Can you imagine waking up one morning with an idea that merges your passion for storytelling and your background in marketing, then seeing that idea become a thriving business? That's exactly what happened to our guest, Tori Scott, author, media veteran, and the innovative founder and CEO of Scribbler, a game-changing subscription box company curated for aspiring novelists. Tori's engaging journey from scribing young adult fantasy novels to launching Scribbler is an entrepreneurial adventure filled with insights, highs, lows, and everything in between.
Tori's media veteran background laid the foundation for her authorship, but it was her keen business acumen that led her to identify a market gap - a subscription box for writers. As Tori takes us through her 'eureka moment' and the process of launching Scribbler, you'll get a front-row seat to learn how she used content strategy, supplier relationships, and community building to successfully grow her company. Get ready to be inspired by Tori's dedication to keeping novelists motivated, her ingenious way of managing inventory, and her persistence in overcoming challenges.
The final part of our conversation with Tori addresses the realities of running a subscription box business. From tackling customer churn rate to managing inventory, every challenge is an opportunity to learn and grow. Tori even shares her tactical tips on content virality, the power of customer relationships, and her unique perspective on patience and persistence in business. Whether you're an aspiring novelist or an entrepreneur, Tori's authentic insights and invaluable lessons are a must-listen.
Can you imagine waking up one morning with an idea that merges your passion for storytelling and your background in marketing, then seeing that idea become a thriving business? That's exactly what happened to our guest, Tori Scott, author, media veteran, and the innovative founder and CEO of Scribbler, a game-changing subscription box company curated for aspiring novelists. Tori's engaging journey from scribing young adult fantasy novels to launching Scribbler is an entrepreneurial adventure filled with insights, highs, lows, and everything in between.
Tori's media veteran background laid the foundation for her authorship, but it was her keen business acumen that led her to identify a market gap - a subscription box for writers. As Tori takes us through her 'eureka moment' and the process of launching Scribbler, you'll get a front-row seat to learn how she used content strategy, supplier relationships, and community building to successfully grow her company. Get ready to be inspired by Tori's dedication to keeping novelists motivated, her ingenious way of managing inventory, and her persistence in overcoming challenges.
The final part of our conversation with Tori addresses the realities of running a subscription box business. From tackling customer churn rate to managing inventory, every challenge is an opportunity to learn and grow. Tori even shares her tactical tips on content virality, the power of customer relationships, and her unique perspective on patience and persistence in business. Whether you're an aspiring novelist or an entrepreneur, Tori's authentic insights and invaluable lessons are a must-listen.
Hello everyone and welcome to Retails. I'm Caroline Baldwin, and this week I spoke to Tori Scott. She is the founder of Scribbler, a multi-million dollar e-commerce company specifically tailored to writers, as well as Luminary, a content consulting firm that helps small businesses scale organically, and she's actually renamed this business recently to find your followers. I think you're all going to really enjoy this episode. She's just so passionate at building communities and for her, it isn't about the hard sell. When she spent years building all of these communities, she had this ready-built fan club for when she launched this subscription product, and these fans yeah, I want to call them fans they were even willing to chip in about the design of this product.
Speaker 1:I loved hearing about this wholesome community because, at the end of the day, for retail, it's just what everybody wants, because money cannot buy that kind of dedication. So, as well as that, she talks about how businesses really need to stay in the game. You need to stay positive, you need to stay energised. Listen to that podcast, watch that documentary, listen to your favourite music to get you energised in the morning, because it's all well and good if your business goes viral or takes off tomorrow, but you have to be in the mindset and ready to take on that challenge today. So I hope you enjoy. From Bright Pearl, this is Retails.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Retails e-commerce growth stories, when we unveil captivating tales of triumph, hard earned lessons and the secrets to success in retail and e-commerce. Join us as we sit down with e-commerce titans, disruptive challenger brands and industry experts to explore winning strategies, market and leadership insights, and future shaping trends and innovations. From AI to venture capital, global expansion to automation these powerful conversations will fuel your growth trajectory. We believe every story contains valuable lessons. Retails is your ultimate destination to uncover them. Now to our host, Caroline Baldwin.
