364: 6 Figures In 10 Months With No Money Selling Ebike Kits With Claire Carpenter

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today is an extra special episode. Now I know I’ve said this about a bunch of episodes in the past, but I think this one is truly special because it’s about a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course that was in a bit of a financial pinch and really needed her business to work. Now this student’s name is Claire Conferter and she runs a site called easyfitebikekit.co.uk.

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and she sells kits that turn regular old bikes into electric bikes. And I was actually so fascinated by her product that I bought one myself, installed it this past weekend and it’s incredible. In fact, I had a lot of problems getting my son off of this bike. Anyway, what’s amazing about Claire’s story is that she didn’t have any money, but she managed to create a six figure business within 10 months and she’s nearly at a half a million bucks right now. And the main thing that’s limiting her growth is the capital for inventory. You’re going to love this episode because it’s about hustle, grit and ingenuity.

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Now before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people were not marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

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That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but any way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning.

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while also evolving in real time as their customers’ needs change. These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife.

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That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. Unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife, Quote Her Job podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have a student from my Creative Profitable Online Store course on the podcast, Claire Carpenter. And I remember Claire vividly because we hopped on a one-on-one consult immediately after she signed up and she barely had enough money to afford the course, let alone purchase her first product for sale. But we concocted a plan to start our e-commerce store with a low initial cash outlay. And today she runs a multi six figure business selling e-bike kits online.

03:27
And Claire is a perfect example of how you can succeed with a little ingenuity, persistence, and the drive to succeed. And with that, welcome to the show, Claire. How are you doing today? Hi. Good. Thanks, Steve. It’s good to be here. I’m so glad that everything has worked out. And I think it was, it’s been a bit since we talked, right? Yeah, it’s been about 10 months. We’ve been trading 10 months and you’ve been, you talked to us right at the beginning. And yeah, I’m so glad it’s worked out as well because

03:55
We were in a bit of a precarious position when we started. We really, really needed it to work out. So things are quite good at the moment. Nice. So Claire, walk me through your journey on what led you to sell these e-bike kits in the first place. First of all, what are they? And then what led you to sell them? So it’s a kit that you install on your push bike and it converts it to an electric bike. So there are essentially three parts to it. There’s a motorized wheel.

04:24
So you would take your wheel off and put our motorized wheel on. There’s a battery and then there is a little controller that you fit to your handlebars. there are various settings and things that you can control the bike from on the handlebars. And that’s it. It’s a fairly simple kit. It sounds like a pretty complicated product for someone to tackle on their first try though, right? There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s electronics, things can break, there’s support.

04:54
I know, and actually that’s one of the reasons why I really wanted to speak to you when we first started because one of your first videos, in that video, you explain various guidelines about your first product. So for example, you say, try and keep it under $200 so that it’s classed as an impulse buy. Try and keep it like a shoe box size. Try and avoid electronics because it’s complicated and it can fail and it gets out of date and so on.

05:23
And we pretty much violated every one of your guidelines. So we were really, really nervous about going to this product in the first place. And that’s why they’re just guidelines. mean, so this is what I usually tell new people because it makes things easier. There’s less things that can go wrong. But in your case, I mean, these products were cool. And I remember when we talked, do you remember how much money you had when you first started like to launch this?

05:48
Oh, God, I mean, it was hardly any. I mean, we didn’t have a fixed amount. We didn’t have any savings or anything like that that we could use. But what happened was so we went into lockdown round about March last year because of the pandemic, of course, and the income that we had at that time, I’m a speechwriter. So I had two sources of income. I’m employed part time.

06:16
as a speechwriter and that’s about two thirds of my income and then about a third is freelance. And when we went into lockdown, my freelance dried up overnight, that was just gone, that income. And then my job didn’t go initially, but I was really nervous about whether or not I was gonna be able to keep that job because my work depends on the live events industry and there was no live events industry.

06:42
Right. Yeah, so I didn’t know if I was going to have that income. And then my partner Clive, he’s a mortgage advisor. And when we went into lockdown, the housing market just ground to a halt. And so the way that he’s paid, it’s 100 % commission, but it’s paid in arrears. So he would get paid about three months after he’s done the work. So when we went into lockdown, we still had an income, but

07:10
I knew that in about two or three months down the line, Clive would have zero income. And so we were literally looking at, we were facing a cliff edge with our income in about two to three months time. So when you say how much money did we have to start, we didn’t have any savings to start, but we did have that income for a couple of months. But then we would have virtually nothing after that. That is scary. Did that come out when we talked one on one? I don’t remember that part of the story. That’s scary.

