Felix: Today, I'm joined by Jessica Yasuda from Chasing Planner Peace, which sells a range of refillable customizable planners with the widest range of planner refills that started in 2015 in Hobart, Tasmania Australia. Welcome, Jessica.

Jessica: Thanks for having me on. I'm really exited to be here.

Felix: Yes, I want to talk about where the idea behind this business came from because you mentioned to us it came out of frustration. Tell us what you were trying to do and how this gave you an idea to start a business.

Jessica: Okay. About six years ago, I fell into planning as a hobby. There's a huge community of people who love using their planners as a memory keeping or scrap booking type hobby. Decorating it with stickers, washy tape, and making it beautiful as well as helping keep yourself organized. At the time, I was using a Filofax planner, which is a ring planner where you can take the pages in and out. I was buying a lot of downloadable printable planner refills from Etsy and printing them out at home because the paper that comes with your Filofax is pretty thin and boring. A lot of people like to take it out and put something a little bit more creative inside. I was so frustrated with these printable downloadable inserts because they were so hard to print at home, I would waste so much paper, so much ink on my computer, and I couldn't find a layout that actually worked for me either. I ended up saying to myself, "I'm actually just going to sit down and design my own layout. I'm going to design my own perfect planner inserts just for my own use."

Jessica: I spent ages and ages doing this. Then, I thought, "You know what? I'm just going to put it up on Etsy, I'm just going to open up an Etsy shop, I'm just going to put them up there, and just see if anyone wants to buy them." That is exactly how Chasing Planner Peace started just out of my own frustration.

Felix: Very cool. Did it surprise you that no one had designed a better solution for this issue that you were facing?

Jessica: Well, I'm based in Australia. There was one other company that was doing these planner inserts that you could buy already printed. There's lots of people in the United States that do it, but postage to Australia from the United States is just really expensive. I guess I was surprised that no one else was really doing it in Australia. I could see that a lot of people were doing it overseas. I'm still only one of a handful of people that do it in Australia. There's still not many people here that do it, the planner inserts.

Felix: Right. Did you notice anything different about your mark in Australia that was different about the kind of products, the kind of needs that your local market in Australia needed that was different than what's more popular around the world?

Jessica: I guess the good thing about Australia is our planner community is very active on Facebook. We have a group called Planner Addicts Australia that has I think maybe around 10 thousand members. I'm very active in that group every day and I've come to know a lot of the other people in that group. I think what's been really good is that through interacting with other people, like minded people, I've been able to figure out what people would like and what products people want to see.

Felix: Right, that makes sense. When you put it on Etsy, that was the first step towards doing it. What made you feel like doing that? Did you always have this idea that you wanted to own a business some day? What gave an inkling to say let me try putting this online?

Jessica: Well, I had always wanted to own a business, but I didn't think this was going to end up being my business. A lot of planner sticker sellers, so people who sell stickers specifically for you planner, have Etsy shops. I used to shop a lot on Etsy anyway. Starting an Etsy shop is super easy. I think it took me about half an hour, I did the most terrible basic job of it, I did my logo in Microsoft Paint because at that time, I didn't use any graphic design software. I took my photo of my planner inserts on my coffee table at 9:00 o'clock at night with the light on. It was the worst picture ever, I'm so surprised that anyone even bought my product at all. That still just baffles me that anyone even bought my product. I've come a long way since then. Etsy's really easy to start a business on. You can start a business with one product, a logo that you've done in Paint, and you can still get sales.

Felix: Like you're saying, I think a lot of people will encounter the situation where they're like I don't have the right software, I only got Paint, I don't have Photoshop, I don't know how to use it, I don't have a studio to take photos. That's where their aspirations end. They face this obstacle and like well, I can't go any further because I don't have the right tools. You went for it anyway. The first question I want to ask about this is, what gave you the confidence to say let me just do this anyway even though I don't have the perfect situation?

Jessica: I don't know. That is how I have done everything. I have just gone, "I don't know how to do it, but I'm just going to have a crack anyway." I'm a big believer in progress over perfection. If I had waited to have beautiful photos, a perfect logo, a beautifully designed website, I probably would have never started. Sometimes, you need to get out there and do it to see if anyone is actually interested in what you're selling anyway. The whole way through, I have just gone with just do it. It doesn't have to be perfect, just get it done.

