Turning $100 into $52,000 selling handmade candles DTC - Dianna Allen, TERRA
01/11/21 • 15 min
Dianna Allen is the founder of TERRA, a DTC candle brand, where she designs and hand pours a variety of candles. In October 2020, Dianna left her life as a freelancer behind to put her efforts into TERRA full-time, which as we all know, is a huge leap to make.
What we covered:
- Should more indie hackers work on physical products?
- What happened with Budget Meal Planner?
- Should more indie hackers kill projects more often?
- Does turning a passion into a business take the enjoyment away?
- What was the breakthrough moment with Terra
- Making the leap going full-time with your business
- Why Dianna went straight into
- How do the economics of a physical product business work?
- How Terra was started with just $100
- Using Instagram for 99% of growth
- The hardest part of running a physical product business
- How to balance one-term purchases vs MRR
- Why we should support more small businesses?
Links
Recommendations
- Book: Shoe Dog
- Indie Hacker: AJ from Carrd
- Podcast: Doesn't listen
Follow Dianna
Follow Me
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week!
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Dianna Allen is the founder of TERRA, a DTC candle brand, where she designs and hand pours a variety of candles. In October 2020, Dianna left her life as a freelancer behind to put her efforts into TERRA full-time, which as we all know, is a huge leap to make.
What we covered:
- Should more indie hackers work on physical products?
- What happened with Budget Meal Planner?
- Should more indie hackers kill projects more often?
- Does turning a passion into a business take the enjoyment away?
- What was the breakthrough moment with Terra
- Making the leap going full-time with your business
- Why Dianna went straight into
- How do the economics of a physical product business work?
- How Terra was started with just $100
- Using Instagram for 99% of growth
- The hardest part of running a physical product business
- How to balance one-term purchases vs MRR
- Why we should support more small businesses?
Links
Recommendations
- Book: Shoe Dog
- Indie Hacker: AJ from Carrd
- Podcast: Doesn't listen
Follow Dianna
Follow Me
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week!
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Previous Episode
How Pat Walls made $20k in 2 weeks from his SEO course - Pat Walls, Starter Story
Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. They interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started their business and how they grew it, including revenue figures for every business they interview.
But in this episode, we’re going to be discussing the new SEO course that Pat launched this week, making over $20k in pre-sales.
What we covered
- 20k in 2 weeks, how did you do it?
- How and why Pat started Starter Story?
- How he grew it to 500,000 monthly visitors
- Why Reddit can be a goldmine, but why Pat stopped using it
- How Starter Story allowed Pat to go full-time
- The most insane story out of 2,000 posts
- Using Twitter to validate an idea
- Executing on that idea
- How to price a course
- The benefit of building in public
- How to execute so quickly
- How to build an audience
Recommendations
- Book: Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Podcast: Indie Hackers
- Indie Hacker: Harry Dry
Follow Pat
Follow Me
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Next Episode
Making over $5k/month from a portfolio of side projects - Dan Rowden, ilo
Dan, like many other indie hackers, runs a bunch of projects alongside a full-time job which all compound to him making over $5k a month. In 2012 he started Magpile, a free online resource about magazines, which was followed by Subsail, a platform to help indie publishers sell magazine subscriptions.
Earlier this year Dan started using the publishing platform Ghost, which he then started to build a suite of products around, now including:
- Gloat; a productised service for hosting and self hosting
- Cove; a commenting tool for Ghost blogs
- Substation; a theme for Ghost
Dan also launched ilo, a better analytics platform for Twitter a few months ago, which has earned over $6k in revenue since launch.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Dan lives in Mauritius
- Why choose multiple projects over doing just one?
- How do you manage your time with 3 kids, a wife and a full-time job?
- Why Dan isn't too worried about 'growing' his side projects
- The pros and cons of working on your side project with a full-time job
- Not worrying about the money your side project earns - does it take the fun out of it?
- Why is Dan so bullish on Ghost?
- Why having a 'suite' of products is complimentary to each other
- Getting a 75k acquisition offer
- Being prepared to sell your projects
- Building an alternative to Twitter analytics
Recommendations
- Magazine: Courier
- Newsletter: Dense Discovery
- Podcast: Startup
- Indie Hacker: Justin Jackson
Follow Dan
Follow Me
Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites, which is launching in the US this week!
‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.’‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.’
‘Absolutely love this community.’
These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet’s most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you’ve ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.
We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.
Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites’ for 50% off your first month.
Interested in ad-free episodes an exclusive content? Sign up to the Indie Feast membership.
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