589: How a Simple Idea Turned Into a $50k a Month Side Hustle

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1:15What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. Awesome side hustle for you today. Actually, one that started on maternity leave. My guest is a longtime listener, whose business was inspired by dropping a Kindle reader on her son's head while breastfeeding. You never know what inspiration is going to strike. So she and her husband said, hey, there ought to be a way to make this thing less slippery. And before long, they'd come up with a simple silicone strap that goes on the back of your Kindle device.

1:52And this business just hit its first six-figure month. From Strapsicle.com, Lou Rice, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. So hi, Nick. Thanks for having me. You bet. I really appreciate you reaching out with this story. It is a good one. Your listener only bonus for this week is my list of 25 e-commerce niche ideas to get your creative juices flowing, because I think you could borrow Lou's playbook with a different product and build that into a new income stream. You can grab that at SideHustleNation.com slash Lou, L-O-U, or just follow the show notes link in your episode description. It'll get you right over there.

2:29I want to start at the beginning. So you drop this thing on your newborn's head, obviously probably upsetting for him. And then you're like, shoot, what happens next? Yeah, I mean, very upsetting for me too, right? And I think it's that new mom's middle of the night, hour long breastfeeds, and you don't want to be on your phone all the time. So reading a Kindle is a great option. And that happened about 2am. Ben ran in, we were all crying. But the next day, Ben's a bit of a creative type. He had a piece of silicon, a silicon mat, and he fashioned a really crude strap with staples. And he gave that to me to try out.

3:04And after a month of that, I was pretty hooked. I didn't want the Kindle without it. I was able to obviously do a lot of things one-handed as you need to when you have a baby. So we kind of thought, oh, this could be something. And this is like 2021. Had nobody thought of this before? There had to be a competitive product on the market? We had a little look around, obviously on Amazon, there are similar products, but they were pretty ugly. They had like little metal claws or they're very industrial looking and nothing kind of sleek and stylish like our straps are. So the silicone means it's the perfect fit, like it molds to your hand.

3:41So we just thought, look, we'll give it a go. We were lucky to have a manufacturer contact from a friend of ours. So I was on that leave. It was locked down. There was nothing to do so we thought why not give it a go let's give this thing a shot so that's the next step like my husband makes this thing i like it it's comfortable it serves the purpose for me and i don't love the existing off-the-shelf products that are available and we happen to know a manufacturer this is a where is this manufacturer how do you go about getting prototypes or next steps we went to china because obviously cost efficiencies are huge there and And as I said, lucky to have an existing contact off the bat.

4:22So I know that a long part of the process can be finding a really good supplier. We probably went back and forth two or three times with the prototype because it was really important. We got the strap exactly the right tension and the right size. So Ben designed, he drew up all the measurements, drawings, scanned those over. They came back with their kind of CAD drawing and then off we went. Sometimes it's going to take a couple of iterations before you get that sample back and you say, yeah, this is the one, this is the one we're comfortable going to market with. Is there any marketing at this point?

4:54Or it's like, we're gonna go product first. And we're gonna find an audience of people who want to buy this. Or like, was there any other validation? I guess the existing products and their sales history was some level of validation. But what else went into it? I think for us, it was we're solving a problem here. But we did do a survey. We put a survey out on Facebook, about 50 friends and family responded. Great response. We were able to find people who had Kindles. And as soon as we were talking to people who had Kindles, they were like, oh yes, I would love this. So we kind of just knew we were onto something there, but we didn't do too much.

5:30Ben had a bit of blind faith that this was solving a problem. So we would be solving this problem for others. Yeah. What did you put down as far as your minimum order once you were happy with the sample? Well, we're lucky because it's such a lightweight product and relatively cheap to make. So I think our first order and our factory was great. We negotiated a 500 minimum order quantity, which we were really lucky to get. So I think about two grand, including shipping. And we got the first box February 22. And then we kind of sat on it for four months. Why is that? Well, I was building the website myself.

6:09I was still on that leave. We were kind of in that spinning around phase of like, oh, how do we market this? What do we do? And I think we got a bit of analysis paralysis. Then it kind of got to May and I said, let's just put this out. And I'd listen to a great podcast about just give your product away for free because it's so important to get those first 1 ,000 true fans. So we decided to launch and give it away for free and people just paid shipping. How do you find those people to even give it away to? It was a bit unconventional. We didn't really have a plan. What we did was I was in a couple of Facebook groups, a female entrepreneurs Facebook group, and then a local Facebook group posted in there.

