248 | Growing Pains, Plan Bs, and Wriggle Room | with Nicole Jenney

Nicole Jenney  

People really buy... They buy your why. They don't buy your what. 

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. 

And today I'm welcoming to the show Nicole Jenney. 

Nicole is the co-owner and founder of GPigBox and BunnieBox. They are monthly subscription boxes that deliver toys and treats to guinea pig and rabbit owners. 

Welcome to the show. 

Nicole Jenney  

Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Chase Clymer  

I'm excited to chat. Subscription boxes are a new popular topic here on the show. 

I kind of alluded to it. 

But can you just quickly let people know what's in these boxes? 

What are they getting when they sign up for this? What's the actual product that these businesses are selling? 

Nicole Jenney  

Yeah, it's not a guinea pig. 

Contrary to popular belief, a lot of people ask us, if we sign up for a guinea pig box, are you sending us a guinea pig every month? 

No. But we are sending you fun stuff that your guinea pig is going to enjoy to enhance their lives to provide enrichment. 

And we do that for rabbits as well. So people who own guinea pigs and rabbits can get goods every month. We change it up. It's a lot of fun. 

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. Now I'm assuming you started with one before the other. We did. Yes, we started with GPigBox first. 

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. Well, take me back in time. 

Where did the idea for this business come from? 

Nicole Jenney  

It actually... It started out as a dog idea. 

So we've been in the pet space for a long time. Fetch Pet Products is our parent company. 

And we started in the dog world and we're kind of thinking of ideas of how to get our products to consumers during the pandemic. 

You know, everything was affected during the pandemic. 

So we started brainstorming the idea of a subscription box. And we were doing a lot of research on that. 

And really, the dog market is, it's a tough competition. And it's pretty flooded with all kinds of things already. 

And I had just adopted two guinea pigs in the height of the pandemic. Ginny and Pidge, shout out to them. 

And, uh, I was just kind of, you know, making lists and brainstorming ideas. And I looked over at them and I was like, I wonder if anybody has done this before. 

And there really wasn't anything out there like it. So my thought was either somebody tried it and it failed. 

Like there's not a market for it, or maybe nobody's tried it yet. So maybe we should give it a shot. 

And then from there, the ideas just started flowing.

We set up a website in less than a week. And we just launched this thing to see what we could do and it blew up. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh my... We're gonna get all into that. Alright. 

So do you remember what month or maybe even... Obviously, during the pandemic, do you remember what month? 

Because I just want to talk about the timeline here and it's really fun for me. 

Nicole Jenney  

Yeah. So this was October of 2020 when I adopted the guinea pigs. 

Chase Clymer  

Was it the same month that you had the idea?

Nicole Jenney  

The same month I had the idea… no. I think December is when I started thinking about subscription boxes. 

So I had them for about two months and was taking care of them. 

They came from a neglect case so of course, they're pulling at my heartstrings and I'm, you know, spending a lot of time with them and getting to know them. 

And then when an idea of kind of changing it up, like what can we do to change up our business, change the trajectory of our future with our business? 

And then I was like, let's just flip this on its head and do something completely different. Like, can we pull this off?

And I think they were excited about it. They got to test all kinds of products and toys. They had the best time of their lives. 

So in December, we started thinking about it. In January, we launched the website. In March, we sent our first box. 

Chase Clymer  

Okay, hold on. There's a lot that happens in these two months. 

Nicole Jenney  

I know. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

You have this idea. You have two product testers that are willing to test anything. 

How do you validate this idea? What do you do? 

How did you make sure this was a good investment of your time? 

Nicole Jenney

Yeah, well, actually, I joined a course on how to start a subscription box. 

So Sarah Williams out of Texas has a subscription box company. She kind of teaches a course and has a whole community there called Launch Your Box. 

And so that was where I kind of got the idea for the concept of the box itself. 

But the details were something that we had to figure out like exactly what we were curating and what we were sending.

But since we've already been in the pet space, we had great connections with suppliers, distributors, where we could buy stuff wholesale. 

So we just curated 6 months ahead and had a plan for items we could buy and how quickly we could scale and put all those logistical pieces together before we actually sent that launch out to the public. 

