SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 100: Couldn't Afford Groceries '08, Now Mom Makes $200k/year
01 Nov 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Coming up tomorrow morning, you guys will hear from Wes Schaefer, who has seven kids and does 500 grand in revenue per year with Wes Schaefer. Okay, Top Tribe, you are going to love my guest today. Her name is Erin Chase, and I'll get to her in a second. You should know. You know, she's a mother of two back in 08, and the financial crash hit her hard.
She now has four kids, and she had to figure out how to be, again, the mom to her family, get meals, make them efficiently, make them cheaply. She realized a lot of other moms needed the same thing. So we met on Twitter here at a conference And I said, you know, Aaron, your story looks great. You should come on the show. Ink's loving the show. Everyone's loving it. It's number one.
So we said, we need to find a quiet spot. And we went on the elevator and figure out a way to get someone else to use the key card to get us to the top floor. We're now here in Santa Barbara in the shade of an olive tree, right?
I'm not lying. I'm not exaggerating. It's beautiful.
It's so gorgeous. and we're going to have some fun. So Erin, are you ready to take us to the top? I am ready. All right, let's do this. So two kids in 08, financial crash happens. What's going through your mind?
So, you know, the gas prices are rising. My husband's a teacher with a long commute and we really needed to do something and I wasn't working at the time. So I decided to take it. I took it upon myself to spend less of his hard-earned money, right? And so the only area in our personal budget that we could reduce was the grocery store. We had no cable. We've never had cable in our married life. We
Our mortgage was at the lowest finance rate it could have been at that time, and it didn't make sense to refinance and get it at a better rate. So, you know, really the only thing left that I really could control was the grocery store.
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Chapter 2: How did Erin Chase adapt during the financial crash of '08?
So I started... What did your husband do, by the way?
He was a teacher.
He was a teacher. Okay, wow. And you were a stay-at-home mom. Yeah. Okay, with two kids.
Yeah, and we've always been very smart with our finance and all that, but with the gas prices jumping up and his long commute, it was like, okay, we have to cut somewhere else in order to keep saving and all that. So I took it upon myself to spend less money on groceries, and I just got so excited about it, how much it was helping me. I knew it would help other people, so I couldn't not share it.
So I was sharing it on my personal blog, which is now defunct.
What's it? Okay.
It's not, yeah. And my sister kept saying, I don't care what you're making for dinner. I don't care what you're buying at the grocery store, how you're such a smart grocery shopper now. I just want to see pictures of the kids. So I started $5 dinners pretty shortly after that conversation with her, you know, knowing that I could help more people and reach a broader audience.
What was $5 dinners? Was it a blog? Was it a ebook? It was a blog. Okay.
blog where i basically shared what we were having for dinner that night and how much everything cost me i would break it down like per ingredient you know a cup of rice is 20 cents you know so i was really breaking it down to show people this is just a different way to think about shopping for groceries so that in the end you spend less money when you're thinking more about how much i'm spending for the meat that i need for the meal for the starches for the proteins
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Chapter 3: What inspired Erin to start her $5 Dinners blog?
FeedBurner.
This is like, let's dig up our ancient history tools here.
This is totally like from the archives. This is vintage. I'm kidding. This is vintage.
Vintage marketing.
FeedBurner. This is vintage FeedBurner. It was just what you did. You had an RSS feed that ran through Google Reader. Okay. More vintage. Yeah. And it was, you had, you were capturing emails through FeedBurner. It was just what you did on your website. I didn't do it strategically.
I just had it there, but I had so much volume that even if my conversion rate was only 3%, I was still getting a lot of emails.
Now walk me through, when did you realize, oh my gosh, I could create my own products and sell them to the list?
So that actually didn't happen until about two years ago.
I just have, I've always... So 2014-ish.
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Chapter 4: How did Erin's blog evolve into a successful business?
Before we get into my favorite part of the show, Erin, tell me, do you remember when you got featured on the Today Show? Do you remember the story? How did it, how did it happen? Did someone call you?
Tell us that story. We pitched them for four years to get on. What? How'd you pitch them? Different ideas. And actually it was, what was it?
An email to the producer to the producers. What's the producer's email?
I'm not going to tell you.
Okay. Top tribe. Go after her on Twitter until she gives us the name. We'll just beat it out of her. Okay. Very good. So pitch dumb consistency. Just keep doing it.
Persistence. And actually what ended up, Landing me the gig, and even though we didn't even do this, was the fact that my 20 meals for $150 went viral a third time.
Wow.
A different version. I actually have created 10 versions of this meal plan now. So the fourth version of the meal plan went viral again. And when we pitched her that and we said, this has been shared a million times on my website, plus another... 12 million reach through Facebook, like that's attention grabbing.
If that's resonating with people, that's the kind of content that Today Show needs and wants because that's going to resonate with their audience, right? So I positioned it just that way. Your audience needs this. And I can tell you that they do because it's already happening. It's already going viral.
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Chapter 5: What strategies did Erin use to grow her email list?
I mean, that's my version of Evernote. It's what I'm used to. It's what I'm comfortable with. I've tried Dropbox. I've tried all kinds of things.
Google Drive's your jam.
Google Drive is my jam. And, of course, Entreport.
And Entreport. Okay, very good. Number four. You're going to like this one. Four kids, husband, busy as all get up. You're building an empire. I don't know if you're doing it in a balanced way. Yes or no. Do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
Yes.
Do you? No, you don't.
You're lying.
Take your glasses off. Let me look at your eyes. You really get eight hours?
I do. I go to sleep. I get up at 630 because that's when my kids have to, well, they start waking up and I'm like, Oh my gosh, just stay asleep.
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