously, you stand to benefit by the time it rolled around to, you know, 2018 2019, whatever, when Bernie Sanders was was a big deal. So yeah, it's a it's a funny, funny business. And it is a lot of trends. And it's a lot of throwing spaghetti at the walls and seeing what sticks. And you just have to kind of keep iterating and improving and developing your your plans. Really? Stacy Caprio 36:51 Yeah, that makes sense. So I did want to ask you, what made you get into the T shirt design influencer space? And how does that compare with your T shirt sales business? Do you like one or the other more, Michael Essek 37:06 I think for a long time, I'd had the idea that I wanted to have a blog about simply making money from your arts and stuff and started things several times and just never really followed through with them. So I'd buy a domain name, I'd start you know, I'd install WordPress, let's get things going. And then I would just never really like do the final push of of writing articles and getting things out there. But I think maybe the confidence of making sales and having this kind of steady growth in the business gave me a bit of a boost. And I thought maybe, you know, I could make it work this time. And I just wrote, I can't really remember what I kind of started with. But I think I wrote like it was maybe in the early days of merge palms. And so I was writing tips and stuff. And you know, here's how to sell on Etsy, here's some advice for selling on redbubble. And it was at a time when there was very, very little out there on that topic. There was very few people sharing their experiences on redbubble and teepublic, and Tee Fury and stuff because there was, well, I know, because I was searching for information, I was trying to sell more. And I was looking for advice and stuff. And there was only one or two people who'd ever written anything about how they're able to make, you know, designs that sell on Tee Fury or get selected by a shirt a day site, or whatever it is. I think I kind of entered that space, I think I interviewed a few artists and stuff where I tried to interview a few artists in the early days. And that was one of the things I got started with. But I think it just kind of snowballed. And you get into Facebook groups, and you get into these communities and you start to follow your nose a little bit into what people want to hear about and what they're interested in. And I think I kind of liked the idea of having, I don't know, a book or something out there that would help people and I thought well, that could be cool having some resources, and then I could sell those online and it would be just another stream of income. I didn't really think of it much beyond that. And it's been, I don't know, maybe four years or something into, you know, publicly posting stuff as Michael Essek and having things out there. And yeah, it's been a good, a good really good experience and especially when you do something under your under your name, it's it's it's a lot more personal and everything's kind of tied up in that and you're so I am like naturally quite introverted and like to keep to myself and um, you know, quite a private person. So, when you're doing stuff like live streaming, or, or you're speaking on stage or something is quite a new experience for me. So I think it has has been good in that sense. And I think I've just enjoyed, I do enjoy the process of teaching and I enjoy sharing stuff, especially when it's something like, you know, here's an insight that I've gained and I can share it with you and here's how I can teach it you know, step one, step two, step three. It's been it's not been like a steady business in that sense, it's not been something that's, you know, made more money every month if you like, compared to like t shirts, it's been more, you know, I've launched a book. So we have a spike of income there. And then I'd launch another book a year later or something and have another spike of income. So it's not really a business, oh, it's not a regular business in that sense. And more, just think of it as I'm going to create a new article, or I'd like to read an article about this. So I'm going to write it and just keep putting stuff out there and sharing news. And I do like, you know, I'm genuinely interested in, in print on demand, and in the space and in what's happening, I think there's technology that's really moving at quite a pace, you know, I've been to some of these facilities, I've been invited to, you know, look around, you know, look at the printers and talk to the people who were behind the scenes on this stuff. And it does, you know, genuinely interest me. And I think it's exciting for artists and designers that there is this technology that allows you to create something and someone on the other side of the world can have it on a T shirt within a few days. It's been interesting, I am, you know, always working on like new projects, whether it's like a little book or a course or something that can can help people. But it's not something that's taken over the T shirt stuff, and I don't think I'd ever really wanted to I think I'm, I'd like to have that balance of being able to create, you know, silly, funny designs. And then on the other hand to go