EU243: Bootstrapping a Business on a Small Budget

eCommerce Uncensored - Email Marketing | Facebook Ads | Social Media Marketing

Whether you’re just starting your business on a small budget or have the money to burn, you want to ensure you start the business out on the right foot. Starting with a small budget doesn’t have to be a barrier to making sales! The guys go through the process of creating a return on your investments with actionable tips you can apply to your own business that are free & budget friendly!

This is a direct transcript. Please forgive any grammar or spelling errors.

Jason: And we’re not just doing what most people want to do when they have money. And that is just like spend it,

Kevin: It doesn’t cost anything. It’s just like every day, creating something new, create a blog, post educational about your product. Take that same content from your blog, make a video again, there’s no cost involved.

Jason: How do we get a return on every dollar that we spent

Jen: You’re listening to eCommerce Uncensored with Kevin Monell and Jason Caruso.

Kevin: Hey everyone. And thanks for joining us on another episode of eCommerce Uncensored. My name’s Kevin Monell and I’m here with

Jason: Jason Caruso.

Kevin: And if you catch me squinting a little bit it’s because I just stared right into these new, beautiful lights that our producer Jen recommended for us, I think makes me look much better you think? So it was the lighting of the whole time. She said, no, not everything’s going to be much better for you.

Jason: I think you were. Yeah. I think you were born this way. There’s nothing. That’s going to fix that

Kevin: before. Speaking of Jen, before we get started, um, we’re going to have a new question and answer section on our website, where you can go and you could submit. Any questions you may have, and we’re going to have an extra we’re planning on having an extra episode, or we just have like little short, little snippets where we answer questions from, from you guys. So go over to our website, check out the question and answer, question and answer section, and you can submit your own question and we’ll do our best to answer it on.

Jason: Yeah. And then if we have one that could, could be a, an entire episode, then that’s what we’ll do,

Kevin: right? Exactly. Um, today we’re going to, did you have something Jason? I’m sorry. No. No. Okay. As always, you know, we talk about our experiences on this podcast and a lot of times when we come on here, we talk about, you know, Facebook ads and building an email list and having, you know, hundreds of thousands. Subscribers and spending thousands of dollars a day that we have done and our clients have done. And, you know, we realized that we weren’t always at that point and we realize a lot of you aren’t always at that point. So we were just thinking about like some of the things that we’ve done and done recently that we’ve kind of like started from scratch, not had a lot of. To put into the project, but things we’ve done to like, get the ball rolling, because I know that can be a barrier for people to get their businesses going

Jason: well, we’ve had the money. It’s just that, you know, one thing that we see a lot with our clients is that they hire us. They have like, they have, they have money, some of them, right. Like when I say money, I mean like money, like real money to spend. And they just want you to spend the money. Right. You’re like, oh, let’s like, look like let’s spend it. It’s it’s it’s okay if you have a lot of it to do that. I mean, but for most of us, we don’t and Kevin and I have started on this new project recently with someone and we’re not going to get into exactly what it is right now because it’s brand new and we don’t really know.

Kevin: Um, we just don’t want to disclose it just yet, basically. Yeah. Eventually.

Jason: We’ll talk more about it eventually, but we started this new business with someone and as you guys know. Kevin. And I have gotten to a point where we’ve been partnering up with a lot of, I don’t want to say influencers, but a lot of experts in various fields, excuse me. And we’re finding that for us because we’re not big, huge content people. Excuse me, we’re not big, huge content people, but we’re really, you know, quite frankly, Our end of things, you know, the marketing side. So we like partnering up with people who, um, may already have a business, just need help marketing it. And we come up, we came across someone who we started a business with and, and we do have, it’s not that we don’t have money because we do have money. It’s just that we’re bootstrapping it. So we’re not just doing what most people want to do when they have money.

