From $0 to $600K per month Selling Tea at 22 Years Old | Gretta Van Riel PART 1

[Music] hey guys my name is Nathan Chan I'm the CEO of founder magazine and today we're going to be interviewing grey rose van real she has started for successful multi-million dollar in commerce brands skinny meaty drop bottle v watches skin talks and basically she's going to be sharing with you guys her process the framework the formula on how she's been able to build these ecommerce businesses and brands from scratch and be able to scale them at a really really fast pace she's one of the smartest people I know when it comes to this kind of stuff around starting an e-commerce brand in business and she's also an instructor she teaches a course called starting scale your online store and it's a course that we published through founder and we work with her to come up with this insanely powerful course if you want to know more so greta welcome thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me thanks for having me no no we've spoken a couple of times now so it's kind of like a walk in the park oh it is yeah so I guess probably the first question I wanted to ask is how did you get your job yeah so I started my first startup skinny meaty in 2012 which is six years ago now I was 22 I was working full time in my first ever job out of uni I just finished my degree like late the year before and had started working full-time as a digital marketing professional in the city in Melbourne and I guess like it's just right away as soon as I started working there I knew pretty quickly that working for someone else wasn't necessarily for me I didn't know Nessa whether there was going to be an alternative to that but I just knew it wasn't really what I was loving and enjoying I found it yeah a bit bureaucratic I guess like your job is kind of to make your seniors look good not to really do your work so I found the whole like politics and structure a bit weird of it but yeah so I guess I started skinny meaty as a side project just because I had been always interested in tea and I've done a few detoxes on the market and one of my own problems with them was just that they weren't natural enough like you're taking a tablet or you know you're drinking this powdered mix and you're like what is in here whereas tea is such a natural way and if you're detoxing you want a natural product so I was just mixing up my own kind of blends of tea and some of my friends started asking about them and being like oh can I try it you're like a tea thing and I was like I call it a detox like a detox of tea and they're like that's so cool I wouldn't try it and then they'd try it and they'd tell their friends about it and then they'd want to try it and then people at my worth were wanting to try it and it was just getting a really expensive to keep just having to give people tea because I wasn't charging for it yet and I was like this is actually expensive to make like these are like high quality ingredients so and B it was getting difficult just corresponding back and forth with everyone like via all different platforms so I just thought like it'd be so much easier if I could just sell this online and not have to kind of be the middleman but between everyone so I basically got on and I googled how to start an online store and luckily the first thing that came up was Shopify and so I opened up Shopify signed up there was a free trial at the time and I just got started creating my own land store and so I think within I think it took me about eight hours to make our initial website so it was a quick easy process we only had one product so it kept it quiet streamlined and hit live on the store and I'd created an Instagram account to kind of go with it because I had just got anagram myself and was just really liking the platform and it was fun and I was like yeah how to start an extra account and when we hit live on the store in our first night we made four sales and our first night and I was like oh this is cool like some weekend spending money that's Mandy like that they were two people I didn't know so then I was like hang on where did these people find out about my store from like I was confused I was like I figured it was just like feel my friends that I'm message saying like he had the stores live go check it out it was yeah completely random people which was such a cool experience because I was like who are these people and it had come from Instagram and they'd seen our product on Instagram so I started focusing basically all my time and efforts on our Instagram account growing through there and so we refer to ourselves as like an Instagram first company like we were basically born on Instagram and started our lives out on Instagram solely marketing through Instagram no other marketing methods are in the Instagram and influences and just using those strategies back in 2012 we were able to scale the store from zero to six hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue within six months so it was just some crazy explosive growth and of course they were all the growing pains to go with that yeah you're amazing and I guess before we get into more kind of how others you think like wave you you know how others right now work should go about starting their store or creating a brand or selling an e-commerce product can you tell us like what happened next because I know that you've started many other businesses I think people love to hear about those as well ciemins done this one time you've done multiple times yeah so the next company that I started is called the fifth watches and I started that with a co-founder we launched in 2014 December 2014 and we grew up our pre lists and pre demand you know similar kind of way using Instagram and influences but we had around an eight thousand person wait list when we launched the store and in our first day of sales that the fifth were able to achieve over a hundred thousand dollars in sales so and that was in that day alone basically so were like okay wow this is clearly