Dropping Her Kindle Led to a $50K/Month Business

Lou Rice is the founder of Strapsicle, which sells innovative silicone straps for e-readers like the Kindle for comfortable one-handed reading 🖐️

According to a recent interview, the business earns $50,000 per month 🤯

Which is incredible for 2 reasons…

1. They started the business less than two years ago (source)
2. Who knew there was such demand for this kind of product?

🚀 The origin story…

Lou Rice was breastfeeding her son Archie one night when disaster struck—she dropped her Kindle on his head!

[Next Day], Ben [Lou’s husband] fashioned a silicone strap with staples to attach Lou’s Kindle to her hand…

After positive initial testing, Ben and Lou explored whether there were any similar products on the market and found very few competitors.

Next…

Luckily, they had an existing manufacturing contact in China through a friend to produce prototypes and ultimately fulfill inventory orders.

It took 2-3 rounds of back and forth with the factory to perfect the design, dimensions, tension, and sizing of the very first Strapsicle strap.

🗣️ Lou explains how they got the word out…

We decided to launch and give it away for free and people just paid shipping… It was a bit unconventional.

She posted on her LinkedIn and in some relevant Facebook groups…

It went absolutely nuts… like hundreds of comments, loads of support, and then people started buying.

That gave them some leverage…

These people only paid the shipping costs, and they were only asked to provide feedback about the strap.

This approach allowed Lou and Ben to begin building community and start a dialogue with real customers using Strapsicle on their Kindles. Plus, it enabled gathering user-generated content and reviews to aid subsequent marketing efforts.

Then 👇

Lou soon stumbled upon BookTok – an engaged subculture on TikTok obsessed with reading… BookTok participants were an ideal target market…

She reached out to lots of micro-influencers, offered them free samples to try, and provided discount codes they could share with their followers to drive sales…

This micro-influencer strategy combined with the initial free giveaway enabled Strapsicle to gain significant organic traction in just its first 3 months in business.

At some point they also started selling on Amazon, and now they’re doing $50,000 in monthly revenue 💰

Last words from Lou…

You’ve just gotta keep going. You will not be able to see the wood for the trees for at least the first year. It’ll feel like you’re a hot mess. I still feel like that. 

But you just keep going and eventually you will start to see traction.

So Lou dropping her Kindle led to a $50k/month business.

Have you had any mishaps lately?

Could there be a business opportunity there? 🤔

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