The Unofficial Shopify Podcast: Entrepreneur Tales

Launching a Journal to Make Men Stronger

Episode Summary

How to start, build, & grow your idea using crowdfunding, bootstrapping, licensing and growth capital.

Episode Notes

In this episode, you'll hear how a designer and entrepreneur from the UK turned a personal tragedy into a compelling story and business that has helped thousands of men live better lives.

Ollie Aplin is the co-founder of MindJournal, the global men's journaling movement a mission to help guys feel happier and healthier.

We ask him:

  1. Why journaling and why journaling for men?
  2. Why launch on Kickstarter? (Building a community and validation was key)
  3. How did you overcome the fear of putting yourself out there and taking a risk both emotionally and financially?
  4. What lessons have you learned about yourself, or entrepreneurship since launching in 2016
  5. The one piece of advice you would give to other entrepreneurs who are thinking about launching a new business or product in 2020

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Episode Transcription

Kurt Elster: Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster, and on today’s episode we’re talking about writing in my journal. Well, sort of. We’re talking about the MindJournal, and the entrepreneur from the UK who brought it to market. Joining us today is Ollie Aplin, co-founder of MindJournal, the global men’s journaling movement, and he has done a ton of incredible things. Not just bring a product to market, but start a journaling movement, and started that with a successful Kickstarter.

So, today on the show, I want to walk through his journey and see what we can take away from it. Ollie, thank you for joining me.

Ollie Aplin: Hi, Kurt. Yeah, thanks for having me on your show today. I’m really excited to be here and to be chatting to you.

Kurt Elster: Absolutely. So, when I say MindJournal, what the heck is a MindJournal?

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, a MindJournal is a journal that I have created that is specifically for guys to just empty their mind, get all the thoughts out of their head and put it down onto analog paper and journal.

Kurt Elster: So, I have a MindJournal.

Ollie Aplin: Cool.

Kurt Elster: Tell me what about it is gendered? I’m on your website. It says journaling reinvented for guys, and you said journaling for men. What about this is gendered?

Ollie Aplin: To be honest, not much. The brand is essentially what we’ve gendered. The product itself and the framework we’ve put inside the journal is not really gendered apart from one question, which is about your role as a man. Most of the system and most of the journal is open to be used by anyone. What we wanted to do was create a brand that felt accessible to all guys, to actually get involved in journaling, which we thought wasn’t really a thing that exited in the market, hence why we went off and created it.

Kurt Elster: So, previously journaling, there was a stigma against it. You thought, "This is a thing that men are needlessly, senselessly ignoring, that can help with your mindset and your mental health.”

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, totally. I think for me, I’ve been journaling for ten-plus years, and I’ve always found it something ridiculously difficult to do, and I’ve just always used like a blank Moleskin notebook, just because it felt the most comfortable tool for me to use and to pour my thoughts into. But after speaking with lots of my kind of guy friends and saying to them, “Have you ever tried journaling? Have you ever thought about doing this?” They all kind of said the same thing, which was like, “No. Why would I do it? How do you do it? Isn’t it something that just women do?”

So, there was this kind of like negative attitude towards the idea of journaling, and so I just wanted to kind of build a brand that could kind of just make guys feel a little bit more comfortable about the idea of doing it.

Kurt Elster: Okay, and so with journaling, when you are faced with… Like I could just buy a notebook. Heck, I could take out a legal pad and I could start writing. If I have a pen and a piece of paper, in theory I could journal. But being faced with a blank piece of paper with no prompt actually makes it a lot more difficult, so you’ve got this product that it’s a framework, it is a system, it is a series of writing prompts that makes journaling significantly easier and in theory more valuable. So, no matter how I’m journaling, why should I bother? Talk to me. What is the advantage? Why should I do this?

Ollie Aplin: Why should you journal or why should you use a MindJournal?

Kurt Elster: Let’s start with why should I journal in general?

Ollie Aplin: So, for me, and I always come back to me, just because of the sort of impact it’s had on my life, it’s the sort of best place for me to speak from. I’ve always found it quite difficult to talk about things that are on my mind. I have quite a busy mind. I have quite an anxious mind. I’ve got a ton of ideas that are constantly running through it that I either want to try and create, or build on, or I’m just quite an excitable kind of hyped person.

Kurt Elster: You sound very excitable and hyped. Calm down, Ollie.

Ollie Aplin: Sorry. I kind of need somewhere to put all this stuff. And so, journaling for me has been a place where I can just let rip and put down all these kind of thoughts, and ideas, and how I’m feeling about certain things. And it’s a legacy thing for me from way back, years ago, when I had a mental breakdown and couldn’t really process that breakdown or couldn’t process the emotions that I was experiencing. And it was a therapist that sort of prescribed to me the idea of journaling, and that’s when I picked it up, and that’s when I found it to be this really powerful thing that allowed me to kind of discover myself and discover all these emotions that I was feeling.

And since then, I’ve kind of really built a different life for myself through figuring everything out through writing.

Kurt Elster: And with journaling, how did you, like it’s one thing to pick up journaling for yourself and have it make a powerful change in your life, and it’s interesting you said like, “Yeah, I was really struggling, and it helped me get through it, and a therapist recommended it to me.” I went through exactly the same thing. I had upheaval in my life, and was really struggling, and journaling just for a few minutes every morning really made a dramatic change in my mindset and my outlook, and that helped me. I didn’t keep up with it, but I did it for about a year, and it made a lasting impact and change, so I absolutely am with you. I see the benefit to it.

It helps organize your thoughts and more importantly, help you get a clear view of your self image, and your goals and purpose, just for a day. If you can get through a day, you can make it to the next day and the next.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah. Totally.

Kurt Elster: How did you go from that to saying, “I want to build a framework and share it with other people. I want to be the world’s champion for journaling and get guys past the stigma.”

Ollie Aplin: Well, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of research and development. I think luckily, I’m a designer by trade, so it was relatively easy for me to kind of almost write myself a brief. I could see the problem from chatting to my friends that they were having with journaling. I could look at the problems that I was facing with journaling, even though I’d been doing it for years, and I could essentially build a brief for myself as a designer, to kind of go, “Okay, well, how do you solve this problem?”

And that was just basically like a side hustle, like a side project thing that I was just working as much as I could on to try and figure out how to kind of solve that problem. Was it a design thing based around the aesthetics? Was it just the physicality of a journal? Did it just need to be a beautiful notebook and that would do? Or did it have to have a system or some kind of guidance in it to kind of take you through the steps of learning how to journal?

And then that’s when I sort of realized that the way that I got into journaling was when my therapist, she gave me like an A4 sheet of paper with all these emotions on it. I think there was like 50 emotions on it. And she said, “Just start each journaling session by picking two or three emotions that you’re feeling and use them as a starting point. Sort of ask yourself why am I feeling this way.” And that was always the best way that I found to journal, was just start by sort of jotting them down, and then sort of kicking off from there. And that became the basis and the foundation for MindJournal, was it was around starting with, connecting with you how you’re actually feeling in that moment, and then sort of diving a little bit deeper into yourself, to kind of unlock why you might be feeling that way.

And so, this system just grew from there, basically.

Kurt Elster: And how did you then go from that to, “Well, we’re gonna sell this on the internet.” What was the moment where you said, “Huh, I think I could sell journals.”

Ollie Aplin: I don’t really know, to be honest. I think I was just, again, running it past my mates and saying, “What do you think?” They’re pretty brutal guys. I mean, they’re gonna be honest with me if they think it’s a completely stupid idea. And when they came back and said, “I think there’s something in this. I would give it a go.” I thought to myself these are quite skeptical guys that wouldn’t necessarily think about this stuff. Maybe I’m onto something and maybe we should put up a little launch page just to collect some email addresses, just to see if there’s any bit of interest at all in this idea. And as soon as we did that and we started to see a trickle of interest from people outside of my network, people that I just didn’t even know, that’s when we thought, “Okay, there’s potentially a market here. Why don’t we take it to Kickstarter and really sort of kick the tires and see if this thing’s got some legs and see if some guys want to get involved in it?”

Kurt Elster: So, the timeline here was you started journaling to help with your own life, and then you realized, “Can I, using my design background, can I make a better journal? Can I help my friends with journaling?” And then from there, once you had validated that idea, said, “All right, well, let’s see if people other than my friends are interested in it.” So, you put up a waitlist page. You put up just like a webpage that described the idea and said if you want to know more, give us your email. And you started getting strangers to do that. How did you promote that page?

Ollie Aplin: I think it was just basic stuff like I put it up on my LinkedIn, just to put it out to my network, and then the wider network of people that are connected to your other… Your wider network outside of that. A few design blogs, where you can just put up a website that looks cool and other people will sort of vote on it, but I thought that would be a good way, maybe generating a little bit of traffic, just to sort of test it.

And that was pretty much it. I think it was just real low level. I didn’t want to really invest too much in it in terms of driving paid traffic to it or doing too much sort of shouting about it, because we were still in that kind of early days of trying to figure it out ourselves and what we wanted the brand to be, and how it was gonna work, and we just wanted to get that initial idea validated in a very small way. 200 to 300 random people to sign up to something that at the moment doesn’t really make any sense. I mean, I think our first holding page for it, like a landing page just to grab email addresses, was so vague that I thought, “Well, if it’s vague at this point and we get some interest, then we can build on that even more.”

And that’s all we kind of did, really. That’s as simple as I felt that it needed to be.

Kurt Elster: And once you had that external validation that gave you the confidence to go forward with it, what was the next move? Was it Kickstarter?

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, so then the next move was like, okay, we hit that target of 200 to 300 people that have just popped in their email address to sort of say, “Hey, I’m up for this. This sounds interesting.” So, we thought, “Okay, well, why don’t we do the next thing?” Which is evolve this and turn this into a Kickstarter campaign, and then part of doing a Kickstarter is you’re doing a lot of pre-marketing to get to that point. You’re building a lot of pre-hype, because when you run a Kickstarter, you have a very short amount of time to hit your goal, to hit your funding target.

Kurt Elster: 30 days, right?

Ollie Aplin: Well, yeah. It’s like 30 days. Sometimes you can set it to 25. I think some go to 35, maybe. I think there’s like a sliding scale. But you have this one shot, one window opportunity to just smash it and hit your target. And so, knowing that, we knew that the work we did beforehand would be incredibly important to the success of the Kickstarter, so when we knew that we were gonna go to Kickstarter, I think we set ourselves like a six-month roadmap, so we knew that we had six months to build as much hype as possible, get as many email addresses as possible that we could send out the campaign to… would further validate it for us as we went along. To test the different ideas that we were having to this community that we were building pre-Kickstarter.

Kurt Elster: How long did you pre-promote before launching the Kickstarter? What’s that playbook look like?

Ollie Aplin: So, the playbook looked like… I mean, for us, looking back now, it was incredibly stressful and incredibly tough, because at the same time as we was developing the product, we was also marketing the product and developing the strategy for the campaign. So, we were doing a lot of outreach to the press, building up relationships, building up our press list of contacts, and bloggers, and writers, and the rest of it. All the content that would go out for the campaign. And so, it was like yeah, I think we’d set ourselves this six-month goal from when we’d wrapped up this landing page, initial landing page idea. It was a six-month target to just steadily grow the hype machine, if you like. Getting to the point of we’re announcing the launch now.

Kurt Elster: Before ever launching the Kickstarter, you spent six months building relationships, building an early audience list, and creating that hype and laying the groundwork. Before this Kickstarter.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, and building the brand. I mean, we were essentially building a new niche. Men’s journaling. A brand that was essentially focused around men’s mental health, and rebranding men’s mental health, but in a completely different vibe, with a different aesthetic and a different set of language. There was no other sort of brand out there that we could kind of learn from. We were doing it ourselves and relying on the feedback we were getting from our very small community at the time, to tell us what they liked and what they didn’t like, and what was working and what wasn’t working.

So, this long roadmap that we set ourselves helped us to kind of guarantee the success almost of the campaign.

Kurt Elster: I think that’s brilliant, because you knew, hey, if we build it, they won’t come. You can’t just throw something out there, even on a platform meant for that like Kickstarter, and expect people to show up. So, you knew, and you put in six months of work. That’s incredible. From once you did launch the Kickstarter, having laid all this out, what happened?

Ollie Aplin: What happened was quite spectacular, really. I don’t think we really understood how big it would go, but I think within… We switched it on on the 29th of February, 2016. We pushed the go live button, and backers started backing it straightaway. I mean, we were asking for 20,000 pounds, which for us was a huge amount of money to set as a funding goal, considering other brands that were notebooks or journals were usually hovering around the sort of 10,000 pounds kind of funding target and we were double that. Because we wanted to create this super premium kind of offering.

We thought, “This isn’t gonna happen. We’re out of our minds. This is just not gonna take off.” But within 72 hours we’d been fully funded. We had a huge amount of press from some really big media outlets, and the funding just kept pouring in, and just kept pouring in, and the messages from guys, and the comments we were getting, and the stories that were being shared were just… You know, they were really emotional. I mean, some of the guys were really baring their souls and expressing not just a want for what we were doing, but an actual need. And I think that was the thing that blew us away the most, was how much this thing was actually needed.

