Pitstop with Sarah Levinger

Claudia Goldfarb is back on Pitstop to talk about her journey starting and launching Sow Good Foods.

• Leveraging technology to preserve foods without altering the taste or nutrition profile.
• Working with quality assurance and lab testing to make sure that the food maintains it's flavour profile, while also keeping it's nutrition and shelf stability.
• Following quality assurance for producing internally vs a co-manufature, and keeping them honest.
• The importance of doing a mock recall.
• Why you need to listen to your customers.

Pitstop is a tactical podcast for DTC/ecommerce/Shopify entrepreneurs to keep their store on the track and winning. Updated a few times a week, these short episodes get right to the point with none of the fluff. Hear real stories from operators and experts to get fast fixes and find free money.

Pitstop is presented by Mesa.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

What does it look like when you launch your business going public?

This episode of Pitstop is presented by Mesa.

In this episode of Pitstop, Claudia and I talk about

• Finding opportunity to help others, in this case it was Claudia seeing empty grocery store shelves in the pandemic. She used her experience from the pet food industry to
• Launching as a publicly traded company by merging with another company allowed them to combine resources and assets to bring better products to market.
• Don't let your fear get in the way of opportunity when it comes to financing. You can get amazing mentors as a new company.
• The more mentors your can bring to your table with different viewpoints saves you so much heartache down the road
• If you are a publicly traded company it will be expensive, you may need to allocated $600K - $1M in annual costs for being public.
• Infrastructure and short cuts can come back to bite you in the butt if you don't have a plan.
• Want to see how clean a restaurant is? Check the staff bathrooms.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

How do you prepare for the holidays after BFCM? Here are four strategies you can use to get the most out of this year's BFCM.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Changing things up a bit since it's a funky week. I'm sharing some last minute tips to help you get the most out of BFCM this year.

1. Get ready to serve your customers!
2. Proactively bust any objections like shipping time, or discounts.
3. Work with your agents to give them script and context, same with a contact centre partner.
4. Proactively communicate with your customers what to expect from lead times to postage times, or things like inventory levels.
5. Increase sales now -- avoid returns or chargebacks later
6. Add Urgency where you can -- now is the time to step on the gas.
7. BFCMTODAY is a discount code that naturally creates urgency (with TODAY in the code). Changing up discount codes is also a great reason to send an email this week, versus time is running out.
8. Housekeeping! 
9. Record a lot! What’s working, how you’re feeling etc. It will get your data context and the memories are still fresh. 
10. What can you automate going into the new year? Mesa from Shop Pad is coming on as a sponsor, and they’ll be a future episode or two talking about some of the automations like easily collecting customer birthdays and more.
11. Save your URLS! This is one of my number one SEO tips from Steve Toth, I’ll repost the episode over the holiday break. If you were fortunate enough to get some press this year -- keep those URLs so that next year they add to your BFCM link juice.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Dave Ackerman is back on Pitstop, talking about the challenges and opportunities of a seasonal brand. Takeaways from this episode.

• The value of living vicariously through family members.
• Motorcycles are a sesonal activity, but it's a long season, even in colder climates you still have five months of riding. This means some people want to buy year round but need their products by the end of the year.
• Compared to winter season sports, there is a short season to sell that isn't clearance items.
• October, January, and February are low in sales, but November and December are strong, even with seasonality of the business.
• Capitalizing on preorders during off peak seasons is a great way to talk about products twice. When it's announced, and when it ships. This lets you pick up off season products.
• Tobacco runs an off season clearance sale called the Garage Sale
• Off seasons can be a great way to launch lifestyle clothing as well and bring customers in to see your quality at a lower price point.
• Why you should greet your friends with good'n'u?

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

How do you deal with supply chain shortages going into a busy shopping time of year? For Dave Ackerman, and Tobacco Motorwear, the same tool that grew their business.

In this episode we talk about

• Keeping customers as less frustrated as possible when supplies are in short demand.
• Shifting preorders as an occasional thing to part of the product launch strategy.
• Putting out fires using capital as your fire extinguisher, and putting out fires early on before it's expensive.
• Using customer feedback to feel more involved with products, and connecting closer to the brand, and serve your customers better

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Tobacco Motorwear is constantly delivering quality products, and providing amazing service to their customers. Check them out here.

In this episode we talk about

• The importance of customer success
• Building a community by giving it a name, Tobacco Motowear has built the Buildr community and even started a podcast with the same name.
• Building all this goodwill proactively (hopefully) outweighs dissatisfaction
• Keeping customers who care engaged with your growth.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

1. Design is hard to get right, easy to screw up. As a rule don’t have more than two fonts. You can differentiate with different weights like bold or italic, different font sizes and colours can all help differentiate.
2. Same with photos, try to get the same angle and background, but be consistent. Do all white background Amazon style photos or lifestyle photos.
3. Walk through your store the way customers would. Do you need to close out multiple tabs and popups to view the merch? I talked about it with Philip Jackson a few months ago, but there is good friction and there is bad friction. Don’t overlaod your customers with bad friction.
4. Be familiar, but original. It’s getting into the holiday season, and there are always ads like ho-ho-ho hold the payments. A coffee website used this tactic to do ho-ho-hold the sugar as a way to be timely and demonstrate and value of their product.
5. With inventory shortages, make sure you’re not featuring too many out of stock products too far up. Some can help you establish social proof, but too many just gets frustrating for customers.
6. One of the biggest hiccups is anything that takeaway trust. It’s not just dropshippers, but things that aren’t consistent. The only question you want your customers to ask is “how badly do I want this?” Not do I trust this company with my credit card.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Asim Khan and his brother are recovering finance professionals looking to make a difference.

Hear how they got started in this episode of Pitstop.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

1:00 Solve your own problem, and listen to first party feedback. The Doggo ramp came to be after the need for longer dogs, and Dachshunds particularly to protect their spines, which can easily be injured jumping off a bed or couch. It was Curose’s fanbase that kept asking about this product they saw in the background of all the videos.

2:45 Supplier issues are hard. Don’t be afraid to be flexible or look towards finding someone closer to you as your volumes go up.

3:45 The biggest question was how much of the initial sale was their audience? Once it was obvious it was not reliant on the community, it made sense to spend more on marketing through paid ads.

5:30 Ryan loves the Jeff Walker Product Launch Formula. It may seem obvious of getting your audience involved and engaging and building your audience to participate in the development of what you’re working on.

This can be as simple as questions, surveys, and polls.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail