Welcome to another episode of Subscription Box Answers! Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Subscription Box Experts Member Jared Latigo, the founder of The Chicken Bawks, a T-Shirt Subscription For Crazy Chicken People. Jared has built an impressive business generating over $500K per year in sales with 800 active subscribers and growing.
Jared's success story is a testament to the power of having a great product and a strong marketing strategy. If you're looking to learn about smart marketing and retention strategies, this episode is a must-listen.
Episode Highlights:
Tune in to this episode to get inspired and learn how you can take your subscription box business to the next level.
Join the Conversation:
Have a question you want answered on the show? Head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the free FB group to post your questions there.
Welcome to another episode of Subscription Box Answers! Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Subscription Box Experts Member Jared Latigo, the founder of The Chicken Bawks, a T-Shirt Subscription For Crazy Chicken People. Jared has built an impressive business generating over $500K per year in sales with 800 active subscribers and growing.
Jared's success story is a testament to the power of having a great product and a strong marketing strategy. If you're looking to learn about smart marketing and retention strategies, this episode is a must-listen.
Episode Highlights:
Tune in to this episode to get inspired and learn how you can take your subscription box business to the next level.
Join the Conversation:
Have a question you want answered on the show? Head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and join the free FB group to post your questions there.
Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope you're having a great day. Today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Jared Adigo, who is the founder of the Chicken Box. How are you?
Speaker 3:Doing good, man Doing good.
Speaker 2:Thanks very much for coming on the podcast. I'm excited to sit down with you and basically discuss your business, because you're in the subscription box space but you do things a bit different. Do you want to tell everybody what your business? Because you're in the subscription box space but you do things a bit different. Do you want to tell everybody what your business is?
Speaker 3:yeah sure, um, we, we got started in 2020. Uh, I have met this dude during covid. Like right at the beginning, everything was kind of shutting down and, long story short, I ended up at his house, house outside, and I was like, hey, you have chickens, I have chickens. So we just kind of connected on that. It was just weird. And so I saw that he had a screen printer in there, so he was pressing shirts.
Speaker 3:So we started talking and, you know, we became super good friends over the course of like a couple months. There was nothing else to do except text people, and so we did. And, and, yeah, a couple months into it, there was nothing else to do except text people, and so we did. And uh, and yeah, a couple months into it, he's like, hey, I have this, um, uh, this idea to do a subscription box. He already had one and it's a guy who wanted to do one. It'd be kind of fun to do one in the chicken niche. And I was like, all right, I got nothing else to do because my other job had shut down. Uh, during covid couldn't, couldn't do what I was doing then, and so I was just literally sitting at home, so we launched it in. I guess it was technically. In May we launched a few shirts and then in August we launched a subscription, part of it and it just kind of exploded from there. So that's kind of how I got into it. It was kind of a fluke, but it's been very interesting.
Speaker 2:So for the people listening at home, you're basically a t-shirt subscription for crazy chicken people yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's really weird and you tell people that you're like oh, I have a t-shirt subscription for people that have chickens as pets um and like there's enough people in the world for that and I'm like, well, apparently there is.
Speaker 3:Uh, yeah, so we, when we started in august, uh, we started running facebook ads immediately, because he already knew how to do that. I'd never done this before. My backgrounds in marketing, web design is not in, you know, tangible products, um. So we started in august, that first month. We were like our goal is, we want to have 50 subscribers in our first month, and so we blew that out of the water in like two days. So by the end of that first month we ended up at 250 subscribers. Within like seven months we had 1400. It was insane.
Speaker 3:But everyone was sitting at home and you know they were falling back on their you know hobby, which was having chickens in their backyard. So, yes, it is a T-shirt subscription, subscription box. We do a brand new design every single month. We do two items and we do a sticker, um, and we send them people who like the chickens, and that's what we do every single month. So it's, uh, it's been going on for almost well. August will be four years for the subscription. So we're, um, we're coming up on that four-year mark here in a couple months.