Speaker 1:My guest today is Tori Scott. She's an author, media veteran and the founder and CEO of Scribler, and she's now launching her latest startup, luminary. An MBA graduate with an extraordinary background in marketing and business, she's the acclaimed author of 11 published novels and has used her storytelling prowess to forge impressive paths in entrepreneurship. She's the founder of Scribler, a multi-million dollar e-commerce company specifically tailored towards writers, and Luminary, a content consulting firm that helps small businesses scale organically, and she's actually renamed this business recently to find your followers. Not only has she managed to create successful ventures, but Tori's unique skills in brand development, content strategy and social media marketing have also earned her recognition from USA Today, buzzfeed, abc and more. Tori Scott, welcome to Retails. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I am fantastic, especially after that introduction. It's a lot of hype. I got to live up to it now.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you will. Oh, we're so pleased to have you with us. I would love to get straight into hearing about your journey to becoming an author. I feel becoming an author is probably one of those pipe dreams that many, many people have. They would love to have a book on their shelf and say oh hey, I wrote that, but you did that with 11 books. So tell us how you came from retail and media into becoming a successful author and how has that been for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, it was a piece of cake, just a total piece of cake. Barely any effort, no. So at a college, I went to Texas A&M University to get my marketing degree and then got an MBA with a concentration in marketing and I went straight into working in media. I worked for radio stations, I worked for print, I worked for streaming services, I worked for agencies. And then the great recession hit in 2008, I believe, in the United States and myself, my boss, my boss's boss, tons of people in my office we all got laid off. But we get nine months of severance. I'd never even heard of severance. At that point I was like four years out of college and I'm like what's that? What are you going to do to me? And they're like we're going to pay you to just sit on your hands and do nothing and I'm like that's fantastic. So no, at the time I cried, but in retrospect it was fantastic because the severance came with a stipulation that I could not work for a competitor, and competitor for them was going to be basically anything in the advertising space or media space. So I kept submitting ideas of companies that I wanted to work for. They kept rejecting them and saying, yeah, you can work for them, but you're going to have full salary that you're getting for the next nine months to go to work. And I was like, well, no, that's not a smart idea.
Speaker 3:So I remember distinctly being at my favorite Mexican restaurant eating cheese enchiladas. The cheese enchiladas is very important to the story. You should always remember stories of cheese enchiladas. And my husband said, well, what are you going to do? Like you can't work in advertising? What are you going to do? And I was like I don't know. And he's like what do you? If you can do anything, what would you do? And I'm like write a book question mark, you know, because I love to read and that was a completely different field for me and I thought you know how hard could it be? Just put some words on the page and turned out to be the hardest thing I've ever done besides building a company. So, yeah, I did it and I.
Speaker 3:The first one was complete and utter garbage, as most iterations of things are, but we'll call that my minimum viable product, which was not at all viable. Then I wrote another book and I ended up submitting what you do when you have a book as you send it out to literary agents. You send them what's called a query letter, which is basically an email, begging them to read your book, and I sent that out to several agents, got rejected by time. It's all rejection same thing as building your business rejection after rejection from investors, from everyone. And then finally one said I see the potential, I'm excited that you, I'm excited about your potential, but I don't see it in this book. And so I sent her what I had of the next one, and that one was enough to get me signed. And then they pitch them to publishing houses and you become an author. So that's all that jumped happened. I got laid off and then I wrote some books.
Speaker 1:So I mean sometimes those scariest things, in hindsight turn out to be these, like wonderful gifts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when my co-worker, he came up to me the day that I was getting laid off he wasn't getting laid off, by the way, and he was like you know, sometimes these things turn into like blessings and disguises I was like, not the message I want today, but, like you know he was he was correct in hindsight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not sure you need that from the person that's not being laid off at that moment. Unless it's coming with a side of Cheesy Angelard as which then maybe I might be a little bit more open. So, tell our audience a little bit about the books that you were writing then, and what did you end up writing? A series, you wrote 11.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I wrote a trilogy first, and when they buy them they usually buy the first book and the second book and with a Option to buy the third. So you have to pitch the third one to them first and then they can decide whether they want it or not. So I wrote a trilogy. They bought two, then they ultimately bought third. Then I wrote a duology, so two books and then after that it was all single titles.
Speaker 3:I just kind of I realized that I got tired. As Entrepreneurs are prone to do, we get tired of an idea after a number of years and we want to like do something different. So writing a book takes at least me. It took about a year to write the, the write it and then you bet it's been about a year editing it and then you spent about a year promoting it. So at that point I'm like ready to move on to different characters in a different world. So but yes, I wrote All fiction. You know books can be, of course, nonfiction. So all fiction. And I was writing specifically in the young adult world. I was in my 20s at this time, so kind of made sense for me. But young adult is like Twilight, hunger Games type stuff. So yeah, fantasy. I wrote all kinds of different stuff in that space excellent, excellent.
Speaker 1:So Fast forward to 2018 and you've launched your own business. What? What happened there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay. So another story for you. I know, isn't it crazy that I want to tell stories. So I was living in Philadelphia at the time. I mean, I'm in Dallas, texas now, but I was in Philadelphia and I had this idea that I wanted to go to the Hamptons. The Hamptons like this little place Outside of in, you know, outside of New York City, where all the super rich people go to like vacation. I was like let's go, act like we're rich people and like go to me and go to the Hamptons, right, so we go out there and there's this.