Kevin: And that is just. spend it, well, you made, it made a good point too. Before when I said not having the money, it’s kind of like, it wasn’t the right way to put it because even if you know, this person came to us and then was like, I have, you know, millions of dollars to put into the marketing of that. We wouldn’t be like, okay, let’s take this slow. Let’s, you know, do. You know, uh, trust the process, you know, do certain things in a certain order and let’s not just go out and we’ve had that with our clients, too. Clients get like money into their businesses from investors and they want to just be like, just go spend it. That’s pretty much all they want to do. And you’re like, no, we don’t. Well, the

Jason: problem with just quote unquote, just spending it is then you have to report back later and they, you know, that’s the problem with it. You can’t just spend it. And, uh, because you you’re gonna have to, you need to like tell them why you did that, or what was the reason. So we, we just took on this, this business, this new business as like, look, if we need to put money into it, we will, but we’re not going into it. Like we’re going to spend our time money because at the end of the day, I want to, I want our investments to be calculated. I don’t want them to necessarily be like taking a shot in the dark sort of speak and hoping and praying that things work. So whether we have the money or not, we still take the same approach regardless how big the company is or small, or if it’s new or if it’s old or whatever, we still take the same approach. And basically that approach is pretty simple. It’s like, how do we get a return on every dollar that we see? And that’s really like where we start. We always start there. And I don’t mean when I say start there. I don’t mean we start the business there. Cause obviously we create a website. Obviously we figure out what the offer is. We figured out what we’re going to give away, yada yada, yada. But from the marketing standpoint, we’re always trying to just figure out how we make

Kevin: a return on our. And like proof of concept behind your product really doesn’t have to be too expensive. I mean, there’s resources like just creating content around your product and seeing if people are engaging with it on an organic basis is, is really all you need or, or even like really low budget ads, which is what we did. Like we were spending $20 a day on an ad and we were able to see that people were actually interested in the topic and they were engaging with the topic. You know, we were looking at, you know, other resources. You know, to see how people were engaging with similar content. So that doesn’t really cost a lot to just get your proofs proof of concept. I mean, yes, selling a product might cost some money, but just to see if people will eventually buy your product, it doesn’t have to cost a whole lot.

Jason: No. And then the other side of it is like the other side of it is that, um, you know, you can do this organically paid. In my mind, or just a way to speed up the process a little bit, but there are certainly ways to do Facebook lives or create a Facebook group. People will find you if the group is named properly, because that’s, that’s how they search Facebook, right. For groups. You know, you can certainly even spend $10 a day and just try to get people into your group and then do Facebook lives. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to do this without spending a lot of money, but this particular business, we decided like, look, we have a little bit of money to spend let’s, let’s run some ads and just get some people on our email list. And, um, the business is actually, we call it a business. We really just been working on it for the past five months or whatever. Um, We recently sent that like an email campaign and create a sales page, you know, using, you know, sales copy. And I don’t know, we did pretty well. We did like what? Six, $7,000 Kevin, the first month.

Kevin: Yeah, the first one. Yeah. And it was just a matter of like, we spent, I think, $14 on a hosting package. We didn’t like go out and buy the most expensive, like we are hosting right now for our, uh, our, one of our businesses. I don’t even know how much it costs. 50 a month. Yeah, and we, we spent $14 for the year for hosting. We built both a really simple website on WordPress. Again, still $14. Then we just created, um, a PDF that ebook type PDF, put an ad out. See if we can get people to give us their email address. We’ve been doing that. And, and that’s another thing like while you’re building the infrastructure, while you’re building the sales page that Jason’s talking about, why you’re like finishing the content. If it’s an info product you’re finishing the, you know, manufacturing or your product or whatever it is, keep get that ball rolling. Spend a couple of dollars a day and see if you can get a couple of people to give you their email address for, you know, even a PDF. And that’s like one of the main things I think. It’s like the content side of it is like just start making content. And that, that is a struggle for a lot of people and it doesn’t cost anything. It’s just like every day, creating something new, create a blog post about your, your product, educational about your product. Take that same content from your blog. Make a video again. There’s no cost involved, but you’re just getting some motion going. So when you do have your product, you’re not just sitting there. It was really nothing.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s interesting. I forgot what I was talking to about this. Like, you know, it took, in my case, like, let’s call it like 16 years to really have a quote unquote successful company.

Kevin: But since then, what happened at that 16 year? Mark? Jason? Oh, you met me. I forgot. No, no, no,

Jason: no, no, no. That wasn’t. No, that was not it. Um, but no, no, no point was like, it took us all that time to figure out how to create a multimillion dollar, you know, brand like from scratch. But it seems like, like a lot of what we’ve done since. You know, with that experience has kind of worked and it’s, it’s funny to look back at how many things we’ve tried and failed that and how the things that we’ve tried recently, how they’ve worked. Right. Isn’t that like an interesting thing to think about? It’s like, we’re so much more confident in, in, in starting a business now because we know what the hell we’re doing.