Speaker 2:The way you do things a bit different is you obviously have your t-shirt subscription, but you sell a lot of one-time t-shirts on the website as well. What kind of split do you see between the subscriptions and the one-time t-shirts?
Speaker 3:between the subscriptions and the one-time t-shirts. Uh, so the one-time t-shirts you know, t-shirts are something that everybody understands what it is. It's not a question of like, what am I buying? But the subscription piece of it is sometimes challenging for people, because there are people who don't understand what a subscription is. Um, I've literally talked to friends of mine that's like, now, tell me about this subscribe thing. Like they literally don't understand what a subscription is.
Speaker 3:Um, I've literally talked to friends of mine that's like, now, tell me about this subscribe thing. Like, they literally don't even know what a subscription box is, which I didn't know. That wasn't like common knowledge. You know, um, in 2024, you think everyone knows what that is, but they don't. So by having the additional products, it gives us an opportunity to sell a kind of one-time to people and they can test how soft their shirts are, they test the quality, they test if they're actually going to get it, because there is fraudulent things on Facebook all the time, and so that's just a way for them to get in cheaper, not commit to something and be able to test their product, and a lot of those people will end up converting to the subscription after the fact, and what kind of measures do you take on the back end to push people into the subscription, because obviously the subscription has a higher lifetime value?
Speaker 3:yeah, oh, yeah, uh, significantly higher. Um. So we have actually struggled, uh, significantly trying to sell single t-shirts through ads and it actually doesn't work very well at all To the point where I've kind of, basically in the last four to five months, I've really switched my strategy to where my ads are solely focused on the subscription and then we use our retargeting ads to sell them single t-shirts. So we literally have an ad and it's like hey, not not interested in committing to a subscription. Did you know? You can get our shirts, you know, from our shop and not have to commit, you know, because that commitment is a thing for people.
Speaker 3:So we see, we do see a lot of people switching from a single, single purchase over to a subscription. But we also see our best customers who will subscribe and also purchase things from the shop, whether it be like a past design that they missed. We do release designs sometimes that have never been released in a subscription, so we have things like that. But yeah, been released in a subscription. So we have things like that. But yeah, the lifetime value of the subscriber is significantly higher than those one-time buyers, for sure.
Speaker 2:And that's actually a really, really clever strategy. And for the people listening at home when you say single t-shirts don't work on ads, is that because the finances just don't work on ads? Is that because the finances just don't work behind it?
Speaker 3:it's really hard to basically make that channel profitable if you're just selling a one-time product yeah, you know, through the stuff that I've learned from you in the resource group and then the mastermind program, which I'll totally um vouch for, that mastermind program, it's amazing. That stuff taught me that you really have to pay attention to your numbers, and that was something that I struggled with. So, kind of backing up a little bit, I took the business over 100% in March of 23. My business partner came to me. I was like I have this other business that's doing well, I want to focus on that, I don't want to do this anymore, you just have it. And so he literally just gave me this business, which was a blessing. But it was also going downhill. We had really fallen off. We couldn't figure out how to gain subscribers, we couldn't figure out how to grow the business, and so for almost a year and a half I just declined. And so for almost a year and a half I just declined After all the success we had in the first seven or eight months. So from March of 23,. So this is a little over a year ago now.
Speaker 3:I took this over 10% and I had to learn all of the things because I was really just doing the website and emails and that was basically it. He already had film handled, he already had the other half of the business going, and so I had to pick up and learn all that stuff. And I had to learn how to do ads. And so your courses taught me how to do those ads and how to set them up properly.
Speaker 3:And in doing that I learned things like what the heck is CAC, what the heck is LTV, what the heck is this stuff? Because I didn't pay attention to any of that stuff, because I didn't pay attention to any of that. But once I learned that, I understood that if it's going to cost me a certain amount of money to gain a subscriber, can I get a single. Someone who purchases one or two or three shirts, you know, one time or two times or whatever, can I get them for cheaper and be able to offset my ad costs. And so I tested, I tested, I tested and over the last year the things that have stood out to me is it doesn't cost me any less to get a single t-shirt purchase than it does to get a subscriber. And a lot of times it's actually cheaper to get a subscriber than it is to get someone who will buy one or two times.