6:48And it went absolutely nuts in both groups. Absolutely, like hundreds of comments, loads of support. And then people started buying. And then I also posted on LinkedIn and got a huge reaction from that. So literally, we wanted to actually not do the friends and family, please buy from us, especially as we needed to find people with Kindles. Yeah. So we went that route. Was this on Amazon or was this on Strapsicle.com, like Shopify powered, like sold your standalone store? At this stage, we hadn't launched Amazon. This was Strapsicle.com. So just literally through those, I think, three channels.

7:24And then obviously, I shared it on personal Instagram, etc. et cetera, we got close to a hundred sales, which was awesome for us because not only did it give us those customers straight away in the Facebook groups and LinkedIn, we were able to start dialogue with our customers. And that's when I really understood the power of community building. And were these specific like Kindle fan, like book lover groups or something like that? It was just kind of, it was more general. So interestingly, it was general. It was female entrepreneurs. so there was a lot of cheering me on and also oh I have a kindle I would love this and then it was I'm in Bondi Beach Sydney it was the local Bondi group and people could pick up from a cafe down the road so that was where we started but then I very quickly discovered book talk on TikTok and that really changed the game for us as well tell me about book talk yeah I don't know if you know book talk i mean book talk is a huge subculture on tiktok of people who absolutely love they have their book accounts love their books and then they love kindles as well so i learned of a affiliate strategy go and find some micro influencers give them okay okay that's what i did i spent hours i researched all of these kind of i wouldn't even call them influencers they were just people that had two or three thousand followers maybe a bit more i reached out to them, told them a bit about our story and offered them a sample to try.

8:51And I knew they loved Kindles because I'd searched all the Kindle hashtags to find them. So I sent the product out, absolutely loved it. And the bonus of that is I gave them a code to share with their followers. So then they were actively promoting for me sometimes daily, weekly. And then I was also gathering all this UGC content that I could then use for my own marketing. So that actually in the first three months of business really helped grow the word about Stripsicle. Wow. Were you like native to the TikTok platform? Like it's still a black box mystery to me. Oh, is it? Oh, yeah. But you're like, oh, shoot, I'm going to reach out to these micro influencers.

9:29I'm going to send them my stuff. I'm going to get them an affiliate code. It sounds like super premeditated, super intentional, like super strategic. It wasn't at all. But I would say, Nick, I mean, Nick, you need to get on the TikTok, but it is. yeah I mean the organic growth opportunities from TikTok are still so strong and I think look I was just on this I was still on mat leave I had this time Archie was in take care I was like I'm just going to run at this I've got two more months before I go back to work so yeah doing this and then seeing the traction this strategy brought this tactic brought I was like keep going keep going I don't know if you've heard the quote from I think it's a Paul Graham early on do the things that don't scale.

10:11And for me, that really stuck. It's like, spend the time, just reach out to people. People with relatively small followings love to hear from you. They probably haven't had many brands reach out. Yeah. Especially in like the book category, it's something, it would stand out. It's like, well, maybe you probably get lots of offers. We'll read my next book from authors or something, but like, oh, a physical product that's going to make my reading more ergonomic or something like, okay, that definitely stands out from the clutter there. Yes, yes. So let me go back to the inventory side. So$2 ,000 for 500 unit minimum order,$2 ,000 shipped.

10:47So like$4 per set, I guess. And then on the pricing side, how do you figure out how much to charge for these after you stopped giving them away? Finger in the air. I mean, this is the mad thing about starting a business. You just have to test and try. So I think our first, we priced it$15,$16 when we started. I was at the post office five times the first day, just completely didn't have the right envelopes, didn't know how to sort the postage. Like I was sticking stamps on mine for the first month. We were lucky because it was a pretty small package to go through the post. So yeah, I think then understanding, obviously, your handling costs, your overheads, working out a bit more of a budget to work out your landed costs.

11:31I mean, yeah, we just kind of have iterated the pricing since then. But it's a massive learning curve and not stuff that you might have ever had to think of or understand. I think I see them at like$20 for a two-pack now. Is that accurate? That is. And I think especially shipping and handling, obviously, but also you've got to obviously factor in all your marketing costs. And then on Amazon, there's additional fees that they're charging you. Sure. Does Shopify have this like affiliate functionality to give these micro influencers a code off the shelf? Like, is that something that's built in with that software?

12:08Shopify works on apps that you add to your store. So there is a great app, which I now have. But back then, no, I mean, sorry, they have a discount code section. So you create your code really easily. Sure, sure. Yeah. So we were just putting those in a spreadsheet, sending them. Oh, and kind of like manually tracking like, oh, everybody who came from person XYZ, like, okay, And then we can manually credit them whatever commission or something. Exactly right. So we would pay them out when they hit a certain threshold. Okay. I mean, that's really smart. It's like fascinating to me because we did another e-com episode with Yo Pretty Boy, like men's skincare brand.