07:40
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I was really, really frightened. But actually what happened is that in the event, I didn’t lose my job. They kept me on. that was really great. And actually, I’m still doing that job part time. So that was fantastic. But the situation that we were in, it was really terrifying. And I was really scared as well, because, you know, normally, if you’re in a normal circumstance, and you have to leave your job for one reason or whatever, then you can just go and find another job.

08:07
But our economy was just shutting down. I thought, well, you know, if Clive’s income is disappearing, then what on earth are we going to do? So it, it was really, really scary. So I just sat there and I Googled how to make money online and all sorts of rubbish comes up as you can imagine. amongst that rubbish was your course. And that really, really appealed to me, really appealed a lot. And, know, one of the reasons why it appealed to me was because

08:36
You were talking about selling products. Now I was used to selling myself as a speechwriter. You have to put in a lot of hard work to sell yourself as a speechwriter, but once you’ve done the selling, once you’ve got a sale, then you have to write the speech. So what you were saying was just, yes, you have to put in a lot of effort to sell a product, but once you’ve sold the product, then you’re done. You don’t have to do anything after that. So that really, really appealed to me.

09:05
as well as, you know, the things like staying at home and… You also said actually that you didn’t need a huge amount of startup and obviously that appealed to me as well. So to sell what you had to sell would normally require more startup, but then I really like how you actually launched your product. Actually, before we can get into the guts of, you know, how you launched, were there any other ideas you were considering at the time?

09:30
Yeah, we had no clue what product to sell. At that point, when we first started, I didn’t even know that this product existed. So I bought your course, and that was an investment. I just thought, God, we’ve got sort two or three months worth of income before our income stops. Do I really want to spend some of that money on a course? What if it doesn’t work? Right. But anyway, we decided, oh, go ahead. We went with the course.

09:58
And I just followed your steps. you know, using jungle scouts and I think there are a couple of other tools. can’t remember now how to find a product. And we, we just talked nonstop about what product could we sell? Every time we sat down for a meal with the kids, you know, we would ask them what products should we sell? We’re driving them mad. Driving ourselves mad.

10:24
But we put a deadline. remember putting a deadline. think what I said to myself is I would pay for one month’s worth of jungle scouts. And by the end of that month, we have to have a product. And I was looking at things. I was looking at things that I’m kind of interested in because I thought it would be easier to sell if it’s a product that I’m interested in. So I was looking at, you know, maybe fitness products and nutrition and was looking at like cooking.

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things, you know, all sorts of things. I was looking at all sorts of things. Anyway, one day I was sitting there just going through the process, like it says on your course. And I came across this product and it’s the second I saw it, I just thought, oh my God, this is it. It is a very cool product. Yeah. And it’s expensive to source. So how did you get the capital necessary to start selling these? What was the process like?

11:21
Yeah, so we didn’t have enough money to buy the products to begin with. So we thought, well, we’re just going to have to build the website and try and get some orders. we built the website. I’d already built a website for my speech writing business. So I knew a guy on one of these freelance websites based over in India. So he built a very simple website for us on WooCommerce. And I thought, OK, we wrote a couple of

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Google Ads and we thought we’ll just see how it goes. I’ve got no idea whether or not it was going to work. Right. But we switched the ads on and in the first 20 minutes we had three or four phone calls. So I thought, oh my God, we’re just not ready. It’s quick to switch it off again. We’re not ready. I’m not sure we didn’t. Yeah, we had actually

12:16
We’d found the product that we wanted to buy, but we hadn’t bought it at this point, nevermind tested it or anything else. So then at this point, then we sort of gathered our senses together. We really, really got to know the factory, you know, the manufacturers. We spoke to them a lot, or my partner Clive really, really spoke to them a lot to just get to grips with the product, how it worked so that he could answer any questions.

12:45
And this is before you even saw the product though, right? But did you say before we saw or before you touched the product? We hadn’t seen the product. hadn’t seen the product. Listen, this is one of the things that I found really difficult to begin with is that we didn’t have the time to get a test product sent to us. So we had to go on faith. Interesting. And that was really, really scary. Really scary. How did you, I remember

13:15
I remember talking about this with you. How did you find that supplier in the first place? We just looked on Alibaba. On Alibaba, okay. All right, so you ran ads, you got phone calls, and this is something I also wanted to emphasize. You actually talked to your customers via voice, right? Yeah, we talked to them a lot. So it’s quite an expensive product. And what we found is that the customers just maybe needed a little bit of a nudge or a hand holding, just…

13:44
just to make that final decision to buy. And that was fine, we were willing to do it. This is one thing I should say actually, when we were deciding that this was the product that we wanted to sell, I did have a look at the competition in the UK. And like you said, there were a lot of people selling complicated kits. I mean, really complicated. were like, you know, it looked like about 20 different parts, wires sticking out all over the place and, you know, it was really, complicated.

