BB2 - Where my Business is Currently

Alright, it's time to get down to business.   Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from.  There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side.   This episode starts down the road of discussing the business side.   http://brandingblitz.com/2/Transcript:   Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand. I want to spend the next couple of episodes discussing where I'm at in the process of launching the brand as well as where I am at personally – both of which I think you'll find make this a fascinating story to follow. For now, let's focus on the business side. The past few weeks have been pretty intense for a number of reasons, not all positive. But from the aspect of launching this brand, things have been going great and very active. About a week and a half ago, I ordered samples for our first product. Normally, if you don't already have a relationship with a manufacturer - which, let's face it, most of us don't - I would recommend ordering samples from several different manufacturers. Due to financial constraints I put more effort into weeding out manufacturers based on ease of communication, responsiveness, how knowledgeable they seem, and details pictures of the products... as well as price, minimum order quantities, lead time, etcetera. I only ended up ordering samples from one manufacturer when it was all said and done. If you've got a little extra cash, I definitely recommend ordering more samples. It was more unnecessary stress waiting for the package to arrive wondering, “What if it gets here and it's not as high quality as they made it out to be?” The fact that the most important aspects of this particular product can't be judged based on a picture didn't really help. Often you'll have to pay $50 or so for a sample, which sounds like a lot initially – way more than the cost of the product itself. But when you consider it gets to your door in a few days from a factory in China, that's honestly not very much. And definitely worth getting a few of them coming so you can have a better basis for picking which manufacturer you work with. That said, it actually worked out for me. I paid $60 for samples from one manufacturer, and I'm very happy with the quality of what we're going to be getting. While I was waiting for those samples to come, I registered the business and got a Federal Tax ID number. If you're serious about doing this, I definitely recommend setting everything up separately under a business name and tax id rather than doing your own SSN. I'm not a tax expert by any means, but I think that will really save some headaches down the road when this things begins to scale. I also registered a domain and began setting the website up. Whether or not you need a website right away really depends on what you're trying to sell – in a lot of cases I would say it's not a big deal. But for my particular market I really feel like having at least a basic informational site will be very helpful. I don't plan to have a store there yet. Eventually we'll set that up, but for now I want to have a laser focus on Amazon as our only sales channel. So I just logged into my HostGator account and set WordPress blog on the brand domain. I've begun adding some information to it, and will be adding more in the coming days. It will eventually need a better theme, but for now I've just got a pretty basic free one on there. A basic website is so easy to set up that it really is hard to justify not setting SOMETHING up when you're getting started even if it isn't absolutely necessary for your niche, but you also can't let it be too much of a distraction as you're trying to get that initial momentum. I've already got experience working with websites so it wasn't a big deal for me to set it up. If that kind of thing is overwhelming for you or you feel it's going to slow you down – don't worry about it right off the bat. There will be plenty of time later once your business has started to gain traction.   One of the things that I believe is going to help me differentiate myself in the market I've chosen is that I am looking to build a brand. This has to do with the fact that I'm planning to expand to a full line of products rather than just a single product – but it also has to do with the fact that I have been thinking about the brand image from the beginning.   Even before I chose my product, I was thinking about branding. Each time I found a new product or set of products to start tracking in a different niche, I asked myself some basic branding questions. “How hard will it be to build a brand and a full line of products around this product?” “Who will my customer be?” “What kind of brand image and messaging will connect with them?” “What are the other brands out there like and how well branded are they?” “Will I want to enter the market as a low cost alternative or a premium option?” “Can I use the brand imaging itself as a way of differentiating my product EVEN before my brand is established?”   I believe the answer to that last question is yes. This is another thing that will depend to some extent on your market. I think it can be done in just about any market, but with my particular market, trying to use every aspect of my branding to show that I'm trying to put out a quality product is one of the ways I intend to differentiate my product in this market.   I'm coming in to a market where I believe the packaging of the product can make a HUGE difference in both conversions, as well as the customer's perception of quality and satisfaction after the purchase – which hopefully also means repeat it may lead to repeat sales. Yet, I honestly don't think ANY of my main competitors have very good packaging. The top two sellers are decent, but really I'm not impressed. Some of the others look especially unprofessional. I feel like stepping in with packaging that presents more of a premium impression could go a long way.   Again, this is something that I think could help at least marginally in pretty much any market and I think it will especially help in my market. But if designing packaging isn't something you feel up to the task for or you just feel like it's a hurdle that's going to slow you down DO NOT let that stop you from taking action. You can always move forward with a very basic packaging – even just a polybag with a sticker on it or a card insert is acceptable for a LOT of products. Then onces you've started to get traction and you're ready to try to upgrade the packaging and see if it increases your conversions you can either design it or hire a designer. I've heard a lot of good things about 99 Designs – I have NOT used them, but most of what I've heard has been pretty positive. If I was looking to pay for a design, that is probably the first place I'd look.   