Felix: Right. What do you think made people buy your first products even though you didn't have the best photos to take or best logo? What do you think was it that still was convincing?

Jessica: I really don't know, but I think it might have had something to do with the fact that my products were priced way too cheaply. I was also really willing to take on custom work. I don't take on any custom work anymore, but at that time, people were like, "I see you've got these planner inserts, could you design me something that works for me?" I was like, "Sure, I would love to do that." I actually became quite busy just taking on custom work in that first year. Some of those designs have actually gone on to be our best sellers. It was probably a good way to get started even though it wasn't really worth my time in terms of how much I was getting paid for it. It was probably really worthwhile in terms of growing the business, getting my name out there, and getting more products in my shop.

Felix: Got it. You took on custom work to build that first client base of probably returning customers later to buy more from you. Also, you were able to learn what people actually truly wanted from you. What was the learnings? What did you learn about? Before you took on custom work, maybe you had some ideas about what the market might want. After taking on custom work, what did you learn that changed the kind of products that you offer based on the custom work that you were doing?

Jessica: People who are into planning as a hobby really like to decorate their planners with stickers. People wanted layouts that would work for stickers. There's a standard measurement of a planner sticker. It's one and a half inches wide by I think three inches tall. They wanted inserts that would fit those stickers, so I just came up with lots of different layouts with boxes that were that size. That's what people really liked and that's what people bought. Then, we just kept going from there.

Felix: Got it. Is this the path that you recommend, especially for more of the creative entrepreneurs, the ones that are creating the products like yours? Do you recommend taking this approach of doing custom, almost service based work first before scaling out into products?

Jessica: I think there's so many different ways you can grow a business. If I was to do it again, I'm not sure if I would do so much custom work, but it definitely worked for us at the time. I think telling people there's a certain way you should do something is maybe not helpful for everyone because everyone's business is so unique. For us, doing custom work really did help to grow our client base. Some of those people have come back every year for five years to buy their inserts from us. It did work and it was a good learning experience for me on how to design because when I started, I was doing my inserts in Microsoft Publisher, I wasn't a graphic designer, and I guess that really helped to expand my skillset as well.

Felix: We at least talked about the benefits of what you can get from doing custom work. What did you learn though as you were doing custom work that made you say I don't think I want to do this anymore, I want to switch to doing something else? Now looking back, what made you think that you maybe did it for too long? What was it about custom work that either you didn't like or that you did that didn't seem like a good fit anymore?

Jessica: Well, it was a couple of things. The first is I wasn't charging for my time appropriately, so it wasn't really worth the time that I spent on it. Once I got established and I had regular orders coming in, it wasn't really worth my time to spend a whole day designing something for someone if they were just going to pay me 30 dollars for a set of inserts. The other problem I found was that people would ask me to design things and I thought, "Well, when it's finished, I can put it in the shop and sell it to other people." People were asking for such unique designs that would really only work for them and that perhaps the wider community wasn't interested in buying. I was coming up with these custom designs for people and literally only selling one copy to them. It just wasn't worth my time and I found that working on designs that had been requested by more people like in our VIP group on Facebook was more beneficial because I knew that lots of people wanted to buy it when it was finished. Now, I don't do custom work, but we do ask in our VIP group what designs people would like to see. If there's a lot of people that are interested, then I will definitely add that to my list of things to design and I will make sure we get to it at some point.

Felix: Got it. Once you moved on to selling the products instead of doing this custom work, where were the customers coming from at this point? For a while, the traffic, the new customers came from people wanting to get custom work, which was super competitively priced. You were selling for basically much cheaper than anyone else out there, so everyone gave you a shot, saw your work, and wanted to buy from you. Then, once that channel moved away, you no longer had custom work, and were just selling products, how were you able to get your sales through that kind of catalog?