14:12
There was one other company in particular that I thought would be our main competition and they had a streamlined, relatively simple kit, which is what ours was. It’s not the exact same kit, but it’s similar. But on their website, although they had done loads of things really good, they looked quite slick. They’d been featured on national media several times, all sorts of things. If you looked at the reviews, people said their customer service was appalling.

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and it was really difficult to get hold of them. They never answered their phones, never answered emails. And we thought, that’s our angle, that’s where we can really show a difference. That was our USP, is that our customer service was going to be good. And it’s one of Clive’s real bugbears, is that whenever you buy anything online, you just can’t get hold of anybody. And it really, really frustrates me. He’s quite old school. And he said, I don’t want to be that company. want to be, we’re people.

15:10
let’s put our phone number all over the website. And we do, and we answer the phone as well. I was just going to say that’s probably the wisest thing that you did. Because for an expensive product, were like, people want to talk to somebody. And also, whenever you’re shopping online, you should always have your phone number on there, just for peace of mind and trust, if anything. Like even if people don’t end up calling you, it’s good to just have that number up there.

15:35
I think so because it just is transparency, isn’t it? It just shows that you’re there, just that you’re a person. And actually, one of the things that I really love and makes me feel really good is that if you look at our reviews, and we’ve probably got about 140 reviews up there now, loads of them talk about our customer service. And in fact, a lot of them mention us by name. And that just makes me feel really good. I’m really pleased about that.

16:00
So you run Google AdWords, you get some phone calls. Can you walk me through what some of these initial conversations were like? Did you tell them you didn’t have the product or how did you sell them on it? Or pre-sell them, I should say. Well, we had to tell them we didn’t have the product in stock because they were going to have to wait eight weeks. Right. So pretend I’m calling you right now and say, I want one of these e-bike kits right now. And I have a whole bunch of questions. Were you just answering their questions? We were just answering their questions. A lot of their questions were just about the product.

16:29
I don’t think I was ever asked directly, have you used the product? Because I would have found that very difficult if I had. wouldn’t have lied. But I don’t think I was asked directly. I think we could just confidently say that the product was good and was going to work for them. we just had every fingers and toes crossed. Oh, but one thing Clive did do actually.

16:58
One thing that our supplier did, which he probably shouldn’t have done, was he did give us the name and phone number of another person in the UK who had bought a few of these kits, not many, but he’d bought a few. So Clive phoned that chap and just asked him about the kits. Didn’t say that we were planning on selling it ourselves, but just said, you know, how have you found it? Right. And he was very promising about it. So that gave us that gave us reassurance. And he

17:26
I mean, he, Clive talked a lot to these manufacturers, you know, every day, just a constant stream of techs back and forth to these guys. And so we kind of built up trust. I do remember one thing that you said in our conversation, Steve, you said, don’t trust anybody. But in those early days, we had to trust, we had no choice. You know, we just had to trust everybody.

17:51
So yeah, I mean, but it was scary. I’ll tell you something good did happen to us though. that is so fair. So we did take some back orders, we did, but even then, you know, there was like, let’s say we took three orders on the first day. That comes to about say $2,000. I mean, it’s in pounds, but I’m just sort of converting in my head. It was about $2,000.

18:16
Well, we can’t go to this manufacturer and say we want to buy $2,000 worth of kits. It’s not enough. So we had to wait time before our sales built up, before we were in a position. But of course, every day that goes by is another day that the customer is waiting for their kit. that was really difficult. But one thing, one stroke of luck we had was that the UK government brought out

18:44
some help, some financial help for small businesses because of coronavirus. So it was called the bounce back loan. And it was a loan that you could get. It was backed by the government, which meant they didn’t do all the usual, know, the usual due diligence that a bank would give you before lending. know, if you, if you want to go for it, if you want to get a loan from, from your bank, you need to, from, for a business loan, you need to be operating for two or three years usually.