Speaker 3:The Starbucks was the first place we stopped when we hit the Hamptons and I go in and I just saw these people and you know, when you see people who are like Uber rich, you can just tell, like you can tell like you see it in their Face and their hair and the way they hold themselves, like it's just a, it's a whole vibe, right. So I remember distinctly we're gonna get a snack. I go in the bathroom to wash my hands and I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like girl, you got to get you a piece of this. Like you got to do something like this. Like what do I have to do. So I was like, all right, well, it's too late. Probably it wasn't, it wasn't really too late, but it felt like I was too late in my old age of like you know, probably 30 to like I think it was more like 30, 34 at this point to like go back and be like a neurosurgeon or be like you know this attorney who it makes partner. But I was like, but I could start a company.
Speaker 3:So for about six to nine months I just kind of opened my mind to the idea of Having a company. I was like I want to have a company and I went through so many terrible ideas, just like when you're writing books. It was like I'm gonna, I'm gonna make t-shirts and everyone's like cool, how are you gonna make a different? I'm like I don't know. I don't know, there'll be t-shirts, right, and one day I'm working on edits for my last book, which I loved as my best book and my editor liked as my least bar she referred to as her least favorite book, right, at least she never said that, but she basically said it and I was going through round after round after round of edits, the kind of edits that like ripped your soul out as like a quote and doing air quotes like artists, right.
Speaker 3:And I was looking through subscription boxes instead of editing a subscription box, by the way, if you're not familiar, it's like it's basically a shipment that comes to you once a month or maybe quarterly, and it's filled with like Things that you don't know. They're gonna be there surprises, but they're around a theme. It could be like a box for like cat lovers and be like toys. I don't know something like that. So I was looking through subscription boxes instead of editing and then I smumbled to myself when is my subscription box? It's gonna finish these edits for me. And then I was like wait a minute, there's gotta be a box of writers, right.
Speaker 3:And I start looking and I don't see one and I'm like this is it? Like I called my writing partner, who was like a New York Times bestseller, and I was like this is an idea, right, this is an idea. She's like a totally an idea. I called my husband and I'm like this is it, this is it. I'm gonna build this. So that's what I ended up doing. It's just. I think, paramount to this story is hearing the fact that I Wanted to be an entrepreneur and for nine months went through bad ideas. But just knowing that you want to do this thing, just having it out there and then let it, letting the idea and the timing catch up to it, and just being patient until that happens, it's easy to stay in retrospect.
Speaker 1:There's probably two types of entrepreneurs, it you know, to really narrow it down into two camps the ones that are just like like you, really wanting to go into that space and got ideas but not quite sure what it is, refining it and then suddenly having that eureka moment, or somebody that's Started off with that eureka moment and being like oh, I've suddenly become a business person, and I didn't even know that's what I wanted you so?
Speaker 1:that's really interesting. So for our guests who have not opened a scribbler box, why don't you detail and tell us what is inside one of those boxes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it is. In a nutshell, it's a box to help someone writing a fiction book. So you want to be a novelist, that's that term Finish your book and stay inspired while you're finishing the book. So things that come in it's usually three to four, almost always four writing gifts. So it might be like journals and like pens, and we customize pretty much everything at this point.
Speaker 3:We didn't in the beginning we would work with like Etsy sellers and get like 20 of something and put it in the box or whatever, but we'll never 20, but a lower number.
Speaker 3:And then it also comes with a live chat with a professional in the space, so a literary agent, an editor, a publisher, maybe a bestselling author. And then we include a book, and the book that we include is almost always a new release and it can be from a bestseller, it can be from a new debut, what's called a debut author. And then they include teaching materials. So there's an inside look at the publishing process, whether that's your edits, your query letter that you send to that agent to try to get an illiterate agent. And then we also have what's called a writing passport, which is probably our bestselling thing. We then created a shop later that you could buy just the little pieces from the box and other things that we put in there. So we have the box and we have an e-com shop. Now the writing passports are our bestsellers because they're just little booklets that we put in different colors and they're an essay from almost always a bestselling author on a certain theme.
Speaker 3:So characters, plot, storyline, you know whatever Like general themes that writers need to tackle in order to write a bestseller book for themselves. Fantastic, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. So let's talk a little bit about you starting that in 2018 and then building it to the business that it is right now. So market share and brand and how you built that brand, because it's all and good having that great idea, but if it's not in front of the right people, then that's a whole different story. So talk to me about the process, about creating a buzz behind your product.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm really, really. I think all founders, small business owners, content creators that are trying to make themselves the brand, we all have one thing in common right, we need to find a customer base, and it is difficult to do when your budget is limited. Right, we have these huge ideas and we want to get it out there. We want to get customers and everybody is like, oh, just spend advertising dollars and then you'll get your customers. Right, that's like it's a foolproof plan. It's not exactly foolproof, but it is pretty dang close. But we don't have ad budgets. Right, like, most of us are bootstrapping, most of us are trying to get customers so that we can grow the company and we can scale. So I think every founder has a strength. I have lots of weaknesses. My one strength is building community. That can also just be called content strategy. So I am huge into content.
