[Music]hey guys my name is Nathan Chan I'm theCEO of founder magazine and today we'regoing to be interviewing grey rose vanreal she has started for successfulmulti-million dollar in commerce brandsskinny meaty drop bottle v watches skintalks and basically she's going to besharing with you guys her process theframework the formula on how she's beenable to build these ecommerce businessesand brands from scratch and be able toscale them at a really really fast paceshe's one of the smartest people I knowwhen it comes to this kind of stuffaround starting an e-commerce brand inbusiness and she's also an instructorshe teaches a course called startingscale your online store and it's acourse that we published through founderand we work with her to come up withthis insanely powerful course if youwant to know more so greta welcome thankyou so much for taking the time to speakwith me thanks for having me no no we'vespoken a couple of times now so it'skind of like a walk in the park oh it isyeahso I guess probably the first question Iwanted to ask is how did you get yourjob yeah so I started my first startupskinny meaty in 2012 which is six yearsago now I was 22 I was working full timein my first ever job out of uni I justfinished my degree like late the yearbefore and had started working full-timeas a digital marketing professional inthe city in Melbourne and I guess likeit's just right away as soon as Istarted working there I knew prettyquickly that working for someone elsewasn't necessarily for meI didn't know Nessa whether there wasgoing to be an alternative to that but Ijust knew it wasn't really what I wasloving and enjoying I found it yeah abit bureaucratic I guess like your jobis kind of to make your seniors lookgood not to really do your work so Ifound the whole like politics andstructure a bit weird of it but yeah soI guess I started skinny meaty as a sideproject just because I had been alwaysinterested in tea and I've done a fewdetoxes on the market and one of my ownproblems with them was just that theyweren't natural enough like you'retaking a tablet or you know you'redrinking this powdered mix and you'relike what is in here whereas tea is sucha natural way and if you're detoxing youwant a natural product so I was justmixing up my own kind of blends of teaand some of my friends started askingabout them and being like oh can I tryit you're like a tea thing and I waslike I call it a detoxlike a detox of tea and they're likethat's so cool I wouldn't try it andthen they'd try it and they'd tell theirfriends about it and then they'd want totry it and then people at my worth werewanting to try it and it was justgetting a really expensive to keep justhaving to give people tea because Iwasn't charging for it yet and I waslike this is actually expensive to makelike these are like high qualityingredients so and B it was gettingdifficult just corresponding back andforth with everyone like via alldifferent platforms so I just thoughtlike it'd be so much easier if I couldjust sell this online and not have tokind of be the middleman but betweeneveryoneso I basically got on and I googled howto start an online store and luckily thefirst thing that came up was Shopify andso I opened up Shopify signed up therewas a free trial at the timeand I just got started creating my ownland store and so I think within I thinkit took me about eight hours to make ourinitial website so it was a quick easyprocess we only had one product so itkept it quiet streamlined and hit liveon the store and I'd created anInstagram account to kind of go with itbecause I had just got anagram myselfand was just really liking the platformand it was fun and I was like yeah howto start an extra account and when wehit live on the store in our first nightwe made four sales and our first nightand I was like oh this is cool like someweekend spending money that's Mandy likethat they were two people I didn't knowso then I was like hang on where didthese people find out about my storefrom like I was confused I was like Ifigured it was just like feel my friendsthat I'm message saying like he had thestores live go check it out it was yeahcompletely random people which was sucha cool experience because I was like whoare these peopleand it had come from Instagram andthey'd seen our product on Instagram soI started focusing basically all my timeand efforts on our Instagram accountgrowing through there and so we refer toourselves as like an Instagram firstcompany like we were basically born onInstagram and started our lives out onInstagram solely marketing throughInstagram no other marketing methods arein the Instagram and influences and justusing those strategies back in 2012 wewere able to scale the store from zeroto six hundred thousand dollars a monthin revenue within six months so it wasjust some crazy explosive growth and ofcourse they were all the growing painsto go with that yeah you're amazing andI guess before we get into more kind ofhow others you think like wave you youknow how others right now work should goabout starting their store or creating