Avocado Queen Earns $45,000 Selling Spreadable Granola

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

[Music]

Welcome to Side Hustle School and welcome to episode 599. That's right, we have almost made it to 600 episodes. Oh my God, you guys are amazing. Thank you so much for continuing to listen to the show. Thanks especially to those who have been with us for quite a while.

Some of you, in fact, since episode one, January 1, 2017. But of course, if you have picked up since then, well, I'm so glad you're here as well. My name is Chris Guillebeau. It is my privilege and honor to bring you these stories every single day, every day, a different story of somebody who's making money, usually in a creative, unconventional way, usually without quitting their job, usually by using the skills they already have, and of course, without going into debt or spending a lot of money. Now last week, I told you a remarkable, soapy success story.

We could say it was sensational, all about a North Carolina couple who was earning tens of thousands of dollars a month selling soap using Instagram marketing. Today's story also focuses on Instagram to create and launch a food product. Now, even though this person is also using Instagram, she focuses more on building a personality brand. As well, it's a great case study of how to launch something that you've been working on for a while, and you wanna make sure you get the attention your project deserves. We're calling this story "Avocado Queen" earns $45,000 selling spreadable granola.

So stay tuned to hear how this health tech worker turns a kitchen experiment into a growing business. [Music]

Meet Allie Banner, a full-time product marketer for a health tech company living in San Francisco. Growing up, Allie's life was pretty normal. She was outgoing, had a bunch of friends, and played volleyball on her high school team. On the outside, everything appeared fine.

However, on the inside, as Allie will attest, she was developing an unhealthy relationship with food. She'd starve herself all day, then spend the night binge eating, which left her feeling guilty. In Allie's mind, she had no self-control and didn't feel comfortable in her own skin. In fact, she had developed an eating disorder while studying nutrition at UC Berkeley. Seriously, food was stressing her out.

She began documenting her journey of intuitive eating on Instagram with the handle Avoquine, like Avocado Queen, shortly after college. Her struggles with food persisted, and she quickly realized this was a problem that wasn't going away. She needed some help. Her breakthrough came when she shifted her focus away from worrying about how certain foods made her look and instead focused on how they made her feel. This changed everything, and the Avoquine began giving zero guacs.

Meanwhile, her marketing job was leaving her creatively unfulfilled. As soon as she'd get off work, Allie would go home and tinker around in her kitchen. This was the place where she could exercise that creative freedom. She felt alive. She began experimenting with different foods, posting her stories on Instagram.

A self-proclaimed nut butteraholic, Allie found herself putting the buttery spreads on everything, almond butter, peanut butter, et cetera. However, those buttery treats were taxing her system, so she began trying out alternatives. She wanted something that tasted good and left her feeling full. It was while experimenting with a combination of granola and coconut oil that Allie stumbled upon granola butter. This spreadable gold was getting rave reviews from family and friends.

Because of all the encouragement, Allie decided to kick things up a notch. What started as mere kitchen experiments resulted in the founding of Queen Foods, Queen with a K, K-W-E-E-N, a wellness company with the mission to empower women to reclaim their relationship with food through self-love and body positivity. Their first official product would be, of course, granola butter, the first ever spreadable granola. It didn't happen all at once. In fact, it took her nearly four months to get through all the red tape.

There was a lot of paperwork to fill out and permits to obtain for a commercial kitchen space. She says reality slapped her in the face because she felt stuck waiting. Thankfully, there was a silver lining. This four-month window allowed her to test and retest her product to get it just right. Allie tried nearly 40 variations before she was certain that she had a winner.

She says now that her naivete was an advantage. She didn't think it would take so long. And if she knew, she might have been discouraged. Meanwhile, Allie's Instagram following, Abba Queen, had increased to over 28,000 followers in just over a year. She was deliberate when it came to building that following, saying consistency is key.

She now has a brand page as well, Queen & Co, which she started only four months ago and already has 9,000 followers. She attributes this to posting every single day, sometimes twice a day. And her followers loved her authenticity of seeing the hard work in her not-so-glamorous posts. Now let's talk about launching that product. Leading up to her launch, Allie created a list of 100 influencers that she wanted to send granola butter to.

She broke down her targets into micro influencers under 10,000 followers, mid-tier, 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and high-tier, over 50,000 followers. When selecting influencers, she was careful to curate those who had high engagement and therefore a loyal audience base. The influencers she reached out consisted largely of people she had had some kind of interaction with in the past. And she asked them to only post about her product if they loved it and really wanted to. Another way Allie leveraged her social media following was writing on the coattails of popular trends.

