You're listening to cubicle the CEO episode 273, we've got an online marketing icon behind the mic today, Jasmine star is a world class speaker, podcast host and the founder of social curator, a SaaS company that works like a Social Media Marketing Agency. In Your Pocket. In today's case study, we uncover exactly how Jasmine fundraised over $555,000 from her community in just one hour to propel the growth of social curator. Instead of looking to banks, VCs or angel investors, Jasmine turned to her community of already invested users for a bootstrapped cash injection. We examined the urgency plays. She used to exceed her goal amount in under an hour, including the logistics of her best conversion, secret recording, hundreds of personalized videos for individuals on her wait list.
Welcome to cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders and CEOs the business questions you can't google. I'm your host. Ellen Yin, every Monday, go behind the business in a case study style interview with a leading entrepreneur who shares one specific growth strategy they've tested in their own business, exactly how they implemented it and what the results and revenue were. You'll also hear financially transparent insights from my own journey bootstrapping our media company from a $300 freelance project into millions in revenue.
Hey, friends, today we have a real treat with us. Jasmine star is joining us on the show, and here to talk about a really interesting case study. We've talked about fundraising a little bit on cubicle the CEO before, as you know, with different founders who have raised from angels or VCs, but Jasmine is actually here to talk about how she leveraged her community and really leaned into that aspect to fundraise over half a million dollars for her software company. So I won't get into the details just yet, but Jasmine, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Ellen. I mean, girl, if that is not a great hook, I don't know what is. I mean, if we, if you, are not telling people right at the outset why they should listen, I mean, that was that was brilliantly done. Bravo. I'm so happy to be here.
Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this day, especially as a fellow bootstrap founder, and I know many of our listeners are, but like I said, before we get into the case study, I always like to ask our guests, what is your cubicle to CEO story? What was that final catalyst that launched you into entrepreneurship?
You know, I don't know where to pick up the story that would be best suited, but I can give you the very nutshell version in any part that you want to tap on. It was literally cubicle, but I don't even know if I was go as far as saying it was a cubicle, because it was legitimately like a storage room, and my desk was a fold out table. My dad is a pastor in East Los Angeles, and I took a job, having quit law school just in the interim, as I decided whether or not I actually had the strength the hutzpah and the wherewithal to start a business. And so there are many times in ways in which people can say, like, I left a cubicle and I was like, I kind of left a storage room with a fold out table. But hey, it's not as catchy as cubicle the CEO. It's like Target fold out table to CEO.
But either way, it started off very much as in my first foray in business was having this idea to become a photographer, but I didn't own a camera, and so I had just dropped out of law school. I had this burning desire to pursue creativity, but everybody's like, Oh, that's the starving path. Like you want to be a starving artist for the rest of your life. I made first generation Latina. I was the first in my family to go to college and the first in my family to pursue upper education. And when I quit, I thought, Okay, I'm gonna be letting people down. And it was actually quite the opposite. My mom was battling brain cancer at the time, and my parents had just said, Life is really short, and so what will you do? And my father had taken so many jobs over the entirety of his life, everything from being a cook at a college to cleaning septic tanks.
I come from a long line of hotel housekeepers and nannies and gardeners. And so he had said, we came to this country so that our children could do something that they were excited and gave them life. And so with that, I had a blessing to go out and pursue photography without owning a camera, without really knowing what's gonna work. So it's one thing to have this idea, so you have to become the thing you desire. But at the same time, if you want to make money, you actually have to become an entrepreneur, and that was my the first time that I actually realized I think I might have a shot. My first year in business made over $100,000 now that doesn't sound like a lot to a lot of people, but to a girl whose father raised five children on a salary that was around $30,000 to make 100,000 that was completely life changing.
And so went from being a photographer, not having a camera, and I started documenting my process. I just dirty. Started saying, like, this is how I started my business. This is how I'm making money. And I became very open on my blog. And along the way, there were other photographers who became interested, not necessarily in the work that I was creating, because they were like, she's average at best. Best, but the girl knows how to make some money, and so they started following me in terms of that. And along the way, my skills started getting better. I started getting awards for my work, and my husband and I, having never done anything online before, people were asking a lot of questions, and so I was like, You know what? I can probably make a PDF.
So we just threw together an online shop, and that was the first time that I realized that there is a way to have a business online and then have an online business. Those were two very different things, and it wasn't until I had actually realized that having an online business means that you are making and generating money without your direct hour for our dollar for dollar trade. And so when we first created digital products. We then started realizing that we had a way to scale this over time. I started creating videos, and from that point, people asked me to start consulting in businesses. And so I started consulting with small and medium sized businesses. And then what happened was these companies, I was going in, and I was talking to their branding and marketing teams on how to build a brand and market on social media, and they said, Well, can you and your team just come into our business and do it for us?
And all of a sudden I started realizing, Oh, this is becoming an agency model, and I don't want to do an agency. I want to help business owners. I don't know if I want to help organizations, at least at that time in my career. And so I started creating online courses. My first course dropped in 2016 and love it. I know. I know. And you know, that was the first time that we had ever created a seven figure revenue stream in less than 12 months. And I was like, oh, there's something that's different that's going on here. So we started creating online courses, and then the feedback we started getting was people wanted something with a little bit more consistency, since marketing was ever evolving, right?