19:13
And you need to have accounts, published accounts, all those kinds of things. Well, we didn’t have that. But I was eligible for the bounce back loan because because my speech write my freelance speech writing was a limited company in the UK. It meant I was eligible for this bounce back loan. And it wasn’t big, but it was enough combined with some of our pre orders that we could put in an order quite fairly early on. What was the minimum order quantity? I’m just kind of curious.

19:40
I think we ordered 20 kits at the beginning. 20 kits. Okay, wow. Okay, so that’s a decent amount of money, given how expensive they are. Yeah, and it’s also quite a lot of money when you haven’t even seen a kit. Right. Okay, so you bought 20 without even seeing a kit. Wow. Okay. Yes, that’s definitely not something I would have recommended in the class. I would have but hey, it worked out. So great power to you. Not only not only have we not seen a kit, we didn’t

20:08
get them quality controlled and we didn’t have any insurance. Okay, so real quick, when you pre-sold those first orders, did you just tell them upfront that the kits wouldn’t arrive for like another eight weeks? Oh yeah, we did, yeah, definitely. That was a really big thing is that we just wanted to be completely upfront and honest with them so that they knew. And what we had to do actually with those initial people, we gave them quite a big discount because what we said to them was, look,

20:36
You know that we’re a new company because there’s no reviews, there’s nothing on our website and you’re going to have to wait eight weeks for your kit. So you’re taking a real big leap of faith. So we’re going to give you a big discount. So we did. So we set up Klaviyo on our website and if they signed up, then the first email that we gave them was a hundred pounds off the kit.

21:00
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

21:29
Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

21:58
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. Nice, nice. And that’s great. And you talk to these people on the phone so they feel comfortable ordering with you, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyway, if you guys are listening, anyone who’s listening to this, that’s very important. Like if you can establish any sort of relationship with your customer, especially for a big ticket item, that’s very important.

22:25
Okay, so let’s talk about this first shipment of 20 when you first got them. And it was sight unseen, right? So did you have any problems with any of those first 20? Oh, my God. We did. Oh, God. Right. So the shipment was a right was due to arrive, but the date kept being delayed and delayed and delayed. And we, we haven’t been on holiday for several years. But we decide because we’ve been getting these sales in, we had a little bit money, we’ve gone through this really, really stressful period.

22:54
And we thought, look, we’re just going to take the kids and have four or five days in really lovely part of the UK called Cornwall. It’s about 300 miles from our home. And we timed it so that it would be after the kits had arrived, so that we would have been able to deal with them, send them out to the customers. We could tell that it would be in a quiet lull in the business that we could go on this holiday. Well, then the shipment was delayed and delayed. we could tell.

23:24
Finally, we got the final date that it was going to arrive and it was right bang in the middle of our holiday. So we thought, that’s easy enough. We’ll just change the address and get them delivered. Clive went and found this third party fulfillment fairly close to us. And we thought we would just change the address. Well, it was an absolute nightmare getting through to UPS because of the pandemic. I don’t know why they just couldn’t take phone calls, but.

23:51
Anyway, it was hellish getting through. eventually got through and they said, okay, don’t worry. We’ll change the address. But they actually didn’t do it correctly. They put the new address label on, but they kind of put it on some of the kits. They put it on half, it half covered the label. So a lot of the kits went to…

24:14
our home address, of course we weren’t there, so then it went back to UPS and it just kept bouncing back and forth from the UPS to our home. But a few of the kits did go to the warehouse and we, to our third party fulfillment, and we asked them, can you ship one of the kits down to where we are in Cornwall? And so they did that and we went and we couldn’t take our own bikes to where we were on holiday. So we went and hired a bike and we installed the kit.

24:44
And it was, it was just horrendous. was just awful. Did the kit work? No. Oh, it didn’t work. Oh my goodness. Okay. It kind of worked, but it didn’t work properly. Like it didn’t fit properly. It was rubbing. It didn’t go smoothly. And it made this really high pitched noise when you were cycling and it just didn’t, you know, the power wasn’t kicking in properly when it was supposed to. And it was just horrendous. So, so then Clive had to uninstall the kit. We had to get the bike back to

25:13
to the place where, you know, the bike hire place. that night, I just remember that night so clearly with just the two of us were just lying there in bed, you know, in the pitch dark with our eyes wide open and sweat trickling down. no. Oh, it was horrific, Steve. It’s just horrendous because, you know, we’d spent two months by that point taking a lot of money, you know, a lot of orders. Right. And the money that we’d got was not in our bank account. would use that to buy more stock.