abrand or selling an e-commerce productcan you tell us like what happened nextbecause I know that you've started manyother businesses I thinkpeople love to hear about those as wellciemins done this one time you've donemultiple timesyeah so the next company that I startedis called the fifth watches and Istarted that with a co-founder welaunched in 2014 December 2014 and wegrew up our pre lists and pre demand youknow similar kind of way using Instagramand influences but we had around aneight thousand person wait list when welaunched the store and in our first dayof sales that the fifth were able toachieve over a hundred thousand dollarsin sales so and that was in that dayalone basically so were like okay wowthis is clearly something that we needto be really focusing on yes and so wekept growing that store growing thatstore focusing on the same things justfocusing on the things that worked forus and the channels that worked for uswhich was still mainly Instagram and onour first birthday we did over a milliondollars of sales in a single day andthat that is also because that store hasa limited sales model which a timelimited sales model limited so basicallywhat we do is we work all the death andwe only sold on the 5th of each monthfor 5 days and so we're exclusive bytime rather than by price which in youknow a lot of fashion items areexclusive because you know they've gotan expensive price tag we were able tobe exclusive by the fact that there wasreal scarcity involved because ourwatches would sell out every monthand there was only 5 days to get themand if you didn't sign up during themonth to be notified of sales then you'dprobably miss out so that was the fifthwhich was shout-out number two and thenI started to more ecommerce stores dropbottle and skin talks drop bottle was aninteresting one becauseit was actually and this is a methodthat I'm sure we'll chat about later aswell in more detail but I am very muchfor growing a market or growing anaudience before you launch a product solaunching that product to an engagedaudience and so with drop bottle it wasmore of a case of we had a really largeaudience that we'd already built onInstagram through one of like myvertical and nisha counts called detoxwater and it was basically just peopleputting fruit in their water to infusethe water and showing all differentcombinations and recipes and it's justlike a visually appealing subject so itdid really well on Instagram I'd seenthat it was really trending on Pinterestactually and then I brought that trendsort of across onto Instagram becausenot that many people are posting on itand curated all the content fromPinterest and then increasingly fromInstagram for that account and were ableto grow to like 900,000 followers withina few months basically so we're like wowthis like is a really like high momentumtopic like this is definitely somethingthat is trending in the market right nowhow you know and from a brandperspective what's a way that we couldkind of capitalize on this so what's away that we could commercialize ormonetize this audience so then it'sdetox water so we made a detox what adrink bottle which made sense so it'slike a fashionable and functional drinkbottle with a fruit infuser so then thepeople that were already quiteinterested in this topic of course wereable to kind of buy into the communityin another way so that was aninteresting one because we launched themarket before we launched the productand that was chosen in I think it was2016 by Oprah as one of her favoritethings which was really cool because wewere front page of Amazon for a week aswell and we'd never done much on Amazonbefore so that was like how to do Amazon101 by being thrown in the deep endwhich was a lot of funand she found us or her team found usthrough social media so they were justfollowing us on Instagram and sorry theydiscovered us through there and it's notlike we sent in like our product to likebe reviewed or anything it was just itwas a big surprise when we got an emailfrom Oprah's team being like she'schosen you as one of her favorite thingsI was like I didn't know open you whatwe were so it's clear to say like you'vehad a lot of success you're very verygood at what you do you've done thismultiple times you've had you know theseincredible brands that you've built so Iguess the first thing that people wantto know is like what's the first placeto get started so obviously you knowwe've got you to teach a course for uswhich is incredible that so manysuccessful students it's called starscale but like for people that are justwatching this right now like how canthey first get started what's the firststep the third step is coming up withyour idea yeah I'd say and like how doyou how she will be going about that sothe first thing to note is that youdon't need to create some crazy newconcept or idea you can take an existingproduct that already exists and kind ofreinvent that product or change it tomake it better or different so the waythat I thought about that usually is bychanging just a single dimension of theproduct so with v for