So we launched a membership, and we had said, when I say, We my husband, my co founder, we said, If 500 people sign up for this membership, like, we would be so excited. And so we had a five day card open period, and 2444 people signed up for the membership. And we were like, Oh, something is here. And over the years, the membership kept on expanding, but we saw there was a friction point, and within that friction point, people wanted to get their marketing resources and actually post them to social media. Well, in order for us to do that, we would need to integrate with the largest social platforms. And in order to do that, you needed a tech platform. We actually had to build a SaaS company software as a service in order for us to fully deploy on that customer journey. So in 2021 we debuted our own tech stack with our own coding, our own team, and since that point, that's really where we've stepped in and leveraged along the way. Wow.
Well, I have to say there's a couple things top of mind. First, I can relate to so much of your personal life. I'm also a first generation Asian American. I know you know, behind the scenes, you your twin. My younger sisters are identical twins, so I grew up in that family environment, and also hearing you talk about, you know, working in that in that closet at your, you know, at your dad's place while you were trying to get your photography business initially, off the ground that made me laugh, because my dad also has a company that he started towards the tail end of my high school, and I do remember at one point working in his storage closet. And there's actually, there's actually some video recordings from my very first course I ever created, back in 2019 where you can see, like the piles of boxes behind me. I'll have to find it sometime. But that just made me laugh, because it's, you know, it's a unique story. But also, there's so much about entrepreneurship that is shared, that is, you know, something that we can have in common. So love that. But
one thing to note, one thing to note, before we actually get into the data and analytics, I want to really highlight what I think that you and I are talking about is everybody starts somewhere, yeah. And I think that sometimes we joke like, oh, you know, Apple started in a garage. And we like to talk about like, oh, the formidable days of us, you know, creating a course in front of piles of boxes or in a fold out table from Target. But at the end of the day, I think it's really important that we do share those stories and we normalize them, because it's oftentimes that what people see is this beautiful version and shiny and gorgeous and amazing, high production value of Ellen today, but we all sorted at the same spot. And then there's some of us who are willing and have the strength to endure those embarrassing, scrappy, really ugly, awkward moments in the beginning to get where we are today.
So if you're in your proverbial storage closet or cubicle like please know we all start there. It's those who have the courage to continue to pursue and those are the people we get to speak about and speak to today. So again, thank you for the honor. Such a good word.
I can tell that your pastor's daughter,
are you gonna give me an amen? Are you gonna give me Amen? Because Amen, okay, okay.
I love that. And to add to that, I would also say even hearing Jasmine's story, for those of you listening, what I want you to take away from that is, you know when you were talking about, okay, like I started a photography business without even a camera, at no point in time, I'm sure when you were at that stage of business. Did you think I'm going to be a founder of a SaaS company? Right? It's interesting how you know, as you evolve and you allow yourself to actually. Experience new things. It shapes perspectives or allows opportunities to open up that you wouldn't have been able to dream up in the moment that you currently stand in because you haven't yet had the experience. So I really wanted to highlight that point. Thank you for sharing your story. I always love hearing the very past that people go through to get to where they are.
And you know, Ellen, I mean, God, we're gonna get to the DNA and analytics. People are like, please stop with the shit chat. But I'm like, No, down. But I'm like, No, it really does bear repeating that that was such a great point, because at the time, my soft, kind, hopeful brain was really only ever wishing that I could travel the world with my camera, that I can actually create a living. All I was trying to do was substitute a salary with my camera, like that was my biggest ambition. That was 14 years ago. Like, I'm blown away that I just think, like Jasmine, if you stay in the game another 14 years, if you have the willingness to get punched in the gut, you know, lose a tooth, walk around with an iron lung, but you get to do this thing, it will look so different and it is better. I've always maintained that the future will look different and it will take longer, but it will be better than you imagine.
And so it's on that note that we could start this conversation because I don't want anybody to hear me speak about something we've done, and then we what happens is it turns into a story of gold plated grit. Brene Brown says that it's easy for us to talk about hard moments or big moments, and we're like, oh, that was a hard thing we did, but this is the thing I learned about it. And we see that a lot on social we see that a lot in digital marketing, but we don't talk about is the grit, the grind, the ugly, the fear, the doubt, the scrappy action, the inaction that all creeps up that stops a lot of us. And so I want to, like, really, truly start there before we get into the shiny stuff and let us know. It's like, it takes a long time to get here, but it's better than we had imagined.
Yes, and I really appreciate that pre frame. I think it's super encouraging. Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. I think it was like the the founder of McDonald's, saying, Yeah, I'm overnight success, but 14 years or 10 years, or whatever he said, is a long, long night, right? So
So for a little context for our listeners, and before we actually get into some of this data around how you were able to fundraise over half a million dollars in one hour you guys, which is absolutely mind blowing, but tell us a little bit more about the actual SaaS product, about social curator, give us the context of like, who it's for, who uses it, what the price points are, just so we have that background information going into the rest of this case study.
Thank you. So we'll just give the facts and give a good idea of where we were at the journey when we decided to fundraise in this way. So traditionally. And here's the thing, Ellen, I had no idea when we started a SaaS company. There are traditional ways that you fundraise. There's traditional ways that you get money, get loans. There are ways to do this that I had zero clue about. I now know Ellen that people can ask people for money based on just an idea. I know it sounds foreign, but I'm like, Oh, wait, I didn't know that. And so here we were with a proven product. We had a membership, but a lot of friction points within that membership, and so we already had high revenue, high profit, proven concept. And I didn't even think, oh, maybe we should go and get fundraising so that people can actually amplify this idea.