Speaker 3:And to tell you everybody what content is, if you're unfamiliar, is it's blog posts, it's Facebook groups it's really not Facebook, but Facebook's kind of in there. But let's stick with blog posts and then social media posts. That is pretty much it. Newsletters that can be in content, it's all the free ways that you can give people a way to be, and these are my two keywords that I always remind anyone on my team to do If they're working with our social media platform or they're putting content out there. Your content needs to do one of two things educate or entertain.
Speaker 3:And please notice how I did not say talk about your product, like I always like. It's like a person standing on a really busy street in Manhattan, right, and they're screaming about their product. Let's say we all wanna scream about our product because we're like please, god, buy my stuff so I can keep this business open and pay my bills and not have to, I don't know, go back to my humdrum job. So they're screaming about this product. Let's just say their product is like Yellow glass orbs. I don't even know what that is, but it's yellow glass orbs.
Speaker 3:Right, you put them in your garden, they're pretty, they're little balls. Right, they're glass orbs, but they're screaming about them, right. If someone is screaming about their product and you're walking by them on the street, it's like you want to like, put your hand up next to your eyes and like, be like, don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact because this person wants something from me and that's. It's so awkward, it's like one of the most awkward things. But if that person stops talking about their product and they instead, let's say, start handing out sheets that's talking about gardening tips and there's nothing about their product on there, it's just gardening tips, like, and that's all they ever hand out every day, then people start they might not stop yet but they're at least gonna kind of look in that direction.
Speaker 3:Or that's education. Or if you entertain them, if that person stops talking about their yellow glass orbs I don't know why we keep coming back to that, but apparently somebody needs to start this company. Apparently, I'll buy one, but if that person starts dancing instead, like you're dancing, right, people are starting to look. So I always say, when you're building a brand and I did this, of course, with Scribbler and, honestly, was trying to get my book sold it is, it is all about putting content out there, that is, getting entertained or educate people.
Speaker 3:And there's, there's a percentage rule at least that I use, which is 80-20. So when you're picking an initial platform and I, of course, did this with Scribbler you, you want to pick one of the premier ones already has a built-in audience. So you're talking like maybe mediumcom is a big blogging platform in which millions of readers are already exists there. Or you pick like a social media platform. Usually that's gonna be YouTube, tiktok, instagram, facebook is fine, but that's more. People generally will go there after they've already heard about you, versus they're hearing about you for the first time.
Speaker 3:So you go to those places and you start putting out content and you want 80% of your content to be entertaining or educating. So if that is a person, I'll give you an example. So there was a client that I had. This is for Lemonary, my other company.
Speaker 3:I had a client who had made educational content for, like, children that parents could buy, teachers could buy whatever, and she was posting about it a lot, as we almost all do we almost all make the mistake. We want to just talk about our business and get people interested in it. And of course, the first conversation I was like I know I'm gonna tell you this thing and it's gonna hurt and I have to tell myself this every day no one cares about your product. No one cares about it Like, I'm sorry, unless you're selling beer or ice cream. That's pretty much the only two, and if you're in those two spaces you've got so much competition to deal with, like, but unless you're selling those things like, no one cares. So you have to find something adjacent that is you know, I'll use the word sexier to talk about, to bring people close to you. Then, once you have a captive audience, then you start talking about your product and they care. So, with this client, I told her let's come up with this list or not let's. I came up with a list for her and I was like here's all the ideas that I have which is my favorite part in doing the consultation stuff and like you pick then what you think makes most sense. And what she chose was prompts for parents to like ask their children, after they pick them up, either from school or around the dinner table or, you know, pick her up from sports, like just questions every single day, to get like closer to their families or their children. So she would post those like you know, every you know, I think, every other day, and then about 20% of the time she'd be like oh, by the way, I sell these like educational stuff. But even even the by the way has to be very, very subtle, like it's really and really, when you're launching or if you're, if you're in a lull and you need to use content to to, you know, get your numbers back up. It really I would, I would challenge yourself to start a hundred zero.