That said, I'm a self-taught computer geek and my wife has a degree in “Print Communications.” Which means, with our combined powers, we form something of a marginally qualified design team. We spent some time as we waited for samples working on potential packaging ideas. Having the product in hand really helped with that, and we've finalized most of the design with a few tweaks to be made here and there.   What we've come up with isn't perfect, and I'm sure a true professional designer could easily pick out some things to clean it up a bit more – but I'm pretty confident that we look more professional than the competition, while presenting the brand image we're going for. And it didn't cut into our budget at all or really slow us down much. That's the key – not letting these little hurdles slow you down. If it's too big and going to really slow you down to work on a website or design a package – don't do it. Not yet. Keep moving forward taking the actions that you can to start getting traction. Once you've got enough traction you can circle around to build out your website and have new packaging made up without losing your forward momentum. We very well may do that in the future ourselves. I'm quite happy with the packaging we've come up with, but if my theory is right and the packaging is going to be a good source of differentiation, it may still be worth having it redone professionally in the future. For now though, we're going forward with what we were able to put together without losing the momentum we have.   The packaging actually did ALMOST become a hurdle for us – but not because of the custom design. Partway through the design, I realized that there were some specific federal regulations regarding the labeling of my product. I'd been basing the information on my labels in large part based on what I saw included on other similar labels – but it looks like some of my competition, as well as the samples from my manufacturer, don't meet up with the full federal regulation... at least as I understand it. So it took me a bit of deciphering to figure out what we needed to include on our product labels, but I believe we've got it sorted out. I'm actually a bit curious what happens if one of the competitors gets reported to the regulatory agency. It feels a bit dirty to report them just because they're my competition – but now that it is also a legal issue. And to be honest, now that I'm aware of law I feel a bit better knowing the info that is supposed to be on these packages. There's good reason for it, and honestly as a consumer I would like it on my package. So I wouldn't feel too bad about reporting them... BUT again that doesn't seem like the most efficient and productive thing to focus on so I haven't looked into it any farther other than just wondering what would happen if they were reported.   There's one last detail I need before we can finalize the packaging, and I think we'll be ready to place our first order.   I purchased UPC codes last week as well. I got 10 barcodes for $20 from a company called Cheap UPC Barcodes. This is a very good deal compared to some of the other websites which mark up the price of their barcodes pretty significantly. On a lot of sites you'd pay way more than $20 for a single barcode and I got 10. If you need some barcodes, this seems like a good place to get the – if you go to brandingblitz.com/barcodes it will send you to their site and I'll get a small commission if you buy your barcodes there.   But instead of putting the UPC code on the packaging, I'm planning to put the FNSKU code on there. Since I'm not looking to get into any other retailers right now, I don't really need the UPC barcode on the package and it saves me from having to put a sticker on there with the FNSKU or to pay Amazon to label it. I had previously started to set up an Amazon seller account, but realized there had already been an Amazon Seller account operated at this address in the past. I have heard Amazon doesn't like people having multiple seller's accounts – I'm not sure how much of what I've heard is true, and this is a different name, different business, etc... but I still wanted to check before I charged ahead. So I've contacted them, they asked for some more info which I gave them and am now waiting for a reply. So that right now is the main thing holding me back from placing an order with the manufacturer– and I'm hoping they'll get that to me today.   In the meantime, waiting for that has given us a little extra time to make some additional tweaks to our package designs and add some of the initial content to our website.   I'm also looking into setting up a Facebook page and targeting people in my niche which would then set me up to do a giveaway for some initial reviews. There is already one set up, and I think Facebook ads would let me target people that are fans of that page, so that would actually take away some of the legwork on getting that set up. I'm not completely decided, but I may try to use some Facebook ads to get some people following my new page. Post for a giveaway and send people to LeadPages to get them on an email list or something. At this point, the main goal would be to gather emails of people interested getting review copies of the product – but that could also be a useful list to have down the road as well as long as I make it clear that I'll be sending them other stuff too not just freebies.   That's one of the ways I'm looking into to build that initial sales and review momentum. But I haven't actually started that process yet. If I decide to go that route, I'll probably try to do that while I'm waiting for the product to be manufactured. I'll also need to continue to build out   There's plenty more I could keep talking about, but I think that gives a pretty good overview of where things are for this brand launch. We've chosen a market, chosen a product, figured out some key differentiators, chosen a manufacturer, gotten samples, designed the packaging, and are ALMOST ready to order. Plus the legal structure of the business is established an we have a very basic website that is up and running with some minimal content.   For a transcript of this show, as well as links to any of the tools mentioned, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/2   A full list of the tools I'm using can be found on brandingblitz.com/tools   If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask   I look forward to connecting with you!   That's all for this episode, I'll catch you next time on episode 3 of the Branding Blitz podcast.     In the meantime if you're enjoying the show, it'd be great if you subscribed on iTunes and left a review. That'll help iTunes know I'm not just talking to myself here, and I'd really appreciate it!