Speaker 1 (00:00):
I was asked the other day by somebody, if I were to start a business online, a D two C business, how would I scale it on a shoestring budget? And I thought it was a great question because so many people that listen to this podcast have the same issue. How do I scale my business on a shoestring budget to take it to that next level? So I wanted to give you some practical advice that you can start implementing right now in your business to take it to the next level. And I promise you it will not cost anything. Well, not much anyway. Hey, it's Oliver Bruce and welcome to the Unlock. Previously known as Success is in the Mind. I'm a UK entrepreneur, angel investor, a neurodivergent founder, and I recently exited my first business, which I scaled from my university halls into a multimillion dollar agency with no backing, no funding, just grit, mistakes and determination. I want to pass on some of the lessons that I've learned, the barriers that I had to overcome and the challenges that I'm still coming up against today. This podcast doesn't grow by itself, it grows with you. If you could possibly share this with friends, family, colleagues, anybody you're in business with, somebody that you think might find this useful, I would be greatly appreciative. Anyway, let's get into it.

(01:10):
So it's the copper framework. So it's capture, organic pay, educate, repeat the copper framework. Now I'm going to just use in this example, a product that is fully paid for. It's manufactured. We've done the branding, we've got everything sorted. It is a business that is ready to go. The website, Shopify website. It's sorted, it's online, it's live. What am I going to do to scale that business on a shoestring budget? Because I've spent all my money manufacturing and building a website as so many people do. Well, I'm going to go out boots on the ground. I'm going to go out onto the local high street, wherever that might be, be it a city, a town, a village. Wherever you are in the world, capture content on your phone. Capture volumous content on your phone. It doesn't need to be glossy. Give people on the street your product, get them to do vox pops.

(01:58):
That's Latin for voice of the people, believe it or not. Get them to speak to the camera, get 'em to tell you how good the product is, how would they use it, why is it better the competitors? And then version that as many times as possible. Get as much content across the course of a day as possible. You'll come away with a hundred, 200 video clips, some photos, some quotes, some things that you can actually put on social across the course of a couple of weeks, and it's cost you nothing apart from time. Go back, edit those into different types of content. Go onto Canva to edit quotes. Go onto cap cut to edit videos. Put different hooks at the beginning. Put them into different aspect ratios. You can do this all yourself. It'll cost you nothing at all other than time. And then go on to every social channel that you think your market will be on.

(02:47):
And here's a little hack. There's a few platforms that you can go to to help you with the heavy lifting here. So as I mentioned earlier, Canva and Cap Cut two super good platforms. So Canva, obviously you can do the design on cap cut. You can obviously do a lot of the editing on. However, if you have long form video content, head over to Opus and you'll be able to upload all your video content into that. It will version it, edit it, subtitle it, make it as interesting as possible based on the content that you've got, and then write copy with AI specific hashtags and plug into your social channels. All you've got to do is hit go and then off you go. It launches it online organically. So those are the three platforms that I'd use for this. However, once you have deployed your creative on these specific social channels, make sure that you are looking at the data.

(03:35):
Make sure you're looking at the engagement, the likes, the comments, the saves, the shares, whatever platform it is, whatever metric you guys are tracking to make sure you are reviewing those. Why? Because that will tell you where to deploy the capital, the shoestring budget that you have got left. You can deploy that into performance. You can deploy that into paid ads, but only when you know what works. So let's dial it back a little bit. We've done the C for copper. So that's capture. We've done the O for copper and that's organic, and now we're into the P for copper. The paid piece, once you have that metric, that organic metric as to what your audience is engaged with, the algorithm is there to find people. The algorithm will reach out, serve it. To get engagements from your specific audience, you should start to double down with paid budget.

(04:23):
The reality is these social channels, they need feeding. They need content. They need stuff to be able to serve to people, and they want people to engage with them because as I said, it's interest media, not now. Social media, people who are interested in stuff will engage with it. So platforms want to serve people, things that they'll be interested with to keep people on the platform. It's that stickiness piece, right? So if your content finds the right audience, because the algorithms on these platforms organically are doing the heavy lifting for you, you can be damn sure that by putting budget in behind it, you'll be able to open up that audience pool to a wider circumference, wherever that might be, wider radius if you will, and find people that are exactly like the people that are engaging with your content, but who might not necessarily have seen it yet.

(05:11):
It just expedites the process. Paid, expedites the process on content that already works. Remember that paid is not going to make something perform that is crap paid will make something perform that is good, but it would've performed okay organically. So you double down with paid media and you don't need to put much into it. Start small, take learnings and gear. Don't waste your whole budget. So once you've done the paid piece, you go into the education piece. Why is this creative working? Why is this piece of content generating me the returns that I need it to? Is it the hook? Is it the copy? Is it the product in there? Is it the location that it's filmed? What does it look like? Why is it performing so well? And once you know that you should go and recreate more content in exactly the same way.