Jessica: By that stage, we had much better photos, we had come a long way. I had a better logo, I had a better laid out shop. We had a lot more product, so we were just getting a lot of orders from people either finding us on Etsy, which our international customers tend to just find us through going to Etsy and searching for planner inserts. A lot of our customers came from Australia from the planner addicts Facebook group. People would ask, "Where can I get beautiful printed inserts in Australia?" People would recommend my shop. Most of our customers at that stage came from Australia and came from the Planner Addicts Facebook group, or from our own VIP group.

Jessica: Once people had purchased from us, they would be invited to join our VIP group where we stay in touch with our customers. Those people would continue to buy from us. The great thing about our product is it's not a one and done product. People will buy some inserts for their planner, and because their ring planners are so customizable and you can put all sorts of pages in there, they might come buy some calendar inserts from us, then come back a couple of weeks later, buy some online shopping trackers, some lined paper, or some contacts and addresses pages, or whatever. We've had people that have come and placed 30 or 40 orders from our store because they just like to keep adding to their planner and making it work for them.

Felix: Got it. Speaking of all of these different products that you are offering, when you first started this business, you didn't think that the inserts was going to be the product that would take off, right? What was the original vision of what would be the core of the business? How did it end up being inserts?

Jessica: Originally, I had this idea that I might put together a planner, a complete planner that people could buy. At the time, I just put the inserts on Etsy as just a little I'll just quickly do that to see if anyone wants to buy this layout as planner inserts. We ended up just becoming so busy doing that, that we left the whole complete planner idea by the wayside. When we picked it up again and thought, "Should we do a planner, like a whole planner," we thought, "No, because it doesn't actually fit with what is so good about our business model, which is that people kept coming back and buying more products." If you sell someone one planner that's one planner for the whole year, you're not going to see them again until the next year. Whereas, with our product, we just have people coming to our online store regularly. We're actually really happy with the way that it went because it's just worked out so well for us.

Felix: Right, that makes sense. When you were able to shift into product space, you mentioned that you are active in this Facebook community, Planner Addicts Australia, that you said had 10 thousand members at that time. Were you already in that group and active in that community before ever having a store?

Jessica: Yes.

Felix: You were, so they already knew you at this point. How much of a known person were you there?

Jessica: No, I was pretty active in that group. I'm definitely my own target market, I created this product out of my own need for planner inserts. I was really active in there. I had been in that group for a couple of years and posted regularly. I've made lots of lovely friends through this group and I'm still active in it at the moment.

Felix: For anyone out there that is just starting a business, wants to get more involved in the community, or maybe they are already part of the community that they want to serve, what is the best way to almost gracefully present your product? It's an awkward situation, it could be an awkward situation for people where they're like, well I have this business, but we're friends. How did you approach this announcing basically that you were starting a business to your community?

Jessica: Don't be one of those people that just drops your link all the time and is disbanding people saying, please come and buy from my shop. That makes you look really desperate and people get annoyed. We have rules in the planner group about you can promote your shop once a week. Lots of people in that group have a planner shop, it's usually selling stickers. That's fine to drop your link once a week and say these are our new releases. Try and share something that's of value, something that people might find interesting. I guess just participate in the group, join in lots of conversations, not just ones about your product. Just actually provide some value to the group rather than just sharing your shop.

Felix: Yes, I've seen those threads all the time where someone will have once a week where you're allowed to promote your own business. It's just the most comments on a post out of anything because everyone's just dropping their own links in there. That can't be a good place for conversion, right? I can't imagine that you can really stand out in a promotion like that or are there ways to do it the right way?

Jessica: I guess we actually get recommended a lot by other people as well. There's only really three or four people in Australia who sell these planner inserts. People will often ask in the group, "Where can I get the planner inserts from?" People will recommend us or we will put our hand up and say, "We can help you." I found in other Facebook groups that I'm part of as well if you just wait for someone to ask the question who is actually looking for a product like yours and then answer them, that's probably a good way to promote your business without actually just spamming people if you can actually answer a question when someone is looking for you product.

Felix: Right. The approach that you've taken here, is this the most successful channel that brings in new customers to you just being active in these communities, particularly in Facebook groups?

Jessica: Yes, 80 percent of our traffic comes through Facebook. People often complain about Facebook and how it's a massive time sucking website, but we wouldn't have been able to build our business without Facebook. It's almost entirely built from Facebook. Now, we're looking at other channels as well. We're a bit more active on Instagram, Pinterest, and that type of thing, but still most of our traffic comes from Facebook.

Felix: Specifically, Facebook groups or what part of Facebook?

Jessica: We do run ads, we spend about 300 dollars a month on Facebook ads, but I would say that most of it comes from Facebook groups. There's the planner group, there's our VIP group, and then there's other groups. We have Afterpay as a payment method. I'm not sure if you have Afterpay in the states.

Felix: No. I saw what you wrote about, but we don't have that here.

Jessica: When we got Afterpay, it's a buy now, pay later type scheme. You buy your product, we get paid straight away, but the customer pays back Afterpay in four installments. Once we got Afterpay, we noticed a huge increase in sales on our website. By this time, we had Shopify. We also noticed that we were able to advertise in groups for people who were looking to buy things on Afterpay. That has been a huge source of new customer for us. People who maybe weren't already into planning as a hobby who didn't have a planner who wanted to buy a planner and could do it on Afterpay. We've managed to just get so many more sales through one, implementing Afterpay as a payment method and two, advertising in those groups. That's the same thing you can share once or twice a week, you can share your shop. It's also answering peoples' questions where they say, "Where can I get a planner, a diary, or an organizer for next year?" We can say, "We sell them. You should come check out our website."

Felix: We have something similar, but not the company Afterpay, I don't believe. There are other methods for buy now, basically a payment plan for the customer. Are there any downsides to adding this as a payment option for your store?

Jessica: The fees are quite high, but I was already used to paying really high fees on Etsy. I feel like Afterpay gives me a bit more value for money in terms of fees than what I get from Etsy. So long as you build that into your product prices, there's really no downside to Afterpay at all. It's been just phenomenal for our business. It really has.

Felix: Do you know what percentage of your customers are going through the Afterpay method versus just paying outright?

Jessica: It would be more than half, definitely more than half.

Felix: Wow, okay. That's definitely surprising I guess to me. Now, you mentioned that not only are you offering this as a payment option, which increases conversion, but you're also in the Afterpay community. I think it's something important there where at first, we talked about how you promoted or were active in the community of the biggest fans, the lowest hanging fruit customers are people that are constantly talking about planning. Now, you're going to almost a totally ... I don't want to say different obviously because you have customers coming from this source, but it's not a group focused on planning. You're still able to get customers through basically an unrelated group. What's the method here? Is it any different than what you would do inside a more planner focused group? Can you do things differently in a group where you're probably the only person in there that is talking about planning.

Jessica: Yes. It's two completely different sets of customers. The planning people, they just want the inserts. The people who are in the Afterpay groups or the organizing groups, they want the whole planner with ... they want a bundle and they don't want to have to go through all the hundreds of different types of inserts that we have on our website because it's just overwhelming. When we opened our Shopify store, we actually started to manufacture our own range of planners. Instead of people using Filofaxes or kikki.K Planners, they could buy a planner from our store and we found that what we've done is we've put together different bundles.

Jessica: We've got just a bundle for 2020, a 12 month bundle, which contains a planner, a bunch of our favorite inserts, and dividers. We've got a bundle for people who study, a wedding planner bundle, we've put them together, so it's just one product that people can buy. Then, if we can share a little video of that product in an Afterpay group or an organizing group where people are not familiar with planning as a hobby, then we find the conversions are really good there because they can see the video, they can see how it works, that you can take pages in and out, you can customize it. They can just go straight to the product on Shopify, add to cart, and check out. Otherwise, they get lost choosing between all the different things to fill their planner with. That's definitely a change that we've made on Shopify to cater to those new customers.

Felix: Got it. You mentioned too that you are sharing pictures of in this case an Afterpay tracker insert. You're creating products that are specific to other communities that are obviously almost like a new SKUs, but all for the same solution, just more specific for these different communities.

Jessica: Yes, that's really our unique selling point. I don't think there's anywhere else in Australia you can get trackers for all these niche needs.

Felix: Sorry, real quick. When you say tracker, can you explain that to someone who doesn't know what that's about? What is a tracker?