Speaker 2:Well, that is crazy and you wouldn't really think that. And I think what do I, like you hear of all you hear of Shopify blowing up in the last few years. I read something I can't remember the exact numbers, but they went from in the ballpark of like 150 000 merchants to like four million people on the platform, which is really, really impressive. But I also read and I don't know how true this is there's a good proportion of shopify stores that aren't profitable, and I could be completely wrong because I don't have insights into the data. I should probably look into it more.
Speaker 2:But I imagine this is probably because a lot of people are just selling one-time products. And when you actually think about it logically, if you're just selling a one-time product, especially the way ad costs have gone these days, it's probably going to be really, really difficult to make them numbers work in your favor, unless you have an amazing backend built into your business where people are coming back and they're repurchasing things really, really quickly. And I think that's why a lot of direct-to-consumer companies ended up in trouble coming out of COVID because they never had the back end built into the business and the numbers just never made sense anymore. So fair play to you for identifying that and switching strategy to the subscription, because obviously with the subscription you're going to have a higher lifetime value and you can afford to actually run the ads and you can actually get the numbers to work in your favor yeah, I think that's a really fair assessment.
Speaker 3:Actually, um, you know my buddy that once you know my best friend that was in the in the business with me. He he runs his, his shop and he has a subscription as well. But he can get those numbers to work. I think he's probably one of the few that can.
Speaker 1:He's in a niche.
Speaker 3:That's a massive audience and they buy for their mom and their dad and their cousins and their cousin's kids. It works really well for them. He can run those ads, he can do it all day long and he can get his average order value up to $ or 70 bucks and his CAC is 12, 13, 14, 15 bucks, which is great, and he can scale the business that way. I think that that is an anomaly. I don't think it's something that most people can do. This business would have been dead in the water had we not had the subscription and I 100% believe that, like if we had not had the subscription, this business would not work period.
Speaker 2:My business would be very, very similar. I would well, we would actually struggle to make the numbers work in our favor too if we never had the subscription element. And I think you're right. I think it really just depends on the niche, because you have to think about it logically, right. Even for us in the dog niche, how many products are they going to buy from us and how quickly are they actually going to buy the products from us? Now, over like a 12-month or a two-year period, they will buy a decent amount of products. But if you're trying to front load that cack and wait like 12 to a two-year period to earn your money back and make profit off it, it's going to be very, very, very difficult unless you've raised like significant investment and you actually have cash to burn to grow. So I think the subscription really is a lifesaver in that regard.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I'll agree with you.
Speaker 3:I mean, and I have some clients that I work with just coaching type stuff, and you know I've worked with them before I even had this business and I've pushed a couple of them to do a subscription because it's like this business model is phenomenal because you can build in so much recurring revenue.
Speaker 3:I mean that's the whole business model, which has always been the struggle that I've had with my other businesses, even when I was doing websites and like that kind of stuff. You know I would do a website and you know I would build one of those and you know charge them five, you know, $10,000 for this business or whatever it is, but then on the backend the recurring revenue is only $150 because it's like maintenance, right, that's really hard to build a recurring revenue over time. You have to have a lot of clients that know it's it's a lot easier to pick up. You know 20, 30, 150. You know new subscribers in a month, um, they're paying you 30 bucks like that's. That's a significantly easier sell than and some of the stuff I've been in the past and the subscription models made, absolutely yes I agree 100% with everything you said there.
Speaker 2:Just backing up a bit to covid times when you took over the business and you absolutely blew it up within a very short period of time. I always say this to people on this podcast if you know now, if, if you knew back then what you know now, what would you have done differently? Would you have spent more money on marketing?
