Ep 30: How to Know When You’re Ready to Launch Your Product

[00:00:04] Trinity: So you only have one opportunity to make a first impression, and that can be really nerve wracking because on one hand, you know, I mean, we're talking about the concept of MVP, right? It's about like getting something out so that you can start to get some feedback. However, at the same time, if someone tries your product once and doesn't like it, the chances of them ever giving you a second chance are low.

[00:00:30] Andrea: First impressions are everything. Once you lose a customer it's difficult to get them back. So I want to know how you launched your minimum viable product. What worked and what didn’t. Some of it was surprising. Let’s get into it.

[00:00:45] HOST: Hi, This is Small Business, a podcast by Amazon. I’m your host, Andrea Marquez. This is one of our Minisodes, which are shorter episodes packed with helpful information for those of you who want a quicker binge. On this episode we'll be talking about how you can prepare and launch your MVP, [00:01:00] or minimum viable product - with Trinity Mouzon Wofford, the Co-Founder and CEO of Golde, a superfood brand that sells matcha turmeric blends, coconut collagen boost blends, and more and of course, you can find them in the Amazon store along with most of the small businesses we feature on This is Small Business. Also, remember that if you want to hear your story on This is Small Business, we have a voicemail line where you can ask questions or share your entrepreneurial story. We want to hear from you! Find the link to the voicemail line in the episode description.

[00:01:37] Trinity: Golde is a superfood health and beauty brand that I started with my high school sweetheart, so we do all sorts of different superfood blends. Think about like powders that you're adding to your smoothie or making a super food latte with matcha, turmeric, collagen. I started the business almost seven years ago now, really sort of focused on this idea of [00:02:00] wellness routines and how to make them more easy, more approachable, and also more fun for the everyday consumer. If I take a step back to like seven-ish years ago when I was dreaming up the brand, I had just parted ways with my original dream of going off to med school. I was really inspired by my mom's journey with chronic autoimmune disease, and so I had seen her see all of these incredible improvements when she saw this holistically minded doctor, of course, I decided that was going to be my career path.

I ended up hearing from my mom as I was in college that, she actually had to stop seeing that doctor because she just couldn't afford it anymore. And so that really forced me to reckon with this piece of health and wellbeing and how accessibility plays into it. At the same time I was sort of looking at my own experiences [00:03:00] in the wellness world and was feeling sort of left out of the conversation as a young woman of color, as someone who couldn't really afford the, you know, $85 protein powders and had this idea to start something new.

[00:03:16] Andrea: I think that's such a powerful story behind your brand, and it adds to understanding the why behind it. As someone with a mother with cancer, and who thinks about this a lot because of it, I relate strongly to that idea of being intentional and conscious of the types of foods you consume that boost your immune system. So, talk to me about how you launched your first product. What was that experience like?

[00:03:40] Trinity: Our first product was our original turmeric latte blend and back then it went by a different name. It was original Golde. The reason why the company is called Golde is because we started with turmeric based products because it has so many incredible health benefits. So whether you're talking about immunity, digestion, [00:04:00] skin, there's something that turmeric can do to support your health and wellness. As far as really beginning the process of getting this product ready to share with the world. It took so much longer than I remember thinking it was going to, I mean, this is like a five-ingredient blend of powders. You would think that it's just like, okay, we're gonna mix it all together. And, there, there was so much tinkering that we did with the sourcing of ingredients, making sure that we were really sourcing high quality super foods. The packaging itself, so, at the time -- so the we is, myself and, my now husband -- we were doing everything ourselves. We were self-funding the business with, I think we had like $2,000 in savings between the two of us. And we were 23. So, you know, it was very sort of like limited resources. And so we had to design the packaging ourselves. We had never designed packaging before. We had no experience in it, but we had this idea of bright colors [00:05:00] of, you know, sort of like a bit of a maximalist approach to the packaging. So from end to end, like ideating this concept of we want to do a turmeric based powder mix, to actually having the product in our hands, finding who was gonna print the packaging for us, et cetera was probably about a year, end to end.

So when we got started, we had that one product, we were living in Brooklyn. We would pound the pavement and go around to all the different little lifestyle shops and cafes and drop off samples with handwritten notes and ask if they would pretty please consider carrying our product. We were, you know, posting about our experience, starting the business on social media and all of these things that feel like overnight successes -- I've had so many people say, oh my gosh, you guys blew up. You guys came outta nowhere -- It really is months and years in the making of like those early moments of just trying to make it happen.