Kurt Elster: Well, all right, so what was the final total? What did you raise on Kickstarter?

Ollie Aplin: I think the final total was 45,000 pounds, roughly. I think it was just under 46. Within 25 days.

Kurt Elster: That’s very good. I mean, that’s well in excess of your goal, and what do you owe the success to? Did you include your story and your reason for doing it in there?

Ollie Aplin: Yes, I think that was the… We knew that that was gonna play a big part in the campaign being a success, and it’s what we focused our Kickstarter video predominantly around. I mean, the rule with Kickstarter is to have a video. It’s the first thing people see. It’s almost like how your campaign is judged, essentially, and so we invested a lot of time into that video. We went to a place in the UK called Cheddar Gorge, which is kind of like a cutout rock system of kind of cliff faces, and hard edges, and mountainous kind of landscapes, and we went in January, which is like the middle of winter here. It was at… The weather was just atrocious. It was just so barren, so bleak, everything was just… It was freezing cold. It was chucking it down with rain.

And we just shot all day of just me sort of climbing this mountainous route, and we had these amazing kind of drone shots that were following me, and every now and then I would stop, and I’d get out my journal and I’d do some writing. And the idea behind it was to kind of take the viewer on a journey, of my journey of starting at the bottom and essentially getting to the top. It was like a metaphorical kind of visualization. And along the way, I’m narrating the video and telling my story, and telling the suicide of my mom, and the things that I’ve been through, and where I want to end up, and how journaling has helped me get there. And I think that was the thing that really resonated and connected with so many people.

Kurt Elster: I mean, it’s such a tragic and personal story. I’d be scared. Were you scared putting yourself out there like that?

Ollie Aplin: I was terrified. I don’t think… No one knew. I mean, I was… I’ve been a freelance graphic designer in the place that I lived, in the town that I was living, Brighton, for six, seven years. Something like that. I had a huge network of people and a lot of friends, and no one really knew anything that I’d been through. They just knew me as Ollie the designer guy.

So, the idea of me being really vulnerable and putting myself out there and sharing this really quite personal story was absolutely terrifying. But it just felt like the right thing to do. It felt like it gave everything I’d been through more purpose and a bit more worthwhile. It just felt like it was the right time. And I think at around that time, it was like the 10-year anniversary of my mom’s death, so it was almost like a way of kind of bookending that chapter of my life, and sort of letting it go, was to just let it out and sort of tell the world.

And to think that journaling had helped me along the way to go from not being able to talk about my emotions, to learning about my emotions, and then learning how to talk about them to other human beings, to then end up making a film about it and putting it on the internet was just a… It was just quite a moving way of ending it, I suppose.

Kurt Elster: Amazing. So, in many ways, it gave meaning, and purpose, and even closure to your experience.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah. I mean, for me, the whole thing in MindJournal has been a huge personal experience. I mean, that entire Kickstarter campaign was hugely cathartic for myself. It allowed me to process so much personal stuff and to validate everything I’d been through, and connect with other guys that were also struggling, or going through, or had gone through similar things. It kind of reminded us that we’re not alone in the things that we struggle with or experience in life.

Kurt Elster: So, this not only launched a business for you and helped change people’s lives, but it created a community for you, didn’t it?

Ollie Aplin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s one thing we always wanted to focus on with the brand, was to kind of not just be almost like a soulless company. Was to build something that was bigger than just a notebook. Bigger than the product, almost. That it was about this idea of connecting and this idea of connecting with yourself and connecting with others and building better relationships. And that’s what we kind of really wanted to… Yeah, to create at the beginning. So, we knew that in order to kind of connect with people and to do this, that I had to put myself out there and be the first one to kind of make contact, if that makes sense.

Kurt Elster: And once this Kickstarter was successful, I assume you had no issues shipping the product, as that becomes troublesome for a lot of brands that are new to manufacturing.

Ollie Aplin: Uh…

Kurt Elster: Oh! Oh, you had some issues. All right, what are they?

Ollie Aplin: Yeah. Well, I think it was just kind of like the logistics of figuring out how this was gonna work. I mean, I think when you’re looking at everything on a spreadsheet and on paper, and you kind of go, “Oh, we’re ordering 1,500 journals from Italy and they’re just gonna arrive on a truck.” You don’t really think, for some reason, especially when you’ve never done it and you’re a designer, so you’re just used to pixels and the internet, and just things that don’t really exist, when a pallet full of stock arrives and you go, “Oh, this isn’t gonna fit in the living room. I need to get a warehouse. I need to get storage. I need to get tables. I need to get people to help box and pack these up. And this is actually gonna take more than a couple of hours and just some Sellotape.”