Speaker 3:I've heard you say that because I've listened to almost every episode of your podcast and yeah, I think the answer is I would have dumped my house into this thing because it like we were literally getting subscribers for like four to five bucks. It was insane and and that's why we were able to scale it the way we were and get to where we're. Yeah, I would have spent every penny that I had to gain subscribers and and now the downside for that is we would have made a lot of money in a really short period of time and I wouldn't have actually figured out how to grow the business beyond that, which is exactly where we ended up, just on a smaller scale. Now, I probably would have had a couple of million dollars in the bank to be able to work off of at that point, but I wouldn't have had a sustainable business model because I didn't actually know how to grow it, which is what I've learned over the last year is actually how to grow the business now, like that's.
Speaker 2:that's the important part yeah, it's a really important information to have and I think it's kind of a blessing and a curse looking back at culver's, because we we were the exact same. Look, if I could go back in time, I would have found a way to dump in way more money than we spent. We didn't spend a good amount of money, but it would have done anything to basically spend more. But the bigger you are, the harder you fall too. So if you got it really really big back then and then the market changed completely and you were trying to figure out how to fix it, it could end up sinking your business very, very quickly because your expenses would be really high too. Really, really strange times. You could literally throw any kind of ad up and just turn it on and people would sign up all day, every day uh, yeah, no, it was, it was insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was you have a really good section on your website here. It says the family member benefits and you have a newly designed tee each month, chicken themed items, collectible stickers, special family member discounts, member only add on products, exclusive Facebook community and so much more. That's really good to see, because I think these days people expect stuff like that with a subscription. They expect more than just the actual box or the T-shirts in your case. How much do you think your customers respond to that?
Speaker 3:So we've tested some different things. One of the struggles early on well, really until the last, about six months, six or seven months was getting that kind of like offer that worked. For the longest time we just did. We didn't run any deals, we didn't run any offers, we didn't run anything. It was just the shirt and the promise was that you're going to get a brand new design every month. Any deals we didn't write any offers, we didn't write anything, it was just the shirt and the promise was that you're going to get a brand new design every month, but in a more competitive market. I mean, as you know and as you teach, you have to figure out how you're going to differentiate yourself. So one of the things that came out of some of these things here, like this Facebook community taught like to ask questions in there and like with some live videos, and we used to do a lot more than we do now, um, but asking people, getting involved and really just having those conversations with them and doing some polls and you know saying, hey, what are some things, what are some key things that are like your favorite thing about the subscription? What are? What are some? What's something you would like to see more of um and and we really do ask those questions and having the community has helped a lot. I will sometimes just email and just say like okay, here's a, here's a poll, um, you know, with five questions or whatever, and just ask them um, and the softness of the t-shirt is is kind of the biggest, one of the biggest like initial factors for people to purchase, which is why we put that at the front of our marketing. You know ridiculously soft and comfy chicken tees and we also don't have a competitor like a direct competitor. There's other chicken subscription boxes, but they do know mostly products kind of like what you would do in the in the dog market. Um, they have products, that kind of stuff, but we're the only one that does a t-shirt every single month like that is our product. So that differentiates us.
Speaker 3:I think differentiation is a huge thing in marketing, finding that gap in the market that you can fill, um, that people actually want having these other things, like it's not just a t-shirt, it's also the sticker. People love stickers, like you'd be. You'd be like amazed at the amount of people that have literally emailed me saying can I just get a subscription to the sort of stickers and I'm like I almost I literally like three times have gone down the path of almost starting just a sticker subscription. You know, my concern with that is, can I actually make it scale? And you know, the cat could be on that and all that.
Speaker 3:But anyways, these things do make a big difference because the more benefits you can put in front of the customer, uh, the the more likely they are to purchase. Because if you have the initial thing that's like hey, this is a, you know, this is a t-shirt, and how much is that t-shirt working? What's the value of that? Right, and then they're getting free shipping. And then they're getting the stickers and they're getting the additional items and they get member only discounts. And they're getting the additional items and they get member-only discounts. So you start going down the list of things. All those are value adds to the subscription and it's on top of what they already thought was a valuable product, in a way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it doesn't cost you much money at all to fulfill them and it keeps your people happy. It builds community, builds loyalty and probably keeps them signed up longer. That's really interesting what you said about the stickers. I think that could actually work quite well for you, but I'd probably test it as an add-on subscription first. Put it in your flow and see if people take it and, if they do, maybe consider launching it as a separate subscription, obviously if the numbers actually make sense behind it.