Kevin: And I think that, but I think the biggest thing that we’ve learned. All these things consider these, you know, these actual tactical things are these, this list of things that you can do. It’s just like patients, I think is what we’ve learned. We learned that like, it’s not going to happen overnight. A lot of these content things. If you’re not spending money on ads, it’s going to take a while for organically your brand to take off or your practice take off. But if you can have patience and just trust the process, you’ll be in good shape.
Jason: It’s funny that you say, I say that because when I was running the sales page, you, you and you didn’t really have much patience. What is this going to be done? Where are you? You know, it’s been a month. That’s not going to shit what’s going on. I don’t know. Well, I mean, yeah, it takes time. Kevin, it takes time. But the point is the point of the matter is that, you know, the things that you hear from people, like build an audience, build an email list. They sound very elementary on their face, but they’re. There that’s not fake, you know, building an audience will never not serve you. Right. It will always serve you to have an audience. It will always serve you to create an email list. May not work the first time. It may not be perfect, but it will always serve you. In fact, Kevin, before you say what you’re about to say, you know, this particular business that we started, this new one, the interesting thing about it was that our partner. Went on other podcasts and sent people to a landing page and that was free and that worked the best better than our pay or paid advertising.

Kevin: Yeah. A hundred percent. And that’s kinda like what I’m saying. It’s like, um, you know, I forget what I was going to say now. I totally lost my train of thought.

Jason: Um, podcasting is another way. Go on people’s podcasts. Get, get your name out there.

Kevin: Okay, go ahead. I was just going to say, like building an audit, like you were saying off you’re building an audience thing. It’s like, I feel like. Never been easier and it’s always getting easier as we go. Like all the things you mentioned earlier, like just starting a free Facebook group, starting your own podcast, being on other people’s podcasts, like go out and pitch your PA go in pitch yourself to interview on a podcast that the topic revolves around your. Which is send an email, cause people are always looking for, we’re looking for people to interview on our podcast. Same thing. There’s podcasts on every topic that exists. So if you can get on there, it’s like free advertisement. Exactly what you said. And they’re

Jason: looking for people to get on. Now. Now you’re not going to go to like somebody with millions and millions and millions of downloads, but you don’t need to. Go on, go on, uh, you know, an up and coming podcasts. They’re always looking for people. It’s a great way to get your, get out there for free and just send them to a landing page and know when people are in real pain and they hear your, your podcast and or they hear this podcast. They’ll take action. Yeah. The truth is, is like you get credibility when you’re on pod other people’s podcasts. Whether, you know, you, you realize it or not. I mean, people trust people that are out in the public or in the public eye, and they just automatically trust you for whatever reason when they hear you on someone else’s podcast that they trust, or they listen to you.

Kevin: And then doom is doomed as much as you can. I mean, being on, you know, a. Like Jason said, there’s podcasting is difficult. Right? Um, as far as the gathering audience and having a popular podcast, because. Uh, it takes a lot to have a large audience, like a Joe Rogan or something like that. So if you got to get on a podcast that has like 10,000 followers or 10,000 downloads a month or something, it’s the same as go, go on 10 of those. Instead of trying to get on one that has a hundred thousand or a million followers, just do it more often. And then the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it, describing your product, talking about it and things like. Yeah, same thing with influencers, go after, send your product to influencers. They, they love seeing themselves on camera. And a lot of these people who are just starting out maybe have 10,000 followers or something on their page or whatever, they’ll promote your product if they like it for free, just to get some free shit. And I think that’s,

Jason: that’s the big one. I mean, and I think what it comes down to Kevin is that people. The easy way out. And they think that running Facebook ads is the holy grail. And that’s the easy way out. When in fact you can like spend thousands and thousands of dollars and get more frustrated than doing anything else. Whereas if you just go into it, you know, realizing it’s just going to take some time and if you’re consistent, eventually things will work out for you. I mean, um, but you don’t need money. And that’s the funny part about all this is like, you know, for those of you who are just starting out, I mean, Like I said, we don’t, we have, we can spend thousands of dollars. We just choose not to because we don’t, you don’t really need it. It’s not money is not really the problem. Everybody thinks it’s the problem, but it’s not really the, that’s a good foundation too.

Kevin: If you go into it and you just, you have money to spend and you just put your product out there on Facebook ads spend a thousand dollars a day or whatever it may be. And then you, you don’t, even while you’re doing that, do these things that we’re talking about, the organic stuff, the content, the blogs, the videos, the podcasts. You’re going to have no foundation in your business. If your ads get taken away, your ads get shut down. For whatever reason, at least she’ll have that foundation to fall back on.

