What do you do when you can’t find a shirt that fits right? Well, if you’re Tanya Zhang, you launch a business.
Tanya and her partner Wesley identified a gap in the market: a lack of nice-fitting dress shirts for slim men. So, in 2018, they launched a very niche business called Nimble Made.
In this interview, she talks about how she validated the idea and spread the word initially about the company. She shares details on finding the right supplier, identifying the company’s core demographic, and using SEO to expand its footprint.
Tanya’s story is very inspirational. She quit her day job before she was profitable to go all-in on her dream, and with its current 6-figure revenue, it looks like it’s all working out.
Tanya kicks off the episode by sharing her background and her experience in creative roles, and then she shares how she decided to jump off the corporate ladder and launch a company.
She noticed that her partner and the people around her were struggling to find slim dress shirts for work that fit properly. After validating the idea, she created Nimble Made, in 2018.
She had no experience in the fashion industry, but she dove right in. Tanya shares the initial steps she took to launch the business, which included getting samples from a supplier and finding someone with a low minimum order and good communication.
Tanya talks about developing their marketing message and working to validate their idea and create a community, and how they quit their day jobs after just six months to dedicate themselves entirely to the company, even though it wasn’t yet profitable.
Nimble Made is earning a 6-figure revenue and the website had 90k+ pageviews in the last month.
Tanya shares how they pushed their brand story and got the word out initially about their company, with many features in leading publications.
Once it took off, she speaks about how they scaled the business and were able to offer more than 40 different types of shirts to their customers, and how they used their marketing budget with paid ads on Facebook and SEO.
Tanya then talks about their SEO efforts and how she used ChatGPT to accelerate growth, and also shares how the creation of customer personas and pinpointing the core demographic were really key in successfully marketing their products and determining exactly what content to write. She also discusses how she uses AI to produce content for the blog.
In the last portion of the interview, she talks about diversifying the company’s revenue with a YouTube channel, display ads, and affiliate marketing, and the use of email marketing.
She also shares her thoughts on quitting her job to go all-in on the company, her worst-case scenario, and the way she planned to explain the experience to future employers had it not worked out.
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