something that we need to be really focusing on yes and so we kept growing that store growing that store focusing on the same things just focusing on the things that worked for us and the channels that worked for us which was still mainly Instagram and on our first birthday we did over a million dollars of sales in a single day and that that is also because that store has a limited sales model which a time limited sales model limited so basically what we do is we work all the death and we only sold on the 5th of each month for 5 days and so we're exclusive by time rather than by price which in you know a lot of fashion items are exclusive because you know they've got an expensive price tag we were able to be exclusive by the fact that there was real scarcity involved because our watches would sell out every month and there was only 5 days to get them and if you didn't sign up during the month to be notified of sales then you'd probably miss out so that was the fifth which was shout-out number two and then I started to more ecommerce stores drop bottle and skin talks drop bottle was an interesting one because it was actually and this is a method that I'm sure we'll chat about later as well in more detail but I am very much for growing a market or growing an audience before you launch a product so launching that product to an engaged audience and so with drop bottle it was more of a case of we had a really large audience that we'd already built on Instagram through one of like my vertical and nisha counts called detox water and it was basically just people putting fruit in their water to infuse the water and showing all different combinations and recipes and it's just like a visually appealing subject so it did really well on Instagram I'd seen that it was really trending on Pinterest actually and then I brought that trend sort of across onto Instagram because not that many people are posting on it and curated all the content from Pinterest and then increasingly from Instagram for that account and were able to grow to like 900,000 followers within a few months basically so we're like wow this like is a really like high momentum topic like this is definitely something that is trending in the market right now how you know and from a brand perspective what's a way that we could kind of capitalize on this so what's a way that we could commercialize or monetize this audience so then it's detox water so we made a detox what a drink bottle which made sense so it's like a fashionable and functional drink bottle with a fruit infuser so then the people that were already quite interested in this topic of course were able to kind of buy into the community in another way so that was an interesting one because we launched the market before we launched the product and that was chosen in I think it was 2016 by Oprah as one of her favorite things which was really cool because we were front page of Amazon for a week as well and we'd never done much on Amazon before so that was like how to do Amazon 101 by being thrown in the deep end which was a lot of fun and she found us or her team found us through social media so they were just following us on Instagram and sorry they discovered us through there and it's not like we sent in like our product to like be reviewed or anything it was just it was a big surprise when we got an email from Oprah's team being like she's chosen you as one of her favorite things I was like I didn't know open you what we were so it's clear to say like you've had a lot of success you're very very good at what you do you've done this multiple times you've had you know these incredible brands that you've built so I guess the first thing that people want to know is like what's the first place to get started so obviously you know we've got you to teach a course for us which is incredible that so many successful students it's called star scale but like for people that are just watching this right now like how can they first get started what's the first step the third step is coming up with your idea yeah I'd say and like how do you how she will be going about that so the first thing to note is that you don't need to create some crazy new concept or idea you can take an existing product that already exists and kind of reinvent that product or change it to make it better or different so the way that I thought about that usually is by changing just a single dimension of the product so with v for example that dimension was time so we were able to change our entire direction of the company by just changing that one dimension that was time so we'll only selling on the 5th of each month for five days and that made our company different that became one of our like central unique value propositions so things like time limit like time limited sales and introducing scarcity and factors like that into the product one of the main things that you'll probably usually want to go about changing would be the function of a product so with drop bottle for example we took just the average like glass drinking bottle and we added that extra function which was the fruit infuser so that was like a good way to go about that so there's time there's function then there's design with drop bottle we added cool like quite fashionable rose gold lids and other like trending kind of colorways and we added like a easy handle so that it's a glass bottle so that it's transportable as well so we change the design or like through that and the last way that I go about generally changing a product would be price so whether there's kind of three different ways that you can go with price you can go for like lower than the average price you can go for like industry standard pricing which is in the middle or you can go for like higher pricing which might signal more exclusivity like designer items so you could create like a limited-edition product that is more exclusive in that it's more expensive and it might be a limited run of that as well so they're kind of the four main things function design time and price