and write a blog post or live stream or something like that. It's nice to have those that variety in the day. Stacy Caprio 41:32 Yeah, that is nice. And maybe you could even sell your own Michael asik branded t shirts one day. Michael 41:40 Yeah, I actually, I put some some stuff on redbubble the other day just to kind of what I was doing, but I was doing like a tutor. I was doing some like a walkthrough blog post on how to upload to redbubble or something. So I was just using my Michael Essek logo was, you know, a T shirt design and stuff and putting a few of them on redbubble. And I thought, oh, that'd be funny if someone bought them and started wanting my classic merge. But yeah, as far as I know, so far, I've not sold any of those. Stacy Caprio 42:11 Oh, yeah. Well, we can put the link in the show notes. And maybe we'll pick one up. But yeah, I think yeah, I think is there any thing in terms of any current offers are things that you'd like, the listeners to know about? Michael 42:30 and not so much right now, I think, you know, if, if listeners are interested in in print on demand, and in the space, then I do have a email newsletter, which goes out usually a couple of times a week, but certainly every Friday, I kind of do a roundup of, of any news in the space. And I try to keep on top of things that are happening and bring them to people fast. So they can be you know, first to market with whatever's going on. So definitely subscribe, but Michael lesyk.com. And I'm also doing live streaming right now on YouTube every Thursday at 3pm. UK time so you can join me on there. I do questions and answers and critique designs and do all kinds of different stuff. So you can you can check me out there too. Stacy Caprio 43:13 Awesome. And yeah, is there anywhere else? They can follow you? Or mostly your newsletter and live streaming? Michael 43:21 Yeah, all the usual places. I think I have an account, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Quora where you can ask me questions and stuff like that. So yeah, if you search Michael Essek you'll find a lot of places where I am online. Stacy Caprio 43:36 Awesome. And thank you so much, Michael. This was so helpful. And I'm sure a lot of people will enjoy hearing your experiences as well. Michael 43:45 No problem. Thank you, Stacy. Stacy Caprio 43:48 I love Michael's story, not only because it is so similar to my own, except we went in opposite directions, but also because he is so willing to share his own journey to try to help others succeed with T shirt design and sales. We went in opposite directions, as Michael started out, creating and selling a website and then realized he needed to build up a new income stream. Once his website monthly income stream disappeared. So he dove into creating t shirts. And I started out inspired by his journey creating t shirts, and then pivoted into buying more websites with monthly income streams that I could grow more steadily than I found I could grow my T shirt income stream business month over month. One thing we can learn from Michael's story is that selling apparel or any type of design or custom product online, takes a lot of showing up day after day, producing new designs constantly and really having consistency to see results as well as seen it take a while to build up to a consistent income stream. In Michaels case taking two to three years for his t shirt income to match his day job income. Michael has had great success following his own gut intuition and his own sense of humor when designing and selling shirts, he knows his own strengths very well, including his ability to generate ideas and his sense of humor, which has helped him find his design niches and actually sell designs, as opposed to a focus on keyword research, which is how I kind of got into the space. I love his advice to always create from a place where you think, hey, that's a cool idea. I like it, and maybe someone else will like it, and then buy it. I've always focused more on keyword research, like I mentioned, using tools like Amazon BSR, Chrome extensions, and seo keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Tool, as well as platform specific keyword research tools. But I like Michael's approach, because it allows you to be the first one in a niche, or targeting a specific keyword to build your own style, and your own brand, which is better for long term success, as opposed to what I did, which was creating a ton of design variations when you're focusing too much on keyword research. And you're just diving into niches that are super competitive. And it doesn't give you the opportunity to build your own brand or really grow something that will have long term success. One thing that is different from my T shirt focus. And Michaels is I have always been focused on evergreen designs as opposed to trends, which is also what I focus on when creating website content sense. I like creating something that will last and generate recurring sales, instead of trying to chase trends or individual sale spurts. However, maybe that is a reason my T shirt sales have never been as successful as Michaels, who has hit a few home runs on trend t shirt designs. I was also intrigued by his mention of submitting t shirt a day