Episode #014: We Sold 300 Candles In 45 Days (Here's What It Taught Us About Online Business)
We Sold 300 Candles In 45 Days (Here's What It Taught Us About Online Business)
Did you know that Zach runs a candle company with his partner Simon?
Well today, he's taking you behind the scenes and beyond just pouring wax to share the crossover lessons between selling a physical and a digital product!
During this episode you'll discover:
How OFFERS are the key to success in any business
The importance of MENTORSHIP to success
The relevance of ROI and METRICS to scaling
And so much more...
Tune in to learn how candles and course collide!
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 14. And in this episode, we are talking about what my physical product business has taught me about digital products and business in general. So if you've been thinking, how do I get a new perspective, how do I think about things differently, how do I change the way that I'm viewing my business, this episode is going to be a game changer for you, so stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, not so average marketer. I am so stoked for this week's episode. For those of you who don't know, my partner and I actually run a crystal infused candle business. We sell candles with things like adventuring, citrine, blue apatite, amethyst, rose quartz in them with really specialty toppings like rose petals, glitter, star anise, dried fruit. It is a really cool business that I love running in addition to Heart, Soul, and Hustle with my partner.
I wanted to give you some context to why this business started and why the heck I'm even talking about it. Back in 2020, around April of 2020 when things started getting really crazy in the world, my partner and I were like going crazy being locked in. At the time, we were in a small apartment in San Diego, California, and we said, "Hey, why not get even crazier and start a small little business?" We started sourcing crystals from around the world. We had suppliers in the US, Canada, overseas. It was pretty darn cool. And we would get different crystals. We would get crystal skulls, crystal sculptures. We sold a rose quartz unicorn one time. It was a really cool business.
But towards the end of 2020, I remember talking to my partner and saying, "This is great but this is not scalable." Our inventory's hard to track, we never know what's really going to sell, we're shipping lots of orders one day and not a lot of orders the next day. And when we had initially started the crystal business, my partner had said, "I'd really love to make crystal candles and sell them with the crystals." And at the time, to be completely honest, I said, "I don't think that's a great idea." Little did I know I was wrong.
We kind of did the whole year through about December, and then I talked to my partner and said, "You remember how you talked about those candles? I think you're right. I think we should sell candles with crystals in them." And the reason is it was really hard to advertise the crystal business because everything was one of a kind unique pieces. It was hard to get people engaging with us. It was hard to monitor or gauge how successful a month was going to be. And I said, "With candles, we can advertise. We can grow an email list. We can do all these cool things that I've learned from Heart, Soul, and Hustle, and we can scale it up and get really incredible results. So what do you think? Do you want to go all in on candles?" And he said, "Let's do it."
So I feel like contextually I want to put some numbers to what we've been able to do. As of just about the last 45 days, we've sold 300 candles, 340 in about the last 45 days. Now, to really put that into perspective, in the last year we sold 712. So we started this real concerted effort to grow our candle business about two months ago at the beginning of October and we've sold about 50% of our candles for the year in the last 45 days. It's pretty darn cool when you think about it.
What I wanted to do in today's episode was talk to you about what I've learned from the candle business that I think directly translates to digital products. You might be listening to this episode saying, "Is this even going to apply to me? Zach, why does this matter?" Here's my thing. Y'all, you got to realize that sometimes we get so head down tunnel vision about our own industry that we don't find inspiration from other places. I think one of the most powerful things you can do for your business is to get inspired by things that are not your business. Get inspired by artists, get inspired by other businesses, get inspired by television, get inspired by movies. Like how do people do things in other places, spaces, and businesses that you can apply to yourself?
The first lesson that I learned, and I've got a few lessons for you here today which I'm pretty darn excited about, I've got about seven lessons total. The first lesson is get help if you don't know what you're doing or if you need additional support. So, at the end of September, I was talking to Simon and I said, "I think we should get help." The candle business, we kind of put it on a little hiatus while we were moving. We moved from California to Ohio to be closer to family. It was a really crazy time. We were selling a couple of candles a month if we were lucky. And I said, "I really want to do this. Like let's do this right."
We hired a mentor. I looked around, I found someone who actually had worked with other businesses in the past that were physical products, hand makers, and we pursued a mentor. We actually put a really healthy chunk of change down to work with this mentor. Now, what was really important and this is where I want you to kind of start to take notes is that we found a mentor that had three specific criteria. One, they provided the level of support we needed at that time. So this specific mentor was actually very high touch. I can message him one on one. We are in a private Facebook group with about 15 people.
