From no clue to new product in 12 months
Jonathon and Maria Denholm have invented a new way for teachers to manage their classrooms with an adorable product they call Your Teacher's Pet Creature. In this episode, Jonathon shares their journey going from "having no clue what I was doing" to running a 6-figure Shopify store with a completely new product alongside his wife, all while juggling two kids and a full-time job.
You'll hear the steps they took to go from idea to product to making a positive difference in education all while working towards financial independence.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Jonathon Denholm
Kurt Elster: On today’s episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to talk through one couple’s entrepreneurial journey. See, it was not long ago that they did not have a Shopify store, or a product business, or any of these things, and have now, being just mere mortals, have been able to successfully develop a niche product, market it on Kickstarter, teach themselves manufacturing, get a multicurrency, so multi-country site working, and have it be successful. Oh my gosh. They have done everything we hope for in an entrepreneurial journey.
I’m your host, Kurt Elster, AKA:
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And joining me is Jonathon Denholm from Your Teacher’s Pet Creature. Jonathon, thank you. How you doing?
Jonathon Denholm: I’m good, mate. How are you?
Kurt Elster: Pretty well. Shot out of a cannon. I’m excited. I mean, truthfully, so this episode, people will hear this in December, but we’re recording this exactly seven days before Black Friday, so we’re like down to the wire. At this point, I no longer sleep. I just sit and pray to the gods of eCommerce and shipping. That’s all we’re doing in my house. Yeah.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. Fair enough. We don’t do Black Friday specials ourselves, so this is a pretty relaxing time of year for me. We have another month before we hit our busy period.
Kurt Elster: What happens that your busy period is a month… Talk me through that. You can’t just drop that in my dojo and I not ask a follow up. You’re like, “Eh, Black Friday, whatever. But by the way, in January things go wild.” What?
Jonathon Denholm: So, our product is aimed specifically at teachers, early childhood teachers, so our busy period is school holidays, which for you guys in the U.S. is that time, but I guess for us in Australia, that’s the beginning of the school year, so it just… Yeah. It goes crazy for us then. And then in the middle of the year when it’s the beginning of the school year for you guys, it goes crazy for us again.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so it’s planning for the following academic year that you have your big selling season.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. We sell consistently through the year, but that’s when it just goes 10X for two months at a time, and then yeah, goes back to sort of a more calm pace after that.
Kurt Elster: All right, so let’s discuss what we’re discussing. What is Your Teacher’s Pet Creature?
Jonathon Denholm: It is a pet that teachers could adopt for the classroom. We have two versions of it at the moment, so one they can adopt to teach their students classroom management, so there’s a book and a teddy. I guess the shortcut is Elf on a Shelf. So, it’s similar to that. The teddy is designed to sit on the shelf, or the teacher’s desk, and act as the classroom pet. The kids bond with it. They read the story. They learn the classroom rules. And then it sort of is there as a bit of a teacher’s aide throughout the year, a visual reminder of everything they’ve learned, and there’s a bunch of different resources the teachers can also buy from us to go along with it to help that education piece.
Kurt Elster: And since we’re an audio only podcast, describe to me what this fellow looks like. What… I’m staring at an illustration of it.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, so there’s a blue monster or a purple monster, so the blue monster is the classroom management, the purple one is the emotional regulation. We have two more monsters launching next year, but it’s just a little blue guy with wings. He’s fluffy. He’s cute. He was designed to be cuddly, basically, and hopefully we achieved that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. He’s a little like McDonald’s Grimace looking thing, vaguely, like that… If Grimace were the father and like a bat creature were the mother, maybe a Pokémon. I’m not well versed in my Pokémon. My children would be disappointed in me.
Jonathon Denholm: Good.
Kurt Elster: Well, what is the purpose of this thing? You say, well, things go crazy, teachers buy these things. Why are teachers buying them?
Jonathon Denholm: It’s basically a cute and easy method to implement strategies to manage your classroom, so instead of having 1,000 reward charts, or having to give out lollies, or stickers, or whatever as a way to keep the class I guess on track and learning to their best, this is a sort of all-in-one sort of system that they can use and it lasts the whole year, and it’s just an easy to implement strategy so that they can focus on teaching the other skills rather than trying to manage the classroom all the time.
Kurt Elster: And so, really, it’s more than just like, “Hey, here’s a plush toy.” It’s this plush creature combined with a book, and then the book is based on… Well, what goes in it? There’s a book that goes with it. What’s in the book?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, so it’s just written in sort of a rhyming verse, something that the kids will remember. Depending on which one you get it just really introduces the pet to the class. It gives them a chance to name the pet, which is a fun sort of thing that the class all do together, and then it just goes on to implement or I guess to introduce some of the strategies that the teacher is gonna be using throughout the year.
So, if we’re talking the emotional regulation one, it sort of talks the kids through the tools that they can use to control their emotions, or if it’s classroom management, it sort of introduces a couple of the basic rules that teachers would use in the classroom and just gives them room for the teacher to sort of introduce it in a way that works for them.
Kurt Elster: And how long has this been a going concern? When did this start?