sites, like t fury is I've never done that. And even though it's technically chasing a sales spirit, as opposed to gaining a long term, organic incomes dream, which I'm always drawn to. I'm also now inspired to submit a few of my best designs to the daily t shirt sites just to see if they'd be approved or if I would get any type of sales from that. It's also interesting to hear about people's experience marketing with influencers. And I enjoyed Michael's tips that he found the most success when he worked closely with the influencers in every way to make it more of a partnership, as opposed to an ad buying space where you're just slapping up a mock up and making sure he really knew the niche inside and out in the accounts he was using inside and out. And then using that influencer marketing to tell a story. The tip that surprised me is to not make the influencer ad about the product. My background in running ads for companies, we always focused on the product because we were paying for an ad. And especially for non impulse purchase products, you don't want the potential customer to miss the fact that you're running an ad and that you have a product you're trying to sell because that defeats the entire purpose of the ad, which is letting them know they can buy the product. However, I do like this approach and it makes sense for t shirts and smaller items that are more impulse buys to structure ads. So the focus is on the idea. And the purchase becomes an impulse afterthought which makes the ad less salesy. And thinking about that it makes sense that Michael found more success using this structure for influencer ads. And I like the specific example he gives where when the influencer does something funny, like telling a joke that really resonates with a niche and then wears a T shirt that matches that joke at the same time. But it seems like the teacher is an afterthought. But when people think the joke is funny, and then they see the T shirt and it kind of triggers like oh, I want that shirt I want to buy it and it makes it their decision to purchase the shirt as opposed to them feeling they are being sold to and seen an ad So giving them the ownership of that decision seems like it would be really effective as opposed to shoving a blatant ad in their face. And it's something that I definitely want to try in the future. The only issue with influencer marketing is it does seem it's hard to find a good niche, and to find accounts that really fit your niche where the person is also influential in the minds of their followers. It seems like something you would have to spend a lot of time and energy doing that, in reality could be refocused on other important things, like creating new designs, or posting your designs on new platforms and really optimizing them to get found in organic search. My favorite takeaway from this entire episode, is when Michael said that if you already have a brand or following, that is when it becomes incredibly easy to sell tons of related t shirt designs. This really struck me, my past and T shirt design has taken the exact opposite approach than this because I don't have a large following in any niche or a huge brand that would make sense to create t shirts around. So I've taken the opposite approach where you spend hundreds of hours trying to do the keyword research and create designs that fit into the existing keyword demand. And then spending tons of time to get those little crumbs and trying to get your T shirts seen kind of individually and pick up a sale here and there. It makes much more sense to take the opposite approach and build a large following. Or if you already have control of a large brand, then you already have an audience that you can sell t shirts or really anything else if you understand what they're looking for. And it makes me think maybe time is better spent, especially if you have a long term view by building a large audience or following first and then launching something rather than trying to spend hours to get only one or two short term unrepeatable t shirt sales. It's definitely something worth considering. But also, building a brand of any kind takes a long time. It's more of a long term play. And as Michael was saying, you can really sell a few t shirts right away and get that immediate gratification. If it's something you just kind of slapped together. So it definitely takes more discipline to play the long game in building a brand. Also, I think it would be kind of miserable if you actually became truly famous. So it's kind of a double edged sword in that sense. I actually recently relaunched my Etsy shop after taking a few year break from posting any new designs. I designed the shirts with my mom who does the drawings and I do the keyword research, the design coloring and the marketing, which is one reason I was looking forward to recording this episode with Michael so much. You can check out my mom and my Etsy shop. It's called Stacy's shirt shop on Etsy. And I'll leave the link in the show notes if you guys want to take a peek. So one thing I've taken away from this episode is that I originally made the mistake of casting too wide a net by throwing hundreds of random designs at the wall and not caring about building a brand or