What a month! What can I say! We launched our new flavoured gin. The podcast took off and started ranking in the charts. And I turned 30.
March has been my favourite month in a long time. It all came together and a lot of the stuff I’ve been complaining about recently seemed to disappear or get solved. In particular I got a new lease of energy and spent much more time being productive.
The only downside was that I spent the last week sick and unable to do anything. Which, you know, is rubbish but the first three-quarters of the month were so productive it didn’t really matter. Here is the breakdown of how many hours I spent on the key categories:
Now onto the important stuff!
In March we launched our new flavoured gin. Pink Grapefruit & Thyme!
We have been working on the new gin for about nine months now and I am really proud of how it has come out.
We officially launched on Saturday 30th March and in the few days since has been going down really well. So most of March was spent making sure our supply chain was sorted and then getting everyone hyped up ready for the launch day.
When we launched our last flavour we didn’t quite have everything in place. We didn’t have enough stock to launch both online and locally. So we had a launch party and then did a few markets over the subsequent weekends, which was great for local sales and for letting everyone in Tunbridge Wells know we existed. But not so good for our overall strategy of focusing online.
This time we wanted to launch simultaneously locally and online. So that meant getting stock to Amazon, our distributors, local bars and restaurants and updating our website all before the official launch. Which I am very pleased to say we managed to achieve.
And you can now buy our new gin on Amazon or on our website… hint hint 😉
The Launch
We also changed our launch approach. Instead of holding a party and giving away lots of free gin we instead set up a stall at the entrance of a big shopping centre in Tunbridge Wells.
We announced on social media that we would be there giving out samples and had some limited edition batch #1 bottles for sale. It was a long day (9am to 6pm) but meant we had plenty of time to talk to anyone who visited. Plus we were able to make money from the day by selling bottles.
And to top it off we were in a really visible location, offering samples to thousands of people walking by.
We learned quite a lot from it. Every other stall we have done has been at a regular market and we were expecting a similar amount of interest from passers by. But although there was a huge footfall of people walking past, most didn’t stop and had their guard up.
I think it is because at markets everyone understands the drill. You can go over to the stall, try a sample and have a chat and then move on. They are there for the market. But that isn’t what they expect from a stall in the middle of the walkway in a shopping centre. And thinking about I can’t remember the last time I saw a high quality brand in one of these stalls.
But it did mean that those who stopped were a different group to our normal audience. And a lot had never heard of us before so we sold a similar amount of our old flavour as the new gin.
On the same day, a few local bars and restaurants had mini events to celebrate our launch. We opened the first bottle with some locals at Chapel Place Gin Bar. And Thackeray’s, the Michelin starred restaurant in Tunbridge Wells, created a new cocktail:
As launches go so far it has been very successful. Each thing we did made us money, the gin was really popular and we have loads of momentum going into April. The challenge now is to keep it up and sell loads!
Something else we spent quite a bit of time in March doing, we trying to sell our gin to famous bars and restaurants. The sort of places where it would add loads to our credibility if they serve us. If you would like an insight into what that was like check out Episode #35 of The Lazy Entrepreneur Podcast, where I interview Emma about a day she spent going round the best venues in London.
Load More…
If you want to support us please buy a bottle of the new gin from Amazon. And if you like it please leave a review! We still have a few bottles of our batch #1 left so you will be getting a collectors edition.
Relevant Posts:
I run two table tennis brands Palio & Eastfield Co and March saw some slight improvement in sales for both. We’re slowly getting back on track with stock but apart from that there is not really much else to report in March. Despite being the businesses with the biggest incomes they are quite on autopilot at the moment. We do have some new products in the pipeline but more on that in a future post.
Relevant Posts:
The podcast! On each episode I discuss a topic to do with entrepreneurship or the lifestyle around it.
And March was a great month. The podcast started to get a lot of attention and ranking on iTunes. Peaking at #82 in business:
Beating some of the awesome podcasts that I have been listening to for ages.
I’m not really sure how the ranking works because my download numbers aren’t high enough to justify that ranking, but I’m not complaining! It is probably some combination of time listened, number of downloads, new subscribers. And momentum is probably in my favour, let’s keep that going!
In March I published 6 episodes:
And I am pretty pleased with all of them. I am getting better and the dynamic between Emma (the co-host) and me is going well. Plus I still have lots of new topics I want to talk about. Bring on April.
I haven’t done much more on monetisation of the podcast. I have a few leads and got some sponsorship a couple of months back, but sorting out new sponsors every month is a lot of work and I have been focused on other things. The priority at the moment is growing its popularity – money can come later.
Listen to The Lazy Entrepreneur Podcast now:
Blog
In March I wrote a monthly report and one other very good and in-depth post:
Posts like that take a long time to write but are the real evergreen content of this blog and the reasons I get most of my traffic. Hopefully I’ll manage to keep them coming regularly.
It was also the first post that I did a companion podcast to. I quite like that as a model because I personally get different things from both written and audio content. And they both have their place.
Listen to episode 33 of the Lazy Entrepreneur Podcast: Value Betting.
I have been trying to hire someone to help turn podcast episodes into blog posts, but so far without much luck. Hopefully I will find someone in the next couple of months.
The blog made £3,069 in March, about on average for the last six months.
I have a lot of behind the scenes work that I want to do in April which will hopefully improve the user experience and make it more seamless between the podcast and blog.
Relevant Posts:
Well, there we go. Another month another monthly report. The most exciting part was the launch of our Pink Grapefruit and Thyme Gin. Be sure to grab a bottle and let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading.
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