Speaker 3:But as an add-on, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, and you know the thing about some of these like you look at it and you're like there's only a couple things in here that are really, uh, additional things that they get as a, as a subscriber.
Speaker 3:Uh, a couple of these other things the family, family member discounts and the member only add-ons I'm actually selling them more product and so I'm actually they're actually becoming a. You know they're. They're giving me more money by being a, by being a family member, and and that's and that's great, because they get more product, they get a discount and they get something that's exclusive to them, but then, at the same time, my lifetime value, that customer, is higher. So it just we we literally have that built into our back end too, where they I can offer like a 40 discount, discount on certain products through it and I will, and so they can go into their portal and they can add these on and when that renewal goes through, those, you know, that t-shirt or that additional product or whatever gets added to their order and it's something that I didn't have to sell them. It's just sitting there waiting for them to add it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really clever way of increasing your lifetime value and making more money from your customers and making them happy as well by giving them that discount being a subscriber. So you hit 45 000 dollars in sales in one month recently, which gives you a business which is doing over half a million dollars a year. If you multiply that out over 12 months, so that's very impressive. Congratulations on hitting that. That's really impressive to see. What marketing did you do to hit that. What were you going heavy on? Facebook ads were. Was there? Email marketing involved a lot of follow-up. What did you do to achieve that? Because I'm sure there's lots of people listening who would love to know how you hit 45,000 in a month.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you know about half of that was renewals. So now that we've scaled up the subscription, we're sitting right around 800 subscribers right now and and that that's.
Speaker 3:that's huge for us. And you know the other piece to it is the amount of spend on Facebook. So we do, you know, meta ads exclusively and anything else. So our, our marketing engine is essentially meta ads and an email and those two things in tandem. When you're doing them properly in tandem, as you teach is you know, those things are enough to get your subscription or to get your conversion right where it needs to be and to get your return where it needs to be.
Speaker 3:And I have some different like ways of looking at things I've kind of borrowed from. I have another brand that does just e-comm stuff, that I follow some of their things and they do a great job with theirs. You know they have like five or six multimillion dollar brands. And then I have your stuff that I look at. And then I have my buddy over here that doesn't look at anybody and he just, like you know, here's $400 and just scaled it and it's insane how easy it is for them to sell t-shirts. So I just look at what everybody's doing and I'm like what can I pull that makes sense for my business and how can I apply these principles to mine and even test them right?
Speaker 3:So that's what I do, is I look at it and I'll say my goal and I don't always reach this goal, in fact I rarely do, but my goal is to don't always reach this goal. In fact I really do. But my goal is to I need my ad spend and my sales per day. I want my sales per day to be 4x what my ad spend is and I'll get. I'll get there.
Speaker 3:I don't care if it's you know, I send an email that day, or I don't send an email, or I send a text message, which I do have some text message numbers, or if I'm just posting on Facebook, you know, or it's just ads, like I don't really care how I get there. As long as I can keep that number above two times, like two X of what I'm spending on ads, then I'm breaking even. So my goal is to break even or higher when I'm gaining subscribers, because I know that they're they're going to, you know, renew within a month and at that point I'm profitable on them. So our, our overall like uh return um on most customers is about six weeks is where we, where we essentially become profitable.
Speaker 3:So by by paying attention to those numbers, I know, is this worth running this ad or not, and sometimes I'll lose a little bit of money, you know, over the course of a day or two or three days or whatever, while I'm trying to test ads. But it makes up for itself in the backend because now I've gained new email subscribers that I can sell on single products, you know, or we'll pick up a subscription that time. Did that kind of answer your question?