So what JD, my husband and business partner decided to do was, at this time, we have a few 1000 members, and we had been using our money and reinvesting it in the business, but we had these large enough profit margins for us to make a strategic bet that if we continued to bootstrap and build out our own tech team. So at the time, we were charging $49 and we knew that if we raised the price to $59 with all of the added benefits and the features that that was coming in the future, we would be able to recoup costs in the future. We had to get to that point. And so for us, our members at the time were paying $49 now this is for a small business owner who feels very overwhelmed with social media.
And so what we were doing and implementing at that time was you would come in, you would create a profile about your business, how you refer What is your voice like, what is your business called? And then what you would do is you would be able to go in and create your social media post. Now we've been leveraging and adding a layer of AI to this. And so what happens is, you have education, you have courses, you have what we call action plans, you have a community. We do live business, coaching on the inside. And then what people can do is go through and schedule and plan all of their social content for the day, the week, the month. And that was the offer. And we're like, great. We know that you guys are having a hard time with our content, taking it off our site and scheduling it on a third party planner or directly on Facebook, Instagram. Tik, Tok, so we decided to say, we will front end this investment, and we did that successfully for about two years.
But what we wanted to do was expand the team, and expanding the team would require more money, and so JD and I said, Can we do. Fundraise from our own paying users, so that they will be the people who are funding the business, and they will be able to see the future and be part of that future build
amazing so just to make sure I understand correctly, you already had, you know, a first iteration of this SaaS product that people were actively paying for, like you said. So these were people who are bought into the software, but you wanted to kind of upsell them, or not even upsell, but just have them buy into the vision of the next level of this 100 of this software. Okay, you actually you took the first question right out of my mouth about why did you go the bootstrap route? So that makes total sense, just not knowing, you know the other funding options available. So with that said
Can I stop there for one second, though, because if anybody's interested, and they're like, Oh, well, now I know, or maybe prior to the conversation, they knew they can get capital in that capacity. One thing that I'm so happy why we stayed not knowing actually was a benefit. Because what happens is, when you take money, everything comes at a cost. And I'm not talking about investment costs. I'm not talking about equity. About equity, I'm not talking about interest. I'm actually talking about when somebody gives you money, they then have an opinion, and the more money they give you, the more opinion they have, and the more weight that that opinion holds.
Now when you are a founder and you so distinctly understand the pain and pressure point of your member, your user, your client, then having somebody else who's less familiar speaking to the future iterations can sometimes dissuade you or put pressure on you to make a different decision that's against what you know to be true as a founder. So for us, not taking that money gave us the power and freedom to run fast and not have to pay any attention to anybody else.
I love that reminder. It's actually, it's funny because I have a coffee mug I'm not drinking out of it today. But my friend shout out, Frenchie frenzy gave it to me. It's called, stay close to the money. And as you were talking that, that literally is what popped in my brain, because, yes, cheers, because you wanted to stay close to the source of the actual recurring revenue. Which is your you know, which are your customers? And as an angel investor myself, and having been on the other side, obviously, with angels, some are more involved than others, but I totally understand what you mean. Like for every investor that you have on your cap table, it's essentially like a mini boss. It's like someone who you you have to answer to, because their ultimate priority is to get an ROI on their money.
And so you now have to lean towards that goal when maybe the real goal is at this moment in time, I need to best serve my customers with absence product. And sometimes those are competing, you know, priorities. And so I love that you gave that extra context for our listeners, knowing you did go the bootstrap route. Though, I really want to get into all the specifics of the offer because I'm so so curious. I have so many questions. Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to keep this concise for our listeners, but basically, when you decided to fundraise from your community, you are going to offer 300 lifetime subscriptions at $1,500 each, and you are going to make this offer available for exactly one hour.
So I really want to understand your thought process behind these specific numbers. So first off, the immediate question that popped into my brain was, okay, why lifetime? Because in a SaaS business, you know that the customer, for every month they stay on, there's still a cost incurred in this support right to service that account. And so when you think about it, $1,500 based on your current pricing of 599 a year, that's about two and a half years. It would be the equivalent of if someone stayed on your platform for two and a half years. But I imagine that for a lifetime customer, the amount it costs to service them will exceed their their lifetime value their LTV to your bottom line, right? So I'm just curious, why did you pick lifetime instead of, let's say, Oh, let me give you a better deal for like, three years, and you're just kind of buying bulk up front.
We were definitely in the position where we like to identify an irresistible offer like, it has to make so much sense that you're like, Well, of course, I would do that. And the beauty about having a strong SaaS offering, specifically over time, is that the better we get with the product, the less support they're going to need. And so the largest part of a membership and or a SaaS offering is getting somebody caught up to speed and then building a level of consistency. But specifically with the improvements that we've made to the platform, is that it should be taking less and less time, over time, to create the content and get a result. And the better you are at creating the content and then getting a result, the less support we have to have. So there are certain sunk costs with the nature of what it is we do, there are sunk costs according to every month we provide a new action plan.
This is like, what do we see out in the marketing landscape? We're going to give you clear ways for us to do that. There's sunk cost inside of the community. We have challenges and ongoing things that people can stay participated in, but if we have two users or 200,000 users, that's the same price. So we've already accepted the fact that there's going to be certain sunk cost. But what we see is the user on the front end will require the most amount of investment from our customer success team. But. The longer they're with us, it's declining amount of time. So for us offering lifetime, it made a lot of sense, because I'm like, the happier are, the less time that we need. And then at the end of the day, do they walk away the ultimate winners. If they're the indiscriminate winner, they're going to become lifelong fans and evangelists. And I thought, I'm okay with that.
Okay obsessed with how you describe that curve. I'm someone who thinks and literally visualizes and analogies. The thing I saw in my head when you were describing that was my current so I'm I've owned the house that we're currently recording out of for four years. I'm actually selling it right now, but my I know
you're gonna get a duplex. Yeah, I did. I did my research. I did. I did.
Thank you. But I was thinking about, you know, when I get my monthly mortgage statements and you see the loan amortization, right? So, like, the interest you pay in the first 10 years of owning a home is, yes, is greater than the principal that, or the amount of your mortgage payment that's going towards principal. So I see exactly what you're saying, and I find that to be very true, even even outside of the software world, I think anybody listening, even if you're in a service based business, the onboarding of a new client is always more intensive than to maintain a current client. And so that's an excellent point. All right, let's talk now then about the so we talked about why live time the actual price point.
So at the time when you did the sale, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you offered it to them for 1500 and you limited it to 300 So is that kind of like an arbitrary number that felt like, Okay, if we get 300 people in at this price, we'll get the amount of funds that we need. Was it just literally a math problem, or was that 300 decided in a different way.
Okay, so can I get super Can I can I share the backstory? Because I feel like I can go through the numbers and they're gonna paint a certain picture, but I would rather somebody hate this approach or love the approach by knowing 100% of the approach. And so I'm unafraid to be like, listen, it was hot mess Express like it was the first time that we had ever seen this done in a particular way. And I know that it's not a new concept to offer a lifetime component to it, but for us, it was, yeah. And so I'm a first time founder, and I'm a first time lesson learner. And so for us, when we had put together this idea, we had said, Okay, we would like to have enough runway to hire a tech team, and we know how much a developer in Los Angeles is going to cost, and we knew we would bring in junior developers and a junior UI and UX, so user experience and user interface.
So we were looking at their salaries, we knew how much we were making every single month from our current users. When we added on additional employees, what was going to be the incremental salary increase that we would need in order for 12 months for us to sustain that? So we just thought we're going to make this offer and we're going to put it out. And at the time, we did not limit it. We just said we're going to only offer it for an hour now there, at the time, this was back in 2020, and this is during the pandemic, yeah, and there's something called clubhouse, and it was a new app. It was all audio. And so there was this room about SaaS founders, and every morning, at 7am there would be two women talking about how to build a SaaS company.
Now, like, mind you, this is me years ago. Like, I want to become a photographer, and I don't have a camera, right? And so this is me. I'm a SaaS founder, and I don't own I don't know a line of code. I don't know what it actually means to have this type of business. All I know is like I need that type of business. So I was literally feeling like I was getting a college degree listening online while I'm making breakfast for my newborn daughter. And so for months, I'd been listening to the way that they speak. Now they were using languages and terminology and nomenclature that was so foreign to me that I was writing it down, and then later in Google, I'm looking at, okay, what does this mean? And I was literally teaching myself.
And so then there's this one morning where they would ask people to come up on stage. And I just had the nerves, and I asked my husband, like I grabbed his phone, I pressed record, and I said, I'm going to ask her a question. So I asked a question. They bring me up on stage. Now if you don't know what clubhouse is like, bless your heart, but they would call them a stage, and they just elevated you. It was like, Really, like the dumbest concept, but you were on stage, on the proverbial clubhouse stage. And so I asked a question, and I said, we have this idea that we are going to fundraise for our tech funding to take us into the following year and debut our own tech stack, and is there any insights that you might have? And this queen came in, and she said, You must incite FOMO, and you must give them a reason to buy something. Must be disappearing, yep.
And she's like, Have you thought about limiting the amount of people that you can have? And I said, No. She's like, I want you to limit the amount of people that you have, and I want you to limit the time frame in which they must do it. So we thought it was going to be unlimited and one day. And what she challenged us and invited us to do was to make it a very short amount of time, because she said, you don't want to over subscribe. Because what happens is we knew how much people, we knew how much money we were going to be making from people over the lifetime of their subscription. So it is. A risk by saying, Okay, I'm gonna take all of that money up front. She's like, you don't want all of your users to give you all their money, which is fine, but then all of a sudden, when you hit MRR monthly recurring revenue, you're gonna see a sharp decline. She's like, so it's gonna be a fine balance.
So we just ran some back of the napkin math, and we felt like 300 was going to be a good number for us. And we started putting that messaging out. I'm saying get on the wait list, because there's gonna be a limited number of lifetime subscriptions. And unbeknownst to us, unforeseeable to us, was like this demand to get on the wait list. They wanted to be the first to know. And so it really became like this Black Friday type sense, right? It's like, so it's like a, you know that one pocket listing that one last cashmere sweater at Neiman's? And people are like, I want to be the first to know about this. Yeah. So we built this wait list, and we did it super scrappy. We did it on Google Sheets. From Google Sheets, what we would do was we had a VA go through and create a document for me to go each by person, line by line, and make them a one minute video.
So if Ellen, you were on there, I would see Ellen Yin, and then I would go to loom or Vidyard, and I'd be like, Ellen. I just want to cast a vision for what we're going to do. We're going to use this money in x, y, z, way, so that in the next four months, eight months and 12 months, these are the things that you're going to see. But I want you to be a part of something bigger. This is my personal invite. I just want to say thank you for being a part of this community. And I want to invite I want to invite you into what we can do in the future. I made, goodness gracious, I think over 901 minute videos, wow. And the team was just like, block off this jasmine. You're going in and you're making this so just minute after minute after minute after minute after minute, and then 24 hours before we opened up that sale, everybody was sent their own personalized email, Hey, Ellen Jasmine made this video for you so that you saw it.
You caught the vision, and it incited even more desire to be like I want to be a part of the 300 so we open at I believe it was noon. We open at noon, and the site is like, buzzing. It's like, we had to do stress tests for everybody hitting the site. And we were like, oh my god, I think it's gonna crash. We just kept on saying, kept on saying, and things happened so much faster that we ended up raising 555,000 we ended up over subscribing and closing the round sooner. We couldn't even get to the hour because we knew of, like, if we actually take this to an hour, we're gonna have way too many people come in, yeah, and so for us to raise $555,000 I just don't think that I was emotionally or mentally prepared to see that happen so fast, and have so many people so excited, and then having people be like, I can't believe I missed this.
It was the first time that I actually saw what it meant to have a community get behind a thing that was much bigger than myself, the team or even the business. It was about who they saw themselves in the future.
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Wow. Okay, I have so I have so many questions.
Let's get in. Yeah,
the first thing that comes to mind is okay, so you, first of all kudos 901 minute videos is no joke, but I'm sure you became an absolute pro at articulating your vision by the 900th video. So actually, my first question is just a question of clarification, were there 900 people on the wait list then hence the 900 videos or or did you know, was it? More or less, just wanted to make sure
every person on that wait list, and what I'm gonna do, I'll get you the exact number. Maybe it, maybe it wasn't 900 maybe it was 600 maybe it was 1600 I actually don't know, but yes, everybody
on the wait list did get a video. Okay, awesome. And then you said they got an individualized email delivering that video 24 hours before you open the cart. At the point when they received the video, did they already know tomorrow is the scheduled date for the drop? So they were already anticipating, right?
Yes. So we said, hey, it's gonna happen on this day at this time, sign up for the wait list so you're the first to know got it. And so we were sending cultivating emails, speaking to that audience specifically got
it and then for the hour you said, you can't remember exactly, but maybe it was around noon. Again, I just love to, like, understand the process behind every little minute detail and decision. So noon? Why noon? Was that a time that, typically, for example, in my business, I find that I often do live events at 11am Pacific Time. And I think at this point, it's probably just habit. There's not really any real data that shows that's the best time window compared to other ones. We haven't tested that many. But I'm just curious for you, like, did you pick middle of the day in a middle times, or if you're in LA, I assume you're on, you know, Pacific Time, West Coast, right? But did you pick a specific hour that you felt like the most number of people could be active and get to their computers or their phones to buy or again, was that just kind of like a, you know, we're just gonna announce the time, and then people will show up and make it happen.
You know? It was either 11 to noon or it was noon to one, okay, so that time frame, and so what I've discovered is my favorite time to do webinars I am based on the West Coast is 10am I love that time. But what I've discovered is that 10am Hawaii is three hours ahead. So 7am is a little bit early on that side. And when we move it to noon, we have 9am Hawaii, noon Pacific, 3pm east coast, but also 8am London, we have a very large contingency. So our largest market is going to be the US represented within the community. US, Canada and England and Australia are very pretty close behind that. And so because we have a SaaS offering that they can access at any other time, this is not like a course or a live dissemination of information, we wanted to make sure that we kind of had level ground for all people who were interested. So, yeah, it was a strategic time frame for us.
Okay, thank you. I had an inkling, but I wanted to be sure, because it's always really interesting to hear just even how the slightest decisions can make a difference in the success of a launch or a drop like this. Okay, so $555,000 came through the the last piece of the $1,500 offer itself was, How did you land on that price? Why 1500 what was the thought process behind that?
It was what we wanted somebody to make to be a part of it. So the more that somebody invest in something, the more they have, like active value or ownership to it. So we did want these lifetime members not to have money that they could just indiscriminately spend and say, Oh, that was something I did. We wanted these people to be the people who were giving us feedback on the product. And we knew that 1500 it wasn't exactly 2000 and it wasn't 997, we really liked this 1500 at the time, our pricing was $49 so we said, for somebody to be in here for three years, do we think that we're gonna over exceed that three year value? And the answer for us was heck yes, and as long as we knew that the people we serve are getting a better deal all in that's what we were 100% about.
I think that's a great filter, actually, for a lot of our listeners, to think through pricing like, okay, pricing is subjective, right? It's like, when someone says, Oh, does anybody know an affordable hairstylist? It's like, well, what's affordable to you? Right? That's very, very nuanced. And so I love the way you're thinking instead, where it's like, it's not about is this price, quote, unquote expensive or cheap? It's more so, yeah, like you said within the. Time frame, or within the container of what you're giving them. Would it be a better deal for them to part with the money than to keep the money and, you know, do things the way that they are so love that mindset shift.
So this wait list, then you said you were driving these people who were interested in knowing about the drop being the first to know onto this wait list. But you also said you did have your pre existing users on social curators, so the wait list was it open to the public or just to the people who are already active users?
It was just just to active users. And so one thing that we like to balance very strategically is how much we're making an Ask publicly. So I've always grown up with this idea, give, give, give, ask. And Gary Vaynerchuk had a much smarter way of saying it. He says Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. So a jab is going to be something like, Oh, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna give you something, I'm gonna give you something, and then a right hook is an ask. And so we wanna be very careful and strategic when we're making asks outward facing. We know that when we make an ask, it's very powerful. We are able to move because we have way over indexed the amount of information and goodwill and education that we're giving on outward facing, so that when we make an ask, somebody feels like, Yes, I am ready to be committed, because I've received so much on the front end.
So when we were doing this lifetime sale, they would have required way too much messaging and convincing of a cold audience what they were building into. And we didn't want a cold audience coming in, because my cold audience, like 1500 that's really nothing people spend, you know, 510, $1,000 on a course getting 1500 just to be a looky loo was not for the market that we were trying to serve. We wanted people who wanted to build alongside us. So it was a really beautiful thing that our segment was a lot smaller than anything out publicly, and so people felt like they were the on the ins. And I was going into the community. I was doing live videos. I was explaining why this was gonna be the language and the cadence, and just like the overall energy that you carry in with people who are already paying customers is so different than a cold audience, absolutely.
And you brought up a brilliant point, which is that not all money is equal, even if you, like you said, person A gives you 1500 person B gives you 1500 it's about what they do with that investment of the 1500 and I think that's really smart, because you're right. There are lots of people who might have just been curious about what you were doing and would pay, but would not be active, would not give you feedback, which would therefore defeat the purpose. So 100% excellent, excellent point, I think we can all stand to remember that whenever we're launching something and thinking through, are we going to make this a public ask or a private ask, and really asking, like, what is the end objective of the type of users that you want to get in there? What types of behavior do you want to be promoting? And then making sure you're filtering based on that. That's so smart
the 450,000 that you originally wanted to raise, and then, of course, the 555,000 that you actually did raise. I think it's really helpful for our listeners to understand how you spent that money. There was actually an episode on our show where we talked to two founders who had raised over a million dollars the more traditional way, with VC funding or angel investing. And we actually broke down like their burn rates and like, what they were spending on. But for you, as a SaaS founder, I'm curious you had mentioned that you were planning to hire some junior developers, some engineers. So I know staffing was the main priority. But was there anything else within that half million dollar spend that you had deployed that capital on pretty quickly after this closed and or are still deploying. And I would just love to know, you know what you're spending on to continue to grow social curator,
absolutely so, because we started off as a membership. Anybody who has a membership understands that the profit margins for digital goods is just bananas. And so the fact that we had been able to really cultivate a very strong organic marketing arm, so that when we went into opening and closing of social curator, we were able to see these really massive spikes of users coming in, yeah. We felt very strong about the model itself. We knew how to optimize our cost for productions within the membership. So what we needed to do was create a new casing for the membership to go in and function like SaaS. However, because we had this was a whole new arm, a whole new division of the company that specifically within this is people's salaries in the tech world, specifically in Los Angeles, most everybody, most everybody's around six figures, yes.
And so for us to absorb a tech arm, and they need runway to build, yep. So we were funding the build behind the scenes, so that our profit margins were decreasing with the belief that when the tech and that SAS came along, that we would then be able to start growing. So what we were doing was fundraising specifically for tech runway. 100% of that went to funding tech SaaS runway
got it, and now that you are several years removed from that initial. Initial you know that initial drop, if you were to need an infusion of cash again in a big lump sum, like you did in 2020 knowing what you know now, would would you do something similar again, or would you perhaps seek more traditional venues for funding the second time around?
It really depends on what we would want to fundraise for. I do believe that if we go for expansion, like pure expansion, I think that traditional bank funding, Angel rounds, VCs, would be a better way to go, because it's hard to sell somebody on this idea of more. We want more if we were to offer something else that improved their relationship with the platform that improved the community. Offered a different feature set, offered something that directly benefited them. I would 100% go back and fundraise from this crew. I think it worked before. It's very, very, very win, win. However, we have to be able to show the win, win. So depending on what the objective was for the fundraise, I think I would choose, according to that?
That was really great answer. So to recap, the distinction is, if it's about product improvement, aka answering the question of what's in it, for me, for your end user, then you'll go the more community raise route. Otherwise, if it's just about pure expansion of team, of top line revenue, of user base, then it's the more traditional route, because there's not a clear what's in it for them, right?
Absolutely. And given our fortuitous position, I probably would not go seed angel or VC. I would go bank. So bank loans are so hard to get because banks will only give money to people who are already making money. They're so risk averse. It is. There are so however, if you have a business that is proven that you're making money, but what you need is a cash infusion for expansion for this, and you can clearly articulate the ROI and what time frame we would be able to do that. And again, I would go bank route, because I don't want somebody telling us what to do, and a bank doesn't tell you what to do. They just need to know, are you going to pay us back and by when? And to me, I would still go for that money. Any money that doesn't come with an attachment of a micro boss, is money that I would pursue first
yes and no, no equity that you have to take off the team, correct, somebody else, right? Correct. Yes, correct. So, so smart. So this flash sale, I know it's we already talked about. It exceeded your expectations. You cut it off before the hour. I'd love to know, just like a peek back into that day where you and JD literally hunched over your computer watching the sales roll in, and you turn to each other at a certain point, go, we gotta cut this off. And you just, like, made the decision right in that moment. Or were you kind of, like, going back and forth for like, 10 minutes being like, Should we close it? Should we let it run the full hour? Like, give us a little behind the scenes peek at the real dialog that was happening in the moment that you decided to shut it off.
Ellen, thank you so much for this question, because I've never spoken about it. So we've been in business long enough to know that despite your best efforts, you're not in control of the outcome. Yep, and so while we gave it 110% we also knew we weren't guaranteed 300 we weren't guaranteed three, yeah. And so the way that we have learned how to be unattached is to decide where we're going to be and how we want to feel regardless of the outcome. And so when you're thinking about this, this is fundraising. It's not a make or break. We have these goals and we have hopes, but we're okay, yeah, if it fares the way we want or not.
So Seth Godin said it best he doesn't want to ever pursue a test that must work. So for us, and I love that, because this was a test that we hoped worked, but it was a nice to have. It wasn't a need to have, yeah. And so what we decided to do is we had said we're gonna be out. We're gonna arrange for a babysitter, we are gonna go to lunch, and we're gonna celebrate whatever happens. So we had already decided that by the end of the hour, so it was either that we were at lunch, you know, planning to be there at noon, or at one that time frame. So crystal blue skies. We live in Newport Beach. We decided to do something local. We were outside waiting for a table, and he and I were not expected to be completely glued to slack. There was a channel, and we just kept on seeing people come in.
We were getting these notifications, and the team and I were just slacking. We're like, do we pull it now? What do we do? Oh my god. Do we stop it? Oh my god. Oh my god. So it's just this complete thread. Yeah. And JD, who is an Enneagram to wing three in a place of service, wants to help people all the time. He's also big on celebration, yeah, but I am talking about there was one time where we had a launch back in 2017 and it was tanking so bad, yeah, we were it was an offer for a brand new course, yeah. Now I'm not in this flash sale anymore. Let me back up a little bit to kind of paint a picture of how he functions and what we learned in this lesson. So in the middle of this launch, and it was tanking so badly, and I was having a freak out because we had pre invested money in ADS. And I'm like, when is the ROI gonna happen?
Because we had anticipated that we were gonna be cash flow positive from these. Ads by this date, and it wasn't happening there, and I was in full on FREAK OUT mode, and we had this really expensive bottle given to us by clients of wine. And he said, Let's go outside and let's start a fire, and we're gonna enjoy this bottle of wine. And I said, You're crazy. I am not opening like I have to reserve opening that bottle of wine at some point in the future. And he had said, If we cannot enjoy a beautiful bottle of wine at our Morse moments, we cannot enjoy the beautiful bottle of wine at our best. We have to understand that who we are and what we're becoming in this moment is actually shaping who we're destined to become. So if we are going to have to go through it anyway, can we not just take a moment and celebrate this?
And let me tell you, it was such a beautiful experience. I was still overwhelmed. I was still sad, and at the end of that launch, it so far exceeded our expectations. At the last minute, due to the scrapiness and things that we had changed and how we innovated and pivoted great. But what we had to learn in that moment is, when are you going to celebrate, and do you have the willingness to celebrate, even if it's not going the way that you had anticipated? So now let's flash forward, back to this one hour flash sale of lifetime subscription so that we self fundraise. The next iteration of the business is he went into the restaurant far before we'd ever closed, and he brings up two glasses of champagne, and he said, we've already won. We won with three and we won with 300 but we've already won. And so to close that, I my whole body was buzzing, and I like, I and JD had said, Okay, when we're done, we're getting off the phones and we're just being.
And I was like, yes, so we're slacking the team. I'm like, Okay, guys, I'm gonna go for lunch. I'll be right back, but we put down the phones, we clink our glasses, and I said, I cannot believe we just did that. And it was one of those times in your life and in your business that you look back at every time it didn't work, and every time you felt like a failure, and every time you questioned the build, and every time he wondered, why did I make this decision, and how did we end up here? And what is it all for? Yeah, that just in that moment, it was just so undistilled, so good and so sweet that he said, just be here now, enjoy lunch, and we're gonna go back, get back to work, and we're gonna continue building like we were before. So for that time, it was freaking epic. And then we get back and we build just another day at work.
That's such a beautiful reminder. I love that, that you have that energy to balance you, like when you're having your like, highs or lows, that your husband is just this steady, like we're going to schedule this celebration, it reminds me a lot of my husband Dustin actually, he's very much always trying to create space or push me to celebrate the little things, and so I love that you have that person in your corner that does the same for you.
We are fortunate. And for people who are listening and they might not have that partner, or they might not have a partner, that's no problem. The key here is to find yourself a circle of people who will hold space for you and who will hold up like a digital champagne glass with you. It's just make sure that you're finding yourself aligned with people who can hold space and hold belief, and then also remind you to celebrate along the way.
Yes, 1,000% now I want to take a quick moment to circle back to an earlier strategy point that you make, because I just realized, okay, my listeners are not gonna be happy if I don't ask you, if I don't ask you this further detailed question, because I'm sure there are some people who heard, oh Jasmine did these hundreds of personalized videos for people. If you can do it at your level of business this many years in and take that time, then there's so many people listening to this podcast who can and should do the unscalable things when they're really swinging big for a new goal, right? So I would love to know just real quick, high level, the more logistics side of that, so that if somebody wants to implement something similar, that they have the right tech or the right approach to be able to actually execute that. So you mentioned, I think you did these one minute videos on loom, and was it Vidyard that you said the other one,
I said you could use loom or video I use Vidyard. It was acquired by Google. V, i, d, y, a, r, d, okay, and it's just like, it's just a plugin, and it's exactly loom, but it's there on Chrome.
Oh, amazing. Okay, well, I'll have to check that out. So you would record these one minute videos and then the actual individual email sends. Did you have someone on your team, literally, like, in Gmail, just like, copy paste each person's email address and send the link, or is there a more streamlined way, I guess, to, like, send very individual emails with these different links to each person?
Okay, so I'm gonna keep it as high level as possible, and then you can ask details. Okay, so when we had our users sign up for the wait list. They would go to a page and they would put in their first name, last name, and their email address, and what that populated on the back end was a Google spreadsheet that had a dialog box for their first name, for their. Last Name and for their email address. Okay, so when I would go in and I would see Ellen Yin, and then I would see your email address, I would then click on my browser and Vidyard, Hi Ellen. I would give you my shtick. Then I would get a unique URL. I would copy the URL and put it in the Google Sheet, and I just did that again and again and again and again for everybody. Then what we had is, as we were doing them on the daily, we would have a VA go into intercom, and she would click on the email address. It would populate in intercom, she would copy the unique URL.
And then we had a template. And so the template was automatically, Hi, Ellen blah, blah, blah, just made you a video. If you have any questions, loop back, but don't forget, 24 hours from now. And so that was the entire logistics of it. Okay, so actually quite simple, a lot of manual copy pasting, but very simple to actually execute. Okay, yes, love at the time, and we still do. We were working with an offshore VA. Now, normally I work with all W twos. However, there are some instances where working with an offshore VA is so much more beneficial. It's like we had such a clear system and process laid out for her that all she was really doing was copying and pasting. And she's very detail oriented, so it worked in our favor very much.
So absolutely, and it's so foolproof, like you said, if you have a very specific process, and then, of course, you know, for some projects, it just it wouldn't make sense to hire a full time copy paste on your team as a WC. But for a specific project, that makes total sense. Okay, absolutely awesome. The last piece, then, to wrap up this case study, I think the last piece I'm really curious about is, since you did cut off the sale before the full hour, and there were people who presumably missed out right on the wait list, either because they didn't show up on time, or they forgot, or whatever the reason is, did you end up offering anything special to those who had just signed up for the wait list period, even if they didn't take advantage of this flash sale? Or was it kind of like a you snooze, you lose? You know, you had the chance to be on the wait list, and if you missed your opportunity, unfortunately, that's just it.
Well, we were very clear on the front end that it was first come, first serve, yep. And so we were setting our expectations to manage the expectations. Now, I think it would have been nice to offer something to them, but these were already paying subscribers, and so to me, that wasn't necessary to give anything digital, because there were so many resources already on the inside of social curator. I was not going to down sell. I don't think that that would have been like the proper, the proper thing to do in that mechanism, since we were fundraising, and we didn't get a single I mean, we got people being like, I can't believe I missed this. We got, I mean, we got these emails that were just break your heart, like, this person was sick, and I this, and I got stuck in traffic, but we were just like, we're so sorry. We're oversubscribed. So we were able to walk in integrity. We managed expectations, and we did not have anything on the back end of it.
I love that. I think that clear communication and that pre frame up front is often so missed. You know, people just kind of assume that everyone's on the same page, but you really have to go that extra mile to make sure, you know, people fully understand what they're signing up for, and that they have every opportunity to, you know, to show up, right if they can. So that's really helpful. Thank you so much, Jasmine, this was incredibly insightful, and I'm really grateful for just the opportunity to get a peek inside the decisions that you're making in your brain, because so many times we see someone's outward decision, but we don't understand all the layers and details that went into a certain decision. So I think this would be very illuminating for a lot of our listeners. Is there anything else I missed about, you know, the splash sale that you just want to speak to? Or do you feel like we covered it all?
I think the unexpected benefit, which was something we hoped but we remained unattached, was that people were really excited to be on the journey. And so oftentimes entrepreneurship feels a little bit lonely, and even though you have a phenomenal team, you can come sometimes get lost in the mire of who you're serving and how you're impacting their life. And so when people were saying, like, Oh, it feels good to be part of something bigger, that was so good, and then they have a vested interest. They want to make the product better, because they know the better it gets, they've already invested. Yeah, and so for us, that just felt like a really good moment to be in and understanding who we're serving and understanding like they want to build alongside of us.
I love that. Thank you. You have so much, so much wisdom, and like so many great one liners that you dropped, especially that one that you referenced from Seth Godin, the don't ever set out for a test that you know has to work or something that one was really good. So thank you. Where can our listeners go find out more about social curator and join I when I was on your website, I think I saw like, it's like a social media agency in your pocket, which I loved, that the accessibility that so tell us where they can actually go and try it for themselves, but also where they can go and connect with you.
I would love that. But first and foremost, if we adhere to the Give, give, give, ask, or the Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, I'm not actually gonna make a pass for social curator. I have a podcast called The jasmine Star show. Let's get to know each other. There. You get to understand, am I a good fit? Do you think the product that we're talking about? Are we in alignment? That would always work better. However, if you want to go get a sneak peek, social curator.com or the Jasmine Star Show
amazing. Thank you so much. All of Jasmine's links will be below in the show notes, so make sure you check that out, or if you're on YouTube, watching in the video description, thank you Jasmine for joining us, and thank you all for tuning in. We will catch you in next week's episode.
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