12:42And it was this game of paid acquisition. Like, hey, we've got a product that we believe in, that we think if somebody tries, they're going to keep using it because it's like a replenishable thing. You're going to need it month after month after month, as long as you continue to care about your face. they were playing this advertising game of like well if we can acquire a customer for 30 or 40 dollars but lifetime value we think is going to be 85 90 hopefully higher long term and it was just like a weird game of not spending a lot of money up front like capital intensive to buy this huge amount of inventory in their case and then capital intensive from the customer acquisition cost but you went about it differently like super low startup cost in terms of just product manufacturing and stuff.

13:25And then I'm going to pay for performance. I don't want to spend any money until that's like, that order is already in my bank. And then I'll pay out this commission after the fact. I think two things come out of that. People probably do discount organic free channels, because paid is very attractive, right? And yes, you have to invest, but then you can see a return. And I think the thing with the organic side of marketing is you You do have to put more work in and it can be a longer lead time. But I would absolutely encourage any business owner starting out to jump on any free tactics you can and really put that graft in.

14:02Like, as I say, like do the things that don't scale. You have to earn every single customer in the first few months until you get that snowball of traction. More with Lou in just a moment, including how to find these micro influencers and how to protect your business from copycats right after this. Did you know there's a disease running rampant alongside hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you gotta do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

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16:24More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. that's q u o dot com slash side hustle you can even keep your existing number quo no missed calls no missed customers i think people are a little bit scared of influencer marketing they see it as a big thing and maybe they're intimidated or they don't want to approach i mean i would just do exactly what i did start with smaller micro influencers or just people who have a following who really know your niche that you're targeting i mean i'm lucky right it's a very tight niche If you have a Kindle, you're going to love our product.

17:06So it's quite easy. Well, as soon as I see someone with a Kindle on TikTok, I'm like, hey. But I think understand who you're going after and then just start reaching out. And you've got to send 100 messages. Maybe you'll only get five back from that. But that's five new potential influencers who might have a reach of tens of thousands. If I want to go out and replicate this, like were you searching specific hashtags or user accounts that happen to be about Kindle? Like I just, it seems very needle in the haystack. Yeah. I mean, I started Instagram and TikTok. I searched and YouTube. Don't forget YouTube.

17:43I searched hashtags around Kindle, Kindle lover. I mean, this is a huge, and then once you start searching for that on TikTok and Instagram, you can get served those accounts anyway. So all of a sudden my feed is filled with these people and then they're all kind of talking to each other. They've got a very tight knit community. So it was just a ripple effect out from that. Gotcha. Okay. I think that's really cool. And so this is all coming through your own store. I imagine you probably sell out of these initial 500 units relatively quickly. And it's you go into the post office and shipping these out Wednesday, Tuesday as orders come in.

18:20At what point does that become, if people are ordering from the States, like you're shipping and I'm from Australia. Talk to me about the logistics side. It was pretty manageable. I have a post office 10 minutes walk down the road on the way to my son's daycare. It's pretty convenient. So every night packing the orders, every morning shipping them out. Once I got the hang of international orders, customs forms, pretty straightforward. And we still do that. We're still shipping from our home office, from Shopify. Yeah. What happened is your attention is finite, right as a business owner and we looked at amazon we turned our attention to amazon about three or four months in and it took me three months to get it all set up and live but all of a sudden you're managing another marketplace so my attention has had to have been split between the two marketplaces since then what's a typical order volume that you're packing up on a nightly or weekly basis here it's actually not too bad at the moment so i think like on average we're only still doing about 20 orders a day.

19:21So it's fairly manageable. I have someone who comes in, helps me pack those orders. Obviously, all the Amazon orders are being fulfilled by Amazon. So I'm not touching any of that. That's where most of the volume is sitting at the moment in the US. Okay. So utilizing FBA just to address that market or the ones that aren't coming through Strapsicle Direct. We even with our US version of our site, we are very prominent with Amazon buttons because we know that the shopping experience for a US customer is, I want to get it fast and I want to Amazon Prime next day. So we're happy to send them there for a better experience.

19:58It's so much easier than you like filling out a custom form at night, like, no, no, no, go to bed. You got a two-year-old, like get some sleep. Yeah, exactly right. So for me, I mean, I'm still blown away by the power of Amazon. I would say everyone should be on it if you have the type of product, I guess, that's going to work on there. Yeah. I mean, especially an accessory for an Amazon specific product, you know, do you lose sleep over like, well, how long is it before the Amazon basics strap comes out and they undercut you? Like what's your comfort level with Amazon long-term? Obviously that's a very real possibility.