25:44
more of these kits that we thought didn’t work. It was just, was so, I just can’t tell you how stressful it was. But then we went home after the holiday and we put the kit onto our own bike and it worked absolutely perfectly. So I don’t know what happened now. I don’t know whether it was this rickety old bike that we’d hired or what it was. I don’t know. But by the time we got home and it worked on our kit, then I thought, okay, that’s not too bad.

26:13
And then we started getting phone calls from the guys, our customers who had got the kit saying, oh, it’s fantastic. We love it. And then we started, you know, the reviews started trickling in and we just started to breathe again and it was okay. And actually the product is fantastic. We just, don’t know what that was, whether it, I don’t know what it was, but that first one, but anyway, all’s well now. you, so all 20 units were fine that you got? All 20 units were fine. Yeah. Wow.

26:42
That’s amazing. Okay. So how soon did you deliver? Actually, I’ll tell you what, no, something did happen. You know, I said half the kits turned up and half of them didn’t. You know, the ones that didn’t turn up, they never did turn up ever. We never got there. And we chased down UPS, we chased down the forwarder that sent them, we chased down everybody. They never did turn up. And in the end, the manufacturer ended up swallowing the cost of that.

27:11
because we paid the manufacturer for shipment as well. So they were responsible for that. that means some of your customers didn’t get their product? They didn’t get the product when they were supposed to, but by that time we’d already ordered another shipment. like two or three weeks later, the next shipment came. But I do remember at the time, you know, we’d been promising the customers that they would get it on a certain day. And of course they, and it was, they’d waited a long time already. mean, two months is a long time to wait for a product.

27:41
and they were going to have to wait, I don’t know how much, maybe three weeks more or something like that. But I remember phoning everybody around personally and just explaining what it was. most people were okay about it. They didn’t love it, but I think they appreciated the phone call. Oh, absolutely. I would probably be fine if the company actually phoned me, which is very rare today, if you think about it, right?

28:07
It is, it is. I think it is rare. Yeah, but we were in a position where we could, you know, we weren’t talking about huge numbers here. Right. We could so we did. So did some of your customers get their product within two months? Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. So the product worked well. And this is a complicated thing, right? I’m looking at it in the installation process. Did you have any headaches there helping people even get their units installed? Yeah, we have had some some headaches. I mean, the reason why we chose this particular product and there are there are there are different

28:37
types of kits out there, but we chose this one because it probably is one of the easiest on the market to install. But even so, yes, there are, some people do have issues. Occasionally it doesn’t fit somebody’s bike, in which case we just pick it up from them and give them a full refund, that’s fine. But sometimes it just needs a bit of an extra helping hand. So what we did after a while was we clived.

29:00
installed a kit and we recorded him doing it and he spoke as well while he was doing it. Basically we made a step-by-step installation video and we send that around to everybody now and they really like that video, it’s really good for them. So that solved most issues. Occasionally we still have an issue and of course because it’s an electronic product, you do occasionally get faulty parts but very luckily Clive’s got an engineering background.

29:29
Okay. Okay. If we didn’t have that between us, then I think we’d, you know, we wouldn’t be able to do this, I don’t think. So I am curious, though, on the if someone wants to make a return, these are these are heavy units, aren’t they? Yes. So are they shipping it back? Or I mean, would you lose money if someone returned it? Yes, we do lose money. But but not too much. We one of the reasons why we went to this third party fulfillment is because they get a really good deal.

29:58
on using a courier, you know, they get it much cheaper, they almost pay for themselves because of the discount that they get on the shipping. So I think it costs costs us 10 pounds. So what’s that maybe 1314 dollars or something to collect a kit from somebody. That’s actually really inexpensive. Yeah. How heavy are these units? I’m just kind of curious. It’s got to be like over 10 pounds, right?

30:28
Yes. Seven kilograms. Seven kilograms. Okay. So about 15 something, 15 to 20 pounds, right? Yeah. Okay. Can we talk about the 3PL? I know this is Clive’s department here. How did you find someone that you wanted to work with? Was that a long process in itself? No, it wasn’t a long process. If it had been me finding it, it would have been a long process. that

30:52
it was Clive. he did think if it involves picking up a phone and speaking to people, then Clive will do it in a flash. I was thinking, I think it’d be a good idea if we use a fulfillment place because we haven’t really got the space and I just thought it was going to be a lot easier. And so I said to Clive, right, I’m going to go and watch Steve’s video. He’s got advice on there about how to find the right one.