Jessica: Yes. The Afterpay tracker for example, tracks your Afterpay purchases. When you need to pay your Afterpay payment or have a tracker track whether you have been following your new habits that you want to incorporate into your life, so you can tick off whether you've drunk your eight glasses of water every day or done 30 minutes of exercise. People like to track their lives, their habits, and things like that in their planner. One of our biggest sellers this year was ... In Australia, we have a national disability insurance scheme where people who care for someone with a disability actually receive funding from the government to help fund treatments and therapies for people who are living with a disability. We had been requested lots of times if we could create some planner inserts for people on this disability scheme. That's something that we did. We created a little video of that product. That's been super popular. We've sold so many of those this year and I guess it's like you said, it's creating a product that's a little bit different from just your standard planner inserts that are just your calendar and appointments, that type of thing. That's where we're really going, creating these unique packages for people who have really specific needs and there's just no other planner product out there that can cater to that.

Felix: How do you know that it's going to be worth your time in terms of having enough demand, having enough customers that are willing to pay for a product like this before you invest your time into it?

Jessica: That's really where our VIP group comes in handy. We have a VIP group that has about three and a half thousand members. It's quite active. People will often post in there asking for if we could create a product for them. They also share pictures of their planners arriving and can use this little space to interact with other people who also are customers. Sometimes, people will say, "Can you create a package for people who are using this disability scheme or for pets?" People said, "We'd love you to create a planner to track our pets' health, training, and that type of thing." I would just see if that's validated in the group because other people were interested in it as well. We did a teacher planner this year and we had so many requests from different customers over the years that we had a good idea it would be a popular product. I guess something like teaching, there's a wide customer base that are really going to enjoy that. Sometimes, we do get asked if we could do something really specific that we just think probably no one else would be interested in. We might just ask in the VIP group and say, is this something you would be interested in?

Jessica: We have learned over the years though that just because people say they would be interested in it doesn't mean they actually will be when it's available and they need to spend money on it. It is something that I'm quite cautious about now when it comes to designing new products. The time to design products is so minimal now as well. I really need to make sure that if I'm spending time designing, that it's worthwhile because most of my time is just actually taken up on printing and processing orders at the moment. It's really a matter of just asking in the VIP group and validating it with more than just a handful of customers.

Felix: Important point that you made, which is that just because a lot of people or people say that they want something does not mean that they will actually put their hard cold cash down when it comes time to take a credit card out to pay for. Now through your experience of going through this a bunch of times, are you getting better at recognizing when people are more serious in the sense that they are going to actually pay you for something that you're building? What are the attributes that you look at these days to determine if it's actually going to be worth it and look through past the fact that people are just saying they want it?

Jessica: Yes. I guess it's a matter of looking to see if there is an actual community of people out there that will use the product. For example, someone might ask us if we could do trackers for pen pals, people who write letters to each other. I might think to myself, there's probably not that many people that are really going to use those inserts. We do have them in the store, but they haven't been a big seller. If people ask for a teacher planner, there's a whole community of people out there that are teachers that would likely use it or a pet planner. There's lots of people that have pets. It's a bit community. Same with the disability inserts, there's a big community out there. That's really where we're going and where we're looking to go in the future is designing things for people where there's a whole community of people that would be interested in the product. Not all teachers are going to use our teacher planner, but at least we know there's a population there that we can market the product to.

Felix: Right, that makes sense. Now, I want to talk about the design process because like you were saying, it's involved and you would certainly prefer to spend more time here. Talk to us about that. When you have decided that it's worthwhile to invest in designing a new planner, what are all the steps that you need to take to make sure that it's going to be successfully designed?

Jessica: I've put a lot more effort into making sure everything's really perfect these days. I used to just whip things up quickly in Publisher and now I use Adobe in design. I will really take the time, I'll set aside ... Usually, on a Wednesday, my kids are at daycare or at school, I've got the house to myself, I'll sit down, and I'll spend a lot of time on it. We ask our customers to review the products as well before they are finalized. Especially something that's complicate like a teacher planner, the disability inserts, or a pregnancy planner, I will come up with a design and then I will ask if there's some customers who might be willing to have a look at a PDF and provide some feedback. Then, we do test print, check that everything lines up properly. I have an assistant, Cleo, she's got a really good eye for detail and she'll have a look over it as well just to make sure that everything's just perfect and really attractive to look at.