Speaker 3:I'll give you one more example. I have my daughter as a figure skater. She has an account on Instagram. It's Lucy skater, lucy with an I and I run that for her. I started a year and a half ago. She's got 40, I think 44,000 followers at this point. She's eight years old, by the way. It's insane, and it took 18 months.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's a long time, but now we have an audience and we can sell them something Like you don't have to do it in that way, by the way. You obviously can just launch your company, lemonary. I am launching, and then I will build community for it. It doesn't matter. It either way is totally fine. But those are the two things I would that I walked away from Scribbler, which is to entertain and educate people, to get them to pay attention, and then to use about 80% of your time in front of them to talk about stuff that's going to be entertaining or educating, and then you can use secondary stuff, like you can bring them into a newsletter, then you can bring them to your website, and so on.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and the joy of one you have that captive audience is the fact that then you have a subscription model and you can keep selling to them again and again and again, because you're giving them more things that they need. So I'm such a fan of the subscription boom. It seemed to hit over in the UK about 10 years ago. Some of them went mad. I remember there was a subscription box once called the cheese posties, so cheese posties sent in the post.
Speaker 1:I don't think, sadly, that that one's still going, but you know there was a bit of a boom and obviously then there was a bit of a lull of the really strong ones that were left. Quite a lot of them were in the beauty space, for instance. There's also a really good art one that I'm aware of so. I can see where the scribbler again is solving that need, whereas, yeah, I could probably make a cheese toastie on myself. I don't really need that necessarily sent in the post.
Speaker 1:But how have you found that the subscription has really helped and leading into loyalty and brand advocacy and with all of that content, I suppose it all goes hand in hand, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 3:You know, I don't know if the subscription helped that much. I mean, I honestly think if it was a one-time box as long as we had other products available, and we do. We offer editing services and we offer writing contests that we do once a month, and some other stuff we do like a featured shop item, which we usually will either create a custom shop item or we'll work with a third party to make, like, a specific notebook just for our audience and we'll sell it only for like until it's sold out. So I think subscription model, yes, has so many benefits.
Speaker 3:Eight, it's harder to get customers on, though I will say on the flip side, it's harder to get people to subscribe because they know that you're going to charge them every single month, but then, once you have them, you have them for a while. Our turn rate is like around 7%, which is it's very great, but it is hard to get them right Like. It's hard. But a community, I think, can benefit any field. Let's say you're a plumbing service. It seems like it would be really hard to come up with content, but no, that could be make for the most hilarious YouTube videos or social media reels, like in TikToks, like I would have a lot of fun with that. But that community could be your actual community that you can drive to and you entertain those people and yeah.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So, talking of the numbers, are there any growth stats that you can share about the company over the last what like five years or so?
Speaker 3:Okay, I'll share some stats that I am proud of. So I've talked a lot about how you can either launch with a community or you can launch and then build your community. Either works, as I've said, but we so. I was an author and my business partner, who I had for a number of years, was also an author, and we had about I want to say about 30,000 followers each. We both wrote young adult fiction, so there was some crossover, and so we knew that a lot of our customer base was writers. We thought that they were readers, but then they wouldn't buy our books really. So we were like, okay, I think these are more writers that just want to write their own books, which is fine. Then we built a writing product for them.
Speaker 3:So we did a really big pre-launch campaign, and what that means is we spent about 90 days really teasing the product Again. We were putting in tons and tons of other content and talking about other things that were entertaining, and writing tips and stuff. In between we kept saying something is coming, something is coming, something is coming. And then finally, about 45 days out, we revealed what it was, and then we started inviting our followers to vote on things like should this be the design of the box or this be design of the box? Should we put this in it first or this in it first? What do you guys value most?
Speaker 3:So by the time we launched, we really had kind of buy-in from them and we opened up just a pre-launch page, just one single page that I built on, I believe, wix, and we had a newsletter sign up and we said hey, we kept saying like the drop is coming soon, the drop is coming like within three weeks, and then we would say like two weeks, one week, and then we never even revealed the day that we were going to open. We knew what day and time we were going to open. We kept saying like, oh, we're really just fine-tuning some things, but you just need to stay on your email because it's coming and we only have a certain number and once we hit that number, we have to sell out because we don't we can't buy too much product, which was total you know, it was total baloney.
Speaker 3:I almost cursed there. But we're live, so we'll hold that back. But so when we finally launched, I fell asleep. My husband was up working late and he came in and he said hey, we have a buyer. And I was like what, what time is it? He was like it's midnight. I was like, how do we have a buyer?
Speaker 3:We didn't even send out the email yet, but we opened it the night before, knowing the email was going to go out at like seven in the morning. And then by the time the email went out, we'd already sold so many because people just kept checking the website to see if it was open. So, long story short, we had 200 sales our first day, just from the prelaunch buzz of building excitement, of utilizing a community, of getting excitement there and getting buy-in from them. And then we had 300 subscriptions by the end of the first month. We had $10,000 within the first 10 days in revenue and then we made about $200,000 in revenue the first year. I think it was actually more than that, but it was around there. And then we more than doubled it in our second year and then grew quite a bit larger from there.
