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Since starting out with our first 40 customers about 8 weeks ago, we have generated $14,251.74 in revenue with about 115 subscribers—and 3 one time product purchases.
For those who haven't read our first post, we run Runner Crate. The idea is simple: with each monthly box, runners get healthy snacks and awesome running gear, complete with running challenges and medals to show off. The customer can pay $35 per month or pre-pay (3 months, 6 months, or 12 months) to save money.
This idea can be replicated to any niche as you can tell from the Cratejoy market. There are literally hundreds of niches that have monthly subscription services.
The intention of this post is to tell you the Runner Crate story and how you can easily start your own business.
How did we get customers?
In our first post, we mentioned that we were using MailChimp. Since then we have switched to ConvertKit. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is it’s ease of use and support. We will write a separate post on this.
We are using our email like it’s our own social network – a way to connect to our followers and anyone relatively interested in what we have to offer. A place to interact and inform as well as a medium to sell. We are willing to bet you are subscribed to a few email lists for companies you haven’t purchased from but want to know when they have something special going on.
We also use our list as a way to give away unique content, drive traffic back to our site, and provide promotions and giveaways. The idea is that we own the email list and we own that traffic. We could always export the list and take it with us. If you build a business on eBay, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat etc… you don’t own that platform so it can go away or they can change their algorithm at any time. Most Instagram marketers are probably noticing lower engagement with their content. Don’t build your business on someone else’s foundation.
Here is an example of a promotion we sent out.
How are we collecting email addresses?
*Giveaways – You can read about one of our methods here. * Just asking.
Here is an example of us asking for emails because we hit 5,000 followers on Instagram. This method netted 40 emails. It’s not an astounding number but it’s a good amount of potential customers. We thought it was very successful, especially for 0 cost and it can be repeated with other milestones we hit. It may not be the BEST method but it does the job. We get it, other people could steal the emails; however, our product is so awesome that customers are only expecting emails from us. Others will be considered spammers, should they receive unsolicited email.
Referrals
Asking your current happy customers if they know ONE person that would be interested in your service. This sounds obvious but hardly ANYONE does it. It helps if your product doesn’t suck 🙂
Along with asking customers, we also asked the vendors we partnered with to refer to their current audience. There’s a good chance that they have runners who may be interested in what we have to offer.
ref
Sent boxes out to influencers and reviewers
We sent Runner Crates to a few runners with decent sized audiences. This was hit or miss and could use some fine tuning.
Here are blog post that were written about our Crate.
Noah Kagan @ appsumo loved it.
Maybe these haven’t translated into actual orders yet but at least it gets the product in front of more eyeballs.
5.** The golden ticket method**
Every month we put a golden ticket into our boxes. The results are amazing.
Getting orders, handling orders, and everything in between
Our current number of subscribers
As our Runner Crate venture embarks on its 8th week, it’s pretty nerve wrecking and exciting at the same time. We didn’t know what to expect in terms of orders. We didn’t know if people would be happy with the products we sent; and as expected some weren’t and a lot were. You can’t make everyone happy. Our website isn’t as pretty as it could be but works and gets the point across. Our logo isn’t something were happy with but you can change logos at any time. If your product is good, it will carry the brand. Our custom boxes have had over 10 changes.
Here is the final one we are going with
The guys over at Kapa99 designed it and we couldn’t be happier with it.
Can you tell what it is supposed to be?
For the first 2 shipments we only ordered a certain number of custom boxes. We had to slow the orders so that we didn’t oversell. We had to put a notice saying we would “Sell Out“ which was true. This month we are setting a hard date as a deadline. This will allow us time to order product and maximize the number of new subscribers. However, we kept the urgency aspect by announcing a ‘LAST DAY to ORDER’ countdown on our Instagram and website. People procrastinate by nature and this works well to increase sales quite a bit.
but how bout profit???
We don’t hold much inventory. Our total cost mostly consists of expenses for products, boxes, design, and shipping. All this is roughly $5,300. Keep in mind we do have a few pre-pay subscribers and that puts shipping cost at $700-$800 a month.
What’s going on now?
We are currently working on redesigning our site with an awesome and talented team. The site should be done early to mid-June! We’re super excited for this and this is what we’ve come up so far.
Since we work full time, we’ve been working on this business (contacting vendors, shopping for goods, etc) whenever we have a chance.
Businesses are starting to reach out to us to ask about getting their brands/products featured in our Runner Crate. This is great because some of them are willing to donate their goods to us just so they can be labeled as one of the iconic Runner Crate options. Margins go up for donated products.
Lastly, we are hoping to get our new custom printed boxes made soon and an LLC created once 20K in revenue is hit. We’ve ordered 2,000 boxes so this project is on full force—nothing half ass here.
TLDR; 8 Weeks in.. made 14k. focusing on collecting email, redesigned and ordered 2k boxes, redesigning website
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