Felix: Do you get early prototypes? How do you get feedback early on before you finalize a product?

Jessica: When I release it, I want to make sure that it's like the final version. I don't want to have to go back and release a product to the public, then have to go and make more changes, take more photos, upload the product again. Before I release it, I will actually contact some customers in the VIP group who have expressed an interest in the product and I'll say, "I'll send you a free copy if you are willing to have a look at the draft version and provide some feedback." I'll make sure I get lots of feedback from everyone, take it all on board, create multiple drafts, until everyone's happy with it. Then, I will finalize it and upload it to the website.

Felix: Are there any specific questions that you try to ask to pull out whether you need to make any changes or not?

Jessica: Not really. People were pretty forthcoming in their opinions. With a teacher planner, it was quite complicated. We did actually contact a number of different teachers and we found that every teacher has different needs. It was just a matter of balancing that, not creating a planner that's perfect for every teacher, but just to make the best that we could out of everyone's different requirements really. That's how it is with all our products. You're not necessarily going to be absolutely 100 percent perfect for everyone, but so long as they're good enough for most people, that's the best we can do. I think that's going back to that progress over perfection. You want to create a wonderful product that people love and people are going to buy. You want to do your due diligence in making sure that it's as good as it can be, but you can't get caught up in just endless improvements and endless redesigning to the point where it just never gets released. Trying to make every single person happy, you have to just go this is as good as it's going to get and I'm just going to release it.

Felix: Makes sense. Now once they had become a customer of yours, you mentioned that you will invite them into a VIP group. This is a Facebook group.

Jessica: Yes, this is our Facebook group. This has been really successful in just creating that sense of loyalty among our customer base. I love our VIP group, it's my favorite place to go on the internet, see all the people that are loving their [happy mail 00:33:56] that they get, and seeing the excitement from the customers because sometimes working from home by yourself can be a little bit lonely and a little bit like you're not getting that validation that you're actually doing a good job. Hanging out in the VIP group, it can be really nice to see people actually happy with what they've bought and see how they're actually using it in their planners. It's super exciting to see that.

Felix: Yes, it's definitely important to see the reaction of your customers, to see that you are actually creating something of value in the world and not just be so focused on, what's the next thing? Actually, taking the time to see what you've accomplished, I think it's important for a group like this. Do you have to convince anyone to join these groups? I think a lot of people out there are looking to also build their own Facebook groups for their customers or maybe potential customers. What are some ways that you found to be able to get more people to join a Facebook group?

Jessica: We have invitations to join it basically everywhere. I think there's a link on the website. When they order, they get an invitation in their order confirmation email. When they get their package, there's an invitation in their package to join as well. We always put a link in our emails and our direct marketing like that. We also have in the past, which has been really successful, is say in the bigger planner groups, like in the Planner Addicts Group, we've released a new planner, we've released something really exciting, or we're running a discount at the moment, running a sale, but to see it, you'll have to join our VIP group. That's been a good way to get our numbers up as well.

Felix: Right. Give some kind of incentive that only members of the VIP have exclusive access to, so that makes sense. How big has that group grown to now?

Jessica: We have about three and a half thousand members. I think at the beginning, I was actually offering all our VIP members a 10 percent discount on our products as well. That was a good way to get people to join because they'd join to get the discount code. We actually stopped doing that when we implemented Afterpay because the Afterpay fees worked out to around 10 percent as well, so we just thought we would swap one for the other so we don't have to put our prices up.

Felix: Right, makes sense. How do you spend your time differently in a VIP like your own Facebook group versus a group like the Planner Addicts Australia where it's someone else's group? How do you spend your time differently between yours versus someone else's group?

