Growing Without Paid Marketing with Sugarfina founder Rosie O'Neill

Growing Without Paid Marketing with Sugarfina founder Rosie O’Neill

The Boss School Podcast

On this episode of The Boss School, I speak with Sugarfina founder Rosie O’Neill about growing your business without the need for paid marketing. We talk about some of the strategies and qualities your product needs to have to actually forego paid marketing.

Rosie discusses the following in detail:

Add a personal touch.
Stalk the media that would cover you.
Interact with influencers and make your product something people will talk about.

Sometimes a lack of funding forces you to be creative. Click To Tweet

When Sugarfina started out, she hand-wrote personal notes and shipped them in each order. These notes kindly asked the customer to share their experience with a friend if they enjoyed the candy. Unsurprisingly, this method led to a serious amount of growth through word-of-mouth.

But tied to this is the idea that your product must actually be shareable. If you want people to share your product with their friends (and their digital friends on Instagram), then you need to think about the presentation. You need to think about how the product photographs, how it looks when you unbox it, and whether those are things that would get your target audience excited.

The right product is inherently viral and shareable. Click To Tweet

Finally, it would help to figure out who in the media is writing about the market your product fits in. Read the blogs, the magazines, and the stories, and figure out who would actually be interested in covering your product. Reach out to them (gently) and sell your idea. Just don’t be too sales-pitchy.

In combination, all of these things have led to Sugarfina being a $40M company with only 1% of sales spent on marketing. Design your product so that you don’t need to market it to people.

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