Jonathon Denholm: Classroom management?
Kurt Elster: No, your teacher’s pet.
Jonathon Denholm: We started on Kickstarter in 2018, late 2018, so we did that and then it probably took six to eight months from there to have all of the product in hand, and that’s when we launched our Shopify site.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and where did the idea come from?
Jonathon Denholm: We initially tried starting a drop shipping store for teaching resources and it just wasn’t working for us, so me and my wife sat down, and she’s a teacher. I have a degree in writing that I wasn’t using. We just sort of said, “What can we come up with? What’s a product we can make that nobody else is doing so that we don’t have to be competing and selling exactly the same thing everyone else is doing that’s gonna make a teacher’s life easier?” So, just a little bit of brainstorming and this is what we came up with.
Kurt Elster: So, your wife is a teacher. Okay.
Jonathon Denholm: She was. She now does this full time.
Kurt Elster: All right, so she was. In 2018, she was still a teacher?
Jonathon Denholm: That’s right.
Kurt Elster: And did you have a day job?
Jonathon Denholm: I do. Yeah. I did and I do.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And were there any skills in that that played into this?
Jonathon Denholm: I worked in account management and sales for a big tech company, so maybe some of the database sort of decision making and those sorts of things, but you know, as far as the actual-
Kurt Elster: But nothing directly applicable.
Jonathon Denholm: No. Nothing. No.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And what was the thing that made you say, “Let’s try to start our own online store.” Because you said you had a drop shipping business before, and the niche was still classroom management.
Jonathon Denholm: It was just more teaching resources in general.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Jonathon Denholm: So, yeah, much more broad. Yeah. But I guess the idea behind us wanting to start a business that we could do together was we were about to, I guess, or we just had our first kid, and we knew we were gonna be having more, and my wife wanted to work from home, so that was I guess the genesis for starting a business.
Kurt Elster: So, really it’s just… I think for a lot of people it’s not… A lot of people, when they start a business, and they go through this, because it’s a ton of work, your entrepreneurial journey for most people, the original goals often aren’t something like, “You know, I want a 20-bedroom house and a villa in Tuscany, and I want to drive cars where the doors go up.” It’s like, “Hey, I just want independence. I want freedom. I want to work from home. I want to spend time with my kids.” There’s just a lot of very reasonable things. I think income goals originally, was it like, “Hey, let’s make a million dollars,” or, “Hey, let’s replace our existing income so we can quit and be our own bosses?”
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, exactly that. It’s just let’s replace our own income. So, we’re halfway there. We’ve replaced hers. And yeah, we’re halfway to replacing mine, so…
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s sweet.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: I love to hear it. Okay, so we have… So, you start the drop shipping store 2018. What does that look like? And what made you say, “Let’s try something else but in the same space.”
Jonathon Denholm: The drop shipping store just wasn’t working. I think we’d done maybe 10 sales in four months. It just wasn’t… Yeah. It was bad. But it was the same products that everybody is selling, like it was just drop shipping straight from Alibaba. It was just sensory toys and things like that. It’s stuff that people were probably already going directly to Alibaba to buy themselves, like it wasn’t… We didn’t really understand what we were doing and looking back, it was never gonna work. But what it did was it sort of gave us the launching pad to do what we’re doing. We definitely wanted to stay in that niche because it’s where my wife is an expert. That’s what she’s trained in, and she was the one that was wanting to start the business initially, so it was just an obvious choice.
Kurt Elster: And was there anything like that kicked it off? Like I talked, I recorded an episode with John Murphy from eBike Generation, who does drop shipping, and he said, “Well, it started the way it starts for everybody. I read The 4-Hour Workweek and thought, well, I could drop ship.”
Jonathon Denholm: Right. No, we didn’t. Yeah. I don’t even know. Literally, we didn’t do any sort of research or anything in terms of how to make money online. We didn’t Google any of that. It just was literally we wanted to be able to work from home, let’s sell something to teachers. Yeah, it’s as simple as that. Sorry.
Kurt Elster: Okay. No, that’s fine. So, you said, “Hey, this is the thing we want to do, so let’s start our side hustle and see where that goes.” And go with what you know, and so you knew you had experience and understanding for teachers, and then, so you start the drop shipping store, really just winging it. It seems like you didn’t know what you didn’t know and that’s what enabled you to try it and fail. And then from there, you said, “Okay, this isn’t working, but let’s try something similar.” And so, you went from drop shipping to manufacture your own product. There are intermediary steps there normally, because manufacturing a product, also incredibly difficult. Is this another situation of you didn’t know what you didn’t know?
Jonathon Denholm: That’s exactly what it is. Yeah, that’s kind of the philosophy that we’ve taken throughout this whole journey, really. We don’t really… I’m the sort of person that if I think the steps through too much, and this probably is gonna kill anyone who’s got any sort of business qualification, but if I think the steps through too much, you just… It seems like too big of a goal and I never take that first step, so we kind of just keep trying things and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, we try something else. We’ve sort of got a fail fast mentality and it’s worked for us so far.
Kurt Elster: You know, I like that approach, because if you’re honest with yourself about it and realistic with it, it can be incredibly practical and freeing. Like if you’re a real type-A personality and you sit down and you go, “All right, I’m gonna plan out the next 10 years of my life step by step and in order,” you just bog yourself down depending on your personality. And then that wouldn’t work for me.
I think your approach is similar to my world view in that you have these long-term goals, and you know what your priorities are and you know what you want for you and your family, aha, okay, then you back into that with, “All right, does this action, does this project, does this task, tactic, whatever feed that goal?” Yes, no. Yes, try it. Did it work? No. All right, next thing. Did it work? Yes? Great. And it’s just not a complicated decision tree. And it may not be the most sophisticated thing in the world. I don’t know that that strategy gets you to a billion-dollar business, but it certainly does work for a really… a lifestyle business that’s nothing to sneeze at. For sure.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. I would agree. The risk we were taking to get us started really was 1,500, $2,000 or something in Australian dollars. I don’t know what that equals in your fancy U.S. money, but yeah.
Kurt Elster: Well, you know, we use nothing but cryptocurrency now if you ask Twitter.
Jonathon Denholm: Ah, so yeah, the risk wasn’t huge in terms of needing to plan it out that far. All we needed to do was get a couple of samples together and some illustrations to be able to launch the Kickstarter, so that’s what we did.
Kurt Elster: And if we do the conversion on that, you spent between $1,100 and about $1,500 U.S.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. Not a huge amount to start a business, really.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s not going… Really, it’s not going to bankrupt anybody. It’s not like a… You didn’t take out a second mortgage on your house kind of thing. And again, it’s that more practical let’s try it and see what happens mentality. So, what was the next step? Where did the idea come from?
Jonathon Denholm: It literally just came from discussion, so I sat down, I literally interviewed my wife. It just… I don’t know why, but that’s what we did. I sat down. I asked her the questions for a couple hours and we just really mapped out what we could do, how we could approach it. There’s a product out there, and teachers will be probably aware of it, called Warm Fuzzies. They’re literally just circle bits of…
Kurt Elster: Felt?
Jonathon Denholm: I don’t know. Cotton, wool-looking things that are just colorful and furry, and teachers would use those as a classroom management tool. If you’re being too loud, as an example, they would take it away, because these little creatures don’t like noise, right? So, I guess that was sort of the genesis of an idea. How do we make that bigger, and cuter, and better, and more all-encompassing? And so, I sat down, and I interviewed her, and we fleshed out everything that it would need to be and came out the other end with a fully-fledged product idea, and then we just had to bring it to life.
Kurt Elster: So, you really did, it wasn’t like a pain or problem. You just sat down and started thinking through, okay, what works based on her experience in teaching, and you were the sounding board, going back and forth, and tried to do essentially customer development or product development by interviewing her.
Jonathon Denholm: Exactly that. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s very interesting. And there’s still no framework, approach. We’re not like buying info products and joining masterminds. It’s just thinking it through rationally on your own.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. You make it sound so simple, but that was basically what we did.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, I think a lot… I think that’s important because I think it’s very easy to overcomplicate things and I think a lot of the time, people really are just looking for someone to give them permission, and that’s where it’s like, “All right, well, if I understand this, if I read this book, if I join this course, then suddenly I’ll have permission to be this entrepreneur.” And really it’s like you could just decide to take action and try it and see what happens.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. I feel like that’s my dirty little secret. I’ve not paid for a single piece of training or education on sort of eCommerce since starting it two years ago, and yet I do all the digital marketing. We’ve launched the whole website. We did a Kickstarter. It’s all just been podcasts, free training content, and that’s all we’ve done to bring it to life.
Kurt Elster: And like you say, “That’s all we’ve done,” but there’s a ton of work here.
Jonathon Denholm: There is.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so we’ve got you come up with the idea. Did you do anything to vet it or did you jump straight to can we try to make this?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, we jumped straight to it. We got an illustrator to… We sent him the words for the book. I wrote the book. I sent the illustrator the words. He came up with a couple of different illustrators until we found one that did a design that we liked based off the description in the book. Went back and forth until we had that. Sent the illustration to a manufacturer and said, “Can you turn this into a teddy?”
Kurt Elster: Okay, so you started with the story, and you’re a writer, or you have writing experience.
Jonathon Denholm: I have a writing degree. Yes. Yes. I have a degree that I wasn’t using, so I decided to use it.
Kurt Elster: So, you were able to use that experience, though, so you have an advantage there, so you wrote the book, self-published, get it illustrated, you’re able to self-publish it, and then… So, that’s not the terrifying part. It’s fairly standard to manufacture a book. Because publishing a book, that’s what it is. You’re manufacturing a book. The scary part here is you gotta manufacture the creature, the pet creature, the plush toy that goes with it. How does that work?
Jonathon Denholm: A lot of trial and error. I think we went through… I mean, we did what everyone does when they’re looking for a supplier. We went on Alibaba, and we typed in plush manufacturer. Yeah. I read a blog post on how to make sure you don’t get ripped off. I’m not sure whether it helped or not, but we didn’t get ripped off, so I guess it did, and we got samples from four, five different manufacturers. We got them shipped to us. We checked them for quality. Different little things. My wife’s quite picky when it comes to quality of the product, so we went through it with a fine-toothed comb and found a supplier we were happy with and placed an order once the Kickstarter was funded.
Kurt Elster: So, you had… What did you supply them with, where you’re like, “Here’s…” Because normally when we have these discussions it’s like, “Well, I had to have a CAD file. Somebody had to figure out how SOLIDWORKS works and develop this 3D render of the product so that we could supply it to one of five manufacturers, and then of the five, only one actually sent us the sample.”
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. No, we just got the illustrator to draw the front, the back, the side view of the creature in a specific way, and then we just sent that to the supplier and from that, they turned it into a 3D plush. So, yeah, I think we were quite lucky. We did get quite lucky in the fact that the product, the idea that we’d come up with was quite simple to bring to life in that way. We didn’t have to learn anything new to be able to do that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Really, it’s all right, so like component one is the book, which as long as you have the creative skills or can find the creative, which is the writing and the illustration, okay, and lay out. All right, not easy to create a book. I don’t want to minimize that. But it’s less intimidating as far as creating a physical thing goes. And then as far as the physical creature that goes with it, it’s a plush toy. And so, I guess if you find someone who’s an experienced plush manufacturer, they’re able to from an illustration go, “Yeah, I can bring that to life.” Because I suppose that is probably how they’re approached most of the time. I mean, I have three kids. There is like a small army of plush toys in my basement, and it’s interesting to see how they execute like 2D creature to 3D, it works pretty well. There’s a lot of Marios in my basement that I’m impressed by.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. I think we got the same feeling with Marvel characters with my three-year-old, but I think the real secret here is probably just Upwork. I cannot speak more highly of a website than Upwork. Just I hired the person who was able to do the book layout design in order for us to be able to get it printed without any issues, the illustrator who did the illustrations for us was from Upwork. Yeah, like everyone that we’ve hired to do things that we haven’t been able to do ourselves has been through Upwork, and it’s just essentially made it all possible, I guess.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. Okay, so you’ve had great experiences augmenting your skills, so the things that you couldn’t do. You just go on Upwork, and you post… You know, I’ve never actually used Upwork. I’ve recommended it to people plenty of times. I’ve never personally used it.
Jonathon Denholm: Use it a lot. I think that’s probably one of the skills I was able to bring from my job, is I do a lot of hiring, so being able to vet people on Upwork, even though it’s digitally rather than in person like I would do in my day job, it’s definitely I guess made it a lot easier being able to find the right people fairly quickly.
Kurt Elster: And so, that’s definitely… That’s a skill. That’s a thing people… Well, it’s certainly, I think it’s intimidating to hire someone, especially for the first time, and like hiring a contractor for the first time, all right, now I gotta maybe hire an agency, like a team, or engage a manufacturer, that’s a team. Talk me through… Give me a few bullet points for someone who is not as experienced with hiring. Here’s how to avoid disaster. Here’s what to do right.
Jonathon Denholm: I think be as clear as you can in the job post. And if you’re not sure how to write it, go and have a look on LinkedIn or SEEK and look at how they write their job ads and literally just steal the format. Be super clear in what you’re looking for. Be super clear in what they should be like. Upwork does a really good job, as well, of obviously providing reviews on previous work, and you can filter who can apply for the job based on how successful they’ve been at past jobs, how much work they’ve actually done on the platform, so it does a lot of the work for you. And then you can set custom questions, so you can be really specific and test them, basically, if you want, in terms of what their skills are and that sort of stuff, and it can make it very, very easy just to filter through the thousands of applications you’ll get for your job posting to the five or 10 people that might actually be a good fit for you and your business.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And so, that’s how, for the stuff you didn’t know how to do, you didn’t learn it. You just went and outsourced the work to Upwork. For the manufacturing process, it’s easier with a plush toy, and so it sounds like you engaged… You took a similar approach to how you hired on Upwork. You went and engaged several of them, bought samples, and then they… when they shipped them to you, then picked the best of the group?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, basically. So, you’re right. Yeah, it is a very similar process to what we did on Upwork. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Now, having talked to people many times about this who’ve been through this, but having never done it myself on getting something manufactured overseas, site unseen, one of the places where things can go wrong is the samples end up being better or significantly better than what the actual… what ends up being delivered at the end of the day. Did you run into this?
Jonathon Denholm: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Uh oh! Okay.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, so the biggest issue we had was with actually the books. I know you mentioned how it’s simple, but the book quality was horrible on the first run, so I reckon probably four in every 10 books we couldn’t use in that first book run.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no.
Jonathon Denholm: Just issues with the pages, and marks, and printing issues and stuff. So, we’ve actually since switched from printing our books in China to printing them in Malaysia, which is closer to Australia, so we get them quicker. It’s better quality. And it’s actually no more expensive, particularly when you factor in the cost of the faulty products. So, it was something we learned pretty quickly, was… Yeah, that was an issue.
When it came to the plush, the quality of the sample is probably equivalent to the best quality in the plushes that we received, but there is a bit of a range, so we had to get creative. Not as high of a faulty rate as what we had with the books, but probably maybe a 2% faulty rate, whether that’s just the hands being stitched on upside down, or just a little bit of a hole in the product. Not much we could do there without hiring a company who’s gonna be able to vet the suppliers in person and that sort of stuff, and I guess at that stage we really didn’t have the funds to be able to sort of do that. So, we just sort of worked that into our cost, so we know, “Okay, 2% faulty rate. We just add that to the cost of the product.” And it eventually turned into a bit of a win.
What we do once a year now is we do an imperfect sale, a bit of a runt of the litter sale, so 45% off, and the teacher can buy a replacement plush or just get basically a really good deal, and it’s we just have a listing on the website that shows what the common faults are and they can pick themselves up a bargain, so we end up selling those anyway.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then the way… Coming up with the idea seems to be the easy part. Getting it manufactured, hard, treacherous potentially in terms of you may not necessarily be happy with the end product that you pay for, but if you throw enough money at it, like no matter what, you can get your thing manufactured. Now the truly tough part is getting anyone to care, is going out and selling it. Because if you just throw up the store with this brand-new idea, it’s gonna be crickets. No one’s gonna show up. And it sounds like your move to announce it was Kickstarter.
Jonathon Denholm: Yes.
Kurt Elster: To go with crowdfunding. Tell me about that. Well, timeline wise, did you have the product in hand when you did the Kickstarter? Or did you go Kickstarter, then manufacture?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. We had a sample of the book, and we had a sample of the plush. That was it, but it was enough to take photos and bring it to life. I have some basic Photoshop skills, so I was able to mockup a few things to make the Kickstarter look good and all that sort of stuff, so we had minimum viable product I guess is what they would call it, but that was all we had. But the approach was that we would throw it on Kickstarter and get enough funding for the first order, and that’s literally what we said in the Kickstarter. Here’s the product. Here’s what we’re using the money for. We’ll ship it out to you.
What we didn’t… sorry.
Kurt Elster: What was your Kickstarter goal?
Jonathon Denholm: It was $8,000.
Kurt Elster: $8,000 Australian. $5,800 U.S. What did it close at?
Jonathon Denholm: Well, once we got over the $8,000 we stopped pushing it. We didn’t want to pay the exorbitant 10% Kickstarter payment processing pees once we’d had enough to place our first order and we switched straight over to our Shopify from there, basically. So, once we hit our goal we just kind of left it at that.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so as soon as you hit the goal then you put it live on Shopify and started accepting preorders?
Jonathon Denholm: No. We literally just stopped. I wouldn’t do it again if this was my approach, but we literally just stopped. We then figured out how to launch the website and do all that, and then we processed all the orders at zero dollars through the Shopify backend, and then probably two weeks before the stock actually arrived, then we opened up the website for sales. So, not how I’d do it now, but that’s what we did at the time.
Kurt Elster: So, on Kickstarter you sold 125 of them, which I think my guess is, what, like 120 was the goal. And that was enough to place the first order and see like, “All right, can we run through our first run of inventory?” And kept it intentionally small. And it seems like the big friction point here was not necessarily getting all the units and being conservative. It was not wanting to pay the 10% processing fee to Kickstarter.
Jonathon Denholm: Look, yeah. At the time, $8,000 in sales was more than we thought we’d ever do. Obviously, a far cry from what we do now, but yeah, at the time that 10% fee on whatever, whether we did another eight grand in sales, was a lot of money back then, so we thought, “No, let’s…” We make mistakes. We learn. We move on.
Kurt Elster: Well, you know, and it’s intimidating, too. Like when you’re first getting into it and people start giving you money, and you see like, “Wow, there’s a lot of people who are trusting me here with just handing me this cash with the expectation that I’ll deliver.” And I remember like the first time I sold a website for like… I think it was like $7,000. And I thought… I’m like, “Is this even legal? Can you do this?” I couldn’t believe it.
And so, I understand. Yeah, that initial… Sometimes the first taste of success is a little scary. A little intimidating.
Jonathon Denholm: It’s also… Teachers also don’t really know how to use Kickstarter, so there was a little bit of that. We had to educate them not just on our product, but on how Kickstarter worked, as well.
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Jonathon Denholm: So, it was also… Yeah, it was obviously some teachers know how to use it, but in general as a broad, sweeping statement… Yeah, teachers don’t really know how to use Kickstarter.
Kurt Elster: And was Kickstarter your only funding?
Jonathon Denholm: Yes. Yeah. We’ve never taken any outside funding or anything whatsoever. Yeah. Just that.
Kurt Elster: Fully bootstrapped. I like that.
Jonathon Denholm: Fully bootstrapped. Yeah. We had a credit card with $2,000 on it and that’s how we got started, and yeah, that’s all we’ve done.
Kurt Elster: So, did you do anything to market the Kickstarter?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. We actually got really lucky in that, so I had no idea how to do digital marketing. I didn’t know how to use Facebook ads, or Google ads, or any of that stuff back then. So, we picked up a dresser table and we went to teacher’s markets, and I had a tablet set up with a signup form, and people could give me their email address. We had the sample there that they could look at and as soon as our Kickstarter went live, we would let them know. That was literally our marketing for the Kickstarter.
But we got really lucky that there was just someone at this teacher’s market who really fell in love with the product, and she happened to be the head of a not for profit in Perth, where we’re from, that was really sort of in touch with the teaching industry, and she spruiked it for us. Our Kickstarter went live, and I reckon probably 60 to 70% of our backers came from her.
Kurt Elster: There is an aha moment here in that I… A theme I have noticed is early on in a business’s life, where you’re in that stage where you’re trying to get traction, is you’re just trying to get people to hear about you and care. Going to physical events is one of the shortcuts. And what’s smart is like if you’re going to go to a physical event, be that like a farmer’s market, a sporting event, whatever it is where you could put out a table and sell your wares, like straight old school merchant style, put an iPad and run a newsletter signup on that iPad, or tablet, or whatever. Or just have a clipboard. That works, too.
Because that really… A pretty tremendous way to get that initial traction when you don’t know where to go online, like you don’t know what those watering holes are. You haven’t figured out Facebook yet. It’s a lot cheaper to go get a folding table and go to a farmer’s market, or flea market, or whatever event you can get yourself to, and show people the thing. You get a lot of impressions and eyeballs. And you can talk to people and tell them about it. It’s really quite effective.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. I think the hands on, tactile, you can pick up the plush, and squeeze it, and feel how fluffy and soft it was, right? I think it’s underrated. If we could have something pop out of the screen and they could feel how soft our teddy was on the website, I think we’d convert at a much higher rate than what we do.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that’s always… That’s the thing. I think that’s why people get excited in eCommerce over the idea of augmented reality, or virtual reality for eCommerce, because they’re trying to bridge that limitation where you can’t… I can’t see, feel, touch, smell whatever it is, the product.
We get the Kickstarter going. You put it on the website. You get your product. You’re able to fulfill it. Now you have that post-Kickstarter slump where, “Okay, now what?” How do you keep that success going? What happens next?
Jonathon Denholm: I Googled I think something along the lines of how to advertise my website and I just… Yeah, I picked up a few YouTube videos, and listened to a few podcasts, and taught myself how to do Facebook marketing just using photos that we’d taken and photos we’d had from our Kickstarter backers to run ads, wrote a bit of copy, and yeah, it was expensive to start, but as I got better at it, it got cheaper. And it just sort of built from there.
Kurt Elster: So, really it sounds like with the Kickstarter, with the initial moving 125 orders, now you have your foot in the door, so you know, “All right, I could start to throw money at this and even if I lose some money in advertising it, I know. Now I’ve proven it. This is an idea worth pursuing. I’m willing to lose a little money at it up front and spend my time on it because I know this could be successful down the road.” It’s certainly working out better than the drop shipping store attempt.
Jonathon Denholm: It is. And I had 900 blue plush teddies in my garage that I had to move, so I needed to make some space anyways, so worst case even if I didn’t make a profit, we had to get rid of those.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I love that. Yeah. That was another… We talked to Mojca. She was so great. She bought all the stuff she was gonna ship and she had not… It hadn’t even occurred to her to buy boxes, and shipping, packing materials, but her house was full of this stuff, and so she said, “Well, I gotta sell it and get it out of here.”
Jonathon Denholm: The theory backfired though, now, because now the garage is completely full of it and now I can’t park my car in there, so it kind of went the other way. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You know, it’s a good problem to have. I assume… It probably won’t be long before you find yourself with outsourcing fulfillment with like a 3PL. So, you’re shipping out of your house right now.
Jonathon Denholm: We are. We’re looking at getting a warehouse, but we’ve got a four-month-old and my wife wants to continue to be able to work from home until she’s a bit older and goes to daycare or whatever that is, so once that’s happened, then we’re gonna get an off-site warehouse, but we’re not gonna go to a 3PL. We’ve looked into it a few times but we now do custom products and things like that and we have custom boxes that we’ve designed that sort of are also a resource that teachers can use, so then having to get a 3PL that will ship with our boxes that we’ve custom printed on and making custom products like stamps with the teachers’ names on it and stuff, it’s just not practical for a 3PL.
So, I can’t see us ever actually switching to that.
Kurt Elster: So, we went from winging it to, “Look, we’re too good for a 3PL because we got custom everything.”
Jonathon Denholm: Oh, we’re just complicated. We’re not too good, we’re just… You know.
Kurt Elster: All right, complicated. That’s a better word for it.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, it sounds like you’re using Facebook advertising is how you were able to continue the success.
Jonathon Denholm: Yes. It’s really the channel that’s worked for us nonstop. I’ve tried Google advertising and had limited success with that, and given all the Facebook changes and stuff, I’m scrambling to try and get another channel of marketing that’s gonna work for us, but I guess that’s our challenge at the moment.
Kurt Elster: Well, if you can get organic content marketing to work, you’re a writer. Doing a whole bunch of really big, like a few 2,000-word articles on these classroom management ideas is… That’s probably how I’d go about it.
Jonathon Denholm: It’s like you’re reading my mind, Kurt. It’s what I’ve been working on for the last probably two weeks. I’ve just put together a content plan, learn how to do some keyword research. I’m writing some myself, but I’ve also hired off Upwork a couple of writers so we can start pumping out sort of four to five blog posts a week, and I’ve got a budget set aside to give that 12 months, and we’re gonna see how that goes.
Kurt Elster: And this is to add an additional channel, more of an owned channel, like I don’t know that we can necessarily say that you own Google results, but you’re not paying for the traffic per click the same way you are with Facebook ads. How has Q4 of 2021 been for you with Facebook ads with the iOS privacy changes?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, it’s been a challenge. We actually brought on a marketing company right about the start of Q4, as well, so not because of the changes, but just so that I could have time to focus on other parts of the business. I felt we were at that point, so we’re both of us, me and Toby is the guy’s name, we’re trying to work through those challenges, but we’re really coming up against a bit of a brick wall. It’s working okay, but we’re just not seeing the massive spikes that we were seeing this time last year.
Kurt Elster: So, you were previously, the Facebook works it sounds like significantly better for you, and now they’re still working but not the same.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, so obviously it’s hard to measure the ROAS, and I listened to your episode the other week talking about how we should be measuring-
Kurt Elster: Media efficiency ratio. Yeah.
Jonathon Denholm: That’s the one. I just call it money in, money out, but media efficiency ratio is probably better. Yeah, so I’ve been tracking that. I use an app called BeProfit tracker on Shopify and it just measures that for me in the backend pretty seamlessly. So, yeah, but previously we were seeing like a 6 ROAS. We’re probably seeing more like a 3 to a 4 now, so it’s definitely been a significant drop. I think it’s just because it’s hard on an ad-by-ad basis to know where I should be tweaking and where I should be spending the more money, and after listening to that recent podcast of yours, we’re making some changes there as well.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. He had some good advice. Let’s see. Well, you mentioned BeProfit, which is this profit tracker, profit analytics app, that has 4.9 stars and 200 reviews, which is no easy task, so clearly this app is good. There’s their free plug. Are there any other apps that you like in your store?
Jonathon Denholm: I have a few that I use. Not to step on your sponsor’s toes or anything, but Candy Rack Upsell is probably our favorite app in terms of getting the upsells. It just works with our multicurrency app seamlessly, so that’s why we went with that one, but really good for upgrading customers to the bundles as well as offering the upsells. Works for us really well. And then Reconvert for some post-purchase cross-sells or upsells is a really good one. They’re probably the two main ones that we use.
Kurt Elster: I’ve been thinking a lot about cross-sell strategy. Of those, which placement do you think works the best? If I had to just pick one.
Jonathon Denholm: Actually, I’ve tried a few. Popup doesn’t seem to work for us for some reason. I’m not sure why. So, literally just the top of the screen, embedded in the thank you screen is the one that converts for us. It just seems to work. I’m not sure why, but that’s the one.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. And do you do cart cross-sell, checkout, post-purchase?
Jonathon Denholm: So, we do the add to cart popup, so that’s where it’ll offer them to switch to one of our everything bundles that has all of our accessories included in it, which… once we implemented those, that was a massive winner.
Kurt Elster: That’s a true upsell strategy.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. One button and it just adds all of the accessories to it. A customer asked us for it. We hadn’t had it before. Honestly, our attach rate went through the roof once we added that. And then we do a post-checkout. We sell our digital resources. If they haven’t already purchased them we offer them at half price, but being a digital product, no cost price, that’s been a huge winner for us, as well.
Kurt Elster: Oh, man. You sell digital products too?
Jonathon Denholm: Printable worksheets, classroom posters, all that sort of stuff.
Kurt Elster: Oh, they’re pure profit.
Jonathon Denholm: Pure profit.
Kurt Elster: They’re like 99% profit. That’s what’s so brilliant about info products.
Jonathon Denholm: It works really well. We probably have about a 50% attach rate overall, given the combination of the half-price ones after checkout and the purchase with the initial product. Half our customers purchase our digital product, as well.
Kurt Elster: Well, and it works so well for this product and for the audience, because if I’m a teacher and you say, “Hey, you could buy these worksheets,” right? They hand out the worksheets to their students, right?
Jonathon Denholm: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so all they see is, “Hey, you just saved me a bunch of time and I look like a hero to the students and administration. For a small fee, I get to look better at my job and be better at my job.” That’s what’s so brilliant when you can sell a worksheet like that and a digital product to the right person. And then on top of it, the profitability of the order goes through the roof.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. Not to get too deep into our strategy, but the best bit about it is when we add a new resource that a teacher’s requested to that pack, we send it out as a free update to every person who’s purchased it before, and in that email with the update it’s just a little link to leave us a Google review, and we get reviews in 10 at a time or whatever it is whenever we send out one of those updates, which is a couple of times a year.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s really clever.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. Works really well.
Kurt Elster: Whoa! Okay. I need… Actually, I have a friend who does a lot of info products. I gotta share that info product tip with her. Okay. Well, other apps, because so far we’ve got some winners here.
Jonathon Denholm: Just looking through it right now. So, we got Digital Downloads, obviously, which is a great free app by Shopify for sending out digital downloads.
Kurt Elster: It was one of the original apps, too. The thing’s… and it just works. We’ve got that running in a seven-figure store.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. Right. I mean, my wife would love if it would let people go in and resend their download links to themselves. That’s our only complaint. She does a little bit of admin for that. But otherwise, it runs perfectly. And that is… Oh, Klaviyo, obviously. That’s it. That’s everything we run.
Kurt Elster: Of course. Favorite Klaviyo flow?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah, abandoned checkout. You can’t get past a good abandoned checkout flow.
Kurt Elster: For sure. Abandoned checkout, and I bet for you, a welcome series probably does pretty well.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. It does really well, actually. We have a free poster popup, just actually… During COVID, we had a poster made up how to wash your hands properly, but with the monster, so the blue hands or the purple hands, and we offer that as a freebie to get the email address. I don’t know what a good conversion rate is for you guys, but we convert that at about 20% for the email address.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. No, that’s great.
Jonathon Denholm: Which it just suits, right? The world we live in, a poster on how to wash your hands, it’s cute, and they can just put it up in the classroom, so that’s working really well for us.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s an easy win, for sure. Well, we’re coming to the end of our time together, but I want to know. This business sounds successful, sounds like it’s taking off. You’re into six figures now. And you’re still working a full-time job. What’s that like?
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. Busy. Yeah. I do all my research and my education while I’m on the road a lot for my job, so I do a lot of podcast listening and that sort of stuff while I’m driving. Get home, we put the kids to bed, and then we sit down, and we work for three hours most nights. Yeah. That’s how we get it all done. My wife packs the orders and ships all that stuff during the day, schedules social media and all that sort of stuff, and then at night we work together on whatever it is we’re working on.
Kurt Elster: You know, when my wife and I have to do something together for her business, we take the same approach. All right, it’s the evening after dinner, the four-year-old’s in bed, the older kids are busy doing I don’t even want to know what, and then we’ll sit down and work on stuff for a few hours, usually with a glass of wine in hand. How has it been having your wife as a business partner?
Jonathon Denholm: Better than expected, and hopefully she doesn’t listen to this, but she probably will. Really good, honestly. We work… I mean, we got married and we manage to run a household together, so I guess it just follows that we’d be able to run a business together, as well. It just… Our skillsets naturally complement each other. I’m the techy guy who does all the marketing, and the writing, and the website, and she’s very hands-on and very good at product quality control, and talking to customers, and shipping orders, and all of that sort of… She’s got that very structured approach to everything, that organized approach that you need to have to run all that side.
So, it really just kind of naturally worked. We never sat down and assigned roles or anything like that, and we just kind of fell into it, and again, we got lucky.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Certainly, I’m sure it could go horribly wrong and blow up in your face, but the couples I’ve talked to, it seems to work pretty well. You’ve got this common… Suddenly you have this common goal that benefits you both equally and it often works out pretty well. I think it probably works better than most people would realize.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. The only drawback is date nights become strategy meetings, so apart from that, yeah, it’s really great.
Kurt Elster: It’s true. Inevitably, like when we go out to dinner, usually between dinner and dessert we end up talking marketing and strategy.
Jonathon Denholm: Yeah. 100%.
Kurt Elster: Unavoidable. Okay. What’s next? What is next for Your Teacher’s Pet Creature?
Jonathon Denholm: So, I think I mentioned at the top of the episode, but we’re launching a third book early next year, so that’s officially written and illustrated. That’s on social skills, so we’ve taken a bit of a different tact with this one. We’ve actually got two pets together. They both only have one wing each, and their hands Velcro together, and they have to work together to fly. That’s the story. It’s a little bit cute. Yeah, and the initial feedback from our customers in our community group is that they’re very excited for it, so we’re hoping it’s just gonna add another element.
We’ve doubled revenue year on year. We’re hoping with this product that we’re gonna be able to double it again. And yeah, that’s the third and final book. That covers the major curriculum for early childhood, the social emotional learning curriculum, and then we’ve got other products that we want to launch as just accessories, add-on products. There’s a whole list. I’ve got a whiteboard that’s… yeah, longer than my arm with different products that we want to add to the website. We want to become the one stop shop for social emotional learning resources for early childhood educators all over the world.
Kurt Elster: And my final question, if I’m a teacher, where can I get my own Pet Creature?
Jonathon Denholm: www.yourteacherspetcreature.com. I’m not sure how many of your listeners are early childhood teachers, but maybe they want to buy one for their kid’s teacher for Christmas. I did set up a discount code, as well. TechNasty for 15% off anything on the website.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: Wonderful. Jonathon Denholm, yourteacherspetcreature.com, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much.
Jonathon Denholm: Thanks for having me, mate.