31:20
all the rest of it. So I went off and did a few things and I came back and he said, found it. And he just, he just Googled third party fulfillment and just phoned about a dozen of them. And the one that he found was about maybe half an hour’s drive away from us. So that was really good. They were cheap. And on top of that, just by chance, the guy that run it is a bike enthusiast. Yeah. And that was really, really helpful because actually we did need him to do some stuff to the kits.

31:50
He does modify the kit slightly. And so he could do he does that. Yeah. So what do you actually get most of your sales today? Do you still have those AdWords ads running? Yes, we do. So I would say, well, I gonna say 100%. But it come from Google Ads, but it’s not 100 % anymore, because we do get quite a lot of referrals. Right. And then you also have email marketing, right? Oh, yeah, we have email marketing as well. Yeah. I am curious. It’s actually

32:18
kind of rare that you just turn on Google ads and they just start converting at a profit right away. What was your experience with it? Yeah, it just worked really, really well. I think it’s to do with the product, actually. I mean, it’s quite a specific product. And if somebody is typing in e-bike converter kits, you don’t get millions of

32:47
you get the same names coming up again and again. and, and, you know, I think we, we’ve got a really good proposition because like I said, these other people, for some reason, they just are not good at customer service. And when you’re spending that much money, people do like good customer service. Are you still answering all the phones yourself or do you have people to help you now? No, we do it all ourselves. Okay. So does the phone, is that how you spend a lot of the time then?

33:15
doing pre-sales or sales? I wouldn’t say we do it a lot of the time. I mean, we maybe get, I don’t know, I don’t know, maybe a dozen or two calls a day and emails, quite a lot of people prefer to email than call. Okay. So yeah, I maybe an hour or two on emails a day. I mean, I think at this point, you’re pretty established on, you have all those reviews, people probably feel more comfortable just buying without even talking to you, I would imagine, right? Yeah, definitely, definitely.

33:45
So are there any other hiccups that you can think of just selling like an electronic part with so many moving parts? Do you do quality control now or do you depend on the manufacturer? Like have you had any, what percentage of your units have any sort of flaw to them? Yeah, about 5 % I think. Okay. And actually Clive has started doing repairs now. So there’s a year warranty that the manufacturer gives and they’re pretty good at honoring that. You we haven’t had any…

34:14
problem with them. what happens is the next time we place an order with them, they just put in extras for us, or maybe they just lower the price slightly so it accounts for the faults. But there are some faults, like within the motor, for example, that it’s quite, I was going to say it’s easy to fix. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy for me or anyone without an engineering background to fix, but it is something that Clive can do.

34:42
let’s say something goes wrong with the motor, then we’ll pick up the wheel from a customer. Clive will just put a new rotor in it or whatever it is he does with his spanner and screw driver and then send it back out to the customer. And it’s a lot easier and quicker than, you know, having to wait for the next shipment of goods to come in. Right. Nice. So are you at this point, are you still taking pre-orders or

35:10
Do people, oh, you still taking pre-orders? So there’s still a two month lead time? No, it’s not two months. We’re better than that now. And there are there have been times when we’ve got kits in stock. And as soon as we do have them in stock, you know, they just they just fly out the door. but we probably place a new order once every two to three weeks. OK, yeah. Nice. We found we found it easier. We got some more funding. We use ClearBank.

35:39
for funding, which are really good because ClearBank, what they do is they don’t look at you as an individual, they don’t look at how long you’ve been trading, they don’t look at anything like that. All they do is they connect to the back end of your store. So they see the sales and then they give you an offer of how much they can lend to you.

36:01
Yeah, they’re quite expensive. It’s an expensive way to borrow money, but they’ve been good for us. And I like the way that you repay the loan as well. And that is that you literally do it by how many sales you make that day. So if you don’t make any sales in one day, then you don’t pay any money back to ClearBank. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there’s actually several of those companies out now. Yeah. And these are short term loans anyways, right? We’re talking like a couple months or whatnot, right?

36:27
Yeah, exactly. exactly. And that’s that’s helped us. It’s helped us get to a certain level where people don’t have to wait two months anymore. They may have to wait, I don’t know, maybe three or four weeks. Something like that. One thing I have found is that because we’re still new to this and because we haven’t done a full year of trading yet, we have been caught out sometimes. Like I was I know this sounds crazy, but we were caught out for Christmas. You know, I suddenly thought in October, the middle of October. Oh, gosh.

36:58
shouldn’t we have lots of stock for Christmas? You know, scrabble together to do that and, you know, to get an order in time for Christmas. And so we’ve been caught out a little bit, but at least now it’s not, we’re not at the point where we have to wait for somebody to order before we can place an order with the manufacturer. You know, we’re ahead of schedule a little bit. We’re just not at the point where.