Jessica: I guess in the VIP group, I want to provide value for people. I like to ask the customers' opinions on, what do you think of this new design? What would you like to see? I let them know about things before I would perhaps go and advertise it in another group about new designs that are being released or sales that are coming up. I just feel like it's a lot more conversational, feeling almost like these VIPs are my friends. Interacting with them on a much more personal level. In the planner group, I'm not wearing my business hat unless someone's specifically asking for where they can buy planner inserts. It's more just sharing tips on planning or where people can buy stickers from. That type of thing. It's different. I'm not just in the Planner Addicts Group as Chasing Planner Peace, I'm there as Jess. Does that make sense?

Felix: That does. You can almost be more, not necessarily promotional, but you can talk about your product more, talk about your business, and the things that you're offering more in your own group. That's not seen as, as acceptable in other peoples' groups. That makes sense. You did mention that sharing videos in groups, specifically these videos you've talked about earlier, has been effective. What does the video look like? Is it how you produce, is it just shot on your phone? What kind of videos are you talking about producing?

Jessica: Just on my phone. Facebook loves videos. If you share a video, they will show that to more people. The algorithm really favors videos. In some of these Afterpay groups that have got so many members, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of members, showing a video can be a really good way to actually make sure that people are more likely to see it. I just shoot it on my phone, I don't have any good equipment at all. I literally have my phone attached to a stick that is attached to the ceiling above my desk. I will just do a little flip through of whatever our new product is. Our Christmas planner inserts for example, I'll just do a flip through so you can see what's in there. Then, I just use Windows Movie Maker, speed it up, and put some music over the top so it turns into a little one minute clip. Then, I'll just share that. That works really well. It doesn't take a lot of effort to do. I'm not spending heaps of time creating these videos and then people can actually see what's involved because it's a bit tricky with products that have got lots of different pages to actually show that in a photo as well or just some written information.

Felix: You try to do a demo video, you're not doing a voiceover or anything. You're just literally showing them the product. Is that the idea?

Jessica: Yes. It's just to show them the product, just to give them an overview. In the VIP group, I'll usually do a voiceover and I'll explain what everything is because I feel like those people know me more and I'm actually talking directly to them. In terms of advertising our products in the wider community, wider Facebook, I just do a little video with music, I don't talk.

Felix: Okay. How do you drop this kind of video into another Facebook group without seeming overly promotional, without getting kicked out? It seems like there's also another fine balance here between promoting in someone else's group where main admins may not like that.

Jessica: Yes, so I'll only do it in the groups where advertising is allowed and only do it on those days when you're allowed to advertise. It's obviously really important to respect the group rules. We don't like people coming into our VIP group and advertising their businesses unless we specifically ask, do you have a business? If you have a look, there are lots of groups on Facebook where you are allowed to advertise on certain days. It's just a matter of being smart and waiting for those threads to pop up or days to pop up. Using a video can be a really good way I guess to stand out from the other people that are just dropping their links.

Felix: Yes, I was going to say that because maybe it's different in the planning community, but whenever I see these groups where people are allowing people to promote, it's almost like always dropping a link, not going to the length of creating a video. I think there's something to be said about putting that extra effort in so you can stand out amongst the sea of maybe not necessarily competitors, but the flood essentially of other people promoting their business.

Jessica: Absolutely.

Felix: You mentioned that you have a 50% repeat customer rate, which is really high. Your focused on potentially just that new customer, not so much about that first sale because you'd know about the repeat customers that are coming in. What's your key to success here? Obviously, having a great product. That's a given. You need to have that to have a repeat customer. Are there other ways through marketing, through anything else that you have set up that encourages people to come back and repurchase?

Jessica: Well, it is really the way the product is set up. People will come and maybe they'll buy a starter bundle for 100 dollars. Then, they'll go I could really put some Afterpay trackers in here as well or I would really like to put some password logs in here as well. Then, they'll come back and buy. I guess the other reason is people at the end of the year, they need new inserts. They keep coming back to buy their new inserts year after year. I know it's a cliché and I know everyone says customer service is so important, but I really do feel like in a business like ours, customer services is super important. I make mistakes all the time. Sometimes, parcels get lost in the mail. Things go wrong every day, but I really do always just go above and beyond to make sure that the customer's having a good experience. I know everyone says that, but sometimes I see conversations in seller groups on Facebook where people were just arguing with customers over things like missing parcels or whatever. I just really feel like you should give the customer the benefit of the doubt and just do whatever you can to make sure that they are happy.