example thatdimension was time so we were able tochange our entire direction of thecompany by just changing that onedimension that was time so we'll onlyselling on the 5th of each month forfive days and that made our companydifferent that became one of our likecentral unique value propositions sothings like time limit like time limitedsales and introducing scarcity andfactors like that into the product oneof the main things that you'll probablyusually want to go about changing wouldbe the function of a product so withdrop bottle for example we took just theaverage like glass drinking bottle andwe added that extra function which wasthe fruit infuser so that was like agood way to go about that so there'stime there's function then there'sdesign with drop bottle we added coollike quite fashionable rose gold lidsand other like trending kind ofcolorways and we added like a easyhandle so that it's a glass bottle sothat it's transportable as well so wechange the design or like through thatand the last way that I go aboutgenerally changing a product would beprice so whether there's kind of threedifferent ways that you can go withprice you can go for like lower than theaverage price you can go for likeindustry standard pricing which is inthe middle or you can go for like higherpricing which might signal moreexclusivity like designer items so youcould create like a limited-editionproduct that is more exclusive in thatit's more expensive and it might be alimited run of that as well so they'rekind of the four main things functiondesign time and price gotcha so onceyou've kind of got a few ideas like howmany ideas do you get every day how doyou know which ones are still the onesthe mean now because it's not like youcan just have an unlimited amount ideasit's the things that I can't not pursuethat have been maybe in the back of mymind for a while and I've been kind oflike trying to sort through it and thenyou might have that kind of light bulbmoment where you're like yes likefinally I've pinpointed exactly what Iwas trying to like sift through in mymind and when you have that light bulbmoment if it is something that you justcannot not do then go for it like all ofmy products have just been somethingthat's like this is too good anopportunity or this is too good an ideaI can't like not pursue this so if youjust if you just keep coming back to itagain and again that's something todefinitely pursue and even just the ideaof starting an e-commerce store or beinginterested in that in general if youjust keep coming back to that idea inyour mind if you see that for yourselfin the future and you'd like think aboutthat and put a lot of your energy intothat it clearly is something that youshould be thinking about pursuing laterso I mean at least you know resourceslike this like our course that we'vecreated really enable you to be able todo that because it gives you afoundation and guide to get started Iwish that I had this guide when Istarted we're to save me a lot ofmistakes so like here's a story that youtalked about once before like well howcan me like is a million dollar mistakeor something with this T stock this is agood onecan you see that one yeah well it's agood one now the story it was not a goodthing to happen at the time probably oneof the worst days of my lifebut yeah so basically we were growingskin immunity and we were manufacturingin Australia still and you know you hearall this like China like it's cheaperit's easier it's better Langan go try itso well like yeah let's go try the Chinathing and we'll like tea China likeclearly it's a few yeah so we went overthe track to China and we met with themanufacturer would even met with the guywe did a couple of sample or to run so Iwasn't like entirely stupid I didn'tjust like be like okay cool done yepthat's our manufacturer we got a coupleof sample orders everything was great wesent it back to Australia to get testedno problems all as well we then one ofmy things that I was definitely not asstrong in was the manufacturing side atthat time yes and I was just like oh ifI could just not have to deal with themanufacturer again for like a year andjust make a really large bulk order oflike a year's worth of tea that wouldjust make my life that much better yeahbecause it's annoying having to orderthe stock move it somewhere get it allsorted yeah be constantly we just hadthis problem where we're growing soquickly we're constantly running in andout of stock all the time I was justlike I just don't want to run outanymore I want to be aheadlike would be excited well more likethree days ahead as opposed to yeah sirI wanted to be one year ahead that wasmy goal that was my dream and we so Iplaced a really large order for over amillion dollars us of teeth so andthroughout all seemed fine processesgoing well got the tea and stored it inHong Kong for a little bit because wewere we still had enough in Australia wethen after storing it in Hong Kong weshipped it to Australia that cost moremoney again because we had to ship itover and then it got stuck in customsfor like three weeks and that cost likeanother $80,000 or something so wefinally got this tea and we opened upthe tea and it was like the exciting daywould basically I think we were about torun out in two days of tea so it wasperfect timingyou're about to get it all going out andwe opened up the tea and it was likemoldy compost with metal bolts in itlike it was like visibly rotting well itwas absolutely disgusting I don't thinkI would touch it like without gloves onit was like waste nuclear waste no nobut it was just horrible and I couldvisibly see like bits of metal and stuffin it so I was like well clearly there'snothing to be done with this we evensent it off to the labs just to have alaugh to see what was in it and it wasfull of bacteria e.coli just all thesedifferent just lucky we didn't touch ittoo much anyway so we got it turned outeven throwing it out cost anotherfourteen thousand dollars that was likea ton of tea yes like a lot of tea itfilled we had like a warehouse space itfilled the whole thing like to the roofjust boxes and boxes and boxes and sothen we had the problem as well becausewe hadn't placed another order with anyAustralian manufacturer had to go backto manufacturing the product like mixingit up ourselves by hand when we're doinglike $20,000 a month like sorry we hadto descale up teamquickly had like 30 people alternatingdifferent ships packing t cost so muchmore money of course like someone handmixing and like blending and thenputting a tape like it didn't deservesin like the packaging is so much moreexpensive so that was a huge lesson onwhat not to do with manufacturing Ithink I just got a bit ahead of myselfand now we just order in much like moremanageable quantities not from suppliesthat we don't know as well I thoughtlike those couple of sample orders weregoing to be a good indication of alarger order but I haven't placed areally large order yet so I think justlike scaling up and building trust asyou go in a more manageable way would bea good tip and you talked about like solet's say you've can't with yousomeone's got their idea and it justkeeps coming back to them like youdescribed like that let's say you placethe order you get the samples you placethe order and you know it's all lookinggood you've got your moq minimum orderquantity you've booked that and youtalked about building an audience firstwhat did you mean by that yes so I meanbuilding an audience I mean on socialmedia usually that's where all of myaudiences live across social media and Iguess our email marketing lists as wellso and those go hand-in-hand as well youwant to simultaneously build an audienceon social media and use that audience toget signups for you know maybe yourpre-launch or your wait list for yourproduct via email so that then once youlaunch you can do a big email push outto those so social media is definitelyan Instagram specifically is still oneof the key places that I will go to whenstarting any new startup any new companytoday is still as well yeah so a lot ofpeople like yeah I mean founder has seenhalf how social media is doingwhat 1.4 million followers on yourInstagram account right now it's crazyso definitely Instagram has been inplace and I've built all differentcommunities on Instagram so across allof my different Instagram accounts Ihave over 16 million followers in breachwhich is not just on my branded orpersonal accounts either that's acrossdifferent niches and areas so aroundskinny meaty we built all differentpages like detox pages like health pagesfitness pages of recipe and food pagesjust basically like based off ourcustomer personas and who what we knewabout our audience and what theirinterests and interest groups were weapplied those to those accounts and thenwe're kind of able to grow these largeengaged followings around there's topicsso those are a great starting point forlaunching any new business in thoseareas now as well because we alreadyhave those audiences like with dropbottle that were able to instantlyinstantly but we're able to monetizewith the right product yeah so talk tome like if you were to start a new brandyou know this is an idea that keepscoming back to you you want to buildthat audience over Instagram just likeobviously we could talk about this allday even myself I could share a lot butwhat are some things that people can useto get started if you were startingtoday on building that audience onInstagram you're not gonna get a hundredthousand files over a couple of daysyou've built a massive like book ofpages where you can then you can getthem to shout each other out so you canbuild up really fast if someone's juststarting a cold hard scratch is thefirst business like what would you dolike how would you approach Instagram orYouTube you know that yeah yes wellbasically for any social channel there'swhat I call my like a three C's ofcommunity yepand so those are like the three kind ofkillers that I always think about whenI'm starting any new social account andthis works across the board as well notjust on Instagram so there is a conand collaboration and consistency yepso I guess if we just break down each alittle bit content-wiseit's about posting the content not justthat you want to see from your brand andwhat you think your brand is but thatyour audience actually responds to soit's breaking down and I call it contentweighting so weighting your content moretoward the things that your audiencereally responds to and loves and notavoiding the other things but justhaving a larger like an 80/20 kind ofrule so 80% like popular engagingcontent and 20% you know things that youfeel like product and promotion sort ofcontent so and I call it I have thisother thing that I call our contentterritories so I break down the types ofcontent that we post on our account intosome different territories so for thefifth we had things like rest andrelaxation aspire and inspires the kindof more motivational content we had likean explorer kind of one which was travelcontent so there were all differentthings that our audience we knew thatour audience was interested in and thatwe knew because we'd posted similarcontent before so it's just like gettingit's testing different types of contentuntil you find that there is cool kindof areas that your audience reallyreally engages in with so that from aContent perspective that is probablylike my number one tip just postaudience that you're kind of postcontent that your audience wants to seeand so then there's takes us onto thecollaboration stage and this is probablythe most important stage for growth socontent is like your foundation of youraccount you have to have content ofcourse that's always going to be therecollaboration is definitely a step thatsome people will miss and bycollaboration I meanactively working with other pages onInstagram other brands on Instagram andinfluences on Instagram so by pages Imean like things like those verticalaccounts that I was talking about beforelike detox pages like health pages ifyou're in like a similar niche to us orfashion pages and there's heaps of themit's like week on fan pages yeah exactlyso yeah niche pages fan pages verticalaccounts whatever you call them gettingin contact with those usually they'lleither have their email and their buyeror this platform called kik um which alot of them still use or telegram itjust depends it'll be in their buyer oryou can reach out to them via DM and youcan either if you already have afollowing you can trade shout outs soit's like just a mutually beneficialrelationship so say you have 5,000followers and they have 5,000 followersyou both shout each other out basicallypost a piece of content and mention theother page in that content and you'vemutually grow of each other or there'spaid shoutouts so if you're juststarting out from early days you couldpay for some shout outs to get you thatinitial traction and attention from someof these pages where you know yourtarget audience already lives andanother thing that I'd recommend is notjust paying for shout outs but payingfor engagement as well so this isn'tsomething that you're going to alwaysneed to do down the track but in theearly days of an account you can getreally huge attract and really hugetraction if the right people areinteracting if influences and the rightpages from your nature interacting withyour account because it's growing youraccount within that niche so gnashingdown on your account is really reallyimportant so focusing content aroundlike what your nation interest group issurrounding your product is reallyimportant because you know that's theway that the Instagram algorithm worksit attributes like followers andaudiencesdifferent niches shows content on theexplore page for example and even thecontent that comes up in your newsfeedbased off your interests and what you'veengaged with in the past so it's reallyimportant to be niche specific at thesame time so that's when you're workingwith pages so either for paid shout outsand paid engagement or paid engagementjust means that they're engaging withyour posts when you post so making surethat they're liking that post andcommenting on that post earlier ratherthan later and then another form ofcollaboration is brand to brandcollaboration which is huge as well sowhen you collaborate with like it couldjust be one other brand or it could befor a loop giveaway with a lot of otherbrands yes the giveaway is basically yesso you collaborate with another brandyou host a giveaway you havecomplementary products so not competingproducts it would be like okay skinnymeaty makes sense to collaborate withlike a health or beauty company so maybelike a scrub and then maybe a bikinicompany as well because all those thingswould go hand in hand the same peoplewould be interested in doing a detoxthat would be interested in buying abikini and etc so that just makes sensein that way so collaborating withlike-minded companies to leverage offeach other's followers and account andgiveaways are just a really really corecentral way to grow so the fifth forexample we did a tag to win giveaway andwe got 80,000 tags on the post and grew20,000 followers overnight and we onlygave away two watches so yeah it was avery low kind of cost and really highreturn so then yeah so brand to brandcollaboration and in the last way andthe way that I use for all of my brandsis influencer collaboration so this iscollaborating with social mediaanalogies more so not the fan pagesthese are real people that have grownengaged audiences around their interestsor around themselves like if they're aTV personality or something throughexamples so people all follow them onInstagram and the cool thing aboutinfluences is that they already havetheir audience's prayer and trust andthey're able to leverage that prayer andTrust on your brand's behalf so you'reable to kind of scale that trust thatcan take years for brands to build inthe past really really quickly at anunprecedented rate so it is a hugeopportunity for right now because thisis something that is working now andit's something that wasn't possiblebefore nobody you know there weren'tlike girls that lived like literallylike the whole girl-next-door thingwhere they have 200,000 Instagramfollowers as well like these people justdidn't exist like five years ago yeahwhen I first started can he maintaininfluence there was somebody with athousand followers and that's how wediscovered influencer marketing in thefirst place a girl from Tasmania boughtour tea we didn't send it out to her anda thing she loved the tea she lost someweight doing our tea talkswho took a before and after photo postedit to her Instagram and we had ourbiggest day of sales ever and I was likeoh wow like so every time I see a girlwith like over a thousand followers I'mjust gonna quickly reach out to her andask her whether I can send her some freetea in return for her posting and at thetime that was like this crazy idea likepeople would be like what do you meanyou want to send me tea to just post itlike of course like and like 95% ofpeople would just do it in return forthe product now it's become an entiremarket and it's a huge huge industrywithin itself and I have an influencermarketing platform as well called heyinfluences and the fact that I've chosento focus on that as a product shows justhow powerful this was for my ecommercebrands it's something that has beenintegral to the success of us growing sothere's all different ways to kind ofwork and collaborate with influencerand maybe we'll come back to a few ofthose later but the last see sorry sorryI didn't I liked it this is good this isbad away so we've had content we've hadcollaboration and then there's finallyconsistency so consistency there's twokind of reasons that you want to beconsistent one is because most socialplatforms prioritize accounts that postmore frequently frequency of posting isone of the things that affects thealgorithms of most of these platforms sothey want to of course show more contentto people that are more engaged withtheir platform that are postingregularly so consistency is good in thatway but consistency also createsmemorability through repetition so ifsomeone if your target audience or yourcustomer is seeing you show up everysingle day again and again in thenewsfeed it starts to continue to buildthat relationship with them and so againyou're able to scale that brand equitythrough consistency it creates that muchwanted front of mind association withyour product it's like when you'rethinking of okay I need a new car andlike three car brands that you like popup in your head you want to be thatfirst thing that pops up in someone'shead you want someone to be likeentrepreneurship founder like it justit's those words that have thatassociation so when you do show up everyday and you are consistent with yourcontent and with your community you canstart to build that front of mindassociation which is just one of themost important things for a brand soyeah they're my three C's yeah communitycontent collaboration consistency yeahthat's awesome then yeah just on thecontent piece like one thing that I'vefound with a lot of Instagram accountsis the reason that they lose engagementis because they lose that consistencypiece it is so okay hmm like for founderwe've posted seven to ten timesthe past three years Wow but it's ahuman every single day and that's whyyou said to me other day like found hisaccounts like super engaged like reallyguys yes you guys posted me the otherday and it got like 17 18 thousand likesand I gained a thousand followers on mypersonal account from being justmentioned at the very end of the captionyeah I was like keep doing it let's talkabout like a little bit more on theinfluence of marketing piece because Iknow that there are a lot of people thatperhaps have created let's say the Lordsof brand and they've sent out productsand they don't get a return and thenthey just don't believe that it works itdoesn't work anymore or yeah you knowthis influencer marketing stuff issinking ship yeah I think first up thereturn section I think that when you'relooking to get a return in anything andany form of marketing you have to knowwhat that return was going to be youcan't just put something out there andexpect that something to