37:26
we can hold lots of stock ourselves. Right. Let me ask you this. I mean, you basically learned a lot as you did things. What would you do differently today if you were to just start all over again? Well, that’s interesting, because what I would love to say is have the funds to buy the stock. But if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it. Right. So, you know, I mean, that’s that’s a sort of, you know,

37:55
very wand type situation. I could have the perfect ideal situation, then that’s what I would say have the money to buy stock upfront. Regardless of that, what would I do differently? Cloud might disagree with me here because it did all work out in the end, but I’m not sure it was worth the stress of not having insurance and not having a quality check. So that was just a monetary thing, right? At the time? Yeah.

38:24
Right, because if you had the money, you would have done all these things. that? Well, we yeah, we would have done all these things. mean, yeah, we Clive and I have got a slightly different risk profile. I’m definitely a lot more cautious, whereas he’s sort of, know, just trust it will work out. We would we would have addressed the balance a little bit, I think, if we could, you know, if we could have done. Let me ask you this. What would you say is the hardest part about getting started? Was it the tech?

38:53
Was it the sourcing? Was it getting customers? What were your struggles? It wasn’t getting customers because Google AdWords did that for us. So that worked really well. The tech, I did find the tech quite frustrating actually. And it’s funny watching your videos, you know, when you talk about getting hooked up, getting linked up with Klaviyo, getting that installed or, you know, getting a review platform installed. I mean, these things should take somebody half an hour to do. They would take me three or four days.

39:22
And so I really, really struggled with the tech. That was tricky. we did, I I outsourced, but even with outsourcing, I found it difficult because there’s still some things that you have to do yourself. Right. Like write the email sequences and that sort of thing. Yeah, the writing I didn’t find too bad. I mean, I write for a living. That’s true. So I thought that was OK. One thing that I did find was good was that I used to put fake deadlines in place.

39:53
because if you don’t do that, things just can take forever. So I would just put these deadlines and say, like for example, writing the email chain, I think I said to myself, you’ve got half a day to write 10 emails, something like that. And if I didn’t put the deadline in, I’d spend forever trying to refine them or make them extra perfect or find the…

40:22
find a better picture for it or anything, I don’t think it’s worth it because you can spend so much more time just to maybe get it 5 % better. And we weren’t at that stage, we just had to get money in. Remember we had this cliff edge facing us, know, Clive’s salary disappearing. that wasn’t a fake deadline, that was a real deadline. Can we talk about your email sequences? Do you get a lot of repeat business or is it?

40:49
just the primary unit that you sell? Because I noticed there’s accessories and stuff now on your website. Yeah, we do get some repeat business because let’s say somebody buys a kit, then not repeat business for them, because most people just put it on one bike. Once in a blue moon, I think we’ve had somebody who’s maybe got two bikes, they put it on, but very often they’ll come back and maybe somebody in their family, know, their partner, their wife, they say, you know,

41:18
I got a kit for my wife two months ago and it’s fantastic. And now I can’t keep up with her. I need one for my bike. So they’ll do that. Or we get people who are maybe part of a cycling club. So they get a kit on their bike and then suddenly you’ll get two or three referrals from there. Other people see them and like it. So we get that quite a lot, which is good. And I know it’s only been 10 months so far, but what are your plans for this year in terms of

41:48
making changes to make the business better. Well, then we’ve got a couple of things. One of them is I would like to get a YouTube channel going. We’ve got a couple of videos up there, but not very much at the moment, but that’s the channel that I would like to use to try and get some organic traffic going. Nice. Yeah. So that’s one thing I’d like to do. I would like to maybe look at getting some more accessories because I think once people have got that trust in you,

42:13
then they’re willing to buy other things. And with cycling, there are some quite nice accessories that you can get. People like to sort of spend money on that type of thing. So that’s another thing. And one thing that we are thinking of, I’m not sure we’re quite ready with this yet, but it’s seasonal. we definitely have noticed that our sales dropped in winter and they’ve picked up again now in spring, is the weather’s getting better. And so we’ve been looking at other countries.

