Resonation Keynote

Editor's Notes

1. Hi everyone, I’m Gretta and first off I just wanted to say thank you for having me in your beautiful country all the way from Australia today.
2. Over the last 5 years I’ve build 5 multi-million dollar startups from the ground up. I’ve also grown my Instagram following to over 16 million followers which I use to help me launch new brands and products.
3. So now what I’m going to do is take you back to the very start of my startup journey. Beginning with my first startup, SkinnyMe Tea.
4. So to set the scene a little, the year was 2012, I was 22 and I had $24 in the bank.
5. 1. What were you doing when you first started SkinnyMe Tea? 2. How did you come up with the idea for SkinnyMe Tea? 3. How did you launch?
6. When did you realise it was time to quit your job?
7. What happened once you quit your job?  Once I quit my job, we grew scarily quickly, to $600,000 a month in 6 months, but we were still super scrappy…
8. But at the same time we were achieving really exciting things — Things that I still look back on today as some of my biggest achievements. The following year we went on to win the Shopify Build A Business Competition.
9. Today, I still own SkinnyMe Tea. We’ve sold over 11 million cups of tea worldwide, that enough tea to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool and helped our customers lose a combined 1.5 million kilos.
10. So you see these people succeeding on social media and you need to remember that it’s all curated. A lot of the time they only really show you the best moments. So here is what people think success looks like vs what it really looks like. And that leads me to talking to you about my biggest mistake… When we lost $1.3 million dollars on a faulty tea order. How did it happen? Tell story.
11. 1. What were you most scared of when you first started? 2. How did you overcome this?
12. The next company that I co-founded this time was The 5TH watches and The 5TH achieved even faster success than SkinnyMe Tea, something I definitely didn’t think was possible but I’d learnt what worked and more importantly, what didn’t work.
13. 1. Did The 5TH grow faster than SMT?2. Did you sell out on day 1? 3. What was unique about The 5TH? The model… What came first, the name or the model? So a lot of people think that we were called The 5TH because of our model but it was actually the other way around.
14. Sticking with the detox theme I started two other sister brands to SkinnyMe Tea which live under the ‘Health Boutique’ group — Skintox and Drop Bottle. Skintox is a detox range for your skin, targeting from the outside, in and Drop Bottle is a detox water drink bottle, allowing you to infuse tea, fruit, vegetables and take them with you. A bottle that looks good and does good with $1 from every sale going to communities without access to clean drinking water through our charity partner Drop4Drop. I’ll speak a bit more about Drop Bottle later but we need to keep moving for now.
15. Now I’ve shifted my focus somewhat from eComm to tech by creating my influencer marketing platform Hey Influencers. Having been on both sides of the market as both an influencer and a brand I was in a unique position to create this platform. Influencer marketing was one of the key ways that I was able to grow my brands so quickly so I wanted to create a tool to help other brands achieve the same success that we had. Again, I’ll talk to you about Hey again later because I want to get started on the actionable part of my talk now.
16. Now that you know a bit about my story I’m going to tell you about How I Built My Own Door. I saw Gary Lee speak in Melbourne recently, who else loves Gary Vee? I want to be him. I could be like Gretta V? Anyway he said something that really stuck with me, he said that ‘nobody on earth’s success comes at your expense’. And I loved that and I couldn’t agree more — success isn’t limited, it’s abundant. And I’m all for the concept of collaboration over competition, so I’m here to share with you the 5 ways that I built my own door.
17. So here they are, [read them] and now we’re going to dive a bit deeper on them and remember that if you have any questions save them up because I’m around for a good hour after this to answer them all for you.
18. When coming up with your product idea, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.  What you do need to do is start with a problem and find a solution.  Then make it different and better than anything else on the market.  I’m going to quickly run through the way I go about differentiating a product. 
19. So we’ve spoken about coming up with your product idea now we’re going to talk about our market. So I have a semantic problem with the term product market fit because the product comes before market. This implies that you build your product before you have an audience. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see new entrepreneurs making. By creating an amazing product, a beautiful website with great product photography, pressing live and launching to crickets. They say, build it and they will come but unfortunately that is just not the case. So I prefer the term market : product fit. By flipping the term on its head it emphasises the importance of building an audience before you launch your product. This is what I did with Drop Bottle… But How Did I Do It?
20. When it comes to community building, on any platform, I focus on what I call the 3 C’s of community. Content, Collaboration and Consistency. [Insert text from IG]
21. So as an action item you need to start building your audience as soon as possible. You can do this with what I call a vertical account or fan page like I did with Drop Bottle even if you don’t have a product yet. Just pick a niche and focus on the 3 C’s.
22. Incentives? Free gift with purchase, free shipping, a discount or a free piece of content.
23. Build A Waitlist — What we did with The 5TH.
24. So as an action item I’d recommend starting capturing emails as soon as possible. Just create a landing page with email capture and get started. There are a couple of tools on the screen to help you too.