Welcome back to issue #6 of Subscription box tips with me, Gary Redmond.

In this newsletter I break down the best tips and growth hacks for my fellow Subscription Box Buds just like you dear reader! Here’s what I have for you this week: 

Idea rolling around in my head

You need to take a Risk.

“The biggest risk in life is not taking any risks at all”

I heard this quote ages ago and have been thinking about it a lot recently. I just Googled it and was shocked to learn this: it turns out it was said in 2018 by Mark Zuckerberg, that was unexpected to say the least. I was expecting Abe Lincoln in 1850 or something.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about… the moment of commitment

The time when you have to stop skirting around on the coast and dipping your toe in the water, but push your boat out into deeper waters and set sail

There’s only so much you can do from the shoreline – the shoreline being that phase in your business when you’re sort of committed but you’re not totally committed, financially, emotionally, time wise etc

This moment came up for me with my new project Formify this week

Basically the dev team sat me down and said in order for this to progress as fast as you would like it to, we need to hire 4 developers to build the product

Up until now we’ve had 2 part time developers, so lets say 1. The issue was, the cost (to me) will now be increasing 4x what it was. Immediately I agreed.

Here’s what I said:

“It’s out of my comfort zone and I’m terrified it will bleed me dry, but without it we will spend 6-12 months with a half built product. So let’s do it”

The safe option was to push back on this and ride out the 12 months at a snail’s pace

Not really committing financially, not really saying I believe this will work

But I do believe

I believe in the product and what it will do for people – so it was time to commit

It reminded me of 2017 in BusterBox.

We’d been ‘running’ our business for about a year at this point, losing money and with very few people signed up. We applied for a grant from our local enterprise office here in Dublin and they granted us €10K, but we had to get a bank loan to match it. So we did it

We had €20K and half of it was debt

It was at this point we all quit our jobs and decided to go full time in BusterBox. Looking back, it was far too early, we didn’t get paid anything for months, then we got paid €1000 a month for over a year

The miserable life, the fear of not having enough to cover your bills, the terror when the car makes a funny sound and you don’t know if you can cover the mechanic fees

But that was the moment.

The commitment. Burn the ships, we’re doing it. No going back.

We had to take a RISK

It also struck me throughout the past 4-5 years since then, we took on more debt. Looking at it objectively we couldn’t afford to pay it back, we took a huge risk and backed ourselves that we could use that money to grow the revenue enough to pay it back

If it all went south, we’d personally guaranteed every cent

The 3 of us would still be paying back the debt off of our failed business right now

Now we got a little lucky with the pandemic which accelerated our growth, but you make your own luck

If we didn’t take the debt on we wouldn’t have had any cash to take advantage of the growth opportunity presented by the pandemic

So basically what I’m trying to say here is… of course don’t go gung-ho

Don’t go nuts and spend all your money or quit your job tomorrow