42:42
to try and even out that sales, you know, the sort of graph of sales. And I quite like the look of maybe South Africa or Australia, something like that. Those countries, their summer is when our winter is. it could even out. We did think about America, but like I said, our insurance company, we’ve now got insurance, product insurance, and they will insure us everywhere in the world apart from America and Canada, because it’s…

43:11
That’s interesting that you can’t get insurance for this in America. I don’t know if it’s because you’re more litigious over there. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s the understatement of the century. Yeah. So for anyone who’s listening to this, who can’t find a product to sell or is having problems finding a product to sell, how long did that process take you? And when you were thinking about value props, what was going on through your head? Like how many products did you go through? Like how long was the process for you to just even figure out what to sell?

43:41
Well, it probably took about three weeks, but remember, we really, really had this big deadline. We had the deadline looming over anyway, three months down the line, most of our household income was going to stop. And then I imposed another sort of interim deadline that we had to have a product by a certain date. I think I gave myself a month to do it.

44:10
But we just thought about it nonstop, nonstop. We talked about so many different things. I just went through the process on your video. I wouldn’t have known what to do otherwise. And that was really, really good. But I think it’s important as well to look at the competition. Look what else is out there and see what angle can you. So you don’t want to be selling the same stuff that other people are doing. You have to come in with a

44:39
with a unique angle, I think. definitely. And so for us, seeing where seeing that other people were falling down on the customer service, well, that’s just an easy thing that you can do. And it sounds like something you excel in, quite frankly. thank you. Do you have any other advice for just people who are kind of waiting on the sidelines, kind of debating whether to get into business or not?

45:04
Yeah, buy your course and just follow your videos. Yeah, think, think, really, I mean, this, this, this just, it sounds like such a simple thing to say. And I know from experience, isn’t, but you just absolutely have to take action. You have, and if you set these deadlines for yourself, don’t let those deadlines slip, just follow them. If you give yourself a month to find a product, for example, then stick to that.

45:32
And even if it’s not the right product, at least you’re getting going, at least you’re doing something. So if this product hadn’t worked out for us, the entire process of designing the website for it, of writing the emails, getting connected up to Klaviyo, that’s just huge learning experience that you just don’t get when you’re just watching the videos. So you have to take that action and go for it. And we were just really, really lucky that it did work with this one product.

46:02
But if it hadn’t, the amount that we would have learned going through that process in the early months would have been invaluable. And I’ve got absolutely no doubt that eventually we would have come across the product that did work for us. So that’s what have to do. If you’re standing on the sidelines, get off the sidelines, get on the pitch and start playing. And I will say this is, you know, we had a chance to speak one-on-one via Zoom and there was something about you I can just tell from talking to people within like the first five minutes, like that drive.

46:32
or it could have been desperation, who knows, but that drive was there. And I had a good feeling about you as soon as we got off our conversation. So, and I’m very glad it all worked out for you. Oh, wow. That’s really good to hear. Thank you. Thank you, The vibe isn’t bad either. He’s not bad. He’s not bad. I really have to say a massive thank you to you because honestly, if this hadn’t worked, then I don’t know what would happen to us.

46:58
So thank you because it’s work because of you and what you’ve taught us. So thank you. Yours is one of those products that I think has broad-based appeal. Do you ship to the US also? Oh no, you don’t right now, right? Yeah, I’m too nervous without insurance. But if anyone is in the UK right now, can you just tell us what the URL of your website is? Yeah, it’s easyfitebikekits.co.uk

47:28
It’s a bit of a mouthful. Actually, that’s probably one thing we I’m not 100 % convinced we did the right thing because the URL is a mouthful actually. Actually, do you want to spell that because I know easy isn’t spelled as what you would expect, right? Yeah, so it’s easy with an I so it’s E-A-S-I-F-I-T-E-B-I-K-E-K-I-T.co.uk. Easy fit e-bike kit. Yep. It is a very cool product.

47:57
And I’ve actually, so we have these bikes around where we live where you can rent them and bike around. And I think it would just be amazing to just have one of these kits. And it’s reasonably priced. was just looking on the website. I encourage everyone who’s listening, especially if you’re in the UK. Do you ship anywhere outside the UK? Yes, we can ship anywhere outside the UK except for America and Canada. We’ll have to get that rectified because I actually definitely want one of these. So, okay. Cool.

48:26
But thanks a lot for coming on the show and sharing your story. It’s going to be inspiring to a whole bunch of people who are on the sidelines debating right now whether to start their business. You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much.

48:40
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now I know a lot of you out there love listening to stories about successful students in my course. So if you want to hear more, simply go to mywifequitterjob.com slash category slash podcast where I’ve organized every single episode for you. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 364. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign.

49:09
basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

49:36
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash div. Now when I talk about how I these tools on my blog, if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.