just come backin so I think focusing on what theresult is that you're looking toward andthe way that I generally go about thatis by determining my goals before I seta campaign or before I set acollaboration I think from the veryoutset what do I want this campaign orcollaboration to achieve and those goalsI generally break down into four mainareas which are increasing brandawareness generating content growing mysocial following or generating sales sothere the four kind of main goals that Ilook at before starting any influencermarketing campaign and then you're ableto kind of work backward from that goalor reverse-engineer that goaldeconstruct that goal to be able toachieve the result that you want so thenonce you know what the result you'reworking toward is you can apply the typeof campaign through that so an examplefor a brand awareness campaign would bea product for post sorry for a brandawarenessor for a brand awareness goal would be aproduct for post campaign so that'sbasically where you send out a productin return for the influence of postingon that product to their social channelnot every influencer will do this ofcourse this is a micro influencerstrategy so for people with definitelyunder 50,000 followers usually under20,000 followers closer to that 10 to15,000 follower mark is the kind of hotspot for in terms of follow a level fora product for post campaign and againit's good to know that not every singleinfluencer is always going to post onyour brand it's about relationshipbuilding with those influences at thesame time making them feel involved inyour brand's story making themunderstand why you chose them why youselected them why you think that youraudience will under your customers willreally engage with that product so it'sjust making the influencer feel kind ofspecial and understanding why it'simportant to be working with your brandthat you know it's kind of like PR in away you send out a thousand pressreleases and maybe you'll only get a fewarticles written but I mean you're notgoing to send out a thousand productsand only get a few posts I usually theindustry standard completion rate ismaybe like 50 60 percent of theinfluences that you send out product towith you know the right follow-ups willgenerally post on that product so that'sfor the brand awareness goal forgenerating content we just tweaked theproduct for post campaign a little anddo a product the content campaign sorather than expecting the influencer topost it to their social channel youlower that expectation and you just askfor content or you might ask for alittle bit more content so say yourproducts worth something like $200 likev you might expect you know between 3 to5 images in return for gifting the watchrather than just one image and so brandsare constantly needing new content likewe spoke about in the content part of my3 C is to post to their social feed andinfluencer generated contentis the best content to post to socialmedia because it's platform native likethink about when you're scrollingthrough your Instagram feed and you seelike a stock image or an ad you justkeep scrolling that influencer generatedcontent makes you like stop and look atthe photo because it looks like it'smeant to be there so you get thatattention and attention is just becomingincreasingly hard to get like attentionspans are an all-time low the averagehuman attention span is like somethinglike six or seven seconds now in 2018and it was 12 seconds a few years ago soit's just dropping rapidly so to be ableto get that attention is so important soinfluencer generating content andgenerating content is a really reallystrong goal then moving on to increasingof social following like we spoke aboutin the collaboration section of my threeC's giveaways so running an influencerhosted giveaway like you you probablysee on Instagram influencers postingsaying you know for example with vthey'd say hey guys I have like twowatches to give away v of like kindlygifted me tag a friend on this post andboth follow v on instagram to go on thedraw to win and because you're givingaway two watches as well they'll bothfollow the account and you keep growingyour social following like that it'squite a cost-effective way to targetfollowing growing your social followingso it's good to have a really strongcall-to-action and then the last methodand goal so the goal is sales of courseone of the methods that you can go aboutfor a sales goal in terms of yourcampaign type in an influencer campaignis a personalized discount code campaignand they work really well because you'reable to directly attribute the sales tothat influencer you can say okay you caninstantly kind of know whether it wasworth it in terms of a monetary returnor not which is always going to be thebest indicator of whether somethingworksnot financially for a business so and Imean our brands like your your yourgirlfriend's brand as well well fishhave achieved great results using thisattribution kind of method of apersonalized discount code so basicallyit's like saying hi like my discountcode is greater 15 and you get 