Hola 👋🏻
I learn how to do things by disassembling how someone else has done something, aka reverse engineering. So today, I’m going to take you on a journey of how someone else has built a bootstrapped product strategy, that has grown and evolved over time.
The person in question has built a very strong personal brand, leveraged it to create a product brand all while being brutally honest and transparent in the process. A woman after my own heart.
I’ll be showing you how you might take a similar approach to creating your own product strategy.
This article is great for beginners and people who are experts with a service based business who want to monetise that knowledge by creating products.
Show & Tell
This is the very essence of a show and tell. Showing how something has been done by someone else, and telling you how you can apply it to your own business.
I’ve been watching this person build her own product empire, and feel like it’s an absolute master class in how to do it.
I’m a huge fan of her products, but I’m an even bigger fan of the strategic approach she’s taken to building her product strategy.
Today, we’re looking at the doyenne of skin care, Caroline Hirons.
A bit of background
For those of you who don’t know, Caroline Hirons has a banging personal brand, and a skin care brand, Skin Rocks.
She’s spent her career working on cosmetic and skin care counters in department stores, and SpaceNK (for my non-Brit readers, SpaceNK is like Sephora). To say she’s passionate about skin care is an understatement.
The beautiful thing about the way Caroline’s product strategy builds, is that each product has its own thin slice strategy built into it. She starts with one part, and then gradually builds on it. Caroline is a lady known for perfectionism, but you can see how she’s manages this by starting small and building from there.
Skin Rocks app - monetising knowledge
If you subscribe to her Instagram profile, you’ll find that she does regular lives where she’ll take different skin care products and gives a (brutally) honest breakdown of how they perform.
She doesn’t just randomly test them, she’ll take a full size product and use it until it’s done.
Leveraging this knowledge, she’s used it to build a massive knowledge base of products that are now built into an app. The thing that makes this different to apps and websites like Sephora or SpaceNK, is simply that she’s not selling the products on there. This creates a slightly different dynamic to how users trust the information.
The app has recently launched paid for tiers that give a richer content experience, additional features (like exclusive access to podcast extras and fan content).
Monetising your knowledge
If you’ve got a service based business and want to add products that monetise your knowledge, it can sound really daunting.
Your strategy might look like this:
- Commit to writing two posts a week explaining how *you* approach something. This is your first thin slice
- In 3 months you’ll have 24 posts that you could take and add some extra secret sauce to and create a small book, maybe including some templates. This is your second thin slice
With each of those slices you’re looking for feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Taking those 24 posts, plus feedback and some extra secret sauce gives you something valuable. The book can then go through more iterations.
If you keep taking this approach, you’re producing regular thin slices of your knowledge that builds over time.
Kitmas curated products
If you know, you know. By that I mean, Caroline runs something called Kitmas. Kitmas is a curated set of full sized skin care products in one of her branded neoprene kit bags.
The kits are curated around specific things. She’s run them for acne prone skin, menopausal skin, hormonal skin, etc.
She teases then launches them on her Instagram Lives, and they sell out rapidly.
The genius behind these kits, is the way she differentiates herself from other brands. SpaceNK, Liberty, Sephora, etc, all sell kits, or give them away when you spend a certain amount of money. But they’re usually trial sized products and their curation is usually determined by which brand wants a new product in front of a customer.
With Caroline’s it’s the full size, specific skin concerns, the branded kit bag *and* her knowledge are what makes these so in demand. She listens to what her Skin Freaks (her fans) tell her about the products which also helps shape them.
Listening to her customers feels like a brand value, because she’s used that information to help her create her own products.
Creating your own kits
You’ve probably been told that the way to make money if you’re a service based business is to create a course and sell it.
Great. But do you know how f king hard it is to do that? If you’re just starting out, have never created a course in your life, have a very small audience and little to no insight about what they need. Don’t do it.
If your product strategy says your end goal is to create a course, you could start with a kit.
A kit takes your book you’ve created, and turns it into something a little more dynamic. You add more detail to it, maybe a single how-to video (run a webinar, record that and use that to start off with) and some tools to help complete that task.
With this, you’ve taken your knowledge thin slices and added a few more toppings to it, and you defo sell it at a higher price point than the booklet.
Skin Rocks - own brand products
And the fans went wild. I’m not kidding, when the first Skin Rocks product launched, everyone went wild for it. If my memory serves me correctly, I think the first product was retinols.
But it wasn’t the product itself that I found amazing. It was the entire approach of how Caroline designed and brought the product into the world.
Instead of launching an entire product range, waiting for every element to be perfect, Caroline has launched them one product type at a time. All the while teasing us that there’s an entire range.
The highlights of what this product strategy looks like:
Bootstrapped - Caroline said there were lots of skin care brands who wanted to bank roll her product line, but she didn’t want to have to compromise or go against what she believed in. She funded each product launch with the revenue from the previous product. Which means the product strategy includes a revenue strategy, breaking down how the income will be reinvested into product development.
Quality - the quality of the ingredients was especially important to Caroline, after all she’s built a personal brand tearing down low quality cheap ingredients. There was a LOT of testing that went into them, including scientific testing.
Product packaging - the products packs were specifically designed based on all the insight Caroline gathered from her customers and fans over the years, simply by listening to them. Customer reviews are a gold mine of insight because it’s unprompted. The thing I love the most are the guides on the lids of the products showing exactly how much you need to use. I also like the colour coding, it’s a nice touch.
Launching a line when ready to go - Caroline has said explicitly that she chose the first product to launch when it was ready to go, and that happened to be the retinols.
Testing and listening - we’ve already seen that Caroline design packaging around customer insights. But it didn’t stop at the product package design. When she launched the face wash, everyone said they loved it (me included) but the pack size was WAY too small. This week, she’s launched a bigger size.
Bootstrapping your own product build
If you want to build a product that succeeds, listening to the people who will buy it from you (and sometimes the people who won’t), is essential.
If you truly listen to what your customers want, they will help you shape the direction you should go in without you having to do a lot of work to get there.
Read the comments (just not the shitty ones - delete, block, move on), what are people asking for? What do they love? What do they not love?
Use that insights and what you’ve already put out into the world and look how you can layer that up into your own products. Still want to build that course? By now you should have all your course material to hand - tried and tested - with a fan base who want to buy it from you.
A masterclass in thin slicing
Caroline’s approach truly embodies what it’s like to thin slice a bootstrapped product strategy.
Not everyone wants to build a bootstrapped business, but Caroline chose to do so because she didn’t want to compromise on her own brand values, and retain control over the entire creation process.
It shows you can go from content creator to thought leader to product creator without external investment.
This is honestly why I love thin slicing. A thin slice takes something small and controllable, which you can learn from to build upwards. Small, thin slices are lower risk. Each time you add something to it, you’re doing so in a controlled and informed way. By the time you launch something big and high value, it’s still relatively low risk because it’s built on seriously strong foundations of insight and knowledge.
If you want help creating a product strategy like Caroline’s or fixing some flubs in existing products, drop me a line, I can help.
Links
If you want to check out Caroline’s little digital empire, here are the links
Have an awesome weekend!
Emma
