Hello and welcome back to the show! It’s Doone here, your host and hype girl! We have such a cracking episode for you today, chatting with the founder and inventor of Contour Cube, Sarah Forrai. We had her on the show back in October 2021 - which I highly recommend listening to first so you can get the full picture of just how insane this story is and the power of finding a true gap in the market. This brand journey has been next level!
In this ep we’re chatting through Sarah’s the top hacks to growing her tiktok account to over 400,000 followers and her tips and insights into the 100s of millions of views she has across all of her channels thanks to winning short form video content. We also take a deep dive into everything gifting and influencers and at the verrrrry end Sarah takes us through her very new product that just launched this week, the GuaCube with a detailed plan on how she built crazy hype in the lead up to launch. Definitely don’t miss that final gem!
Last time we spoke it was only 8 months into the business, now it’s been three years. We met on TikTok in 2020. This is the part 2 episode. I’m so excited to dig into this today! So many lessons to share, and so much cool stuff going on. The story circa October 2021!
Last time we chatted, you were running two businesses (also a hand sanitiser business). How did you know what to focus on?
We really saw the vitality Contour Cube pop off and take up so much more of our time
We needed to focus all our time on that business
We kept both businesses going and up and running - and to this day still put our product on E-Bay and let it have a second life
Last time we chatted, both us founders were working full-time. Sarah really didn’t know whether to quit, and just kept juggling both businesses - but in the end there was just too much going on. The key moment was when a crazy influencer (Kendall Jenner) posted about us organically and some cool stockists reached out to us around the same time (450 Priceline stores across Australia)… This was the moment I realised I needed to quit my job, work out the logistics of working with a big stockist. But it was REALLY scary. I just got into things straight away. This was around September 2022, and my partner Lewis joined in February 2023.
SHARK TANK 🦈
So many people would reach out and say we should go on Shark Tank
Applied and went through the whole process, binge watched all the seasons of Shark Tank, practicing pitching so often
On the actual day: pre-interview, tour of the lift-situation, then the pitch! It came out the way we wanted it to turn out
What was the impact? If you’re em-ing and ah-ing about going on Shark Tank, and sharing all of these numbers with the whole world. But knowing who the sharks were was such an opportunity. At one point in the night of airing there were 6,000+ people on our website. A quarter of a million people were watching the show as it aired.
We were able to repost our episode on TikTok and made a little series with it: this is a great TikTok hack! Audiences love a series they can follow along. Part 1, part 2, etc. You take them through a journey.
ORGANIC MARKETING & TIKTOK ✨
This has been such a big driver for you in business (organic short form video content)
Consistency is always still key: everybody knows the algorithm loves that, we used to post 3x a week, now daily, but we’re moving up to 3x a day. That’s 21 videos a week! But we’re going to work smarter and not harder. We’re thinking of 7 ideas, but 3 different ways of doing them. That’s the beauty of TikTok. A voice-over video, a trending sound video, an entertaining video, a photo carousel… A great way to hack the quantity you want to post on TikTok. You just have to get your reps in.
How do you come up with the ideas? Inspiration from other creators on the app. I’m constantly saving videos that I come across that I love. I put things in three baskets: entertaining, educational, inspirational.
What’s the system / process you’re using? When I have an idea, I script it out. Then I think about the visual, and then the sound I’m going to add to that idea. Sometimes the sound is what triggers the idea. I scroll one hour a morning, one at night. But the end of the week I have this big bank and dedicate a day to content. If there’s a day I don’t feel like filming, I’m just not going to do it. It’s going to show in the video. I’m going to park it for now, give myself a rest. That’s where the montage videos come in.
Montage videos are my biggest hack: they allow you to make an endless stream of content, especially when you’re really lazy and you don’t have a lot of time. You can put your camera up packing orders, going to the post-office, looking at prototypes. When you piece that all together people love seeing the journey. Over time I have this huge B-Roll of content - so montage videos are my go-to things nowadays giving a peek behind the founder life.
What are some challenges you experienced? Trying to think of new angles to capturing your audience and idea fatigue can really sneak in. But to overcome that we’ve really started repurposing a lot of our content, and then we can capture a really diverse demographic. Get onto repurposing your content because you never know what going to hit.
TikTok Shop: I think it’s going to be really great for us. It’s really popping off for some people in the US. It’s going to make it so easy to buy directly in the app, I think it’s going to be massive.
Tell your story: if you don’t know where to start, start by telling your brand story. Why you created your product, how you’re filling a gap in the market. Through people’s engagement on those you can start to figure out what else people want to know, and directly reply to their comments in a video. You don’t have to always be perfect in the video, because you’ll improve over time. You’ll figure out your style over time. Storytelling is so powerful: people want to buy from humans.
Gifting & influencers: one morning out of the blue we woke up to so many sales, and Kendall Jenner had posted us in her story organically. I was totally mind-blown. From there we decided to create a video about it on TikTok, which did really well. I put the whole thing down to the vitality of TikTok. Every video you post on TikTok has the potential to reach some really powerful people. We kept leveraging it and talking about it. Good lesson: anything that happens, how can this be a content piece? What milestone can you talk about?
How do you go about getting your product in the hands of a celebrity: influencer giveaways by teaming up with other brands, PR agencies. It’s not huge for us because we’ve been able to reach a lot of organic vitality and word of mouth vitality.
Key hacks: I would create a PR list of the people you want to reach out to and also DM people directly. For us, reaching out to people you know are going to love the product, keeping an eye out on those creators in your space.
What consistent actions should be prioritised every day in business?
Start some kind of content creation plan
Write a list of everything you want to achieve and cut that down to your top 3 things you want to focus on for every quarter
“I just love the idea of building something from the ground up, life is really about creativity.”
Reccies: Diary of a CEO on YouTube - anything related to business on YouTube.