$5,000,000 per year with zero employees: the Strapsicle story

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. We are the number one business platform for women. And today I'm chatting with Lou Rice. She's the founder of a brand called Strapsicle. And it's this genius, I'm going to show you, if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see it. And if you're not, go have a look because you have to see it to really understand what they are. It's kind of this like rubber strap that goes on the back of your Kindle or your e-reader and means that you don't have to hold it in your fingertips. It's really clever. And I'm going to let Lou introduce how she started this business in a second because it is a very, very funny story.

0:31But first, let's talk about a few of the highlights and what I want to cover in the show today, because it's going to be a really tactical one. And I always like to bring you stuff in the show that you can then replicate in your own business or just get ideas about how you can implement them yourself. So first of all, Lou's business is on track to hit 5 million in revenue this year, and she doesn't have any full-time employees outside herself and the co-founder. So we're going to talk about how she does that. They've also really masterfully infiltrated a niche on TikTok called BookTok. If you're on there, you know all about it.

1:05If you're not on there, you've probably never heard of it. But 50 % of their sales are coming through organic traffic right now. So we're going to talk about that. Third, they've absolutely been smashing it on Amazon since day one. We're going to find out how that's working and figure out exactly how you guys can smash it on Amazon as well. And listicle PR, this is something that I think a lot of us have thought about and maybe not explored to the fullest potential. and we're going to talk about how Listicle PR is really just like this superpower for Strapsicle and how it is fueling their growth and then finally we're talking about expanding into China as a brand that is not from the country and founders that don't speak Mandarin correct?

1:45Absolutely not. As founders that don't speak Mandarin and how you can pick up on that opportunity and some of the things they're doing to expand into that market because this brand is absolutely killing it. Lou, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I've just explained what the brand is and what you do. And I want you to give us a little demo for the people on. I'm going to pass you a Kindle. So for people who are watching on YouTube, have a look at this. It's like just the most clever little thing ever. Okay, there's the Kindle. So there's your Kindle. So then we have what's called a Strapsicle Strap.

2:16You get two straps in a pack. Each strap fits each side. So you just slot it on over the top, top left, top right. And you can hold your Kindle just like that. So you'll never drop it. We didn't even realize how many people had an issue with dropping it on their face when they fall asleep. So you'll never drop it again. And the other great thing about it is, you know, otherwise you're gripping it. Exactly what you said. You're gripping it. And you get very sore. People get sore hands. I always like was resting it on the side of a pillow or something. Just trying to get your comfort angle. But now, you know, you've got a very neutral position for your hand and wrist.

2:49Really clever. It's one of those things that you look at and you're like, oh, why didn't I think of that? Oh my God, how many people have said that to me? How did you think of this? Okay, so it was my newborn son Archie was about three months old. I was breastfeeding him. It was about 2 a.m. I was trying to read my Kindle because, you know, we don't want to be doing scrolling all the time on our phones. Yeah. And I nodded off for a second. And Archie in one hand, Kindle in the other, and dunk, whacked him on the head with it. Poor love. He's fine. I screamed, Ben screamed. No, I screamed, Archie screamed.

3:19Ben, my partner, came running in. and the next day thank god it was lockdown there was nothing to do no one to see Ben had an old silicon mat in the cupboard he's a hoarder and you know grateful for that and he made this really crude strap we still have it a very crude silicon strap held together with staples wasn't pretty but it did the trick and I used it for a few weeks and I didn't want to go back to my normal kindle amazing it's so yeah and that story I think everyone can relate like we've all dropped a phone or a kindle on our baby's head at some point it happens guys it happens there's no judgment here this is a safe space so that was june 2022 that was the year prior so about september 21 dropped it on his head and then it took us dropped it on his head dropped it on his head and then luckily we um we were connected with the manufacturer really easily in china we had a couple of goes getting that because we have to get the tension just right for the strap and then launched it nine months later not really with any plan as we kind of as naive founders do we actually just said let's give away the first 200 um just to get get the market see if there's interest and then it went really well from there amazing and you were working a few days a week you had your baby your partner was working full time so this was a this was a nice this was a side hustle and so you were able to hit 230k in revenue that first year then you got up to one and a half in your second year which is when you quit and went full-time on this yes i love this for you yes and one of the things that fueled the growth was launching on amazon and i want to know first of all like what is working for you on that channel and why do you think it's like specifically great for this kind of product well i mean if you think about it you know amazon makes kindle that's where our ideal customers you know they're going to buy a kindle why not buy some straps so i really focused on that about five months in we were probably only making two or three thousand dollars a month on Shopify it felt great but five months in it took me ages to get on Amazon I was really grafting trying to get that listing up naive again decided to launch on the in the US and Australia at the same time because why not just a bit more stock and I think we launched just before Black Friday which again I didn't realize even what Black Friday you know I will live and die yes and December we had our first ten thousand dollar month and I was like okay I get the potential of this.