So, that was a lot of fun to try and figure out, and back then when we did it in 2016, there wasn’t as many tools to help you with the actual processing of that many orders through fulfillment companies or fulfillment systems. So, a lot of it we had to do quite manually, which was just a super laborious and ball-ache of a job. But we did it with no glitches, it was just a quick, sort of steep learning curve for us to kind of go-

Kurt Elster: It was trial by fire, but you survived.

Ollie Aplin: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Kurt Elster: Okay. And if you had to do Kickstarter over again, or the product launch over again, is there anything you would do differently? If you could go back in time and tell yourself like, “Here’s this one thing. You’ve gotta know this.” And then the time portal closes.

Ollie Aplin: I probably would have gone a bit harder on the marketing. I think I was… I think there was an apprehension around is this actually even gonna work, and that hindsight being a beautiful thing, which is had I know that it was gonna work, I would have just doubled down. I would have gone into paid advertising. I would have hooked up with a PR agency. I would have… I would have done what the kind of bigger brands do now on Kickstarter, which is invest quite heavily into their marketing. We did a lot organically, did it ourselves, did the PR and outreach ourselves, which was hugely time consuming and therefore resulted in a smaller amount of impact that we had.

It was still enough and it’s still an incredible amount that we achieved on our own, but yeah, I would have just gone in a little bit more harder.

Kurt Elster: I think you did such a good job with the pre-launch, that is the last thing I would have guessed that you were gonna say. It’s like, “Man, I wish we’d gone harder.” It sounds like you did pretty good.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, but I always just… I’m like that kid who always wants more. I think for me, it was like, “Oh, we could have got even more guys on board. We could have…” But that was, I think for me it was like the Kickstarter ended and then we were like, “Holy crap. What’s possible now? What can we really do with this thing? And how do we do it? We clearly have something.” If the Kickstarter was our super validator, which it essentially was, we had that validation, so for us it was kind of like we’re back to the drawing board a little bit, because we sold out of the stock, we didn’t have enough money, because we broke even to buy more stock, so we were essentially back to square one.

Kurt Elster: Ouch.

Ollie Aplin: But what we really knew was this is a thing. We’re really, really onto something now. How do we go to the next level? And that’s kind of the result of our Kickstarter.

Kurt Elster: And once the Kickstarter’s over and the orders are shipped, what happens then? Where do you go from there?

Ollie Aplin: Well, you look at the bank account and you kind of go, “Um, that was awesome, but we still don’t have any money, so how do we make more product and how do we get it to more guys?” And at the same time, we were still running our studio, doing design work for clients, so our time was still split between MindJournal and the paying business. And so, we were kind of like stuck in this limbo mode of not really knowing what to do and how to go to that next step. And then a literary agent got in touch with us and said, “Oh, I saw your campaign. I thought it was amazing. Have you ever thought about selling the idea to a book publishing company and turning this into a book?”

And at that time, we were like, “Well, here we go. This is what we’re meant to do.” We didn’t actively go out and look for this opportunity, it just… It was just a random phone call one day that I picked up. And then that led to us going around some of the UK and the world’s biggest publishers, pitching the idea and receiving a ton of proposals back to us of why we should pick this publisher over another publisher.

Kurt Elster: Isn’t it a great feeling to be the prize in that relationship? Months prior, no one knew who you were, and no one cared. And then suddenly, you’ve got these publishers fighting over providing service to you. Isn’t that… It’s quite a change, and it’s just it’s so validating, and freeing, and feels so good. Because it’s like… I mean, you put your heart and soul into this. And then to have that, the tables turn like that, must have been tremendous.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, it was an incredible feeling. I think for us, it was a kind of very surreal moment, especially when we were going into the offices of the publishers, like Penguin Random House, and Hodder and Stoughton, big names. And you’re seeing posters of like J.K. Rowling’s books, and other incredible authors, and you’re sitting in there going, “What the hell is going on? Why are we in here? Surely there’s a mistake.” So, that was an incredible experience itself, and again, like you say, like validating what we were building and the idea that we had. We just had to navigate this next process that we had no experience in. I had no experience of licensing, of publishing, of the publishing world, it just was another area for us to kind of go, “Right, okay. We need to unpick this. We need to think about what’s best for the brand, what’s best for the business, what’s best for our community and our guys. Make a decision and navigate our way through it as best we can.”