Speaker 2:yeah, that was a really uh, in-depth answer. Thanks very much for that and you definitely have the right approach where it sounds as if you're going on a blended cac approach. You just know what you have to hit and, honestly, you don't care really what you have to do once you hit it. You're not really. Obviously, your facebook ad performance is very important, but you're not solely focused on that, if it's like because we know things go up and down, up and down, but we need to look at things over a bigger period of time. We'll just go on a daily schedule. You just, basically, you don't care what you have to do. If you have to send an email, post more on social media, send the sms, you don't care. You're going to deal with to basically hit the goal.
Speaker 3:Yeah right, yeah, no, absolutely, um, yeah. And so to your point about the uh, about the sales from. So we're talking, talking about April sales. We did just over forty five thousand in April. The previous year in April we were up. This year we were up one hundred and seventeen percent over last year. Same time, same time period.
Speaker 2:Well, that is amazing.
Speaker 3:Congratulations that is amazing congratulations, and a lot of people I'll tell you a lot of that was just listening to what you teach and following those things and staying consistent with it and, over the course of the year, our businesses, uh, we've, we've grown. We grew almost 90 percent in 2023 and we're on track this year. Um, we should grow about another 100 from 23 through 24. So it's it works like it works well.
Speaker 2:That is absolutely amazing, especially when we're in a tougher economy. Pretty much it's definitely a tougher economy, but to hear and I know loads of other people too are doing quite well there is still so much opportunity out there if you actually get your marketing dialed in. During COVID it made everything really easy to scale up. But it's actually not like that. You have to have your marketing dialed in in normal times if you want to get anywhere. And you definitely have your marketing dialed in because you're paying attention to all the numbers, you have your system set up and you actually understand what you have to do to grow one of these businesses. So yeah, congratulations, Really happy to hear things are going well.
Speaker 3:You know, I heard I think it was a podcast you did a few weeks ago, talking to someone I think it was a guy from Subly and it was really good to hear that this past year was a struggle because we had so much growth. And, yeah, he was looking forward to like this year and what this year is going to do and I was like I told my wife I was like you know this guy's saying, across the board, as a subscription industry, 2023 was a struggle and if we were able to grow 90% in a struggle year, what can we do in a good year? And that's kind of where my head is is paying attention to what these experts are saying, paying attention to the guys that really know what they're doing, Because I'm just testing everything. I don't know. I don't have it all dialed. In this past month, the month of May was not as good as April for us and it was a struggle to get ads, you know, to get ads operating.
Speaker 3:But paying attention to your numbers, like the thing would be that I would tell anybody who started and I even have a client who tells me right now like, if you're you know the stuff you teach, if your conversion rate on your website is where it needs to be between 2% and 3%. Conversion rate on your website is where it needs to be between two and three percent. If you're, if you're doing email marketing consistently you know if you're sending one or two or three emails a week, based on how many emails you're adding to your list. If you're, if you're running ads and you're paying attention to your ad costs and all that stuff like you have to know those things. If you don't know those things, then you shouldn't be running the business period, because it won't go anywhere, which is not gonna happen no, and that's 100.
Speaker 2:True, there's a lot more involved than just putting things in a box and posting organically on social media and and I think people can be sucked in and they're like, oh, it sounds great, it's recurring revenue and it is great when you get it right, but there is a learning curve. But yeah, you're the proof that you really can scale up one of these companies like the niche that you're in. It's a very niche product and you've still managed to scale it up to a significant amount of revenue. So fair play to you, really impressive thanks. If you had one piece of advice for the people listening at home who are stuck, or if they're even thinking about setting up a subscription box, what would it be?
Speaker 3:If you're in a place where you're like, hey, I have an idea because I see this. I see this in the subscription resources group. I have this idea of this great product. I think it would go really well.
Speaker 3:I really think you have to really understand the market. You have to know the actual lingo, the actual industry, who your customer is, who they're going to be buying for. Are they going to be buying gift subscriptions? Are they going to buy for themselves? Are they buying for everybody and their mom? What is this industry going to be buying for? Are they going to be buying gift subscriptions? Are they going to buy for themselves? Are they buying for everybody and their mom? What is this industry going to do? How are you actually going to fill a need for them?
Speaker 3:Not just put another product into the market, because the world doesn't need another product. I truly believe that the world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because we're niching down more and more and more, and the internet's allowed us to do that. You know, if you'd have told me heck, even four years, five years ago, before we started this business, that I'd be, you know, running a half a million dollar T-shirt subscription for chicken lovers, like I would have thought you were insane and sometimes I look, look, if someone told me seriously I'd be sending out dog toys all over ireland, I think like that just sounds insane.
Speaker 2:And yeah, sending out chicken t-shirts half a million dollar company, it's crazy, but that's the opportunity, it's out there.
Speaker 3:It is, it really is, but. But if you had told me that, I literally would have said like you're nuts, right. And I think that that's why this stuff works is because we do end up in an industry that is passionate about something and is very interested in what you have, because it's so different from anything else. And you're doing all of the right things, you're checking all the right boxes, you're providing customer service, you're providing quality products, your marketing is on point, whether it's funny or it's interesting or it's educational or whatever it is but if you're not hitting those things, then you're not going to be able to break into the market and actually solve any problems or provide any sort of happiness or provide any sort of value to your customers and therefore your business is not going to go anywhere. I think you really have to understand that piece of it. All the other things can be learned along the way, but if you don't have like a true understanding of your market that you're going into, then you're not really going to go anywhere.
Speaker 3:And we actually did this. I started a second t-shirt subscription in an industry that we didn't really care that much about and didn't really know that much about, and we spent probably $1,000 on ads and it literally got zero sales because we did not understand what we were getting into. And after spending some money and spending some time and all that, me and my business partner were like you know what, let's just stick with the chicken thing and let's leave this alone. We're fine, right? But it was one of those things that we had to test because we thought we had it figured out. We didn't, we didn't, we didn't know that market, we shouldn't have been in it.
Speaker 2:Thanks very much for that advice and thanks very much for jumping on the podcast. Really really good information you shared there and I'm sure the people who are listening are going to get a lot of value. Definitely have to have you back on at some point Before I let you go. I know you're doing a bit of consulting. If somebody wants to reach out to you and connect with you, where can they go?
Speaker 3:I mean everything runs through the business right now. Like, you can check out thechickenboxcom. It's spelled B-A-W-K-S and you know if you will just check out there, you can contact me through there. I don't really do, I don't do a lot of consulting, but if someone does need help, I'm always happy to see if it's something that makes sense. Um, and and of course you know it, it depends on the industry, it depends on the.
Speaker 3:You know, again, I'm going to point people to the same things that I've said here and the same things that you say. And and I always say, like you know, did you, if you're in Liam's stuff, if you're in his mastermind, if you're in his group, like, did you follow what he's saying? Like, because we don't really need to have a conversation unless they've already gone into what you're doing. And if I would do the same thing, like, do you understand your market? Do you really know? Like, do they want this product? Like you can't. The old adage of like selling ketchup to a woman in white gloves I don't think anybody could do that. No, they don't. Like, we've niched down so far that it's not gonna happen. It just isn't. You gotta have a great product and they gotta want it and that's it. I mean, there's some psychology there, sure, but it's gotta happen 100.
Speaker 2:if you have a great product and there's people there who want it, everything else is so much easier. So so a lot of people miss that when they're actually getting started. Exactly Like you said, they don't understand the market and they're bringing out a product that there's no demand for pretty much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And I see people posting the group from time to time and I'm like I'm not even going to comment to this because this person is literally just like I have this idea. And they'll ask, like, do you think this is a good, do you think this is a good idea? And I'm like that is such a relative question. Like you're, you've got so much work to do before you can ask a better question. You know, and I think that's true, like, and I would tell anybody that I'm not somebody who's going to pull a punch on that kind of thing. And maybe there's somebody, is somebody out there that will be like oh well, let's think through this. That's not me. I want somebody to succeed because they want to succeed and because they want to bring value to a market, not because they're going into it thinking I want to sell trash and make a million dollars. That's not what I'm going to do.
Speaker 2:Well, look. Thanks very much. We will be back next week at the exact same time as always. If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post your question there. Chat to you next week. Bye-bye.