Speaker 1:So incredible work. That's so interesting about involving your community and getting them to design the box. That's fantastic. Thank you, right. So let's go on to talking about suppliers, inventory management and capital management and such. So how do you work with your suppliers? I can imagine in a subscription box type thing it's fairly interesting because you must have different suppliers for different boxes. Yeah, they're constantly keeping it changing. I know kind of in the beauty world they often provide sample sizes, not necessarily full sizes. Do you have to kind of work with your suppliers to get bespoke products? I suppose? Talk to us a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:Yes, so in the beginning, like I said, we worked with places like Etsy and stuff like that, and then we very quickly started pivoting to creating our own stuff. So now we were in the space of not looking for suppliers but looking for manufacturers. We just needed people to produce the stuff that we were designing in-house. So we work with three different kind of manufacturers. One is a printer, and that was simply a matter of going online and looking for best prices for the printing sizes that we wanted to create and then also seeing could we adjust our sizes a little bit to make them cheaper? And then we started working with the manufacturers that were going to print our stuff, which one of our big ones that we just went to was Quality Logo Products I think it's QLPcom and then like discount mugs, stuff like that I mean just really places that you can find on Google. That was.
Speaker 3:There were some pros and cons there. I mean, there was a product that would come broken or doesn't look the way it's supposed to look. We figured out pretty quickly that we could get samples, and so we would just email the company and say, hey, this is our company size. This is when we would need the product by? This is when we would buy it by, this is when we would need it to ship by. Can we get a sample of this, this and this? And here's the shipping address? And they pretty much all of them would send it. So really, the only thing you're not seeing is the product with your you know spin on it. So these are, these are products, at least, I will say, up until about six months to a year ago. Most of these were products where we could see the notebook, we could see the packet pens, we could see it just didn't have our specific design on it yet. So that's been a pretty good oh, and then, I'm sorry, more recently in the last year. So we've moved international so that we can actually design everything inside of the notebooks, outside of the notebooks, and that's been great.
Speaker 3:The hardest part about this and anybody that's in this kind of world that has to get actual product in those it's stuff just doesn't show up on time a lot of times and that has been difficult because it's forced us to hold inventory that we don't want to hold, because we used to say, oh, this month we have exactly 750 subscribers in the beginning, so we could call and say we need 750, please ship them. But as our numbers got, bigger companies were like oh, it's going to take us a while to create all that and we'll ship it. We'll try to get it for them by then, but we don't know. So then we had to kind of overshoot by like a couple hundred subscribers and then just whatever showed up, we would piecemeal the boxes together and be like, okay, this looks good and then send it out. So sometimes we'll get like a snack in that we really wanted to have, in that. We always have a writing snack, by the way, because it's like who?
Speaker 3:doesn't want a snack. So we really would have wanted that snack to go in that box, but instead the chips showed up and the gummy worms didn't. So we have to like swap them and like make everything make sense. And then we're at the dining table or at my office like moving stuff around and being like no, if we're doing gummy worms, then we need to have this with it, and like that hasn't shown up yet.
Speaker 1:So yeah, you touched on your churn rate earlier, which was an amazing only 7%. But there is still a churn rate in this business, Absolutely. So what are you doing to make sure that you at least keep the business at that stable level? What are you doing in terms of customers at the moment and getting more on board?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want to first say that 7% did not always look like 7%. If I would have read that 7% in my first year or two, I would have probably shut down, because our number was way higher than that. It was probably closer to like 15% plus. And I was reading all these things like, oh, your churn should be 10% or less, and I was like, oh my gosh, everybody hates our product. Like, what are we going to do? A, it's patience, right, it's just waiting until your product gets to a point where it's hitting that sweet spot of, yes, people like this. Now, the other big part of it that also feeds into patience was waiting until we built a brand for ourselves that had a reputation for being customer first. And by that I just mean if somebody emailed us and said, hey, I didn't get the box, we'd be like, cool, here's your refund. Like, or hey, I'm missing a product, cool here, let me send you another one. Like, we don't ask a lot of questions unless it's pretty apparent that there's like, maybe some benign going on there. So that's part of it.
Speaker 3:Number two is you know I'm going to keep coming back to content. Is we keep putting content out there? We have a blog. We have our Facebook community. We have Instagram account. We spend a lot of time continuing to put content out there and bringing in new customers as we lose customers, but keeping the current customers happy. A big part of that has been our Facebook group and asking questions. And oh, okay, here's a big one.