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. All right. So you invest in yourself in education, which is the best place to ever invest. And now... 

Nicole Jenney  

Yes. 

Chase Clymer

So you've got a coach in your corner helping you do this the right way. 

And I know there are entrepreneurs out there right now that are still working on their website. 

How did you build a website in a week? 

Nicole Jenney  

Yeah. So that's a great question. So I'm actually familiar with website building because I'm a graphic designer by trade. 

So I worked in WordPress for a long time, which a lot of people use for their Ecommerce. 

I have used Shopify for a while and so I was familiar with Shopify. 

I did some more research there and did it myself. 

I also now teach a how to Shopify DIY course on creating a Shopify store for ecommerce specifically. And I pair up with Sarah to do that within that community. 

So I've kind of been a Shopify expert for a little while, luckily. 

But I know that the tech is where a lot of people get hung up. But keep going. Don't get hung up on tech. You can do it. 

Chase Clymer  

I think it's… the amount of choices that are out there. 

It's the analysis paralysis. And it's chasing this idea of perfection, which doesn't exist. 

Nicole Jenney  

Yeah. My sister is also an entrepreneur and she has a great saying. 

And I'm glad I learned it after schooling, after college. But this saying is... And we chuckle when we say this. But...80% is good enough. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh my god. 

Nicole Jenney  

And it was kind of like, if you wait for it to be 100%... I know you're nodding, you're rolling your eyes like, yep, exactly. 

If you wait for it to be 100%, it's never going to get off the ground. 

So, we got the Shopify store in place. We got the subscription application in place for people to sign up and subscribe. And then from there, it was just constantly monitoring it and making it better and better.

Chase Clymer  

This is a little more in the SaaS ecosystem. 

If you're not embarrassed of the first version of your product, you've waited too long. 

Nicole Jenney  

Yeah. That's a great way to put it. 

There have been so many iterations of the website or the customer experience or the emails that have gone out but I really wouldn't have done it any other way. 

I think we crossed those spots when we needed to and we updated them when we needed to. 

And I think as long as you can always have the mindset of…it’s not the finish line. This is the starting line. 

And then it's just an evolution from there all the time. I think you can have success with that. 

You have to adapt. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. All right. 

So you have a website, an MVP that is good enough, and you're ready to launch. 

And how do you get those first customers? What is the go-to-market strategy? 

Nicole Jenney

So the go-to-market strategy is always like you want to nurture your social media audience. 

So we were making videos and...I don't love being on video, but the guinea pigs are great, you know, little targets on video. 

And if somebody sees a guinea pig in the first frame of a video, they're going to watch it. So we, you know, holding guinea pigs, hey, I'm here with Ginny and we're doing a cage cleaning video today. 

And people would just watch and like, and we were just getting hundreds of people every few days. 

And then we had thousands of subscribers. 

But with that, when we launched, we also did paid advertising.

We did that to an audience of people who had interest in guinea pigs and that brought in a lot of conversions. 

Though expensive, that is quite an investment to make. 

Our thoughts were if we can get them signed up for a certain amount and they stay subscribed for a while, we'll see a return on our investment eventually and that's exactly what happened. 

Chase Clymer  

I want to get into the paid side a little bit more in a second. 

But you were launching organically and you just glossed over how you were making these videos. 

So you know that your target market is people that are interested in guinea pigs or own guinea pigs. 

So… I don't know the answers everyone. Just let you know. I'm asking and I'm assuming some of this stuff. 

You are like, all right, let's make educational videos around guinea pig ownership as a way to put in the door for the content. 

How did you build that idea out? 

And then the second is like, was this just on Instagram or Instagram, TikTok? What platforms were you doing this on?

Nicole Jenney

Yeah, so at the time, this was before the iOS update too, when we could have a lot more data from people who were watching things and interacting with us. 

But mostly it was on Instagram, we were making reels. 

So like reels at the time were kind of new, but they were pushing it a lot more than static posts on social media. 

And we really didn't know what kind of content people were going to watch. We had to test a whole bunch of things. 

So it could just have been as easy as, here's something I'm feeding Ginny and she loves it, or cage cleaning videos.

The time of day mattered, how often we posted them made a difference. 