5:39Amazon has been a game changer for the business. Actually, the first couple of years, it was actually Amazon US was about 80 % of our revenue. And I was kind of ashamed of that. I was like, oh, just got an Amazon business. Don't really have a proper business. But now we've been able to build the Shopify side of the business because the Amazon revenue has been able to fund that for us, which is great. So what's working really well for us, we you know I've partnered with various agencies I've had some fails for Amazon yeah so Amazon ads is obviously a no-brainer but the other thing is Amazon loves it when you drive traffic to their platform so we are constantly like from the very beginning I was giving influencers Amazon codes discount codes and we were driving a lot of traffic through viral content that way so So influencers were sending people to our Amazon store to buy, which was great.

6:33And then anytime we have a marketing campaign, I just want my customer to have the easiest experience to shop. So sending them to Amazon to check out all the time. Really smart. Something that I think you've done really well and that I think a lot of folks can learn from, particularly if they are either looking for an idea of something to do that is going to instantly like hit with a devoted community or if they want to find a devoted community to launch their product to or share their product with is you have found this cultish community on TikTok. BookTok is one of the strongest communities on that platform and you have just infiltrated it.

7:11I want to know how you did that and for people who are sitting at home and they want to take this advice and replicate it in a different niche like what insights do you have that you can share to them to kind of like get them five steps ahead of everyone else when they try it absolutely so yeah booktok millions and millions of reading accounts dedicated to books and within that a huge subsection of kindle users so made total sense for us we need to be there that's where our ideal customer is and then tiktok i think gary v talks about this a lot it's an interest-based search platform yeah you can be in there you can find the nichest of the niche content for your like know your customers so deeply and then know what the trends are and around your product and just go and make content around that so I think my story though I was trying to do that I was trying to follow trends I was trying to show up I was trying to learn editing techniques I just didn't have the time I didn't have the inclination to do it you're not obsessed with it not obsessed with that there are some amazing founder brands out there who you know do their own content and hats off to them not for me so i had a friend who had had had great success hiring her own creator and i knew we needed to do that because we needed to stay first to market first to mind we couldn't have a we had to build the brand because the copper cats coming especially being on amazon right so there are other straps on amazon not like ours and they're very functional in design but it was only a matter of time so i set out to find a creator now it took me good two or three months that's probably the hardest part where do you find them I was on TikTok creator marketplace I had an ad on Upwork I was looking in Facebook groups maybe I wanted someone local and I finally found my creator on Upwork and at the time it was the biggest marketing investment for us we hadn't really spent much on paid ads because we were doing this building through Amazon and content creation doesn't really have an ROI you do you're taking a punt you know you're relying on the expertise of that creator but We knew we had to do it because, you know, the worst case scenario was I would carry on doing it.

9:16So we hired Summer and it was the best decision we made last year. I think that's such an interesting insight because so many of us are sitting around like in our heads about not showing up for our brands on these platforms. And kind of like some people, it is their natural skill set and that's your superpower and you should absolutely be doing that. But if it is not, it can just be such a mental drain because every day that you don't create a post, you're thinking that you didn't create a post. and it just like takes up so much like mental space I think and so just being able to make that decision and say okay I'm not going to be the face of my brand on this platform I'm going to let somebody else who you know who knows this space better be that on my behalf I think is such a hard decision because you have to take your ego out of it but such a smart one how do you structure that is it a full-time person do you have a certain amount of deliverables like what's the nitty-gritty I mean with summer I use she has her own agency essentially she has a team of creators so she's a contractor for me and we have an arrangement where she will do five pieces of content a week she will come up with the ideas she will make the clips she will edit she will and she will post and she will post tiktok first then again on instagram and youtube shorts so i've been doing that for seven months now i absolutely agree with what you're saying i think it's about as founders taking the frustrations out of our head and getting out of our own way a bit because there's so many things that make us frustrated all the time that we don't get to.