Speaker 3:Okay, so every time we send out a box, instead of waiting until your customers go online and say this company is garbage, we get in front of it as fast as we can and say hey, we just sent a box out. And most of them are on our Facebook group because when they subscribe, we send an email that's like hey, please don't forget to go into this community. It's a free part of the box where you guys can talk. We're not going to spam you about products. We're not going to even talk about it. It's just for y'all to talk. But we do the effort to keep it a safe, productive place and we add to it sometimes, but never about the box. We have our own Scribbler Facebook page, but then we have a group that's called Scribblers and that is just that. We run for them. So a big part of it is so my example was going to be we will send that box out.
Speaker 3:As soon as we know everybody has it. We post a poll to say what did you like, what did you not like, rank them and then tell us in the comments what did you love and what was garbage. And it gives everybody an opportunity to get out their frustrations and to say, hey, you sent us a notepad and it's been like the third month in a row, Like I'm tired of these notepads. And other people will jump on and be like, oh, I'm so tired of them too. But then other people might be like what are you talking about? I want a notebook in every single box and it just kind of gives people a place to vent and for us to read it.
Speaker 3:And in the beginning that was hard for me because I wanted to like talk back to everybody in the screen and be like no, you're wrong. Like that was amazing, but I don't know. I think that has helped our attrition. A lot is to be very like tell me what you think. Then it's like when you get in that argument with, like, your partner or spouse. When, like, you're able to like, tell them everything you're upset about it and really let loose, then afterwards you're almost like I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I yelled at you so much.
Speaker 3:You're bringing that so yeah, that's been a big part of it. And then also just learning over time, like I said, patience of really learning exactly what they want, and that 7% that fluctuates. I mean, come on, we have holiday months where, after December rolls up, we sky high because so many gifts and then we're plunged again, but as an average, highs and lows over the year.
Speaker 1:And how about new customers right now? Are you going down the Google ad space or you just content?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we do more social media ads than we do Google AdWords. Adwords works for us too, but because our product is more visual. If I was a electrician, I would be doing more Google AdWords and stuff like that. But because we're a very visual product and people react to seeing the box because it says really big on it, right, you know? Like if you were, like I'm a writer, you know what's this. We also added a lot of ads to like newsletters and stuff, but that one didn't shake out for us, as well as other things. So now we mostly speak to social media ads.
Speaker 1:Interesting and looking towards the future. You know the world's still a little bit of a scary place right now and the restaurants are kind of holding back on spending. How are you feeling about, you know, potential recession and the economy at the moment? I guess boxes like this you know they are a little bit of a treat, but it is the kind of thing that people look at straight away when they're going through their bank details to see which direct debit so that they can get rid of. How are you feeling about that?
Speaker 3:So I am somewhat optimistic, only because I was a writer myself and it would have taken probably one of my last paychecks for me to stop the dream of writing, and because it is around 40 bucks. I mean, it is an expense but it's not $404,000 a month, like.
Speaker 3:One of the big reasons and let's be honest that Scribbler has been successful is because we're not a box of although I love my boxes of beauty products and stuff. This is something that supports people's dreams, right, and that's a big thing for people, right? When you're holding onto a dream and this box gets you and it supports you and it keeps you motivated, it's a big thing and it can survive a lot. The company can survive a lot because of that. Having said that, if this is another reason that I like to diversify not even just within the company and offer different products, so we offer things like editorial services and writing contests and stuff, because that might be a cheaper option. Maybe you need to unsubscribe from the box for a while, but you want to get your query letter critiqued for 20 bucks because you just want to focus on getting in front of an agent and you need it to be as strong as possible.
Speaker 3:We also rolled out a Scribbler Slim. So it is without all of the gifts, it just has the teaching materials and that is 20 bucks, so that's like almost half price. I think it's like $5 shipping also, so that's helped too, but in my mind, if I'm being honest as an entrepreneur, that is another reason for me to open another company. Yes, to kind of offset, just like we do when we're investing our money. You know it's bonds and index funds and CDs. You got to put the money everywhere and make sure that it grows. When one is down, the other is up.
Speaker 1:Which segues perfectly, because I was about to say, before we let you go, we need to hear a little bit about your latest startup, luminary. So what exactly is it and what problem are you hoping to solve for small businesses?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Luminary is my newest baby. It's Luminary, it's like so. One day I was talking again with my husband about building Scribbler and it was so hard in the beginning. It's so hard. If you walk away from this conversation with anything, please God walk away with the fact that this was not like we didn't. Just it seems like it was easy. I guess when I say we got 300 subscribers in the first day, it was not. It was. It was years of building community before this. That was not working, that I was thinking nobody wants to follow me. This is so hard, like no one wants to push, follow. So it was hard.