something that would actually attract a loyal following when I started selling on merch and Etsy. I remember when I was spending eight to 10 hours a day creating 10 or more designs a day, pretty much full time as my focus. I was still living with my grandma at this time. And I still remember the day I got 16 Amazon merge sales in one day, I felt so on top of the world and I was just so happy about that. It ended up that I hit kind of my max t shirt sales having a few two k profit months on merge back before they cut the licensing percentage again and kept rotating designs and changing the algorithm which is something they keep doing it definitely started to decrease my profits and I started focusing on other things and uploading last to merge because I found you really needed to upload consistently to keep even your sales level. And at its max my Etsy store got a few hundred in revenue a month. And so that's not really much profit at all. So that was kind of my really peak experience. With print on demand, I remember when I hit my first two k profit month, that was the month where I had 16 merge sales in one day, I was just so happy that month with my T shirt sales, I was thinking, this is it, I found what I love doing. And I can just keep creating new designs and scaling it. However, that's not really how it works. Just because you keep pumping out designs, it doesn't mean your sales will keep going up at that same amount or even at all, especially if you're posting your designs on other platforms not owned by you, such as Etsy, and Amazon, that are great because they have their own customer base that they sell your shirts to. And so that's why they're so great, because they're pretty much a marketing tool where you get access to their audience, but selling on these platforms. They work by trying to optimize their own sales. And they do this by rotating and testing through their design base. So this means that all designs you create will usually fade off in terms of sales after just a few months. And definitely after a year or more. Unless that design was in the top .001 of that platforms converting designs. And then look, they'll keep it there. But they really do optimize test rotate, and your design is going to get pushed off eventually, t shirt selling platforms like Etsy and Amazon. They're not like Google where you can put up a piece of good content, and it can rank for years or more. etsy and Amazon rotate through things much more quickly. And they're really focused on testing conversion rates, and finding what will make them the most money. So they're always optimizing designs. And this is one reason why it's much better to target your designs with super specific keywords and targeting. Because this gives them a better chance that people who see your design when they search for the keywords in your title that they'll actually convert. So when you have a high conversion rate, and everyone else is targeting really broad keywords in their title, yours will stay on the page for those keywords for longer. So there are things you can do to optimize and to win those algorithms. But it's still not a permanent type of play. So I've always found it to be temporary. And it's a numbers game where you have to have constant output, which I respect because Michael, he seems to do such prolific output every single day. He has so many ideas and is constantly creating new designs as well as designing around trends, which if you're willing to constantly create the new designs, selling around trends, and doing this type of side hustle is actually a great way to create some type of income stream. And if it's something you love to do, I would say give it a try. And it's definitely something that I actually do love doing in a small amount. And I'm still creating designs just in a smaller way and in a more brand focused way with my mom. And I do enjoy doing it. And it's also it's kind of addicting when you make a sale Etsy gives you a notification and your phone dings. And it's a nice dopamine hit. This episode made me realize that Michael and I should narrate one of those calm app episodes that helped people fall asleep. I think ours would be a best seller. So Michael, send me an email if you're in any way. Let me know how you guys enjoyed this episode. And feel free to email me Stacy at hurt sto and if you think there any t shirt or apparel brands or sellers you think would be a great fit to have in a future episode. I'm always looking to learn from more successful t shirt sellers and ecommerce store owners so feel free to send me anyone you think would be a great fit for a future episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hearst SEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you're listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments at [email protected] that's [email protected] Thanks again.
Contact Michael Essek
Buy Michael's own T-Shirt design we talked about in the episode, actually pretty cute! Sign up for his newsletter by going to the Michael Essek website Instagram: www.instagram.com/MichaelEssek Twitter: www.twitter.com/MichaelEssek Facebook: www.facebook.com/MichaelEssek Quora: www.quora.com/MichaelEssek
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