10:41This is one thing. This is a massive thing. If you could just hire someone to do this for you, A, it frees up your time so much, your mental capacity, and then also you're not having to think about what am I posting on social media this week. We've just got a content machine rolling. As I said, it was such a big investment. I looked at our stats today. Within the first three months, we had doubled our sales and our traffic was up by about 80 percent but what has happened in the last seven months we have garnered over 80 million views on tiktok instagram and youtube combined wow and that's amazing right that's bringing eyeballs to the brand through paid ads exactly and that organic content i mean as you know piece of tiktok viral content can carry on being viral for months and months a month so not only that the view is great but also I've just I just see spikes in sales on Amazon so Summer uses she has two or three other creators in her team it's not about Summer being the sole face of the brand because I'm still showing up as the founder in more of a goofy like lo-fi way but it is about bringing people constantly back to our page and I think that's what people need to realize the benefit of that strategy something else that really worked for you last year so we're going into um towards the end of 2024 now and you started tapping into listicle pr as this like superpower strategy what is listicle pr and how do people do it yeah i yeah i stumbled across this so listicle prs are just literally those lists that we consume online you know if you're searching you know what are the best restaurants for my group of friends in manly i've written like a thousand

12:24you'll google it and my byline will be okay fantastic yeah and there's so many of them right and and if you think about buyer behavior as a consumer if i'm searching and reading a listicle i'm much further down the buying funnel i'm ready to buy or i'm ready to book that restaurant so listicle pr to me is like i've been calling it pr that converts and then around you know black friday christmas time when everyone is so hyped up and they're desperate to not miss out on the deals make sure the christmas presents come in time like that list of copia just cranks so the gift guides the gift guides oh my god so i'd had some moderate success with doing it myself in december 23 and i just wait just like emailing a journalist yeah i just i i went through prowley i don't know if you know prowley it's a journalist database you pay for a monthly membership and you can go and get x amount of journalists i think up to a thousand journalist names you can pay more to get more and then and it works did my press release and chat gpt pitched it out i got oprah daily and i got cosmopolitan awesome but the cosmopolitan article i mean get this for a niche listicle the it was like the top amazon kindle accessories under 35 dollars you need right now yeah please take my money thank you so give me that so yeah so then my amazon traffic search because they're always sending everyone to Amazon because they get their affiliate commission.

13:48So I knew I had to double down on it for 2024. I literally hired a PR agent in the US who specializes in listicle PR, no joke. Who? I need to know who it is. Nicole from NRPR Relations. She's been incredible. I could literally show you the snapshot of our December PR. There were 20 listicles. Oh my God. Like Yahoo Live, 395 million readers a month. Yeah. obviously they're not all reading about the best gifts for book lovers but you don't need all of that pie yeah new york post wrote these are the kindle accessories that will arrive before christmas like fantastic amazing yeah so highly recommend that plus the organic content going viral absolutely fueled our amazon sales last year that's so cool you know what it sounds like to me it sounds like you have uh just nailed search in everything except for like optimizing for google Do you know what I mean?

14:37Like you have been like, okay, where are people actually searching right now? And how do I reach them through those channels? It's TikTok. It's Amazon, where I think 60 % of people are searching on Amazon instead of Google now. And TikTok's taking up like a lot of that as well. So it's pretty impressive. And then the people who are like really searching and then the results they're getting are usually the professional publications who live and die by SEO optimization. And you're getting in those stories. Yeah. Like it's really smart. Well, I think too, I feel like a lot of businesses start and they go traditional marketing, right?

15:11Of course, get your emails, do your organic socials. And then they jump to paid ads because paid ads has got that lure and appeal of I can pay some money and get immediate response back. And then you get stuck in that trap. Whereas I think we've just, for whatever reason, gone these slightly less conventional way. And it's just worked out for us. And you've had pretty amazing wins with retail stockists as well. What's that journey been like? Obviously, we're a niche product that attaches to a product. We'd had a bit of wholesale opportunities through bookstores and that was great. We went to New York now last year, big gift fair in New York, and quickly realised that actually it's not for us.