Speaker 3:But my husband and I were talking about how hard this was and he said, yeah, you know, I guess it's just like making lemon. You know, lemonade out of lemons. And I was like, no, it's like making lemonade, but all I have is the lemons. I don't even have sugar, I don't have water, I don't have a pitcher, I don't have glasses like I don't have anything because I don't have budget right, like it's just all I've got is the lemons. So that lemon has been kind of a key funny word in my brain for the last like five, six years. And then luminary, of course, just this person of influence or product. In my mind it's a product of influence, so it's luminary. But yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 3:I did a bunch of consulting a few years ago to help people create a content strategy, so that it's not just about. You know, I can sit here and, you know, beat a dead horse about how important I think it is and getting a product off the ground cheaply. But there's also some tactical stuff in it and what days to post, what times to post, what hashtags to use, how many hashtags to use, how to look. One quick thing, like on hashtags when you're pulling your hashtags, make sure that they are used between 100,000 times and about 500,000 times. That's the sweet spot to like so that you can have a chance of being on the explore page when you're trying to get content to go viral.
Speaker 3:Viral is 200,000 views or more in a 24 hour period. It's really impossible to really pick what's going to go viral, but you have to make sure all the boxes are checked so that if it does perform well, it doesn't just grow to like 50,000 views, it goes to millions. One of my daughters, my daughter's seventh reel is going viral right now. It just I checked like it hit like 3.3 million this morning and it's going nuts Like, which is great, and one of her's hit 59 million, I mean. But this is you got to have the check boxes.
Speaker 3:So that's part of what I'm doing with Liminary is just teaching people how to do this, and then also what your side, your jacid product, is that you can talk to people about to get them to get closer so that you can sell your actual product.
Speaker 3:It's like you know the person with the yellow orbs right Like Gardening, giving them a list of ideas of how to do this. So, yeah, I've been doing that. Now we were just getting it off the ground and it's like, well, I won't say price in case this is like two years later you're hearing this, but it's like a 40, 50 minute call and you can get pretty much everything you need from me in that one call. Like if you book again, it's just because you like me, like it all seriousness, about half my clients rebook again, but that at that point it's like they're just wanting another marketing expert that they don't want to have to hire full time, but they want a quick. Like what do I need to do with this? Just tell me in 50 minutes so I could pay your one check and then go back to not spending.
Speaker 1:So much money. Tori, it sounds like such another adventure for you and, yeah, we really wish you all the best with the luminary as well. And lastly, we have our rapid fire, quick fire round of questions, so don't think too much about them, kind of just coming at you. Right, so are we ready? Yes, what do you do to stay mentally and physically fit?
Speaker 3:Workouts obey. Obey fitness best workout app ever. Oh, I've not heard of that. What's that so good? It's like if they put them in a 80s type box, and it's like if you want instructors to make you laugh and cuss at you the whole time. That's what you need, obey fitness. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. What is your Sunday morning guilty pleasure?
Speaker 3:Reading always. You can see the bookshelf in the back If you're watching clips.
Speaker 1:If you had five minutes with the president, what would you ask for?
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh. Oh, you know, I want to say something like world peace, but can he just like cut me off a check, like just give me like a house or something like that. Like, yeah, without getting too political, I just ask for personal stuff just to be super selfish, super.
Speaker 1:And Netflix or Disney. What are you watching right now? I don't even need to hear the second option, it's Netflix. Come on.
Speaker 3:Be real.
Speaker 1:What do you typically have for breakfast?
Speaker 3:Oh okay. It used to be like whatever I wanted and now my trainer has me on a high protein breakfast called three wishes cereal. It's garbage, but it's doing the trick.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm on board with that. And then, finally, what do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning of your career? Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:I okay here it is. The most important thing that I can part with is this Be patient. Please, god, be patient. There is going to be huge breakthroughs in your company and in your life and you have to be doing the work and staying there for it to happen, like, because it's when those breakthroughs happen. It's just like videos that you put up, content that goes up. Most of it is going to be tinkering along and then you're going to get a phone call or you're going to have something go viral, or you're going to have some product breakout or some influencers going to talk about your, your restaurant all of a sudden and you're going to have a huge spike.
Speaker 3:But you've got to be in business when it happens. You've got to keep going. And the other part is just keep working, like. Keep like listening to music that inspires you on the way to work. And like listen to that loud, crazy music that makes you want to kick a door down. And like keep watching documentaries that inspire you. Keep watching movies, like, keep reading books about inspirational people and don't get frustrated that you're not there yet. You will get there. Whether it's one company or it's 15 companies, you'll get there. You will Like just be patient, be in the game when it happens for you. That's what I would tell myself today. I'm going to tell myself about liminary too. Like, be in the game, be patient.
Speaker 1:Oh, Tori, that is a perfect way to end this really great conversation. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun.