[0:00] Music.
[0:12] In case you missed it, I am in the process this week of retiring my beloved Kaylynn.Priest Instagram account and starting a new account completely from scratch, completely brand spanking new. My handle, by the way, now is just KaylynnPriest with no dot. I've gotten gotten so many questions asking about what's going on and the strategy of starting fresh. Why am I doing it? What's going on? And I have a lot to say. So I'm turning this into a full episode. I was debating if I should wait a few weeks before I record this to see if I distill any new insights from this experience, but obviously it's fresh on my
[0:53] mind and I feel like I should talk about it. So I'm going to. So before I tell the story of why a new Instagram account. There's another story that I have to tell first that will explain so much of this that I've actually never told on the podcast yet. And if you've heard my story before, you've probably heard pieces of it, but there's a little layer in here that I want to add that I think will be interesting. So I started my product business on Etsy almost seven years ago, and my main product when I started was wooden baby gyms. They're a modern take on those humongous red, yellow, blue baby activity mats that you lay a baby on, and they lay upside down and kick and play with the toys.
[1:31] Generally, the big box store version has lights and sounds and just does not look very cute in your living room. So my version was made out of wood. Nate and I, my husband, were making them out of my parents' garage and it was the very first product that I ever listed and sold on Etsy and somehow it ended up sticking and that was the product that I sold for the next six years.
[1:53] So fast forward a few years after I started a successful Etsy business, and I had so many friends and family asking me about what I did. Can I give them tips and tricks and hacks? And I started teaching friends and family. And it was during that process that I realized, wait, I really love talking about this and teaching people this stuff. And it turns out I know more than the average Joe about this. So a little seed was planted in me when I first started teaching and mentoring.
[2:22] And within a few months, that turned into me launching a full-blown course about how to start a product business and get your products listed on Etsy, how to optimize your listings for Etsy, SEO, the whole enchilada. Side note, I always like to tell the gory details a little bit sometimes because I feel like when people gloss over their story, it makes it look like their entire business journey has been a picnic, even though we all know that every business gives us opportunities for growth. But I just want to say that I remember, I have a flashbulb memory of the night before my first ever webinar for the Etsy seller goldmine launch. And I bawled my eyes out all night long. I was absolutely paralyzed with fear. And I remember looking at Nate and being like, what am I doing? I'm doing this because I have however many people registered for this workshop tomorrow, but this is terrifying. And he was just so sweet and just reassured me. And he's like, it's because this is the path that you want to be on. It's because this is what your heart really wants to do. And that's why it feels so scary because it feels vulnerable. It feels like there's a risk. But if it wasn't important to you, you wouldn't feel this stressed and worried about it. So I really appreciated that reassurance from him. And I also think that he sort of like caught a glimpse into the future with me for a moment of like, you know, this is what you really want to do. And so it makes sense that it feels scary. And so now that would have been almost a little over three years ago.
[3:49] I'm still on this education slash mentorship slash coaching path. And now I've launched a gazillion times and launching doesn't scare me very much anymore. But it's just kind of cool to look back and reflect at, you know, that moment when I decided to sell a course that was not just like, oh, that would be an easy thing to do. It was debilitatingly scary for a little bit. Okay, back to the story.
[4:13] So when I started welcoming women and men, actually, there were a few men who ended up joining the Goldmine course, which is another funny story for another day. But I started teaching them all about Etsy. And the thing about Etsy that's really cool is that you can make sales without doing any marketing, which sounds amazing as a business owner, right?
[4:32] But that also has a dark side, which I'm going to get to in just a minute. it. When I started my Etsy business, I also launched my own Instagram account for my product business. Even though I didn't quote unquote need to, I just wanted to have one because I knew that one, I wanted to look legit. And two, I wanted to start growing an audience because I knew there would be a day in the future when I would want to grow beyond Etsy. I'd probably want to have my own website. And if I was going to want to have my own website, I was going to need to have a way to drive traffic to it. And so it made sense to start doing the work of building an audience sooner rather than later so that it would make that effort a little bit easier in the future. And I'm really glad I did that, by the way. But I started to see a lot of other Etsy coaches encouraging Etsy sellers to, quote unquote, not waste their time with social media marketing because it's too hard and it takes too much time. That's a direct quote from a mentor, an Etsy mentor that I actually worked with. And I appreciate that perspective. I'm just really glad that I didn't do that. And obviously a lot of people love that messaging because that feels like such a relief, right? Like, wouldn't we all love to have sales without doing any marketing? You would think you would, but there's a reason why. So I saw that as a huge problem for businesses who wanted to be sustainable, who had a long-term mindset, who wanted to one day scale beyond Etsy and have their own website and start doing wholesaling.
[5:59] So that was basically my entire unique shtick of my course was that I taught people how to do the Etsy optimization stuff, but I also taught super basic Instagram marketing for product business owners.
[6:11] And for that reason, I wanted them to feel like they had some power, some levers they could pull to make sales if they wanted to. And so after teaching Etsy sellers for a little while, I started to hear stories about how some sellers all of a sudden had a big drop in their sales out of nowhere, or they had their stores deactivated by Etsy for no apparent reason.
[6:32] And if you're someone who has been 100% reliant on Etsy to bring you all of your sales and you don't have an audience anywhere because Etsy also makes it, they add some extra steps in the process of getting people on your email list as well. And something like this happens, it's completely out of your control, that can be pretty debilitating. Some might say that would absolutely chop you off at the knees, but I actually think we have more power than we think that we do that way. But I'm going to say, yeah, that would be pretty debilitating to lose your sales and have nowhere to go to reinvigorate them. And so that's when I started to get even more passionate about Instagram marketing, creating your own content, creating content that makes you sales. So again, the thing that is super great about relying on a platform that brings you sales is that when it works, it's awesome. But when it doesn't work, you are basically left up a creek without a paddle because there's very little that you can do to pull a lever to get a quick cash injection, especially if you're selling on Etsy where you don't really own your customer list. So again, I'm telling you this whole backstory to show that my passion for Instagram marketing and creating content on your own terms, and learning good marketing skills and habits, and being able to communicate the value of the things that you offer, my passion for all that stuff runs deep.
[7:49] And I actually ultimately decided to retire my Etsy course, even though it was going really well for some of these reasons. So the first reason why I retired the course was because it just, it was kind of a smoothie of several different reasons. Some of them were that it just wasn't bringing me joy anymore, more. But also that I started discovering that I wanted to play with mentoring business owners who were like two to three years into their business instead of business owners who were just barely starting out, which was the case for most of the people who were just launching their Etsy shop for the first time. But I also realized that there was a passion growing even more deeply inside of me to teach women how to create a business that is not dependent on any platform. And yes, that includes Instagram. That's why I also love email marketing and word of mouth marketing just as much as Instagram. I'm super passionate about teaching people how to create success on their own terms without having to rely on any magic system outside of their control to bring them sales. Because if it doesn't work, it leaves you frustrated and debilitated.
[8:56] Okay, so like I said, that's not a random tangent. All of that is backstory to why I'm creating this new Instagram account. So the idea of possibly starting a fresh Instagram account was first planted in my mind about a year ago when I hired my dear friend, Rebecca Peterson, to rebrand me. And I started to have conversations with her then about how I wanted to be a personal brand. I didn't want to be known for the physical products that I sold. I didn't want to be known for any kind of particular course.
[9:27] But I have a lot inside of me that I want to say and ways that I want to help people. And that's what I wanted to be known for. So last year when she was rebranding me, we had conversations about like, okay, so if you don't want to be a product business owner anymore, do you want to keep coaching product business owners? And at the time the answer was yes, but I also want to serve service business owners because I know that the skills, the marketing skills that I've developed can help pretty much any business owner. And so I didn't really know for sure if there was a way that I could serve all types of business owners, physical product owners, and service business owners.