[00:06:00] And so we started to get some bites. We started to get the brand into these sort of destination shops and cafes mostly in New York. And it was at that point that I noticed that people were starting to say that they had seen us around, and what I realized was because we had chosen this sort of distinctive packaging style, bright colors, they're much more common now in packaging. But if you're going back six, seven years in the wellness industry, everything was much more minimalist. It was black and white sand serif, you know, typefaces. So to come out with four colors all kind of mixing together was like, whoa, you remember that you saw it. And so we had this wonderful strange experience of in our first year, I think people thinking we were a lot bigger than we really were because they kept, they were seeing the product around. They had the sense that it was familiar to them, that it was exciting to them, but in reality it was still just [00:07:00] myself and my partner mixing up powder and, and getting it into bags and, getting it out into cafes.

[00:07:06] Andrea: So color went a long way with your packaging when you first launched. Can you tell me some of the things that didn't work when you first launched and what you learned from that?

[00:07:15] Trinity: When you are in this entrepreneurial journey, you have to look at yourself as you're sort of a scientist, you're a great experimenter, and so you're gonna try a lot of different things as you try to understand what works, what catches your audience's attention, what drives sales, what creates more brand love? And for every 10 things that you try, maybe one or two of them really work. The challenge I think, is making sure that when you are hitting the other eight or nine things that don't really work that you are seeing them as the necessary part of the experimentation process versus seeing them as like, [00:08:00] I keep making mistakes. I keep failing. What did not work as well for us was any time that we tried to sort of emulate what we saw another business doing, especially a larger business. I'm just thinking like a, a specific marketing tactic or something that a much bigger business was using just wouldn't necessarily do much for us because we didn't have the budget. And it just, frankly, it just wasn't as impactful for us. I think what in the end did work for us as a very small business with very few resources was to sort of really lean into doing things the way that we wanted to do it. Really telling our own story and bringing people along for the ride. You know, even today, I, I think the consumers that are going to support you very early on in your business journey are the ones who want to know who's behind the brand, and they want to feel that they're actively supporting a small business. [00:09:00] So really putting your, your ethos front and center, and not trying to emulate the multi multimillion dollar conglomerates that don't have that, that special secret sauce that you have anyways.

[00:09:15] Andrea: What advice would you give an early stage entrepreneur who is about to launch their MVP?

[00:09:20] Trinity: I think it can be really smart to put the product out to a limited audience like friends and family, um, depending on what the product is, just to get early feedback and a little bit more of a safe space. Once you do have it out there and people are trying it the hope I, I think at least on my end, was really that we were, we were serving something up that people were going to love, and was going to make them want to try more things from us as they came out.

[00:09:46] Andrea: How did you know you were ready to launch?

[00:09:48] Trinity: I remember thinking that we were actually too late to launch. We launched probably six months later than I intended for us to, and at the time some other company [00:10:00] popped up that seemed to be doing something that was vaguely similar. And I remember thinking to myself, it's too late. We've missed our opportunity. It's so funny now because that company, I wouldn't even really consider them a competitor at this point. We've kind of gone in in very different directions, so, that moment of actually launching versus, you know, what you think it's going to look like can be very different. The timelines can really shift. I think you, you know, when you're ready, when you don't wanna keep working on it anymore. When you look at it and you say, okay, yeah, let's do it. It's not necessarily done. You probably are going to do more with it at, at some point you might tweak the packaging or tweak the formula or whatever. But you have a feeling that you're just, you're done working on it and you're ready to let it see the light of day so you'll know when you're ready.

[00:10:55] HOST: That was Trinity, Co-Founder and CEO of the wellness brand Golde, [00:11:00] talking about her experience launching Golde’s MVP. Make sure to check out her products in the Amazon store. I especially love the Macha Turmeric blend. And as always, here are some key takeaways from today’s episode:

• One. First impressions are everything. So before you launch, try launching with your family and friends first if you can. That way you can get some early feedback and you won't lose potential customers because they didn't end up liking your product.
• Two. Try to stand out from the competition. Trinity's products stood out because of their bright packaging - which at the time was less common in the wellness industry -- but that made people remember them.
• Three. Sometimes doing what others are doing doesn’t necessarily help. Especially as a small business trying to emulate what a larger business is doing. In the case of Golde, Trinity and her partner decided that they were going to do what worked best for them, and it paid off.

That's it for this episode of This is Small Business Minisodes, brought to you by Amazon. [00:12:00] If you liked what you heard, make sure to subscribe and tell your friends about us by sending them a link to this episode. And we would love to know what you think, so please please please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It's easier to do it through your phone. Or send us an email at thisissmallbusiness@amazon.com with your thoughts.

Until next time – This is Small Business, I'm your host Andrea Marquez -- Hasta luego -- and thanks for listening!

CREDITS: This is Small Business is brought to you by Amazon, with technical and story production by JAR Audio. [00:12:40]