How Habit Nest Made $6,251 Within 48 Hours of Launching Their Shopify Store

Brian on 18th of Jan 2017

How Habit Nest Made $6,251 Within 48 Hours of Launching Their Shopify Store

Habit Nest is the team behind the Morning Sidekick Journal, a resource that helps people get laser focused on morning productivity in just 3 minutes a day. The team recently made $6,251 in sales within 48 hours of launching their Shopify online store. Shopify sales breakdown The product clearly struck a chord. You could say it was an overnight success, but that doesn’t do the real story justice. The Morning Sidekick Journal was birthed out of a failed project, 100 customer research calls in less than one year, weekly lead nurturing emails to stay in touch, and a successful Kickstarter campaign. In short, hustle. Here’s the full story behind how the Habit Nest team did it.

A failed project

In January 2016, Habit Nest launched Partners in Grind, a service that matched two people as accountability partners to build a specific habit. Partners in Grind The team focused on five habits:

  • Becoming a Fitness Beast

  • Eating Healthy

  • Meditating Regularly

  • Mastering Your Mornings

  • Learning & Growing Through Reading

New signups filled out a 9-question Typeform, which was then run through an algorithm to introduce accountability partners to each other. Success habit The project failed miserably. Turns out that ongoing communication through email has terrible response rates. This produced an unreliable experience, especially for staying accountable. However, the team learned two valuable nuggets from the failure: 1. People were interested in building positive habits with a big emphasis on mastering morning productivity 2. People wanted some sort of system and/or form of accountability to help them do it

Interviewing users

To explore those insights further, the team created a journey with Autopilot to ask users for interviews. Here’s what the journey looks like from a zoomed-out view (click the image to view in hi-res):

Interviews journey up close

There are five smart segment triggers, eight delays, fifteen A/B split shapes, and three emails. When a user enters the smart segment trigger for any of the five habits, the journey fires. You may notice that there’s a lot of delays and A/B split test shapes in the journey. Why? The team wanted to ask for interviews at different stages in the process of building a new habit, since users have different struggles on day 4 than they do on day 50 (not to mention all the days in-between). Just ask anyone who’s trying to keep their 2017 new year’s resolutions. ;) Here’s the actual email Habit Nest sent to land an interview: Interview ask email Using a Pokemon gif wouldn’t work for every type of company, but it definitely fits the personality of the Habit Nest brand. Also notice the conversational tone, the link to schedule a phone call on Calendly, and the fact that the email is sent from a person instead of the company. This adds a nice human touch. All three emails in the journey were the same, minus the different calendars they linked to. The team interviewed close to 100 users over the course of a year and learned exactly what their targeted audience’s needs were by asking these questions:

  • What were the biggest pain points that led to wanting to build new habits?

  • What struggles did users have with actually making new habits?

  • What excited them about succeeding with new habits?

The team used their newfound knowledge to create autoresponder journeys for all five habits as well as a new product based on user’s pain points: The Morning Sidekick Journal.

Creating autoresponder journeys for each specific habit

Habit Nest created a targeted email series for users based on the habit they chose. The team used these emails to address the specific problems they heard over and over again in their user interviews about mastering mornings, getting fit, eating properly, meditating regularly, and learning through reading. Here’s what the mastering mornings journey looked like (click the image to view in hi-res):

Master Your Mornings journey

The team sent eight emails over the course of fifty-two days that walked people through how to make the most of their mornings. The journey kicks off with this email sent on day three: First email Then this one on day 10: Second email And this one on day 17: Third email The other five emails that round out the journey are comparable value-add emails based on their real-life user interviews. Habit Nest executed a similar process for the rest of the habits. The team wasn’t trying to sell anything with these journeys; their only goal was to provide overwhelming value to users with helpful and relevant content. This is lead nurturing in action, applied to a Shopify business. As a result, over a ten-month period, the team rallied a group of diehard followers who are passionate about their brand. Plus, they received their fair share of “thank you” emails, like so… Inspiration email

Making a product based directly on user pain points

When Habit Nest checked the subscriber and engagement numbers from their product autoresponder journeys, the Master Your Mornings series blew the other habits out of the water. This caught the team by surprise. Their gut instinct was that “mastering your mornings” was a bit vague. In fact, they thought meditation would be the big winner—especially with the flood of meditation apps hitting the market. But the numbers proved them wrong. For example, the master mornings habit drew in 6,799 subscribers compared to meditation’s 1,867. Plus, its click rate was 36% higher. This confirmed the team’s hunch that they should build their next product around that specific habit. So Habit Nest made The Morning Sidekick Journal. Master Your Mornings Journal The product design process was informed by qualitative and quantitative data. The interviews booked through their A/B split testing journey gave them insight into user pain points at every stage within the first two months of building a habit, and the engagement metrics showed what content worked best and when. Together, both of these data sources shaped the daily content of the journal and led to a finished product people actually wanted to buy.

Doubling their $10,000 goal on Kickstarter

When the product was ready in September 2016, Habit Nest launched a series of marketing emails to drive traffic to their Kickstarter campaign. Here’s what the journey looked like: Kickstarter promotional journey The team set up three different smart segments to make three different sales pushes. This email was the main driver to their Kickstarter campaign: Kickstarter promotional email Remember, these emails weren’t sent out of the blue. Habit Nest had been nurturing these relationships with helpful and relevant content for nearly a year. Trust had already been built. This email campaign, along with their Instagram efforts, resulted in Habit Nest raising $19,000—nearly doubling their $10,000 fundraising goal on Kickstarter. Word of mouth started to kick in from there, and the team sold an additional $6,251 in revenue within 48 hours of launching their online store in December 2016. All of the team’s combined efforts—learning from a failed product, interviewing users, nurturing relationships, creating something people want, and promoting to existing users—led to a successful product launch even after their big flop nine months earlier. So much for overnight success. How have you used interviews to inform your product design process? Or automation to nurture existing leads? Share your strategies in the comments. For the next 48 hours only, the Habit Nest team is giving an exclusive 15% discount to Autopilot readers for their Morning Sidekick Journal. Just use the code AUTOPILOT15 at the checkout.

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