gotcha so once you've kind of got a few ideas like how many ideas do you get every day how do you know which ones are still the ones the mean now because it's not like you can just have an unlimited amount ideas it's the things that I can't not pursue that have been maybe in the back of my mind for a while and I've been kind of like trying to sort through it and then you might have that kind of light bulb moment where you're like yes like finally I've pinpointed exactly what I was trying to like sift through in my mind and when you have that light bulb moment if it is something that you just cannot not do then go for it like all of my products have just been something that's like this is too good an opportunity or this is too good an idea I can't like not pursue this so if you just if you just keep coming back to it again and again that's something to definitely pursue and even just the idea of starting an e-commerce store or being interested in that in general if you just keep coming back to that idea in your mind if you see that for yourself in the future and you'd like think about that and put a lot of your energy into that it clearly is something that you should be thinking about pursuing later so I mean at least you know resources like this like our course that we've created really enable you to be able to do that because it gives you a foundation and guide to get started I wish that I had this guide when I started we're to save me a lot of mistakes so like here's a story that you talked about once before like well how can me like is a million dollar mistake or something with this T stock this is a good one can you see that one yeah well it's a good one now the story it was not a good thing to happen at the time probably one of the worst days of my life but yeah so basically we were growing skin immunity and we were manufacturing in Australia still and you know you hear all this like China like it's cheaper it's easier it's better Langan go try it so well like yeah let's go try the China thing and we'll like tea China like clearly it's a few yeah so we went over the track to China and we met with the manufacturer would even met with the guy we did a couple of sample or to run so I wasn't like entirely stupid I didn't just like be like okay cool done yep that's our manufacturer we got a couple of sample orders everything was great we sent it back to Australia to get tested no problems all as well we then one of my things that I was definitely not as strong in was the manufacturing side at that time yes and I was just like oh if I could just not have to deal with the manufacturer again for like a year and just make a really large bulk order of like a year's worth of tea that would just make my life that much better yeah because it's annoying having to order the stock move it somewhere get it all sorted yeah be constantly we just had this problem where we're growing so quickly we're constantly running in and out of stock all the time I was just like I just don't want to run out anymore I want to be ahead like would be excited well more like three days ahead as opposed to yeah sir I wanted to be one year ahead that was my goal that was my dream and we so I placed a really large order for over a million dollars us of teeth so and throughout all seemed fine processes going well got the tea and stored it in Hong Kong for a little bit because we were we still had enough in Australia we then after storing it in Hong Kong we shipped it to Australia that cost more money again because we had to ship it over and then it got stuck in customs for like three weeks and that cost like another $80,000 or something so we finally got this tea and we opened up the tea and it was like the exciting day would basically I think we were about to run out in two days of tea so it was perfect timing you're about to get it all going out and we opened up the tea and it was like moldy compost with metal bolts in it like it was like visibly rotting well it was absolutely disgusting I don't think I would touch it like without gloves on it was like waste nuclear waste no no but it was just horrible and I could visibly see like bits of metal and stuff in it so I was like well clearly there's nothing to be done with this we even sent it off to the labs just to have a laugh to see what was in it and it was full of bacteria e.coli just all these different just lucky we didn't touch it too much anyway so we got it turned out even throwing it out cost another fourteen thousand dollars that was like a ton of tea yes like a lot of tea it filled we had like a warehouse space it filled the whole thing like to the roof just boxes and boxes and boxes and so then we had the problem as well because we hadn't placed another order with any Australian manufacturer had to go back to manufacturing the product like mixing it up ourselves by hand when we're doing like $20,000 a month like sorry we had to descale up team quickly had like 30 people alternating different ships packing t cost so much more money of course like someone hand mixing and like blending and then putting a tape like it didn't deserves in like the packaging is so much more expensive so that was a huge lesson on what not to do with manufacturing I think I just got a bit ahead of myself and now we just order in much like more manageable quantities not from supplies that we don't know as well I thought like those couple of sample orders were going to be a good indication of a larger order but I haven't placed a really large order yet so I think just like scaling up and building trust as you go in a more manageable way would be a good tip and you talked about like so let's say you've can't with you someone's got their idea and it just keeps coming back to them like you described like that let's say you place the order you get the samples you place the order and you know it's all looking good you've got your moq minimum order quantity you've booked that and you talked about building an audience first what did you mean by that yes so I mean building an