15% offstorewide using my code and you probablysee them on instead companies likeDaniel Wellington really popularizedthat method and grew very very quicklyusing that method so basically it justis a way to be able to know whether ornot the influencer did generate salesoff that and for example at the fifthone of our best posts in terms of likeROI and monetary return was we spent$1000 on a post with one influencer andwe got $23,000 in attributed sales fromthat one influencer over the space ofjust a week Wowand that was with a YouTube video andYouTube is pretty evergreen so if thatpost is still generating sales for ustodayyeah same time so and you guys have asimilar sort of story with health issuesyeah yeah yeah yeah that's crazy yeah solook we could talk about this stuff allday every day like you're and weactually kind of do yeah we do it's ourgreatest course like but she's Mortyshe's teaching it's not about me and I'mnot asking a questions it's actuallyfully scripted like you know it's it'sit's amazing but anyways long storyshort we have to work towards wrappingup yeah so for anyone that is thinkingabout starting an e-commerce brand orwant to start a business like maybethree pieces of advice you'd love togive and then we can work towardswrapping up yes I think that I'd have togo back again to start building anaudience as soon as possible yep youlike don't even need to have yourproduct like completely formed in yourmind yet you don't even have to knowexactly what you're going to do youmight just know the generalyou're interested in like you're likeokay I'm definitely you know interestedin the fitness industry and so you mightstart building an account and acommunity around fitness givingdifferent workout tips or recipes ornutritional advice whatever and start togrow that community there because thebest way to know that your product isgoing to succeed and to have goodvalidation early on is by having anaudience – already launched – so thatwould be tip number one my tip numbertwo would be and it's a quote from ReedHoffman if you're not embarrassed by thefirst version of your product you'velaunched too late when I launched skinnymeaty I literally would hand blend thetea put it in these little hideouscellophane bags wrap them up put like asticker on it write with a permanentmarker Smt or just do a love heart ohgod it makes me kind of stick on to thelike little cellophane thing and thatwas how I sealed the bag and then I putit in an envelope like literally justlike a postage envelope that you'd put aletter in because it was very flat so wegot to send it out for like a dollar andI'd ship it out people would get thislike random mix of herbs in the mail andbe like yeah so I think just yeah thatis just the number one tip if you're notembarrassed by the first version of yourproduct you've launched two lights youhonestly it's just about taking thoselittle steps and iterating on thosesteps to scale so you just you do thingsyou keep doing doing doing you make amistake you iterate or pivot a bit youfix that mistake and you keep going it'sjust problem-solving on your feet againand again so it's not as scary as itcould be then number three yeah so andthen tip number three would be build abrand not a store so there is a hugehuge difference in e-commerce it's afundamental difference and thatdifference is between building ane-commerce store and building ane-commerce brand in a store is justsomething that is thereyou have a product on it you make somesales you get some money and it's notshould be it is yeah exactlydrop shipping would be an example of ane-commerce store a brand on the otherhand is something that you're buildingvalue into you're building brand equityand you're building up an asset that oneday you'll be able to sell so it's ascalable asset so one definition that'sjust easy to understand of what brandyis is a brand is if you took all yourproducts out of your brand what valuewould be left over at the end and thatis your brand it is it's you know thingslike front of my positioning that wespoke about it's scaling brand equitythrough trust through influencerrelationships it's consistency andcreating a good product experiencearound your brand so focusing onbuilding a brand from day one so they'rethe three awesome well this is a greatchat Greta I think going yeah like yeahI think people are gonna get so much totake away from this interview now ifpeople want to find out more about yourcourse that you've published with us itfound out it's like a fully in-depthcourse takes you step-by-step throughGreta's framework people can go tofounder calm /e commerce and there'll belinks below this episode slash interviewbut where can people find out more aboutyour brands and and everything thatyou've used like all your bodies arework I would just follow me on Instagrambecause I've got all my links in thefire there as well yeah so at Greta it'sa really easy one yeah I also took theog handle that yeah awesome look thanksso much great it's a great fun thanksfor having me[Music]
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