This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, Side Hustle School listeners. Thanks for tuning in today. This is Chris Guillebeau, your host. I'm excited to welcome you to a new episode and a new Failure Friday episode, specifically. Our weekly segment all about business mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure, all those things that go wrong.
And so just like our Throwback Thursday segment, conveniently taking place the day before Friday, you get to hear directly from a sight hustler or an entrepreneur who has struggled to get something off the ground. They're gonna tell you a short story of something that went very wrong. We've been doing these all year. They're very popular. So I just kind of like to get out of the way here and let you hear directly from that person.
And today's short story features Angela Perkins, the owner of Organic Now. Organic Now is a new business that's doing well. And Angela was diligent with her product launches. She built this whole strategy, had it down to a system. The only problem was maybe she trusted that system a bit too much.
So let's hear the story from her. [Music]
Hello, my name is Angela Perkins. I work at a marketing agency and on the side, I'm building an organic cosmetics brand called Organic Now. I have more than 2000 email subscribers and have been following a strategy of launching new products every other month. And for each launch, I hope to bring at least 5,000 to $10,000 in new revenue as well as maintain activation with customers, even for those who don't wanna buy the new product.
Over the past year, I did this four times in a row with no problems. In fact, the fourth time went so well that it gave me an ambitious idea. I'm always encouraging my subscribers to live a balanced life and not stay on their phones too much. And since my fourth launch was a smashing success and I'd set up full automation between the shopping cart, email list and fulfillment system, I thought I'd try something special. This time I complete all the work in advance, then launch during a week I'd already committed to doing a digital detox with almost no phone access.
I thought this would be a cool story. I'd come back from digital sabbaticals, see the stellar sales results and then email everyone again to say surprise, I wasn't even around this week. If I can do it, you can too. Famous last words. Even though I tested everything or so I thought, something didn't work.
The link I sent to all my subscribers ended up going to a broken page. Even with the customers who found the working page on the site, for some reason, the checkout process failed every time. This would have been a problem if I'd been monitoring the sale, but it was a full disaster since I wasn't. I didn't check in until two days later, expecting to see a lengthy sales report. Instead, I had two sales of my new product, both of which were my own purchases from earlier testing.
I also had a lot of emails, some nice, some confused and some upset. It took me 20 minutes to fix the website problems, but much, much longer to communicate with everyone and send out a new working link for the sale. I ended up making less than $4,000 for that sale, roughly half of what I expected. I also felt embarrassed at making such a rookie mistake. My lesson is, never take a digital sabbatical.
Just kidding. It's more like, don't plan a big launch while you aren't able to mine the store. I'll never let that happen again. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday.
Thanks so much to Angela for sharing this story. And here's a fun fact. I have done almost exactly the same thing. Not so much like taking a digital sabbatical, but just not paying attention. One time, many years ago, I had a product launch where I sent out the link and just didn't check my email for the next couple of days.
I don't remember if I was traveling in Africa or had some other semi good excuse, or if I just decided to wait and see what happened. But in fact, I went back and I had sent out the wrong link. And I had much the same experience as Angela in terms of trying to regroup and relaunched. And I still made some sales, but definitely a lot less than I would have if I had gotten things right in the first place. So I guess a good lesson there is just test everything and test it when you're actually doing it, not just tested days in advance or a week in advance and not pay attention to the actual launch.
But as I said, I've been there. You can recover from anything. And listeners, if you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, let me know, sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 2,078. Of course, we have a new one tomorrow.
You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. It's totally free. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