audience I mean on social media usually that's where all of my audiences live across social media and I guess our email marketing lists as well so and those go hand-in-hand as well you want to simultaneously build an audience on social media and use that audience to get signups for you know maybe your pre-launch or your wait list for your product via email so that then once you launch you can do a big email push out to those so social media is definitely an Instagram specifically is still one of the key places that I will go to when starting any new startup any new company today is still as well yeah so a lot of people like yeah I mean founder has seen half how social media is doing what 1.4 million followers on your Instagram account right now it's crazy so definitely Instagram has been in place and I've built all different communities on Instagram so across all of my different Instagram accounts I have over 16 million followers in breach which is not just on my branded or personal accounts either that's across different niches and areas so around skinny meaty we built all different pages like detox pages like health pages fitness pages of recipe and food pages just basically like based off our customer personas and who what we knew about our audience and what their interests and interest groups were we applied those to those accounts and then we're kind of able to grow these large engaged followings around there's topics so those are a great starting point for launching any new business in those areas now as well because we already have those audiences like with drop bottle that were able to instantly instantly but we're able to monetize with the right product yeah so talk to me like if you were to start a new brand you know this is an idea that keeps coming back to you you want to build that audience over Instagram just like obviously we could talk about this all day even myself I could share a lot but what are some things that people can use to get started if you were starting today on building that audience on Instagram you're not gonna get a hundred thousand files over a couple of days you've built a massive like book of pages where you can then you can get them to shout each other out so you can build up really fast if someone's just starting a cold hard scratch is the first business like what would you do like how would you approach Instagram or YouTube you know that yeah yes well basically for any social channel there's what I call my like a three C's of community yep and so those are like the three kind of killers that I always think about when I'm starting any new social account and this works across the board as well not just on Instagram so there is a con and collaboration and consistency yep so I guess if we just break down each a little bit content-wise it's about posting the content not just that you want to see from your brand and what you think your brand is but that your audience actually responds to so it's breaking down and I call it content weighting so weighting your content more toward the things that your audience really responds to and loves and not avoiding the other things but just having a larger like an 80/20 kind of rule so 80% like popular engaging content and 20% you know things that you feel like product and promotion sort of content so and I call it I have this other thing that I call our content territories so I break down the types of content that we post on our account into some different territories so for the fifth we had things like rest and relaxation aspire and inspires the kind of more motivational content we had like an explorer kind of one which was travel content so there were all different things that our audience we knew that our audience was interested in and that we knew because we'd posted similar content before so it's just like getting it's testing different types of content until you find that there is cool kind of areas that your audience really really engages in with so that from a Content perspective that is probably like my number one tip just post audience that you're kind of post content that your audience wants to see and so then there's takes us onto the collaboration stage and this is probably the most important stage for growth so content is like your foundation of your account you have to have content of course that's always going to be there collaboration is definitely a step that some people will miss and by collaboration I mean actively working with other pages on Instagram other brands on Instagram and influences on Instagram so by pages I mean like things like those vertical accounts that I was talking about before like detox pages like health pages if you're in like a similar niche to us or fashion pages and there's heaps of them it's like week on fan pages yeah exactly so yeah niche pages fan pages vertical accounts whatever you call them getting in contact with those usually they'll either have their email and their buyer or this platform called kik um which a lot of them still use or telegram it just depends it'll be in their buyer or you can reach out to them via DM and you can either if you already have a following you can trade shout outs so it's like just a mutually beneficial relationship so say you have 5,000 followers and they have 5,000 followers you both shout each other out basically post a piece of content and mention the other page in that content and you've mutually grow of each other or there's paid shoutouts so if you're just starting out from early days you could pay for some shout outs to get you that initial traction and attention from some of these pages where you know your target audience already lives and another thing that I'd recommend is not just paying for shout outs but paying for engagement as well so this isn't something that you're going to always need to do down the track but in the early days of an account you can get really huge attract and really huge traction if the right people are interacting if influences and the right pages from your nature interacting with