 Seven steps to start a subscription box business, a complete guide. All right guys, let's get going. You've heard about it, you've seen it. You may even bought some of these subscription boxes, but how do you actually start a business like that? Well, the first thing you do is subscribe to my channel so you can learn more about it. Hit that subscribe button down there. Don't forget to ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or I upload a new video. Give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. Let's get into this video and let me show you how to start the subscription box business. Now, the first thing you're gonna need to know is what kind of subscription box you're gonna sell and why are you doing it? You also wanna make sure that you're unique in the marketplace and I'll show you how we're gonna go about all this in this video. By the end of this video, you'll know how to do this and you can just get going. Now, there are two types of subscription boxes that I wanna talk about in this video and it's important that you know what the difference is. The first one is a curated box. A curated box is where every month you're gonna send out a box and you're gonna select different items that that particular consumer's gonna get. So that could be dog treats and dog toys. It could be cat treats and cat toys the next month, okay? But it's gonna be something that you're gonna curate as a business owner and send them a different box. The next one is a recurring box. A recurring box is where you constantly replenish their supply of something. A good example of this would be Harry's Shave Club where you're always gonna get razors and you're always gonna get shave cream and all these things, things that you're actually gonna use up. So you gotta determine what type of box are you gonna do. The next thing you wanna do is figure out your niche within this step. Figuring out your niche is super important, guys. You do have to be niched down and there's so many different niches. There's so many different niches out there. I mean, let's say you selected food and grocery and you wanna niche down from that. You may have gourmet foods or you may have barbecue supplies or you may have cake decorating things. That would be one particular niche, but you wanna make sure you know exactly what that niche is and you can describe it to somebody. If you can't say what your niche is, the odds are you don't have a niche. Okay, so we're to number two and that is start your online store. There's certainly a lot of possibilities here. There's Shopify, there's Wix, there's big commerce. There's a lot of them out there. What I would recommend you doing though before you build your store is test some products first, test them out on some sales pages. Now you say, well, JR, I gotta have a website to do that. No, you don't. You need Cartra. I'm gonna suggest that you get Cartra. Cartra is gonna be your email marketing, your sales pages, your sequences, all that stuff. I put a link below where you can watch a video on Cartra so you can see everything it does and you can actually test out products there. If you're interested in Cartra and you use my link, you can actually get a trial membership for only $1. So I would definitely recommend you checking that out because that's a great way to get started and you don't have to build out a whole website to do so. After you've tested some products and you find out they work, then of course you can build a website and you can have that permanent presence there. But you're gonna need to have some email marketing anyhow and since Cartra will allow you to build sales pages and sequences and all that, that's the best place to start. Number three is to build your subscription box, okay? Figure out what your subscription box is gonna be and get that started. You wanna kind of build a sample one. This first subscription box that goes out to your customer is gonna kind of give them an idea of what they're gonna get in the future and if it's a monthly subscription, if they're gonna continue paying or not. So you wanna make sure it's pretty darn good. Of course you wanna look at budget based on what they're paying per month. That's certainly important. You wanna have an excitement factor to your box. It should have some things in there that they can't normally get, that they can only get from you or they're very hard to source. Generally, and this is not a hard and fast rules, but there's five to seven products in a subscription box and you wanna make sure the products in there look different, okay? That's kind of cool if you can do that. Different sizes, shapes, colors, that type of thing. So it's more exciting when they open it up. Now, you'll wanna contact some suppliers and negotiate some terms with them. Let them know what you're doing and get your best pricing for buying these different products to put in the box. That's if you're building the box yourself, which in the beginning you probably will be. Number four, you need to develop your branding and packaging. On subscription boxes, this is really important guys. That box has to look cool. It has to look like something a little bit different. So you're gonna probably need imprinted boxes. In the beginning you could use labeling but it's really nice to have printed boxes. It doesn't cost you that much more but you wanna have that excitement level when that box shows up at their house. So branding really counts. Number five is really important. A lot of people don't do it. Organize your business, organize it, okay? Get everything set up. Know how you're gonna handle refunds. Know how you're gonna handle packaging. Know how you're gonna handle fulfillment. You may decide to farm some of this out later on. I know when I started my business and I was selling an e-commerce, which I am now, I actually packaged everything myself and put everything in packages myself. I don't do any of that now. I have a company that does all that for me but in the beginning you should. If nothing else so that you understand the process and what goes into it. Number six, start selling and do strategic marketing. This can be through post on social media. It can be through email marketing and that's why I mentioned Cartra a couple minutes ago. There is a link down there for Cartra. Cartra can do all that email marketing for you when people opt in for freebies or downloads or whatever and they get on your email list. It can automatically start sending them emails about the different products you have, the different subscriptions you have so that you can get going fast. Number seven, strengthen your subscriptions. Guys, this is so very important. If you think that you're gonna start a subscription business and you're gonna come out with one box and that's it and you're just gonna grow this big business, it's not gonna happen. You have to strengthen your subscription base. Now the best way to do that is to have different subscriptions. Now in the beginning I understand you can't have tons of products but you can offer more of products. So if you're a subscription based business and they normally get