Jessica: There's that thing where if you make a mistake and then you fix it, the customer actually feels better about you than if you just got it right the first time anyway. Not that you should go and make mistakes on purpose, but that's really I guess how I try and run my business because these customers do literally pay our bills. They do literally put food on the table, so I'm really grateful to everyone that buys from our shop. I want to make sure that they're happy, I really do.

Felix: Definitely. Let's talk about the growth of the business. Can you give us an idea of the kind of success you've had with this business since you've started essentially?

Jessica: Yes. When I first started, I was really busy, but I was mostly just doing custom work. I wasn't charging enough for my product, so we weren't really making enough money to live on at all. In about 2016, my husband actually became unemployed, which allowed me to work on the business pretty much full time because he was home and could help out with the kids. That's when things really began to take off. We've noticed in the last 30 days, our sales are almost double what they were this time last year. Things just keep improving and we keep doing things here in the office to make ourselves more efficient. We batch print things, we just have different ways of doing things to how we used to do them so that we can get more orders out faster. Now, we're really looking at scaling it more, bringing on employees, and that type of thing, so that we can really continue this success.

Felix: Makes sense. When you were able to focus on it full time, what were you able to do that you weren't able to do before? What did you do with the extra time that really helped your business take off?

Jessica: Well, I could spend more time on designing and releasing new products, which has been really good. I guess focus on making sure the photos ... Taking photos takes such a long time, but making sure our photos were good. We actually could set up the Shopify website because before that, we were just on Etsy. Really, running a small business, your to do list just never ever ends. Running a small business when you're also looking after three kids at home is really difficult. Being able to just be able to spend the daytime hours as well as some nighttime hours on the business was ... at the time, I was so stressed because my husband was unemployed and the business wasn't making a lot of money. Looking back on it, it actually was such a gift because I was able to just really invest that time to grow the business quickly and turn it into what has now become the full time income for our family.

Felix: Definitely. You mentioned that you wanted to scale up and take advantage of building the system. What kind of apps and services or tools do you rely on to help run the business?

Jessica: We do use a few Shopify apps, we have a subscription service, like a subscription box that people can subscribe to every two months, and they get a box of goodies in the mail. We use ReCharge for that, which has been wonderful. We also use Judge.me, which is really valuable because it sends an email to the customer two weeks after we've fulfilled their order, and says, "How are you liking this product?" Then, they can post a review. That is really helpful in terms of social proof on the website in terms of people actually seeing that we have all these five star reviews and people love our product. I love the app Judge.me. Apart from that, I don't think we really use a lot of other apps actually. Those are the two that we use the most. We do use Selly, which is an upselling app. When people add something to their cart, we can actually cross sell with another product. For example, if they add a study planner to their cart, it will say, "Do you want to add some study stickers to your cart as well?" If they buy a budget planner, it will say, "Would you like to also add these budget inserts as well?" That's been really good in terms of getting extra sales coming through.

Felix: Awesome. ChasingPlannerPiece.com is the store, is the website. I'll leave you this last question. What was the biggest lesson that you learned so far this year?

Jessica: I guess the biggest lesson that I have learned this year, that's a tough one. I would say that you can't do it all yourself. You should do it all yourself to begin with, you need to put in the effort, and you need to get across all the different aspects of the business, and you need to make sure that you know how to do everything. At some point, you can become so busy that you actually need to say if this is going to continue to grow, I need to get someone else to help me with it. About a year ago, I brought on my assistant, Cleo. She's a school mom, I've known her for years, and she's always been super interested in the business. She now helps with a lot of social media, the newsletters, and things like that. We're looking to bring on more people and grow the team because at some point, you've only got so many hours in the day and I didn't start a business to work 24 hours a day. That's the thing. At some point, you need to outsource, and you need to just say I can't do it all. That would be my lesson.

Felix: Awesome. Definitely, awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica.

Jessica: Thank you so much, Felix, for having me. I've had a wonderful time. Thank you.