5 reasons my first business flopped

In my last post, I shared my entire business journey from not start to finish. And one of the things I touched on was my first business, my very first business, which I don't actually talk about that often. So I'm going to share a little bit more about it in this blog. For background, it was a health food subscription box business, and it flopped for many reasons. I eventually shut it down in early 2017 because I had basically created a job for myself.

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Why my first business failed

 

#1. I created a product that I loved, but it didn't really solve a problem

I thought that it was this amazing, unique idea. Nobody else had done it, which it was, but I didn't realize that what makes people buy isn't the fact that it's a unique, cool idea. I also had a lot of hype, something that I know these days doesn't work for selling is hype. So I had a lot of influencers on board promoting my product, but it didn't change the fact that my product didn't solve a problem and people didn't really want it because it didn't solve a problem for them.

 

#2 – My messaging was off

I really struggled to communicate what I was selling in a way that my customers would find compelling. So I knew why I would want to buy the product and I communicated it like that, but there was a mismatch between how I was communicating it and what was going to resonate or land with my customers.

 

#3 – The numbers were off

This is kind of funny considering I come from an accounting background and I didn't even really think about the fact that making $2 profit on an order on average was going to be an issue. So I thought in my mind, I thought I'd be able to scale this thing to thousands and thousands of orders per month. Not really realizing that there wasn't a market for it to sell thousands and thousands per month. And that at $2 profit per order, it wasn't really going to bring in the kind of money that I needed not only to live on, but also to build this lifestyle that I dreamed of. I wasn't planning on having a super extravagant lifestyle. I didn't really want a private jet. I'm not really that kind of person, but I wanted to be able to have the financial freedom to do the things that I love, to not have to worry about money and at $2 profit per order, that was not going to happen.

 

#4 – I was doing everything myself

I was the bookkeeper, the marketer. I was packing all of the orders myself in the living room of my two-bedroom apartment. I couldn't outsource the packing and shipping of orders because every logistics company I spoke to didn't want to even talk to me until I was sending out a thousand orders per month, which meant that I would have had to be packing 999 orders in my living room every month before I could outsource it. So that was like oh, okay, this is not really going to be scalable, kind of moment.

 

#5 – I was focused on growing the wrong things

I was trying to get more followers and I had a pretty big Instagram following back then. It was like 20 something thousand. So I tried to get more and more followers and I tried to get more and more people onto the website without really thinking about how the website was converting. I spent a lot of money on Facebook ads and influencers trying to get people onto the website, but then they would land on the website and not buy. And now with the benefit of hindsight, I know, oh, I should have actually invested in branding. I should have invested in copy. I should have got the website professionally designed because I did it myself. I should have invested all of these things that actually moved the needle rather than the things that I thought moved the needle, like Instagram followers and influencers and all of that.

So while I was getting traffic, while I was getting eyeballs onto the business, the basics that would decide whether people bought or not, those were off.

Those are five of the reasons why my first business flopped. I'm sure if we really dug into it, we'd find a whole bunch more reasons, but these are the most glaringly obvious ones with hindsight. And it's great because I've learned so much from that, that I then managed to apply to my next business and to my current business. And I know that had I not gone through the whole process of that first business flopping, I would not be equipped to deal with the business that I have today.

 

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