[10:05] And everyone is talking about how you need to have a niche and how you need to get super narrow and super specific. And I've just been honestly battling that a little bit but the long story short is that I've been trying to keep a foot in both worlds for the past year to see if there was a way that I could straddle the line to see if there was a way that I could help both types of business owners and it turns out that I actually can and I can serve both of them really well and I have both service and product business owners in my program the greenhouse and it works beautifully where it gets challenging though
[10:40] is growing my audience and inviting new people into my audience. It's been really challenging for me to grow my following ever since, even though I rebranded and I have been serving my current net of the current people in my net in a really big, beautiful way. And it's worked really well. It's been really challenging for me to grow my following because I don't know how to call in so many different types of business owners without confusing everyone, especially with the specific way that I want to serve people. So the result was that I just ended up turning down the volume and the specificity on all of my marketing as a whole in an attempt to attract any type of business owner.
[11:20] And I shouldn't say I wasn't gaining any new followers because I was. I was gaining new followers and also losing some at the same time. So there was some turnover in my following. Some people were coming, some people were going, but it was the numbers staying basically stagnant, which is totally fine, except for that deep in my soul, I really want to grow. I really want my impact to grow. And it stopped growing when I started spreading myself across across multiple niches. When I look to the future, there's like a person, there's a woman in my mind who I can see who I really want to help and serve. And this woman wants to be known as a thought leader. She wants to create deep and wide impact for her audience. She wants to have an audience. She wants to have a big audience. She wants to be a big deal on Instagram and in other places too. And that's what she wants to be known and recognized for. She wants her face to be known. She does not want to be a faceless Instagram account. She wants to have genuine relationships with people and not just scale for the sake of making money, but scale for the sake of increasing her impact. Side note, I would love if that happened to be a girl who started following me when I was teaching Etsy business owners. And then she decided that she wants to stop marketing her product and start marketing herself.
[12:38] If you want to market you and start creating courses or programs or coaching and start pulling the amazing genius out of your brain and instilling it into other people, then like, let's freaking go. You're my girl. But in a nutshell, I guess I am tweaking my audience just a tiny bit to talk more specifically to that kind of girl.
[12:56] So if you are following my new account, you're probably going to notice a shift in the kind of content that I create and in my content strategy because I'm playing a game now to grow instead of playing a game just to maintain and to
[13:08] sell to my current audience. I'm still going to do that too. But there's a new game in my sphere of reference right now where I want to serve the audience that I have right now and monetize the audience that I have, but I also want to grow it very intentionally. So with that decision made, it made sense to start a fresh account and just be like, hey, everyone, my content's going to be changing. If you like it, come on over. Everyone is welcome. But I want to make sure that the people who are following me now are still here for me and are game for the kind of content that I'm going to be creating because it's going to be a little bit different than what I've been doing. As a side note, this is just interesting, but I was scrolling through my following the other day and I realized that a lot of the accounts that are following my old, it sounds funny to say old, my Kaylin Dotbury's, Instagram account are women who started Etsy businesses who found me at some point but have since decided to set their business down for whatever reason and no judgment with that ever. But it's just super interesting that it's almost like I have a little bit of a ghost town in my following where people are following me, but they're not active on their accounts anymore.
[14:13] So that wasn't the reason why I decided to start a fresh account, but it's just kind of an interesting side note. So that's the story. That's the tea. And I am really, really excited. I feel real like newer, bigger, bolder energy inside of me stepping out this way. I'll be honest, I did panic for like half a second on Monday right after I announced I'm retiring my account.
[14:36] Panicked for just a minute and thought, what am I doing? But I'm feeling really excited about this and thrilled and excited for a new place to run experiments. Because if you've been here, you know my entire business is a giant science experiment. And I'm sure I'll have more to report on my findings in the next few months. And I'm sure I'll be learning a lot about how to create content in this changing Instagram landscape and how to grow a following on Instagram now, because it's been a while since the last time that I did that. But I'm excited and I hope you're excited. I'm grateful that you're coming along with me for this ride. I hope you have an amazing week, my friend, and I will catch you next week. Hey, I hope you loved this week's episode. If you did, I know you would love to be a member of my community, The Greenhouse. It's where I teach you how to build an amazing fruitful life while you build an amazing fruitful business. It is a movement for women who want to unsubscribe from the traditional success path that says that life has to be a struggle and instead learn how good making more money can get, how fun marketing can be, and how much joy and presence you're capable of feeling as a woman and as a mother. Find out more and join at kaylenpriest.com slash greenhouse and I'll see you there.
[16:01] Music.
