What’s In the Box? Low-Carb, Low-Sugar Snacks

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh, hey there. So glad you made it. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Sada School School. I'm really excited because today we have a listener success story. I love bringing you stories of people who've gotten ideas from previous Sada School School episodes and then gone on to start their own project.

And this is a good one. It's all about a CPA who learns to start her own subscription box. In less than a year, it's bringing in more than $5,000 a month. So stick around and you'll hear all about how she does that. And remember, there's something out there for you too.

I'm not telling you stories of celebrities. I'm not telling you stories of famous entrepreneurs. The stories that I bring you every day are of regular people with real jobs, often with families or other responsibilities. And despite the pressures of life, they are finding a way to invest in themselves through the form of a new source of income. That is what a Sada School is all about.

It's not just working harder. It's not just getting a second job. It's about creating an asset for yourself. There are five stages to this process. I'll do a little recap of those stages at the end of this episode.

But first, I want to tell you all about this story because it's really great. So shout out to today's sponsor and then on with the show. [Music]

By day, Donna Boone is a certified public accountant who works for a mortgage company in Dallas, Texas. She's good at her job. She genuinely enjoys what she does and has no desire to leave.

But like so many others listening to the show, she also wanted something more, something different and fun that could potentially help her to develop new skills. That's right, what she wanted was a side hustle, perhaps just like you. As an avid listener, Donna was introduced to a multitude of new ideas and interesting business models that she had never before considered. Of all those ideas, she found that she was particularly interested in subscription boxes, monthly services where customers would pay a fee to get a box of stuff in the mail. But what would her subscription box be?

What stuff would she put in the box? She didn't know. That changed in November 2017 with episode 333. It was about a subscription box called My Bariatric Box that was tailored to those who had undergone bariatric bypass surgery. The featured side hustler, Nikki Wilmore, having gone through the procedure herself, found that all the weight she had struggled to get rid of was making a Britney Spears comeback 13 years later.

When she discovered that others like her were also struggling to find solutions, she went looking for those solutions. The answer became a highly successful, highly profitable new source of income. Getting back to Donna, she liked the idea of bringing in extra income while also improving the lives of others. This got her thinking about specific dietary needs. She knew it wasn't practical to expect something you created to be everything to everybody, but to the right group of people, it certainly could mean a lot.

While she didn't have any direct personal experience dealing with dietary restrictions, many of her family members did. Her mother and several of her relatives were living with type two diabetes, so she knew that the struggles were real. With some research under her belt, she also knew that at the very least, conditions like type two could be better managed with a proper diet. And at best, they could even be prevented or reversed. Grocery stores are packed with sugar and carb-loaded food items as far as the eye can see, and Donna knew it was a challenge for many people to find the right kinds of foods to eat, even more so for those like her family members who had restricted diets.

When she started to put together the service she wanted to offer, she figured it would be wise to focus on low sugar and low-carb snacks, since those pesky midday cravings end up being the hardest. Her goal was to provide a healthier, easy-to-grab alternative to the overly processed snacks found in vending machines and office break rooms. And that's really how the idea for Sugar Smart Box came to fruition. The box was created with diabetics in mind, but would still be great for anyone looking to cut back on their sugar and carb intake. At this point, you might be asking, okay, but what's in the box?

What is in the box? Donna wanted to include a variety of at least seven different salty and sweet snacks that each had less than five grams of sugar. She ended up with everything from jerky to cakeless, which by the way, did you know what a cakelet was? Because I actually didn't, but I Googled it and cakelet is just a little mini cake. So it turns out it's kind of self-explanatory, but I didn't know that until today.

Donna didn't move forward immediately. Instead, she did a lot of research on how to actually run a subscription box business. She gathered as much knowledge as possible, and she also joined Facebook groups for subscription box business owners to learn more about the model. She learned about the necessity of testing her product idea by running a pre-launch. And those Facebook groups gave her much needed direction on where to source certain products and which technologies to use.

Somewhere along the way, she learned it was important to ask manufacturers about lead times since many smaller companies require a longer lead time to produce orders of a certain size. And when it came to determining how much she wanted to charge, Donna took a look at the competition to see what the market rates looked like. Some of the snacks she wanted to add to her boxes were more premium than what you would typically find in a vending machine. So she had to take that into account as well. She spent a lot of time coming up with a name and branding for the box itself.

Her idea was to present the box as solving a problem while also helping to describe the audience it was created for. Between that and her love of alliteration, Donna came up with Sugar Smart Box. Then she saw that the URL sugarsmartbox.com was available. Huzzah! It seemed like a sign, so she went with it.

Not wanting to get in too deep, Donna set up a simple landing page using Wix to run a six-week pre-launch. She then spent approximately $3,000 on Facebook ads to bring traffic to the landing page and collect email addresses of her target audience. She saw the pre-launch as a process to garner interest in the product before spending more money on inventory. And to sweeten the deal, she offered everyone who subscribed in the first month a 15% lifetime discount. That pre-launch was a smashing success and encouraged her to move forward with her idea.

Next, she hit the ground running. She built a website for her business using the platform CrateJoy. She chose it because it felt intuitive. She also liked that they thought of things she would not have thought to do on her own, things like sending emails the day before a subscription is about to renew. They also had a marketplace where people could purchase her box directly from their website, so they increased her reach and exposure as well.

So let's talk about the bottom line. Although she's still in her first year of SugarSmartbox, Donna is bringing in around $5,000 a month in revenue. How has she been able to find so much success so early in? Well, it comes down to a couple of different things. First, the fact that she grew her audience before actually launching, that whole pre-launch phase, the Facebook ads, et cetera.

Second, that initial 15% lifetime discount to her first round of subscribers. And then third, the value that she places on customer feedback. She started sending out a survey each month to get a feel for what her subscribers liked and didn't like, and that helped her to create a better box month after month. Now that she's had a taste of what it's like to build a subscription box of her very own, Donna shows no signs of slowing down. She hopes that changing snacking habits will lead to better overall health for her subscribers.

Her current goal is to grow SugarSmartbox so that it reaches more people. There might even be some different options in the works since her subscribers have expressed an interest in gluten-free and nut-free options. Whatever happens next for this Texas-based CPA, side hustle school listener, and now side hustle owner, I have a feeling she'll have it all boxed up. [Music]

All right, lots to take away from this episode, all about generating ideas, how to do some market research, testing, that pre-launch, and of course, the critical follow-through. If you're listening and you're like, wow, that's a lot, how am I supposed to do all that in a short period of time?

Well, first of all, I never say it's easy. What I say is it's possible. It's gonna take a lot of work. Most people aren't able to make $5,000 a month on the side without putting in a lot of work. But again, it's possible.

If you're willing to put in the work, I do believe it's possible and we see it over and over. So don't forget there's something out there for you too. It's just a matter of discovering it or maybe even creating it and bringing it to light in the first place. I briefly mentioned the five stages of a project and the introduction. We might spend a bit more time on this in a different episode, but just to follow through on that promise, the five stages of a project through the 27-step plan that I developed for the side hustle book are as follows.

Step one is all about generating ideas. So in this episode, Donna got her idea from listening to a previous episode. And she didn't copy that idea. She just took it and adapted it in her own way, different market, different process. But in fact, it's totally normal, in fact, beneficial to pay attention to different ideas and ask yourself how you might be able to make them your own.

Second stage is all about choosing your best idea. Now, in this case, Donna had one idea. She probably had some other ideas earlier that she discarded, but this is the idea she chose to focus on. So she went forward with this one. Stage three is all about getting everything ready to launch that project.

So that's that research that she did. That's contacting manufacturers, learning how that process works, getting the minimum technology set up and so on. Stage four is about launching or in this case, doing a pre-launch with the Facebook ads, the landing page, et cetera. And stage five is all about reviewing and regrouping. Okay, so in this case, she had done the pre-launch.

It was a smashing success. She did that 15% discount for everybody who subscribed early on. And so she officially decided to say, "Okay, this is my project. I'm moving forward with it." And here we are now, Sugar Smart Box, less than a year, reaching a lot of people with a goal to reach a lot more. So it's not easy, but it's possible.

Congrats, Donna, wonderful project. I hope we can send some people your way. If you're listening to this episode and you'd like to check out the Sugar Smart Box or you're interested in starting your own subscription box and want to know about some of the resources that I mentioned, just check out the show notes. Those are online at sidehustleschool.com/546. That is for episode 546.

Who knows, perhaps this episode will inspire somebody else that we can feature later. Just kind of keep that chain of side hustle goodness going. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School. [Music]