Beach Bath Bomb

We created a monthly bath bomb delivery service from its inception to mailing our first box to our first customer in just 30 days, and for only about $600 in cost. Bath Bombs contain an element of popularity in current culture that I was hoping to use for some viral content on social media. When we started running the cost of things, it quickly became apparent that hiring the help we needed would be the most expensive part of starting. So we decided to do what could on our own to get the ball rolling. We focused heavily on the lean startup idea, that we just needed to get the product out here and develop it as we go.

We grabbed a Cratejoy site and started tinkering away on a template. It was quick to start up (although what we slapped together is low quality). It was always our plan to get it done right as soon as possible, and it looks like that time is now. We use Google Analytics to track traffic because Cratejoy has a limited function for it. I recognize that the shortfalls of many subscription boxes lie in poor margins and difficulty to scale, and I wanted to take extra steps to ensure we could avoid those. From the beginning, I wanted to make sure that what we were doing could work for a thousand subscribers and not just for fifty. 

Continue reading this write up at https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/4rlaiy/how_we_took_a_subscription_box_from_first_idea_to/

Costs:

Total Design-$600

CrateJoy-$29.99monthly

Instagress-$9.99monthly

Facebook Ads-$300

Twitter Ad Spots-$540

Instagram Ad Spots-$250

Community Size:

Instagram-3485

Twitter-1500

The Box

I couldn’t be happier with the product we have created, and I believe there is real value to it. We started with an idea to create sixty boxes, each containing the same six scents, for our June release. We wanted six different scents each month, that we then themed after beaches from around the world.

Although we’re still in the red from startup costs, we’ve done well so far. We’re hoping to accelerate our customer acquisition so this can turn from beer money to actual profit. We’ve had good success. I know doing this lean has cost us on customers, but it made starting practical from a financial perspective. Now that we have sales and the money is starting to roll (our idea is validated), we can afford to optimize and expand what we’re doing.

The Instagram

Built with an Instagress bot, paid shoutouts, and giveaways to bloggers. The Instagram account is the pride and joy of this project. Everything went right with it. Strong growth, great interaction, dozens of DM's, plenty of comments, and just great buzz about Beach Bath Bomb. Instagram easily supplies most of the traffic for BBB on a regular day. It also forced us to get much MUCH better at taking pictures so that we could have a regular source of content to post. The only thing I would do differently is start the much earlier than we did, time+content= great growth.

The Twitter

Built initially with the basic follow/unfollow method for establishing a small free audience. I began buying ad spots from Twitter influencers to push my advertisements out across popular accounts. Typically this cost around $18 per 100k impressions. Paired with giveaways to give some organic legs, these tweets would do quite well and snag a great deal of attention and followers. Unfortunately, converting from the tweet->to the Twitter account-> to the webpage-> to purchasing often proved to be a difficult conversion rate. The Twitter account has quickly grown into a strong source of traffic for the site.