She sent her curated list of influencers a free the drip kit, which was everything they'd need to create a worthy Instagram post. Hashtag free the drip was a play off of the hashtag free the nip movement. Free the drip was basically a way to let your smoothies run wild, welcoming the nut butter overflow. Allie says that 90% of her sales have come from her Instagram following. It made reaching out easy because of those existing relationships, the ones that she had taken time to cultivate and interact with for years.

An additional perk of Instagram was the immediate feedback she received when testing various brand ideas. For example, her followers helped her pick the product name Granola Butter. When asked about that, her response was the people have spoken. The new name was clearly the butter option. Using Instagram was like having an instant survey at her fingertips.

And it also made her community feel more invested in her brand success. Since launching Queen Foods four months ago, Allie says business has been a steady climb, resulting in $45,000 worth of sales. Now, food is not a cheap business with her startup costs equaling nearly as much as her sales in the past four months. But the majority of her costs were upfront. Things like ingredients, shared kitchen fees, and labor, accounting for the bulk of it.

In other words, as she goes forward, she's gonna make a lot more in profit. And Allie also says starting Queen has fulfilled me in ways that my full-time job couldn't. I've always had this creative streak in me, which I couldn't fulfill with my traditional marketing job. But now with my side hustle, I have that freedom and control, which ultimately means I'm a lot happier. That sounds good to me.

So what's next for Queen Foods? Well, Allie says Queen is scaling quickly, so there might even be an opportunity down the road to pursue it full-time. But for now, she's cooking up some seasonal flavors for the upcoming holidays. Do you think she'll have pumpkin spice? We'll have to wait and see.

Either way, the Avocado Queen's reign is set to continue. Did you hear the joke about the granola butter? Well, I'm not telling you because you might spread it. All right, if you are interested in Instagram marketing, I definitely encourage you to listen or re-listen to last week's episode that was number 594 about the Soap Couple. That was the Soap Couple that made something like $40,000 or $50,000 a month selling soap using Instagram ads and Instagram influencer marketing.

I'm gonna do a little compare and contrast with that in just a moment. Also, if you're interested in Instagram marketing with a food product in particular, you should also check out my friend Mary Shinuda. She is the creator of Fat Fudge. Her story was in episode 422. And as a reminder, you can always access any side hustle school episode by just going to sidehustleschool.com/ and then add the number to that URL.

So that would be sidehustleschool.com/422. And the other one was 594. All right, so what is the difference here in these two perspectives, methods, campaigns, granola butter versus soap? The soap account was called Bombed Aesthetics. Now they're both very successful.

They're both selling a product. But one is much more of a personality brand versus the other one which is focused almost entirely around the product. So today's story is all about personality. If you look at Ally's Instagram, you know, Avo Queen, you can see that she's not actually selling that much. She does have this brand account that she made now specifically for the granola butter.

But most of her own posts, most of her posts on her main account are encouraging and uplifting. She's connecting closely with her followers. She's sharing inspirational messages. So the relationship there is super important. Then if you go and look at the soap account, which is Bombed Aesthetics, they are pretty much all soap all the time.

Like it is a brand that sells soaps with a clear focus on e-commerce. Doesn't mean that they can't have a positive message too. They do have a positive message. Doesn't mean that they can't connect with their followers. They do that as well.

But they are primarily about e-commerce, primarily about selling those soaps. Whereas Ally I think is primarily about empowerment, encouragement, and then the wellness brand is a connection or an extension of that. So when I say this, it's not that one is necessarily better than the other, but the path to further success for each of these projects, or let's say if you're just starting out, the path to your success, one way or another is gonna vary quite a bit depending on what you choose. So if you choose that personality-based approach, it might be slower going. You might not be able to start a project and all of a sudden be making $10,000 a month like these other folks have.

But I also think the benefit is that with a project like Ally's, she's building such close connection and relationship with people that it has the potential to be sustainable for a long period of time. It has the potential for her to develop a lot of different kinds of products. Like right now she just started with the granola butter, but she has a vision to go beyond that and eventually do more. So like everything else, it really does come down to what are your goals. Two huge successes here, both using Instagram marketing, but just with a little bit of a different approach in terms of how much they're focused on their own personality versus how much they're focused on their products.

And Ally the Avoqueen, thank you so much for letting us share your story with our listeners. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this one. It's been fun to see all these crazy, amazing success stories as we approach episode 600. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you wanna check out the show notes for today's episode, just come to sidehustleschool.com/599.

You can also pick up a free five steps to hustle course. You can also say hi, give me a shout out on social media, or you can also just tell other people about the show. That would be awesome, I appreciate that. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you do one thing for yourself today. I'll be back with you tomorrow.

My name is, once again, Chris Gallipo, and this is Side Hustle School.