(06:03):
Take the learnings, recreate content, take the learnings, recreate content, post that organically online, make it work, leave it to perform, then put budget behind it. You do this time and time again, and I promise you it'll compound. It will gear and you will make a seismic return. I guess I should caveat it that if you haven't got the correct conversion rate optimization, so CRO funnel, then you're not necessarily going to make the returns that maybe you could. But again, that's super simple for people to fix, right? So at this point, when you've got your ads performing and you've put a bit of paid budget behind it, build out some bespoke landing pages. Don't just push people to your website. If you push people to your website and you've got 10 of a specific product in different colours and different flavours and whatever, but the content that they have seen is the content relevant to a specific type of product or a specific flavour, then they're going to get confused, right?

(06:57):
The customer journey is a little bit kind of broken. They're going to go there and go, well, do I want the strawberry lip balm? Do I want the coconut lip balm? Frankly, do I even want the lip balm at all? Because there's too many options there. You need to make the journey simple. They see a video online, they click on it because they like the products. They need to go through to a landing page that talks specifically to that individual product, and then they need to be told to buy. Don't have reams and reams and reams of filling out details. Don't make it complicated. Simple, apple Pay, Google Pay, something that's fully optimised. Shopify does it brilliantly so that you can in two clicks, maximum clicking the ad, filling out your details, and then double click for Apple Pay. That's all you want. You want that friction to be as minimal as possible.

(07:45):
It's very different if you're doing lead gen. So if you're a business whereby you're wanting people to inquire, to go through to a service website and then put in details, that flow does feel different, we might double click into that in another podcast. But in terms of starting a business that's consumer focused, where you have content, you have ads, you have performance, you have landing pages, you have the customer fundamentally buying the products, you want that flow to be as seamless as possible. So once you've done the landing pages, you then can assume that that circle is complete, and that would be fine for most people. But if I was building this out, I'd want to have some kind of keeping in touch strategy. So assuming they've gone from my paid ad through to my landing page, they've bought a product, I now want to re-serve them both with ads in time because they've obviously purchased from me.

(08:34):
So they're quite keen on the product, but also serve ads to a lookalike audience, IE people that are similar to that individual that's purchased but hasn't yet purchased. And also serve that person that has purchased with mailers in time to get them to buy more, right? It's far easier to sell to somebody who's already bought from you than it is to win a net new customer. So Klaviyo is a really good example, plugged straight into Shopify. If you were to build a Klaviyo campaign out, you'll be able to, I'm sure, generate more revenue for very, very little heavy lifting. It won't take you long. It's just a bit of time investment. If you build it out, you can understand that CRO, that conversion rate optimization flow from the performance marketing campaign through to the person buying the product through to. Then, if you really want to the email campaign, you've got a really elegant and very scalable D two C business that is fundamentally built out on a shoestring budget.

(09:27):
It really won't cost you much. It might take a bit of time, it will take a bit of learning. You won't get it right straight away, but I promise you, if you break it out in that way, you'll be able to build a very, very simple, very, very scalable consumer focused business. The only restraint is going to be both time and how much money you actually want to put into it over the long run. For me, for instance, I would simply reinvest everything back into both performance and product performance and product performance and product and make sure that it compounds over time. As a founder, you're hopefully wired in such a way whereby you don't want to take too much out of the business because you're trying to grow this thing organically. I appreciate it's very different if you've got private equity VC or even angel tickets invested into it.

(10:10):
But on a slightly different scale, you still don't want to spend too much money. You want to keep your burn rate as minimal as possible so that you can actually make sure that you can live for as long as possible and keep the business growing and scaling and compounding. So the logic is still the same. It's just a slightly slower process if you are building it organically. So let's get back to the copper framework. So once you've built out the landing pages, you've understood exactly what type of creative is working, you've educated yourself on that type of creative, that flow, that audience that ICP, you are then able to repeat that process. So the E and the R in the copper framework is educate yourself and then repeat. If you educate yourself on what's working and you consistently repeat that, then you'll compound over time.

(10:56):
And I guarantee that you'll have gone from a shoestring budget into something that is six at least figures per year just out of your bedroom. So it's a super simple business model. You go out there, you capture content, you post it organically online, you understand exactly what is working and why it's working. You put a bit of paid budget behind it, you build out a few landing pages, you optimise those correctly. You maybe build out a bit of a keeping in touch strategy. After that, you educate yourself as to why this is working and you repeat that process time and time again, and that shoestring budget that you had initially will be no shoestring budget any longer. You will have enough money to be able to scale and gear and explore other lead gen activity, for instance, influencer or UGC, but maybe we'll touch upon that another time.

(11:45):
Appreciate you listening to the podcast. Hopefully you found it useful. For those that want to read up or learn more, head over to my LinkedIn page, Oliver Bruce online, where you'll find a weekly newsletter called the Brucey Bonus, where we double click into more detail and give you more tips and tricks around how to scale your business. If you want to share this with friends, family, colleagues, business owners, people that are in your circle then might find it useful. I would be super appreciative if I said at the beginning of the podcast, this does not grow on its own. This grows with you and we do it for you. So thank you so much for listening and catch you next time.