Kurt Elster: From once you had it published, next step is build your Shopify store, right?

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, so the book deal was awesome, and it got published on the anniversary of my mom’s birthday, which I didn’t pick, they didn’t pick, it was just a random date that was selected, and that was the date that it was to come out, and so that was a bit spooky. That was a kind of like… That was almost like a validation from mom almost, going like, “Yeah, I give it my-“

Kurt Elster: It’s the universe saying, “I approve.”

Ollie Aplin: Exactly. Yeah. So, that was pretty cool. However, the book didn’t do as well as we hoped. I think there’s a lot to be learned with the publishing world on both sides, whether it’s authors, or whether it’s the publishers themselves. We were kind of left at the end of it thinking, “We’re still not really in control of helping as many guys as we can. We’re still not in control of producing more content and producing more products, essentially.” Because we were at the… it was down to the publishers to kind of agree to produce the ideas that we were coming up with.

And you know, they’re a big machine, and they have to focus on their investments, and the money that they’re allocating to other authors, and the projects they’ve got on their books, et cetera. So, that’s when we thought, “Okay.” I think it was late 2017. We thought, “Why don’t we just go back to square one, essentially, and build our own product again? Take the system that we’ve created, that’s again been further validated and refined with the book version, and wrap it up into a beautiful journal,” that we still felt like we were missing. Use everything we’d learned in the Kickstarter with manufacturing, and shipping, and all the logistics, and the supply chain stuff, and have a go at this Shopify thing. I believed in the platform and I could see a lot of businesses doing really well in there, and the whole direct to consumer thing was really starting to take off.

And so, I thought, “Here we go. We’ve got the perfect thing for the platform. Let’s just go for it.” And so, I think in… I think it was 2018, we thought, “Yeah, let’s go for it and let’s essentially relaunch our new edition.” And that’s what we did.

Kurt Elster: So, wait, so it went Kickstarter and you manufactured it on your own? And then you went to book publishers to just publish it and sell it traditionally in bookstores, and then that didn’t do what you wanted, and then you said, “All right, let’s be our own publisher, manufacturer, and go direct to consumer with a Shopify site.”

Ollie Aplin: Yeah.

Kurt Elster: Okay, and that probably took some capital, and you said you had… You ran into the cashflow inventory issue that a lot of people do, especially post-Kickstarter, where it’s like, “All right, well, the money we made from that needs to just go into producing more.” Did you have any issues with cashflow or capital?

Ollie Aplin: Yes, we did, but we’ve just bootstrapped it, and that’s pretty much what we did throughout that first period of when we self published again under own Shopify store, is we just bootstrapped the whole thing. And that was through personal credit cards and the money that we were making from our studio business. We were able to kind of reinvest that capital back into the other business, the MindJournal, and kind of keep the lights on essentially as we were growing it and trying to figure how to market this product. How are we gonna actually generate traffic, essentially now to our store, our own store? Switch it from where we’re having to pay to keep the lights on, where it can actually stand on its own two legs and it can pay for itself. That was the process that we took.

Kurt Elster: From there, what was the thing? Because the successful Kickstarter helps, because now you’ve got a list and you have customers. And people know about you, and you’ve got those press logos. But you still have a brand-new website that needs to have traffic driven to it. What was the thing that helped you reach the tipping point, where you’re like, “All right, this is gonna make it. We can shut the studio down and just focus on MindJournals.”

Ollie Aplin: Predominantly, Facebook ads. That was the thing that we tried so many channels, we tried so many tactics, we realized that for our audience, that organic social was just a very long… It’s a very long game that you’ve gotta play with like organic social and social media strategy. And to produce that amount of content, and to build a brand around a niche that doesn’t necessarily exist, and isn’t something that technically feels cool for guys to kind of connect with straight off the bat, you kind of gotta take them on quite a long journey to understanding the benefits of why this is important, how it works with them, and the result of doing it.

So, our funnel was quite long. We knew that email was super critical for us to kind of showcasing our knowledge and getting content across versus social, but when we discovered the power of paid social, especially within Facebook and Instagram, that’s what propelled the other flows within it, and underneath it, to really kind of lift and take things off.