your account because it's growing your account within that niche so gnashing down on your account is really really important so focusing content around like what your nation interest group is surrounding your product is really important because you know that's the way that the Instagram algorithm works it attributes like followers and audiences different niches shows content on the explore page for example and even the content that comes up in your newsfeed based off your interests and what you've engaged with in the past so it's really important to be niche specific at the same time so that's when you're working with pages so either for paid shout outs and paid engagement or paid engagement just means that they're engaging with your posts when you post so making sure that they're liking that post and commenting on that post earlier rather than later and then another form of collaboration is brand to brand collaboration which is huge as well so when you collaborate with like it could just be one other brand or it could be for a loop giveaway with a lot of other brands yes the giveaway is basically yes so you collaborate with another brand you host a giveaway you have complementary products so not competing products it would be like okay skinny meaty makes sense to collaborate with like a health or beauty company so maybe like a scrub and then maybe a bikini company as well because all those things would go hand in hand the same people would be interested in doing a detox that would be interested in buying a bikini and etc so that just makes sense in that way so collaborating with like-minded companies to leverage off each other's followers and account and giveaways are just a really really core central way to grow so the fifth for example we did a tag to win giveaway and we got 80,000 tags on the post and grew 20,000 followers overnight and we only gave away two watches so yeah it was a very low kind of cost and really high return so then yeah so brand to brand collaboration and in the last way and the way that I use for all of my brands is influencer collaboration so this is collaborating with social media analogies more so not the fan pages these are real people that have grown engaged audiences around their interests or around themselves like if they're a TV personality or something through examples so people all follow them on Instagram and the cool thing about influences is that they already have their audience's prayer and trust and they're able to leverage that prayer and Trust on your brand's behalf so you're able to kind of scale that trust that can take years for brands to build in the past really really quickly at an unprecedented rate so it is a huge opportunity for right now because this is something that is working now and it's something that wasn't possible before nobody you know there weren't like girls that lived like literally like the whole girl-next-door thing where they have 200,000 Instagram followers as well like these people just didn't exist like five years ago yeah when I first started can he maintain influence there was somebody with a thousand followers and that's how we discovered influencer marketing in the first place a girl from Tasmania bought our tea we didn't send it out to her and a thing she loved the tea she lost some weight doing our tea talks who took a before and after photo posted it to her Instagram and we had our biggest day of sales ever and I was like oh wow like so every time I see a girl with like over a thousand followers I'm just gonna quickly reach out to her and ask her whether I can send her some free tea in return for her posting and at the time that was like this crazy idea like people would be like what do you mean you want to send me tea to just post it like of course like and like 95% of people would just do it in return for the product now it's become an entire market and it's a huge huge industry within itself and I have an influencer marketing platform as well called hey influences and the fact that I've chosen to focus on that as a product shows just how powerful this was for my ecommerce brands it's something that has been integral to the success of us growing so there's all different ways to kind of work and collaborate with influencer and maybe we'll come back to a few of those later but the last see sorry sorry I didn't I liked it this is good this is bad away so we've had content we've had collaboration and then there's finally consistency so consistency there's two kind of reasons that you want to be consistent one is because most social platforms prioritize accounts that post more frequently frequency of posting is one of the things that affects the algorithms of most of these platforms so they want to of course show more content to people that are more engaged with their platform that are posting regularly so consistency is good in that way but consistency also creates memorability through repetition so if someone if your target audience or your customer is seeing you show up every single day again and again in the newsfeed it starts to continue to build that relationship with them and so again you're able to scale that brand equity through consistency it creates that much wanted front of mind association with your product it's like when you're thinking of okay I need a new car and like three car brands that you like pop up in your head you want to be that first thing that pops up in someone's head you want someone to be like entrepreneurship founder like it just it's those words that have that association so when you do show up every day and you are consistent with your content and with your community you can start to build that front of mind association which is just one of the most important things for a brand so yeah they're my three C's yeah community content collaboration consistency yeah that's awesome then yeah just on the content piece like one thing that I've found with a lot of Instagram accounts is the reason that they lose engagement is because they lose that consistency piece it is