one widget a month, maybe you can have a box where they get three widgets a month. After you've done that, after you've offered level one, level two, level three, which will really increase your income, guys. Here's the funny thing that most people don't realize. They wanna make more money but they don't ask for more money. They don't ask for more money, okay? So the other things you can do is let them know that if they offer the subscription to somebody else that you will pay them a commission or they'll get a free monthly box or something like that or they'll get one month free of their box. So you wanna get that word of mouth going. You wanna post on social media as much as you possibly can. I think that's a really good thing to do. Now once you've done that and you've maximized all that, you need to come up with another box that's a little bit different that offers a little bit something different to your audience. And then you know what you need to do? You need to come up with another box, okay? And another box, and another box, okay? Constantly adding to your product line, constantly adding these new products and offering to people is the one thing that will almost guarantee your success. You may have one box that is curated by you that some people like and they think it's okay but they didn't buy it. But if they get on your email list then you offer them the next box that's a little bit different. They may buy that one. I think a lot of people look at these subscription boxes as oh, I send it out to these people and they weren't interested. Maybe they weren't interested in that particular box but maybe if you offered something a little bit different they would be interested. If they're on your list, they obviously opted in and they were interested in some type of subscription. I think subscriptions are really gonna be the future of a lot of businesses. We've seen so many of them grow like Dollar Shave Club, Harry's Razors. I could go on and on and on. There's a bark box, there's all kinds of things for pets, for kitchens, you name it. The possibilities are really endless. And if you really wanna know how to do a good one, look at some of the top subscription boxes out there. Now you can actually Google top subscription boxes, monthly subscriptions, look at them. Buy a month of them. Look at what you get for the dollar so that you know what you need to supply to people. The success is already out there. I guess when the first guy came up with a subscription box, he didn't know what to do, she didn't know what to do. But now it's been proven. You've got evidence out there. You've got people who are already selling them. You can get on their email list. You can see how they market those boxes. You can see what type of emails they send out. So the actual way of doing this has already been figured out. All you have to do is really emulate it. Don't copy it, but you can emulate it. You can do something similar. Now since social media is so important, the one thing that buyers say is that they will more often than not buy a product because somebody recommended it to them. Now when I say somebody, I mean anybody, like anybody online, if they recommend something, many times people will buy it. They see other people happy with it. So what can you do with that? Well, when somebody buys your subscription box, go out there and get reviews from them, offer them something, 10% off their monthly subscription or one free month of their subscription if they give you a review on the product. Video reviews work very well. You can put those video reviews on your website so people can see other people. And you can say, hey, if you do a video review of you opening your box one month, we'll give you the next month for free, right? And that's gonna buy you a lot of credibility. And you say, well, J.R., I don't wanna give away $59 or 29 or whatever it is. How cheap is that to get a video of an actual person opening one of your boxes, okay? How cheap is that? That's pretty darn cheap. But you gotta think about giving before you take. And the best way to do that is to get people to do reviews of your boxes. The next thing I'm gonna tell you is really establish a close customer bond. And the way you're gonna establish a close customer bond is by following up with your customers. You're sending emails, how did you like the box? Can you rate the box? Would you like about the box? What was it you didn't like about the box? You need to get this feedback. This constant feedback will help you improve your subscription box. In addition to that, you wanna have really strong customer service. The first thing that most people do online when they start a business, if they get a complaint, they get all scared and worried and upset. And all that is is feedback. A complaint is just feedback. So what you wanna do is contact that person. Contact them as fast as you possibly can. So running an online business is really a 24 hour a day business. Everybody likes the idea of collecting money 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but not too many people are that crazy about responding 24 hours a day. So do the best you can on that. If you use CarTru, which I told you about in the beginning of this video, they have an actual chat box. You can set it up where it's automated if you want. You can set it up where it has answers to questions. You can set it up where they can put in a support ticket and you can answer it. And when you get the support ticket, guys, answer them seven days a week. Answer those support tickets. They're so very important. If you have great customer support, you're gonna have a great company. You could have average products, but if you have great customer support, people are gonna wanna buy from you. You look at Zappos, who had some of the best customer support in the industry, and that company sold for a lot of money. Unfortunately, the original founders no longer with us. However, that was what made that company. If you ever bought from Zappos, you'd know exactly what I'm talking about. Put in the comments below. Did you ever buy from Zappos? Do you know who Zappos is? I'm not even gonna tell you in this video. Let's see if you can figure that out. But they were a great company. And it was all because of customer service. So make sure you have great customer service. So that's pretty much it. You can start a subscription box, not that hard to do. You can make a lot of money at it. You have monthly income coming in. You don't have to constantly worry about, you know, how much money will I have this month? It basically builds and builds and builds. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. Don't forget to subscribe, ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I do a new video. And give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. I want to get your comments, put them in that comments section below. I'll come back by and I'll see you and I'll talk to you in those comments. Thank you so much for watching this video. See you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. 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