Time spent ≠ value added
How did you promote your business initially and where did your first sales come from? Any major media mentions or PR wins since then?
We wanted to offer our Bees Knees for presale as soon as possible, which happened about 3 weeks into our 30-day launch plan.
As spicy honey is a new category, we knew that creating awareness would be key to sales, and thus the importance of press became extremely apparent. Our first efforts included emailing our personal contact lists and posting to our personal Facebook pages (asking for feedback is much easier than asking for sales) which led to our first $1,000 in sales.
Knowing that press begets press, we made a list of potential press targets and our possible connections to these targets, and then Casey aggressively pursued any and every lead. What began as some great but modest mentions (from the likes of Huckberry and a few prominent Instagram’ers) snowballed into features on Uncrate and The Kitchn, TV appearances on CNBC and the Today Show and great coverage in the glossy pages of Bon Appetite, Esquire and Vanity Fair!
Instead of perfecting our recipe over months we intensively tested, revised, and refined options until we had something we thought was amazing. We decided to put our product to the real test by selling it to paying customers ASAP, since paying customers are the best feedback we could ever gather.