So it was a lot of trial and error for a while. But once we figured out what the algorithm wanted to see, it really took off. 

Chase Clymer  

Hey everybody, I wanted to take a few moments to talk about a partnership we’ve had at the agency for years. Electric Eye and Recharge have been partners for longer than I can remember. Recharge is our go-to solution for clients when it comes to subscriptions. 

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Chase Clymer  

When did you start to put money behind it? Now, were you putting money behind the reach of it? 

Or were you trying to retarget people to push them towards the product? 

Nicole Jenney  

Initially, it was... We were just running traffic ads to reach and a few conversion ads, but we really did start spending right away. 

And we wanted to make sure that we were seeing conversions right away. 

So along with making sure that our funnel was nurturing our audience properly, we had them from traffic ads to the website, like a landing page that had a sales page and easy conversion for that. 

We wanted to make sure our email retargeting was good and all that.

We made sure we had a pretty solid funnel before we started investing in paid traffic. But we knew it was working immediately when we turned it on because we had sales right away. 

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. 

Now, can you share any inside stuff about the budgets that you were allocating?

Nicole Jenney  

Yeah. I think when we first started, we were like $30 a day. 

And then from there, we could kind of get an idea of what our cost per acquisition was. So at the time, again, this was before the iOS update. 

And I think we were acquiring customers for like $9 to $15 per customer. So we have a couple sales. 

And when we consistently had two or three sales a day on a $30 budget, we upped it a little more and a little more and a little more until we're spending $100 to $150 a day and having conversions that way. 

But the best reach is that social media audience because it's free and it's organic. 

I went through a Starbucks drive through a couple weeks ago and someone saw my t-shirt. I have these guinea pigs as a stack of pancakes on a t-shirt. 

And they go, “Sweet shirt, where'd you get that?” I was like, “Oh, we made it.” He goes, “Yo, Casey over here has a guinea pig.” 

Like somebody knows somebody with a guinea pig. 

So even if people who see our stuff don't have one, they always tag somebody who does. 

And that's just, that's the best kind of reach that you could get paid or not paid. Just referral, referral, referral.

Chase Clymer  

And that's one of the beauties of such a niche product. 

Nicole Jenney

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. You can't take life too seriously when you work with guinea pigs all day, right? 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely not. Okay. 

So you are acquiring customers, you have paid going, it's starting to work. 

Where does it go from there? Where does it really hit the scale? 

Where do you really start to go, take a step back and be like,”Well, we really got something here”? 

Nicole Jenney

In the first month, honestly. We turned on ads. We turned on the website like the first week of January and by the end of the month we had 280 subscribers. 

So we were thinking, it'd be great if we had like 50. We'll just fill these boxes in the garage. 

You know, every great business starts like in a garage or basement. 

And so we were out there. Our first boxes, like I said, shipped in March. 

So we were kind of collecting pre-orders to see what sort of volume we would be doing and how we had to scale. 

And once we went over 100 and saw it not slowing down, we were like, oh, this is something that's going to actually, actually fly. 

Chase Clymer  

Before you launched this, before you even sold the first pre-order, were you still in your mind like, “This is a test and if it doesn't go well, like, all right, well, we can pivot?” Or... 

Nicole Jenney

Yes. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

And then how long into turning things live and saying go, did you go? We got it. 

Nicole Jenney  

Four days. 

Chase Clymer  

It was four days? 

Nicole Jenney  

I think so. We launched on a Tuesday.

And by Friday, I was like, this is work. People are signing up. They're subscribing. 

And I think as long as the trajectory continues to go as it does, we're going to see a lot of subscribers. 

So  we had 280 in our first 3 weeks of having paid ads on. 

And started in the garage and we fulfilled 2 boxes out of the garage, bursting at the seams. And by May, we had an 1100-square-foot warehouse. 

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. 

And now with this launch you were working with a coach, did she go, “Hey, hold on. This is different from a lot of these other things. 

Nicole Jenney  

She certainly did pick us out of the crowd and go, this is something really niche. 

And it was a good reminder. They say the ridges are in the niches kind of thing. 

We weren't working one-on-one per se at that time. I was just in the group following the training, attending the lives. 

And then...after we had some discussions about Shopify and graphic design things, she took a closer look and then we moved on to joining a scaling.

She has a Scale Your Box program. So we went from the launch program very quickly into the scale program because we were growing so quickly. 

It was crazy. Whirlwind. 

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. And so we're talking 3 months from ideation to validation. 

And then you're getting into scaling this business.

And this is still a pandemic going on. 

Nicole Jenney  

Yes. This is 2021. We launched officially. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. So what has happened since then? 

Things are working. Obviously, you have to get a warehouse. 

There's the growing pains of a scaling business. Do you remember anything from that time period that's worth sharing? 

Nicole Jenney  

Oh my gosh. Yeah, definitely issues with supply. And that would be something that I feel like everybody should expect to happen.

Always have a plan B with a supplier because something will fall through at the last minute or you might need a contact to get something last minute. 

You know, like just for example, our first box we printed cards with the contents that were coming in the box, and something changed and I went, “Oh my gosh, we have to reprint these cards.” 

So instead of doing that over and over again because that was an issue for a last minute change, we changed our cards to have a QR code that went to a blog post on our website. 

So then if something changed last minute, we could just update it in real time. 

So like I said, you just learn to adapt, you take these problems or these growing pains per se, and from the universe, you kind of accept it and go, this is a teaching moment.

 Like clearly there's something we can do better here. 

So certainly supply last minute was an issue in the pandemic, shipping, you know, they changed tariffs on stuff coming in from other countries, importing goods, and things got expensive.

I think some really good advice that a gentleman gave me on a plane when he heard I was an entrepreneur, he said, everything's going to take twice as long and cost twice as much, and if you can just expect that off the bat, you'll never be disappointed when it's faster or cheaper than what you thought it was going to be. 

And I always have that in the back of my mind to always have a plan B, always have a little bit of extra budget because things will change. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now, when did BunnieBox enter the picture?

Nicole Jenney  

So BunnieBox came in about a year later in March. 

And actually we launched BunnieBox quite a bit earlier as a test and it didn't really accelerate as quickly as GPigBox did, but there were a couple of reasons for that and again, teaching moment. 

So we shipped out like a box or two and then we decided we're not ready for this. 

One, we didn't own a rabbit. So we couldn't be like the experts in the space like we were for the guinea pigs.

And say, “Here's why you should buy all this stuff from us.” It's like, what do you know? You don't even have kids? 

What do you know? You don't own a rabbit. 

And just all of the push, you know, you have to move the locomotive for it to keep going. And we're still pushing the GPigBox. 

So we really couldn't expend a lot of energy that BunnieBox deserved. 

So we tried it for a month and we closed it up and we told people we would be back. And that's exactly what we did about a year later. 

Once we had all the kinks figured out, we relaunched it. 

And now it's at 50% capacity of what GPigBox does. So another learning experience. 

It wasn't the right time the first time around, but BunnieBox came in March of 2022. It launched. 

So it's been around just about a year and a half now. And it operates at 50% of GPigBox. 

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. Now, is there anything I forgot to ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?

Nicole Jenney  

Oh man, I definitely feel like fueling your passions will one, make you really happy, two, make you feel like you're never working, and three, just really drive what you're trying to do. 

Because if I woke up every day not doing something I love, it wouldn't be as easy to have my focus on it, my attention on it, and my love for it. 

And I think people really buy, they buy your why. They don't buy your what. 

You know, you can say, you can go on social media and try and sell, sell, sell all day long.

People want to see that you really care about your pets and you really care about what you're doing. 

And I think us having a passion for our pets really helped drive this and show our social media that we were very, very passionate about what we do. 

And just doing something you love doesn't feel like work. So it's a lot of fun. 

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. 

Nicole Jenney  

So have fun with it. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely, Nicole. Now, if I am an owner of a guinea pig or of a rabbit, what are the two websites I should go to?

Nicole Jenney  

So for the guinea pigs, you want to go to gpigbox, like guinea pig box.com. 

And for the bunnies, bunniebox, B-U-N-N-I-E box.com. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely, Nicole. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your knowledge. 

Nicole Jenney  

Hey, thanks for having me. 

Chase Clymer  

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.co to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!