Kurt Elster: So, you had to… It’s a long sales cycle. People aren’t just gonna impulse buy this thing. And so, you’ve got multiple touch points is what it sounds like was the key thing here.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah. I mean, we’ve got like a… We have a free guide book PDF that we allow people to download if they put their email address in, so that then gives them a test few pages to kind of print out and try out on their own, so that gives them two, three weeks of content to kind of play around with. We then send out a lot of emails. We do a weekly email called Mindful Monday, which is a curated list of articles that we put together that just keeps our list warm, but provides value to our audience. There is always articles that are very kind of like important to the lives of the guys that are in our community, so we put that together and that goes out every week at the same time. They expect it. If it doesn’t go out on time, people are hammering our email account, going, “Where’s the email? What’s going on? I didn’t get the newsletter this week. Is everything okay?”

Kurt Elster: Wow.

Ollie Aplin: It’s amazing to have that.

Kurt Elster: I took a break from my newsletter. I promise, over the holidays, not one person was like, “Where’s the newsletter?” It did not happen.

Ollie Aplin: So, if we’re late even by like sometimes 15 minutes, we get a few emails come in that says, “Is everything okay? Did I miss it? I checked my spam. I don’t know what’s going on.” And we’re like, “Oh no, we’re just running late. We’re just putting the finishing touches to it. It’ll be out in a minute.”

Kurt Elster: This weekly newsletter doesn’t even sell anything. It’s a curated list of like, “Hey, here’s motivational articles.”

Ollie Aplin: Yep, that’s it essentially. We scour the web. We sign up to hundreds of newsletters ourselves, and then we sit down once a week as a team and we go through these articles, kind of see what the best themes are, what we ran last week, what were interesting talking points. Is there anything relative to that, the seasonality of what’s going on in people’s lives? And then yeah, we break them down into bite-size chunks and then we link people off to those articles.

Kurt Elster: And this is the Mindful Monday newsletter. I like that you have branded the name of the newsletter. I need to do this, but I’m not clever enough.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, so we branded it up, and it’s become our own… It’s become like its own product, essentially. It’s a free product. It’s just that it’s an email. It provides value, it reminds people around what we’re doing and why it’s important to kind of follow us on this journey, and then when we want to sell them something, when we have an offer or we’re running a promo, whatever it is, they’re more receptive to it. They’re gonna be interested in that content that we’re gonna send out to them. So, we see a great return on our email, because we keep them engaged the whole time. Every week, we’re keeping them engaged. We’re not just always selling to them.

Kurt Elster: That’s incredible. Yeah, you need to… Harley Finkelstein told us years ago, he said… He’s the COO of Shopify. He said give more value than you take. And that really… That stuck with me. I said, “Well, all right. I gotta make sure that I’m doing that. Be mindful about it.” And now, years later, having lived it, it really is an incredible marketing tactic. That producing value, giving people value freely, that is how you get these loyal, true believer customers who are like, “Oh my gosh, did I miss your newsletter?” I mean, quite extraordinary what you’ve built.

Ollie Aplin: I mean, I learned it off… The book I learned that from was, and I have to give credit to David Hieatt, who is the author of Do Open, I think he’s got a company called Do Books, and their books are incredible. They’re just tiny little books that just give you the most incredible amount of value. I think the first one we read was Do Purpose of his, which was around creating a brand with purpose. We read that before we built the MindJournal brand, and a lot of the information that he had in that book has fed directly into our brand. And then Do Open, which is about how to create a newsletter that essentially grows your business, is what we’ve used to essentially build and harness this email community that we’ve created.

Kurt Elster: I love it. I love when people have book recommendations for me. I will include a link to… It’s thedobook.co by David Hieatt, H-I-E-A-T-T, not David Hyatt with a Y.

Ollie Aplin: I think that’s it. Yeah.

Kurt Elster: So, I’ll include that in here. That is fabulous.

Ollie Aplin: And a tiny book, so it’s not like you’ve gotta read like a 500-million word chunky, 7-inch book thing. It’s like you’ll read it probably within a day, and you’ll go, “That was so easy. I can action these points straight.”

Kurt Elster: Those are my favorite books. I like the little ones. As you’ve built this business, it has very much been about you and your story, and personal discovery. What have you… What do you think you’ve learned about yourself, or entrepreneurship, or running a business? What’s your takeaway? Your personal takeaways from this? Because you’ve been doing it for almost five years now.

Ollie Aplin: I’ve learned, I suppose, that telling your story or being vulnerable is okay. I think that was the biggest thing. That was the biggest fear I had initially, which was putting out all my past and talking about the heavier stuff. And how that would be. How people would react to it, essentially. Would people judge me, or would people think differently of me? And that in itself has given me the belief in myself to kind of trust myself a little bit more, to take more risks, I suppose, and I think that’s what helped us think about when we went to building our own Shopify store, which was like we had the validation. That was all fine and we knew that was gonna be okay. But it was the trust in ourselves that we could actually make it a reality and do the best we could for this community. There’s a lot of responsibility it feels like, especially with the kind of category that we’ve put ourselves in.

You know, our guys rely on this, on the newsletter that we send out on a Monday, so they definitely rely on the product that we’ve created, and we have to now kind of keep creating it. We kind of owe that. But everything we’ve kind of been through, I trust myself to continue learning, continue trying to be the best entrepreneur I can be to keep this thing alive that I’ve created.

Kurt Elster: I like that you see the social responsibility in what you do. I think that’s important and helps give you purpose. As you’re reflecting on this journey, what is the one piece of advice you would give to other entrepreneurs who are thinking about launching, maybe they’re starting their first brand or Shopify store, or just launching a new product in 2020?

Ollie Aplin: I think there’s a thing that I’ve learned around perfectionism, and I think there’s… Is it Facebook? Was it Facebook that said it was kind of like-

Kurt Elster: The one I like was from the team who rebooted Digg, which did not work well. They said, “Fuck it, ship it.” Very eloquent. Move fast and break things, I think is the Facebook one.

Ollie Aplin: That’s the one. Yeah. So, I like them, but I think there’s an element of don’t try and break things, but you should definitely try and almost like get out your own way. And you know, this launch page that we did initially just to test the idea, just initially just think, “Okay, has this got any legs? Just let’s collect a couple of hundred email addresses and not invest too much time or energy into it.” Now, I could have, as a designer, I could have spent weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and months, and months finessing over the logo, and the font choice, and the landing page layout, and the UX of it, and the whole… The copywriting, and the whole thing. But that was just pointless. There was no need to do that at that time.

And I didn’t, because I just thought to myself, “I just need to put this thing up there.” Once we knew we had something, then we spent the time. Six months planning to get to that Kickstarter point. It’s almost like the thing I’ve learned is to just sort of find the times when you need to do things quickly, and then find the times when you need to actually take your time.

Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of good quotes about this, and some good aphorisms, like Voltaire, who said, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” I like to misquote this one as, “Perfect is the enemy of done.” Like if you’re always striving for perfection at stage one, it won’t happen. Any creative things, and most things in life are an iterative process, so I think the reality is expect that version one of anything you do will suck, and that’s okay. By version six, it will be awesome, but you don’t start at version six, you start at version one. And that’s okay.

Ollie Aplin: Yeah, and also, I think with… The great thing about something not being perfect is it gives your audience something to kind of contribute towards making it perfect, which gives them something that they feel that they’re part of, and that’s something that we’ve kind of constantly built our business around, which is like, “Let’s put it back to the guys and see what they want.” Let’s ask them. Our new product, The Jotter, for example, we never had the idea for that. They told us to make it. They told us what they wanted in it. They told us how they wanted it to work, what color they wanted it. We just followed orders, essentially.

If we had thought of our own product and spent the time to perfect it, it might not have come out as good as what our guys have actually created, so there’s a lesson there in itself that it’s… You’re missing that opportunity if you’re doing it all yourself and not allowing others to kind of contribute to that development.

Kurt Elster: You have to listen to your customers. And so, you have… On day one, you don’t necessarily have the customers, so you built a thing for you. And I think that’s the journey most entrepreneurs take, at least the ones I talk to, and then by subsequent products and versions, ah, now you have the audience. In your case, you have a loyal, committed fanbase that you have responsibility to, and who is invested in you, and so you can turn around and say, “All right, help us build the next great thing that you want.” So, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

If someone is thinking, “Man, I gotta get on this journaling thing. This sounds pretty good.” They head to… Where do they go and tell us about the special offer you have for us.

Ollie Aplin: So, yeah, head to mindjournals.com and you will find out everything about MindJournal, how it works, and yeah, you can then sign up to Mindful Monday, which is always worthwhile doing. Yeah, or you can follow us on Instagram, I think it’s @mindjournal. You can follow us at there.

Kurt Elster: All right, I have included those links in the show notes. MindJournals.com. Use code KURT20 and you will get 20% off your first journal. Ollie, thank you for joining us, this has been fantastic.

Ollie Aplin: Thank you so much. That was awesome.