15:54That's not our low-hanging fruit. we actually need to be on the shelf next to any retailer selling a kindle or a kobo that makes total sense right as a i'm going to buy this because i'm going to buy this yeah whereas a gift stores i think it's a nice product but it's probably your you know you're not going to be hitting your niche as much it's going to sit on the shelf yeah exactly right bookstores still be good so we went to consumer first of all we went to a consumer electronic show in january in Vegas and no meetings we had no expo stand set up and I just hustled hard on the app it had the whole attendee list I was like thank you and so I managed to get meetings with Kobo and Pocketbook who are competing e-readers in the Kindle market and then we also managed to get an elevator pitch to Apple so that was really cool to to start setting up some of those kind of longer term retail partnerships we're talking to barnes and noble amazing at the moment we're working through um that because they have their own nook e-reader so we can make bespoke straps for them but actually the biggest opportunity that came around last year and it was just before shark tank was office works which is a very big retailer in australia very cool a stationary company top 10 one of the top 10 retailers i want to ask you for some resources i ask everyone who comes on the show And I just want the like tactical stuff that people can go and download, read, listen to, try out that's been helping you as you've been kind of up-leveling yourself as a leader but also just building this business.

17:26Can you give us a few? I actually have two Shopify apps that I'll share. So ZigPol, Post-Purchase Survey. I think it's probably the most accurate way to measure your sales, where they're coming from. And that's how you found out that 50 % of your shop is organic. So it's just one simple question. where did you hear about us post-purchase and so 25 coming from tiktok content 25 coming from instagram content in the last seven months amazing so there's that one um order editing hamish mckay he's a 23 year old he's actually building his journey on linkedin it's fantastic to follow but order editing gives your customers the ability to edit their orders for two hours post-purchase so people who want to change size or i got the wrong size or i want to i've got the wrong color you know they can go and they can change their address they put their wrong address in so it's just saving businesses it's saving us thousands of dollars a month and not to mention customer service time yeah so those are my two favorites i am listening i listen every day to the daily mastery podcast from robin sharma he's the monk who sold his ferrari that's one of his books fantastic like three minute soundbites just on leveling up so like a little pep talk yeah I love following, I don't know if you follow Simon Beard.

18:41He was Culture King, sold, and he is just full of, again, unconventional ways to grow your business. He's very big on content and creative. And then a book I just read I loved, Things Will Calm Down Soon, Zoe Foster-Blade. Oh, yeah, I've been wanting to read this. I mean, it gave me anxiety the whole time reading it. No, because it is literally flying on the wall of an e-com founder's journey. And she's the founder of an Australian beauty brand called GoTo. Yes. That is huge and she bought it back. Didn't she buy it back? Yeah. For like$80 million or something. Yeah, which was a lot less than she sold it to them for.

19:16Yeah, yeah. But fantastic. But it just. Okay. It just. Things will calm down soon. Yeah. It's a fantastic name for a story about entrepreneurship. It just makes you want to hustle harder, I think. Okay, business besties, let's switch gears for a second. Real quick, I want to talk to you about this season's presenting sponsor, Vistaprint. They are sponsoring this entire season of the Female Founder World podcast, and we love a supportive sponsor. So much so that we're actually working with Vistaprint ourselves to create the merch and all of those beautiful event perks that you know and love from our in real life Female Founder World events.

19:54If you haven't heard of Vistaprint, here's what you need to know. Vistaprint helps all kinds of business owners print all kinds of marketing products like super professional business cards, fun merch, eye-catching flyers and brochures and a whole bunch more. And it's all completely custom. So you can do whatever you want. Whatever you're imagining right now, Vistaprint can print it. And if you're wondering if you're ready to be a designer girly, their easy to use website makes it super simple. Plus they have designers on hand to help you if you really need it. Right now, Vistaprint is giving all female founder world podcast listeners a little something 25 % off your first order at vistaprint.com use the code ffw25 at checkout and step up your branding game we put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more so the next thing I want to do is we've got some listener questions and I've got one that I want to play for you and really just get your advice hi there my name is Jessica Santander and I am the founder and designer of my handmade jewelry brand called Jessica Santander.

21:02I've had my small business for the past six years and my current issue has actually been the same issue for the past roughly four years where my monthly sales have been stagnant at roughly four to five thousand dollars a month and 80 % really depends on being at in-person in farmer's markets and pop-ups. I just started investing in online meta ads with 20 to$30 as my daily budget, but I'm not seeing the results that I was hoping to see where basically my ask is, what is the plan? What should be the focus to have my monthly sales be at least 15 ,000 a month coming from online sales? Thank you so much.

