Plant Ahead: Healthy Food Blog Sprouts Membership Service

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

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Welcome to a brand new week of Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Hope your week is starting off well, or if you're listening later, I hope today is going well. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Whatever the case may be, got a great story for you.

In this story, a Canadian communications officer and lover of plant-based food starts a meal prep service, earning $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue within her first three months. We're gonna look closely at this model of recurring revenue, specifically for a low priced subscription. Now you may think $2,000, okay, that's great, but she's worked a lot for this, so is it really that great? Well, indeed she has, she's worked a ton for it, but the key point here is $2,000 a month. $2,000 a month is gonna come in month after month.

Also, it just started a couple months back, and also, also, it's probably going to increase. So this really is a fantastic look at a subscription project that's just beginning, but seems to have a ton of potential. So how does someone position themselves to create such a project, especially after they've been working on a blog for free during the past two years? That's what you're gonna hear about today right after this shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

We all want to be healthy, but it's one of those things that's often easier said than done.

Healthy eating takes intentional effort. When you're busy, cooking up a nutritional meal is not nearly as convenient as ordering fast food or grabbing something processed and pre-packaged. Carly Bodrig, a communications officer for a hospital foundation in Ontario, Canada, knew this challenge well. She believed a plant-based whole foods lifestyle would improve her health, yet she struggled to stick to it. It wasn't until Carly tried meal prepping that she was able to accomplish her goals.

If you're not familiar with meal prepping, it's all about preparing aspects of your meals in advance. Rather than deciding what's for dinner at the last minute and throwing something together, you create a plan for the week ahead. On weekends, or whenever you have more free time, you do your grocery shopping and initial prep all at once. This may include chopping vegetables or cooking or freezing sauces. Whatever it is, when those steps are done, most of your meals for the week are ready to go and take very little time to assemble.

Carly had been writing about healthy eating on her blog, PlantU.com, for two years. So she was well versed in making meals without oil, refined sugars, or animal products. She knew from experience that meal prep could really help her audience. So she decided to offer a weekly meal prep plan. While she'd already built up a substantial network of 130,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram, she had created all of her blog and social media content for free for two years.

Her blog income had previously been limited to product sponsorships and was pretty sporadic. This meal prep service, essentially a membership program, gave her the chance to generate consistent ongoing revenue. So just three months ago, the Plant Ahead Meal Prep Program took root. With this program, Carly sends out a new vegan meal plan every single week, as well as a grocery shopping list and nutritional breakdown for each recipe. Members also have access to an exclusive Facebook group.

She wanted to make sure the program was accessible, so she offered it for just $8 a month. Her startup costs included a website domain, hosting, a light for photography, and a couple of subscriptions. Nothing fancy. All of it came to approximately $600, which she quickly earned back in sales. She also spent a few hundred dollars in advertising costs the first two months to get it going.

She covered those costs easily as well, earning over $1,000 in profit in the first month, and then over $2,000 in months two and three. That's $2,000 each month, month two and three, just to be clear, $4,000. To celebrate, Carly's fiance plays the song, "You Make My Dreams Come True," by Darrell Hall and John Oates, every time someone signs up for a meal plan. This song might be getting old because now she has more than 300 subscribers. Interacting with these members on Facebook has also been rewarding.

People share photos of their meals, support each other, and their feedback helps Carly know that her work is truly benefiting people. On the other hand, seeing people quit the program has been tough for Carly. She had to come to terms with the nature of a subscription model. People will cancel, but more will join as well. So she learned to not take it personally, and as long as more people are joining than canceling, she's doing all right.

She also found that this sudden success came with financial matters she wasn't prepared for. She sought help from a tax expert to gain clarity on topics like claiming expenses and whether she had to charge tax to her international customer base. Finding someone to go to with those financial questions was a big relief. The plan ahead meal prep program has required a lot of hard work. Carly admits that she's had to sacrifice a lot, from her social life to time planning her wedding, but that sacrifice has paid off in more ways than one.

She says, "I would not be giving up weekends and hours during my weeknights for this if it wasn't something I love and I'm deeply passionate about. In fact, I think it would be impossible otherwise, and I certainly wouldn't have gotten to this point if it was just for the money." Well, that's wonderful, of course, but I'd also say fortunately, even though it's not just for the money, the sacrifice is now paying out in money as well. With predictable monthly revenue now coming in, the program should continue to blossom into a business that supports her plant-based future. [Music]

So again, as I said briefly in the beginning, the monthly recurring revenue is what is so powerful about this model. She could have very easily done everything the same way, created this program, launched it, gone to her base of subscribers, paid for a little bit of advertising, but done it as a one-off product instead of this recurring monthly subscription.

And she probably would have made a few thousand dollars, et cetera, but then that would have been it, right? Whereas now, you know, with the 300 people paying $9 a month, she's got $2,000 in monthly recurring income that's somewhat predictable. Like some people are gonna cancel, like we talked about, I got a comment about that in a second, but more and more people are probably going to join as well. As long as she's providing a great service, as long as her audience continues to grow, it seems like she's doing both those things. So fantastic, congratulations, Carly.

Monthly recurring revenue, way to go for this kind of product or this kind of subscription, I should say. Definitely the right approach. Now I did think a little bit about the price and I kind of went back and forth in my mind. $9 is a really low price. People are resistant to subscriptions.

And so the benefit of doing like a one-off product launch is that people are like, oh, it's $40 or whatever, it's a one-off, I'm not gonna be in this monthly subscription. So you have to kind of overcome that resistance when you choose a subscription model. So for a lot of subscriptions, it's usually better to charge a higher price. But then I kind of thought a little bit, I was like, well, it's also a price for $9 at this rate. Obviously her subscribers have taken to it.

It's also a price that I expect has a low cancellation rate, which is really key. I mean, a lot of subscription programs have a really high churn rate, which is basically subscribers coming in and then leaving after a couple of months. So at that price, it's almost kind of like, I have a lot of subscriptions and if I have a subscription for $9 a month, I'm really not gonna think much about canceling it. In fact, it's probably just gonna kind of stay on my credit card for a long period of time, unless there's some real reason for me to cancel. So actually I was thinking, I might recommend creating some options where people don't get as much communication.

Like I don't know exactly how many emails or other forms of outreach they get with a subscription, but I think it's good for this subscription to not give them too much. Because ironically, that's what causes some members to cancel in these kinds of programs. So again, if I've got a $9 subscription and I'm not using it that much, I might still just keep paying for it because I'm like, oh, well, it's good that it's there. Like I'm not making my meals this month. I'm really busy with some other stuff.

Maybe I'm traveling or whatever, but it's great that it'll be there when I'm back. But if I'm getting like, you know, three emails a day and like all kinds of reminders and notifications, then I'm like, well, there's a cost of that too, right? So I'm gonna cancel. So I think on balance, you know, $9 is a great choice and hopefully she can get hundreds and hundreds more members, you know, on up to a thousand members. Like it's totally feasible with this kind of project.

She just keeps doing what she's doing and providing that great value. So in conclusion, great success story. Love to see what happens next. Hopefully we can get an update from her and see where those numbers are. Listener's inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

To find the show notes for today's episode, go to sidehustleschool.com/842. You can check out PlantU, you can check out anything else I mentioned, whatever tools and resources she is using to run that program. Hopefully something will be helpful. Another story is coming up tomorrow and every single day this week. Be sure you're subscribed to keep coming back.

It's short, it's helpful, it's free. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.