so okay hmm like for founder we've posted seven to ten times the past three years Wow but it's a human every single day and that's why you said to me other day like found his accounts like super engaged like really guys yes you guys posted me the other day and it got like 17 18 thousand likes and I gained a thousand followers on my personal account from being just mentioned at the very end of the caption yeah I was like keep doing it let's talk about like a little bit more on the influence of marketing piece because I know that there are a lot of people that perhaps have created let's say the Lords of brand and they've sent out products and they don't get a return and then they just don't believe that it works it doesn't work anymore or yeah you know this influencer marketing stuff is sinking ship yeah I think first up the return section I think that when you're looking to get a return in anything and any form of marketing you have to know what that return was going to be you can't just put something out there and expect that something to just come back in so I think focusing on what the result is that you're looking toward and the way that I generally go about that is by determining my goals before I set a campaign or before I set a collaboration I think from the very outset what do I want this campaign or collaboration to achieve and those goals I generally break down into four main areas which are increasing brand awareness generating content growing my social following or generating sales so there the four kind of main goals that I look at before starting any influencer marketing campaign and then you're able to kind of work backward from that goal or reverse-engineer that goal deconstruct that goal to be able to achieve the result that you want so then once you know what the result you're working toward is you can apply the type of campaign through that so an example for a brand awareness campaign would be a product for post sorry for a brand awareness or for a brand awareness goal would be a product for post campaign so that's basically where you send out a product in return for the influence of posting on that product to their social channel not every influencer will do this of course this is a micro influencer strategy so for people with definitely under 50,000 followers usually under 20,000 followers closer to that 10 to 15,000 follower mark is the kind of hot spot for in terms of follow a level for a product for post campaign and again it's good to know that not every single influencer is always going to post on your brand it's about relationship building with those influences at the same time making them feel involved in your brand's story making them understand why you chose them why you selected them why you think that your audience will under your customers will really engage with that product so it's just making the influencer feel kind of special and understanding why it's important to be working with your brand that you know it's kind of like PR in a way you send out a thousand press releases and maybe you'll only get a few articles written but I mean you're not going to send out a thousand products and only get a few posts I usually the industry standard completion rate is maybe like 50 60 percent of the influences that you send out product to with you know the right follow-ups will generally post on that product so that's for the brand awareness goal for generating content we just tweaked the product for post campaign a little and do a product the content campaign so rather than expecting the influencer to post it to their social channel you lower that expectation and you just ask for content or you might ask for a little bit more content so say your products worth something like $200 like v you might expect you know between 3 to 5 images in return for gifting the watch rather than just one image and so brands are constantly needing new content like we spoke about in the content part of my 3 C is to post to their social feed and influencer generated content is the best content to post to social media because it's platform native like think about when you're scrolling through your Instagram feed and you see like a stock image or an ad you just keep scrolling that influencer generated content makes you like stop and look at the photo because it looks like it's meant to be there so you get that attention and attention is just becoming increasingly hard to get like attention spans are an all-time low the average human attention span is like something like six or seven seconds now in 2018 and it was 12 seconds a few years ago so it's just dropping rapidly so to be able to get that attention is so important so influencer generating content and generating content is a really really strong goal then moving on to increasing of social following like we spoke about in the collaboration section of my three C's giveaways so running an influencer hosted giveaway like you you probably see on Instagram influencers posting saying you know for example with v they'd say hey guys I have like two watches to give away v of like kindly gifted me tag a friend on this post and both follow v on instagram to go on the draw to win and because you're giving away two watches as well they'll both follow the account and you keep growing your social following like that it's quite a cost-effective way to target following growing your social following so it's good to have a really strong call-to-action and then the last method and goal so the goal is sales of course one of the methods that you can go about for a sales goal in terms of your campaign type in an influencer campaign is a personalized discount code campaign and they work really well because you're able to directly attribute the sales to that influencer you can say okay you can instantly kind of know whether it was worth it in terms of a monetary return or not which is always going to be the best indicator of whether something works not financially for a business so and I mean our brands like your your your girlfriend's