Jason: Yeah. So what we did with this business, this new business, just to give you guys some actionable steps, we teamed up with someone who was an expert in their field. He went on several podcasts. We sent them to a landing page where they can get on like a waiting list for our product and download a, uh, a PDF like Kevin said. Um,

Kevin: and just kind of when it’s launched

Jason: with a discount when it’s launched, and then basically we just sent an email to everybody letting them know that that. The course was live. And I think that first email made like $3,600. I think something like that, something like that, um, $3,600 and then there are 35, that’s the 35 or something. I dunno, something like that. And then, um, and then we sent that some other emails and then we, uh, you know, we made the sales page, our home page of our website. Um, we really did all the things. Or we really did everything that we could, that didn’t require money. I mean, we just, that was just like an added thing. It wasn’t even like our core strategy.

Kevin: And so now we have the product and we have a PR, some people are actually willing to buy it. We have kind of like the process. We have the content that we can use to sell it. Now we, now we can start really spending some money on Facebook ads to kind of scale up a little bit.

Jason: And the crazy part about it is Kevin, because. No, I fall into this trap. Sometimes the listening to the quote unquote gurus and, um, you know, the crazy part about this is like we’re doing this. This is a $500 product that we’re selling through a sales page and no video. All right. You hear everybody going? Oh, you know, the VSL video sales letter, uh, now you don’t actually, we just did a sales page and people bought, you know,

Kevin: um, it could help. I mean, it could definitely optimize where you don’t need it, but we’re gonna, we’re

Jason: gonna work on it the way we’re gonna work on that. But let’s just say you’re a solopreneur and you launched this website as we did. You launched it alone. And made $7,000 or whatever, six, $6,000 with a couple of emails. How would you feel? You’re pretty freaking stoked. Yeah. Right. So, um, you don’t have to make it complicated. You don’t have to make it simple. I think that, you know, I think one thing that a lot of people get tripped up on and they say they don’t spend enough time on it. Making sure their product is solving a real problem. Yeah. Um, which reminds me, I just got a text message yesterday that I forgot to respond to, uh,

Kevin: from a guy forgot to respond to a text message. How’s that even possible you can resist responding to texts.

Jason: Yeah. So my stepfather had somebody that needs help with something he’s inventing something and he wants to possibly for us to help him. Um, But he doesn’t have the product yet. So I kind of get like a little like, ah, you know, but he’s like, the thing is, is like with this guy, he’s like, he’s a graduate of the Naval academy, you know, he’s like top of his class, he’s like, he’s a former Navy seal, you know, like you just know he’s going to do it. Right. You know what I mean? So you’re like, ah, you know, you kind of, um, But yeah, like if you solve a real problem, I think it’s the main, it’s the major thing. I mean, going into something, if your product isn’t solving a major problem, then it’s just not going to work no matter what you do, no matter who you listened to, no matter what guru tells you to do, what if it’s just a product that’s not helping people solve a problem. They’re not going to buy it, but you could have crappy marketing, crappy sales page, crappy everything, but your product solves the problem that people need. Like. If you need a problem solving, you find something in like the sales page sucks, but you know, it’s really going to work who cares

Kevin: and find that core pain point and just keep poking at it. I mean, sometimes as you evolve, like I think this project that we’re working on will evolve to is like, we’ll really start to learn what these people’s pain point is. Like. We don’t, we’re not even a hundred percent. What that’s going to be. It could evolve over the next several months or even year. And when we finally find that and we could just hit on that over and over again.

Jason: Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, that’s exactly what we did. I mean, uh, I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t sound as a shiny object, but we literally just created a sales page. Got people on a waiting list. They were able to download. I know it was different. They didn’t download the PDF and go on the waiting list. The waiting list, where people from the podcast, because he was able to explain the waiting list. Yeah. But our Facebook ads where people downloading a PDF and really that’s it, you know, to be honest with you, Kevin, if, you know, when we. We like launching new businesses sort of, I think like going on people’s podcasts is really like a cool way to get exposure for free.

Kevin: Absolutely. Yeah. I agree. So, all right guys, thank you so much for listening as always, you can check us out at ecommerceuncensored.com and we’ll talk to you guys real soon

Jason: later.

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