Two, find a mentor that works with the people you want to work with. Believe it or not, the person we actually decided to hire was already working with another candle company. We just asked, "Hey, do you have a non-compete or can we learn what you're doing?" He was like, "I don't have a non-compete. We can absolutely support two candle businesses." We made sure that the mentor we were looking at knew what we needed. We made sure they were in our industry, in our space.
And number three, we invested at a level that stretched us. I think this is really important to hear. I'm not saying you need to invest all your money into mentorship. If $50 a month is a stretch, join a membership that's 50 bucks a month. If $500 is a stretch, invest $500. To be clear, when I say as a stretch, I mean it's not throw away money. If you're sitting on $10,000 and somebody says it's 100 bucks to work with me, you go, "Ah, it is what it is. It's 100 bucks. I'll throw money at it. No big deal." When an investment pushes you outside of your comfort zone, there is this little voice in the back of your head that says, "Oh my gosh, we just spent that, we have to make this work." I want to encourage you to stretch yourself either financially with who you're reaching out to, with how you're implementing, to say, "I've got to make this work."
Now, the next lesson that was really important, this was a game changer for us, was that in the physical product space, you make offers. This was presented to us by the mentor that we hired. He basically said, "When you're in the physical product space, all you're doing is making offers. You could do 10% off. You could do buy one, get one. You could do specialty sale. You could do buy a product, get a product free, but you're always testing new offers."
Now in the digital product space, when we create an offer, we can't just go out and build an entire course in 30 days. But are you testing different offers? And more importantly, it's not always about, oh, 15% versus 25%. It could be talking angles for your product. So let's say I have a program called grow your list to 1,000 people. I could take a bunch of different angles. I could talk about how much revenue you could generate with 1,000 people. I could talk about the shortest path to 1,000 people. I could talk about Facebook ads for 1,000 people. It could be the same offer. And in the candle business, it's the same product. And I guess I shouldn't say the same offer. It can be the same product but different offers, different angles, different positioning.
We have tested out probably a dozen plus different angles for our candle business, from simple discounts to bundles, to bonuses, to upsell, and it's made a huge difference. We've been able to see really incredible results by testing different offers. But that leads right into the next thing that we learned, which is nothing works forever. So in the digital product space, we kind of get sold this dream of like, oh, you are going to set up the perfect email sequence with the epic automated webinar and the automated mini-course and people are just going to buy from you forever. It don't work like that.
Perfect example. We did really well at Christmas time because at our candle business, we have a Christmas candle and that Christmas candle was responsible for 60% of our sales in the last 45 days. 60% of our sales came from one specific candle. It was crazy. That's really great, but come January, that's not going to work anymore. So we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and test new offers, test new products, test new angles. We have to make sure that we are paying attention to what the market is responding to. You have to realize that you can set stuff up tomorrow and it could work for a week, it could work for a month, it could work for two years, but you've got to be paying attention to it to know what works.
Now, real quick, I just want to throw out there for those who are curious, I've been a little elusive. Our candle business is called The Calming Oasis if you want to check it out. Full transparency, we're not shipping until the new year. So if you check it out and you do buy a candle, just know that we're not shipping until early January for new orders because we're finishing our back orders before Christmas and then we're taking a week off for the holidays. We will link up the candle business in the show notes, but you can absolutely check it out.
I also want to give a shout out to Josh Coffy is his name from Flight Media. That is the person that we've been working with. He has an incredible physical product mentorship. If you're like, "Oh my gosh, I have a physical product mentorship. Who'd you work with, Zach?" You can check out Josh Coffy and I'll link him up as well.
Now, let's get back to the good stuff. If you're getting a mentorship or getting help from a mentor, you're testing out different offers, you're testing them out consistently, especially if they stop working, that brings us to the next really important lesson that I learned, which is know your dang numbers y'all, especially in physical products. Like it's a little different in a digital product because your cost is generally your time. You come up with an idea for a course. What does it cost you? Maybe the course software, maybe some advertising, but those are your big expenses. In a physical product business, you have cost of goods sold, you have shipping, you have tax, you have the software that you use, you have the advertising. There's lots of different costs that go into it.
And so when we started, like early on, we were like, "We're selling so many candles. This is great." And then we looked down and we were like, "Oh my gosh, we're making what we spend." We had to really analyze what can we spend? What does our advertising return need to be? What does our ROI need to look like to return a positive result? We learned from our mentor that it's not a bad thing, especially in the physical product space selling candles, to break even on customer acquisition, meaning we may spend $10 to get a customer who nets us $10, because a lot of times you get return customers, you get people coming back. We have had a lot of people leaving us positive reviews of our candles. Now that we've been shipping them out consistently, we have like 25 reviews on our website, which is awesome, but we need to know our numbers and we need to know how we get people back.