brand as well well fish have achieved great results using this attribution kind of method of a personalized discount code so basically it's like saying hi like my discount code is greater 15 and you get 15% off storewide using my code and you probably see them on instead companies like Daniel Wellington really popularized that method and grew very very quickly using that method so basically it just is a way to be able to know whether or not the influencer did generate sales off that and for example at the fifth one of our best posts in terms of like ROI and monetary return was we spent $1000 on a post with one influencer and we got $23,000 in attributed sales from that one influencer over the space of just a week Wow and that was with a YouTube video and YouTube is pretty evergreen so if that post is still generating sales for us today yeah same time so and you guys have a similar sort of story with health issues yeah yeah yeah yeah that's crazy yeah so look we could talk about this stuff all day every day like you're and we actually kind of do yeah we do it's our greatest course like but she's Morty she's teaching it's not about me and I'm not asking a questions it's actually fully scripted like you know it's it's it's amazing but anyways long story short we have to work towards wrapping up yeah so for anyone that is thinking about starting an e-commerce brand or want to start a business like maybe three pieces of advice you'd love to give and then we can work towards wrapping up yes I think that I'd have to go back again to start building an audience as soon as possible yep you like don't even need to have your product like completely formed in your mind yet you don't even have to know exactly what you're going to do you might just know the general you're interested in like you're like okay I'm definitely you know interested in the fitness industry and so you might start building an account and a community around fitness giving different workout tips or recipes or nutritional advice whatever and start to grow that community there because the best way to know that your product is going to succeed and to have good validation early on is by having an audience - already launched - so that would be tip number one my tip number two would be and it's a quote from Reed Hoffman if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product you've launched too late when I launched skinny meaty I literally would hand blend the tea put it in these little hideous cellophane bags wrap them up put like a sticker on it write with a permanent marker Smt or just do a love heart oh god it makes me kind of stick on to the like little cellophane thing and that was how I sealed the bag and then I put it in an envelope like literally just like a postage envelope that you'd put a letter in because it was very flat so we got to send it out for like a dollar and I'd ship it out people would get this like random mix of herbs in the mail and be like yeah so I think just yeah that is just the number one tip if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product you've launched two lights you honestly it's just about taking those little steps and iterating on those steps to scale so you just you do things you keep doing doing doing you make a mistake you iterate or pivot a bit you fix that mistake and you keep going it's just problem-solving on your feet again and again so it's not as scary as it could be then number three yeah so and then tip number three would be build a brand not a store so there is a huge huge difference in e-commerce it's a fundamental difference and that difference is between building an e-commerce store and building an e-commerce brand in a store is just something that is there you have a product on it you make some sales you get some money and it's not should be it is yeah exactly drop shipping would be an example of an e-commerce store a brand on the other hand is something that you're building value into you're building brand equity and you're building up an asset that one day you'll be able to sell so it's a scalable asset so one definition that's just easy to understand of what brandy is is a brand is if you took all your products out of your brand what value would be left over at the end and that is your brand it is it's you know things like front of my positioning that we spoke about it's scaling brand equity through trust through influencer relationships it's consistency and creating a good product experience around your brand so focusing on building a brand from day one so they're the three awesome well this is a great chat Greta I think going yeah like yeah I think people are gonna get so much to take away from this interview now if people want to find out more about your course that you've published with us it found out it's like a fully in-depth course takes you step-by-step through Greta's framework people can go to founder calm /e commerce and there'll be links below this episode slash interview but where can people find out more about your brands and and everything that you've used like all your bodies are work I would just follow me on Instagram because I've got all my links in the fire there as well yeah so at Greta it's a really easy one yeah I also took the og handle that yeah awesome look thanks so much great it's a great fun thanks for having me [Music]

Channel: Foundr Magazine - Entrepreneur & Business Magazine

Views: 1,347,487

Rating: 4.9210949 out of 5

Keywords: ecommerce business, how to start a business on shopify, how to start a business, nathan chan, Gretta van riel, how to make money with shopify, how to start a shopify store, how to start an online store, how to make money online, make money online, foundr, e commerce business, ecommerce success story, tea, mindset, money, success, financial freedom, gary vaynerchuk, building a brand, influencer, online marketing, influencer marketing, inspirational, how to start ecommerce business

Id: CEPLOwajPaE

Length: 47min 44sec (2864 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018