21:45Jessica, I think you're representative of a lot of people listening to the show. I think a lot of people are in this position. I'd love to know what your advice would be and what you would do in that position. Everything we've just spoken about, right? As I said, don't rely on paid ads. Yeah. How are you getting your brand out there online? What are you doing with content? Are you telling your founder story? How often are you posting? Could you get someone to help you, perhaps someone local, so it's not a big investment? I think thinking about unconventional ways to reach your audience, because really it's It's just about going out and filling the funnel of customers who are then going to buy from you.

22:20And you're only converting probably 3 % to 4%, you know. So you've really got to fill that funnel up. I've built a really small but mighty Facebook group community. And I did that by going out and finding my ideal customer in other Facebook groups and talking to them there as the founder and introducing the brand. And then I brought them over to our testing group. so I think think about your customer where they're spending time online really where they're spending time online and go after them you can't just sit back and expect them to come to you from you know post putting out some ads or posting some content on social media I think yeah and I think of the fact that she actually is able to sell stuff in the farmer market environment means that people like it when they see it yes you just need more people to see it if you could find someone who could just follow you around with a camera and then i want someone to follow you around that would be so good a local a local i mean it'd be terrible but great yeah fly on the wall no holds fired but i mean that content you've got content for days there yeah yeah yeah absolutely i think that that is um such good advice it's like find someone who can create the content for you who's really good at it think about unconventional ways to reach that customer where they're hanging out yeah your online communities i mean reddit reddit is an amazing one that's very untapped everyone is talking about everything in reddit i would be doing a deep dive on platforms like tiktok reddit youtube on jewelry on like on anything else that you think your customer is interested in based on literally you dming them and asking them and like having those conversations with people that keep repurchasing or getting on a call and then looking at the types of content that's on there the other stuff that they're doing and then just like over hours and hours and hours of doing this, you're going to amass this idea of like, okay, this is the content that they like.

24:04This is where they hang out. This is the other brands they're shopping. And then you'll have a strategy. Exactly right. Something else that you have done, which I think is so interesting is you are looking at live shopping and you are looking at China as a market. And I want to understand how, because you don't speak Mandarin. No. What made you first think that you need to be expanding into that market? And what is the opportunity there that people are missing? And how are you doing it? I think my overall philosophy is go where your customers are wherever they may be. Don't be precious about it.

24:33You think this is who your customer is, let them tell you who they are. Exactly right. So we started getting a lot of customers from China and I know some people are often hesitant about that, but I didn't realize what a consumerist society they are. The one talk I went to at CES was on live shopping and the slide they put up blew my mind. I've shown so many people since. I'm such a nerd. We did a workshop on live shopping. If you're listening to this, it's in your Bestie dashboard, if you remember. I need to watch that because we've just got on TikTok Shop. But basically in 2025 in the US, it's predicted that consumers will spend$57 billion.

25:08Cool. That's quite a nice amount. In China, it's$915 billion on live shopping. And define live shopping. Well, if you think about TikTok Shop, I think Amazon Live. It's like room shopping at work. Shopping off video, right? Live video. and we've all seen the video of the you know the influencer in china and she sold like 17 products in a minute so i was like why wouldn't i want a piece of that pie and then when red note started taking over when tiktok was about to go down and there was hashtag tiktok refugees yeah everyone was joining red note you know who went and set up their brand page well i did because why not and it was searching red note there were posts and posts and posts of strapsicle products wow so all my customers had been buying for the last two years was sharing them on red note that's how people were finding us hashtag strapsicle has had 400 000 views on red note wow so of course i need to be there so now we've got summer's content now translated in mandarin we're trying it out my um va in bali's been helping me i think there's an app she's using there's a native translate feature in canon there's another app she found i think that is better so it's like voiceover yeah matter of voiceover and supers so she's just playing around with our existing content yeah you know we've got thousands of views that's great but my next goal would be to hire a chinese content creator yeah someone who also just gets it and can do do live shopping for us because, God,$915 billion.

26:49We can all be a part of that. Are you shipping from here? No. We have three warehouses. So we have an Australian warehouse, we have a US warehouse, and we actually have a bonded warehouse in China. So they ship for rest of the world for us. So then that makes it a bit easier. Amazing. Lou, thank you so much for coming on Female Founder World. Where can people find you and where can they find Strapschool? Because everyone's going to want one now. You can go buy them on Amazon, strapschool.com. if you follow us follow our journey on tiktok or tiktok shop at strapsicle and instagram as well