20:31The hope would be is that we could partner with them, but I don't think that's one of the chances. Look, you just have to keep going. You just have to keep going. You have to go. I mean, I think that comes back to the importance of building a brand, a brand that people know and love and trust. Obviously Amazon is a bit of a race to the bottom in terms of price. But if we can continue to strengthen our brand equity off Amazon, then we've got a real chance to carry on and succeed. Did you do anything proactive to market the Amazon listings once they were live? Yeah. And look, I think that's one of the most important things about being on Amazon these days is driving off Amazon traffic to Amazon.

21:11So we basically have two CTAs always shop on our website shop on Amazon it's really important to keep that traffic flowing through that organic traffic so email marketing our social media marketing one thing I've done with my influencer strategy is now we very heavily target US-based kindle lovers on Amazon you can create a promotional code so we give them Amazon codes and then they push those out to their followers and that's amazing we have to refresh them every month it's a real pain but the value from that is huge we literally hit our six figure months from free marketing tactics. And one was an influencer whose video went viral on TikTok, 2 million plus views.

21:55And then it went viral on Instagram, 1 million plus views. A viral video about a silicone strap. Yeah. I mean, people love it. I mean, look, look at the stuff, you know, never going to drop it. So yeah, I mean, with her social media code, because she is the perfect niche for our product and her audience is the perfect niche for our product. Yeah. And she's loving life because you're like doing rev share or affiliate commission with her? Yeah. She's got her Amazon affiliate link, which is obviously cranking. And then we're actually about to do a collab for a Christmas limited edition set. So we've become good friends.

22:35But I think that's the other thing too, right? Like our first six-figure month that we hit was from free marketing tactics. It was the combination of that virality, the videos that went viral, and also a PR article that Cosmopolitan put out, the top Kindle accessories under$35 on Amazon. That's a nice press piece for sure. Was that something that you proactively pitched or they sought you out or they discovered you somehow? So we did a big PR push a couple of months prior. So I would like to think that they got, we definitely sent it to them. So I'd like to think that we were on their radar, but then just popped up and I was like, where are all these sales coming from?

23:14Figured it out. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Okay. So we believe there's some importance in driving your own traffic to that Amazon listing, like giving that algorithm a little bit of a nudge. So it starts to show up in the organic listings. Are you doing any paid Amazon traffic or anything like that? Yes. I have an agency managing all of the Amazon PPC. I mean, I think it's vital. One thing I would say is if you're thinking about getting on Amazon, hire a coach, hire a consultant to help you do that. It will shortcut your time, but also it really will give you the best chance of success. Those first four weeks, it's unofficial, but Amazon gives you a bit of a boost in ranking and you want to be doing everything you can to drive sales and reviews.

23:55So yeah, ever since then, I mean, I was doing my own PPC. Now I need an agency to do it because there's just so many options available to you. but I'm the one who really focuses on driving the traffic to Amazon. And Amazon rewards you for that. They literally give you a referral bonus. Oh, like you could be your own affiliate? What do you mean by referral bonus? Or just like referral bonus in an algorithm? You basically, you set your campaigns up off Amazon, you create your tracked links, and then every person that comes via those links, whether it's an email campaign, social campaign, Amazon will track them.

24:30They'll track the views, the purchases, and then they give you 10 % back on that purchase. So they're literally rewarding you for bringing traffic to them. Wow, I didn't know that. Okay. It could be very lucrative. We're making a few extra$100 a month. I'm sure you could, yeah. Sure. But versus like something to offset all the fees, at least. Exactly. And we didn't have to pay Amazon pay-per-click for that sale. Like there's, yeah, it's layers on. Were you able to send your Shopify customers, hey, we just launched on Amazon. Would you mind leaving us a nice review on our listing to try and pad that or add some social proof early on?

25:06I did try that. They've kind of caught it onto that now. You really have to be a true purchaser, I believe, to leave a review. The importance of obviously building your brand is protecting your brand. So having your trademarks in place, if you have those, then you can apply for Amazon Brand Registry, which basically helps you protect your brand on Amazon. But it also gives you a whole lot of extra functionality to market your brand. Now they have a review program called Vine. You can literally enroll your products and pay, but then you can get 30 people reviewing your products. They get them free and then they can leave a review.

25:40I would say everyone should do that as soon as they get on Amazon. Gotcha. Yeah. This brand registry, does that prevent you from just having copycats? Just like, I don't know, you apply for a patent or something like how to prevent people from just coming up with a very similar looking design? Yeah. Look, we have a trademark. We have a design patent in Australia and the US where we are on Amazon. We've registered those. It's not going to stop you, is it? I have a very good friend who's been sued twice by copycats of her brand. Oh, gosh. So, yeah. That's so obnoxious. It's so obnoxious. And hearing her story, I'm like, oh, please never let us go through that.