That includes knowing our numbers on follow-up sequences, on advertising, on our website, what does our website convert at? What does our traffic cost us? Over the last say 30 days or so, our website's been converting at three and a half percent, meaning 3.5% of people who visit our website buy a candle. It's important that we know these numbers. And if you don't know these numbers, you're kind of just saying, "Oh, I'll just keep spending till I get the sale." And while that's great in theory, it means you could be losing money on your business. And if you're losing money on a business, it's an expensive hobby. We don't want to run an expensive hobby, we want to run a profitable business.
Now, this I think is one of my most important lessons that parallels between the digital and the physical, and that is that you need to get feedback from your customers. We in the candle business implemented an application, a piece of software that automatically emails people once they buy our candles. So once people have purchased our candles, what happens is that after a number of days, they're going to get an email saying, "Hey, I noticed you bought this product. From this product, I'd love to know what did you think? Would you give us a rating out of five stars?"
Game changer. We started getting reviews, probably two to five reviews a week on our most popular candle. And we now, when we started this season, we had about seven reviews. Now we're up to 28. So we've added about 20 reviews to our website. And guess what? As we got more reviews for our product, our conversion rate went up. Let me say that one more time. As we added reviews to our website, our conversion rate on purchases went up. See, one thing that we realized is that what people are actively looking for sometimes is social proof. They just want to know, hey, is this thing legit? Are people buying this? Are people getting results? What is the results? And so I just want to encourage you that whether you're digital or physical, get a process in place to get testimonials and feedback from your customer.
We've been fortunate that the mass majority of our feedback has been five star. We had one four star review and months and months and months ago, we had one negative review. But when we get those reviews and then negative reviews, we can find out why. What don't people like? What can we change? How do we optimize it? How do we tweak it? How do we change it? How do we improve the product? And full transparency, when we first started, we noticed that there was this issue with our wicks. We didn't realize that they weren't being trimmed low enough before we shipped them. And now we do. We make sure we trim them low enough that they light very easily.
Let's talk about number six in lessons learned, and that is you need to hustle in the early days of your business. I know this is controversial. I know it is, because the online marketing space has fed us this message of like ease and flow, anti-hustle culture, don't hustle do work in the best way possible so that you feel good and recharged and never burn out. Okay. Let's address the elephant in the room. I'm not saying you should burn yourself out. I'm not saying you should work yourself into the ground. I'm not saying that you have to do a million things at a time.
What I am saying is that in the early days of your business, you don't have the same financial resources as a seven figure business. You just don't. You can't necessarily afford to hire a full-time nanny to watch your kids. You can't afford to run $1,000 worth of Facebook ads for a week. You can't afford to just put it all on the line and see what happens. That doesn't necessarily make sense. And so I've said this for years and I'll continue to say it. When you start your business, you can invest time or money, but you can't always invest both. And the more you invest of one, the less you need of the other.
And so guess what? When we started our candle business, I'm running Heart, Soul and Hustle full-time. I have an agency side of the business, I have a membership side of the business, but three to four days a week, I'm in the candle lab making candles. I don't have the resources and the time to fully outsource that right now. So I'm not saying burn yourself out, but what I am saying is we have to get realistic about what it takes to get a business off the ground, and that's usually a time investment. And that time investment is often associated with hustling. And so sometimes, yeah, you do have to hustle. You got to put in a little more time, energy, work, effort, and that's okay. It's okay to work hard sometimes for your dreams.
I'm not saying, please hear me, I'm not saying it can't be easy. There are things that we do in the candle business and in Heart, Soul and Hustle that are stupid easy that generate revenue. Like we do Instagram reels from time to time. It takes me like 15 minutes. I think it's super easy, super low impact. And we've had some of our reels go viral; 6,000 views, 10,000 views on an account with only 1,000 followers for the candles. That's great. But pouring those candles, it feels like work sometimes. So just know that in the early days of your business, it's not unhealthy to put in the time. It's not unhealthy to put in the work, it's normal.
Now, the last thing that I want to touch on is that when you do hit that critical mass, when you do feel like, oh my gosh, this is great, start getting help. So we, no joke, we reached out to my stepsister who we now live close to and we said, "Hey, can you come and help us pack and ship?" Like we are inundated. We got up to we were doing like 50 to 70 orders in a week for like a three to four week period there. It was crazy. I was like, "Can you come help us, please? We just need to get candles in boxes, boxes out the door, boxes shipped into the UPS store. Please help us." It was great. Did it cut into our margins and our profitability? Absolutely. It totally did. But it got us to a point where we're getting positive feedback, we're doing a good customer experience.
So just realize that when you hit that critical mass, when you hit that point where you're like, there's more than I can physically handle, that's when it's time to bring an outside help. My stepsister, I have to give her a shout out, she's been amazing, ridiculously helpful. She comes a couple times a week and packs orders. She used to work for a company where she would pack fragile orders. So it was really like just stupid kismet luck she came and helped us.
I just want to throw out there that when it is time, it's time and that's okay. And we also, thank goodness because she's a close family member, we can be like, "Hey, I need you for two hours today, five hours this day." Some days she comes for a couple hours, some days she comes for four or five hours. That's how you can start. You can bring people into any business you're running and say, "Right now I just need like five hours of support a week. That's all I can afford, that's all I need," and it can work. It really, really can work.
Let's run through these lessons again. Number one, find support and mentorship. Lean in to someone who's been there, done that, and wants to help you. Number two, test different offers and test different positioning of your offers. It can be the same product, but how do you position it? Number three, not everything works forever. We talked about our Christmas candle. It's been a massive success this Christmas, but we don't know what kind of success level it's going to be the next year. So we'll find out. Number four, know your numbers. Whether you're spending on leads, sales, conversions, products, software, know your costs, know your profit, know your ROI.
Number five, get feedback. Ask for testimonials, ask for the feedback from the audience because that's going to tell you what to change, what to tweak, what to do and what to stop doing. Number six, it's okay to have a little hustle mentality in the early days. And number seven, when you hit that critical mass where you're like I cannot do this another day more, or maybe sooner, get help. Even if it's five hours a week, even if it's a neighborhood kid, even if it's a local college student, even if it's a part-time contractor, find someone to get things off your plate.
I hope you've gotten immense value from this episode. One thing that I will say is that having run this candle business and coming back to Heart, Soul and Hustle in terms of switching back and forth is that I'm learning so much from each one. I brought a lot of marketing information over to the candles. I brought a lot of physical product information over to Heart, Soul, and Hustle. If you're listening to this and thinking, oh my gosh, this is great, but how do I get that help? How do I test those offers? How do I get feedback? How do I know when to hustle and when to hire? I want to share with you that we have a membership called Not Your Average Membership and inside Not Your Average Membership, we provide you a monthly action plan that's designed to support you in moving your business forward.
See, each month we give you one specific focus that if implemented into your business will help you generate more leads, sales, and growth. For example, in September, we taught Facebook ads for list growth. In October, we talked about setting up your first email sales funnel. In November, we talked about launching a low ticket product. In December, we built out your entire 2022 business action plan. And in January, we're going to be talking about creating amazing content that sells your products.
Now, if you head over to join.notyouraveragemembership.com, again, that's join.notyouraveragemembership.com, you will see a list of all the things that we're covering over the next several months and you'll see what you get every month. Just to cover that super quick, every month you get a monthly action plan, which is a PDF, a workbook, and a video training, or a video training with a one strategy to help you scale your business. We then do a monthly training call On That Action Plan where you have an opportunity to ask any questions about it and get a clear picture of how to implement it in your business.
Then we do an implementation week which is just a monthly five day challenge that breaks down your action plan and drip feeds you steps so that you can do the dang thing and get results. We wrap the month with a coaching, coffee and conversations call, which is just a dedicated and direct line to me to answer all your most pressing questions about business. Now, this all takes place inside of a private support community with like-minded peers who will support and encourage you as you move along the path of entrepreneurship.
Now, if you head over to join.notyouraveragemembership.com, you'll see feedback, testimonials, quotes from people inside of our membership. The price to join the membership is just $49 a month and we have a 100% guarantee and simple cancellation policy. If you're there in the first 30 days and you cancel, we'll refund you. And if you stay longer and decide it's no longer a good fit, we have a two button cancellation. You click the button, enter your email, click submit, and you're canceled. We want to keep this simple, we want to keep this low friction, and we want to stay in integrity with our audience, making it easy to get the support that you need. So if you want to check it out, head over to join.notyouraveragemembership.com.
Now, I hope you got immense value from this episode. I know I had an absolute blast recording it. If you want the show notes, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap for not your average podcast, 014. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap014. You will be able to see all the links that we mentioned today, get a recap of the show notes. Plus, we do an entire transcript of the show. So if you miss something or you want to go back, we detail the entire episode just for you in the form of a transcript. So check it out, heartsoulhustle.com/nyap014. Until next time, I hope you have an incredible holiday season. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the year to finish strong and until then, stay not so average, do the work and crush the end of your 2021. Let's do this.
