We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nya Jones a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nya, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

When I first started my business I was still living at my parents house. I remember I started with 500 journals. That may not seem like a lot, but when it’s boxes stacked in your parents garage it feels like a lot more. In the beginning it was just me and I definitely wore many hats. I was packaging orders, responding to emails, running ad campaigns, creating content, managing taxes, and much more. I primarily relied on organic and paid social media advertising. I didn’t have a ton of capital up front and was solely relying on my savings from summer internships in college to kickstart my business. Over time as the ads started performing well and people would spread the word about my brand, I started gaining more traction. One day in April of 2021, I remember making a quick tik tok video about my journal and why I created it. This video ended up going viral, leading me to sell out all of my inventory in two days. I remember I had a bunch of family and friends come over to my parent’s house to help me pack orders to get them out as soon as possible because I was not ready for that amount of scale. This is when I realized I needed to invest in a fulfillment center and also a social media manager to help me produce more video content. Tik Tok has been an integral part in scaling my business at the speed in which it did, but there was also a lot of hard work and dedication that went into building the business way before that.

Nya, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I launched Inside Then Out in 2020 with the Better Every Day Journal. It was a period in my life where I was forced to slow down and was spending a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to be more intentional in my life. It started with a list of questions I wanted to answer for myself. I remember looking online to find a journal that would meet my needs and when I couldn’t I decided that I could be the one to create it. I have been journaling since I was a little girl so it was definitely a full circle moment for me to create my own. The name “Inside Then Out” represents prioritizing what’s inside first. I wanted to encourage others who were similarly working on becoming a better version of themselves, to have a simple, easy way to make reflection and self-improvement a part of their daily routine. Since launch we have expanded to offer a collection of modern, minimalistic products that help you prioritize self-care and growth in your daily life.

How did you build your audience on social media?

When it comes to building a strong brand, before you start posting on social media or running ads, I believe you really need to spend a lot of time building something that you care about, that you feel that people need, and that resonates with a problem you would like to solve. I think people too often think about how they want to make money or create a certain lifestyle for themselves, rather than understanding what their why is or how they can serve their customers. Once you have that then the money and the social media presence will eventually come. I believe branding is one of the most important aspects of marketing, and that extends way past your logo, fonts, or brand colors. It’s about building a brand that connects with people and meets a specific need that they have. For Inside Then Out we want our purpose to be reflected wherever you interact with our brand, whether that is on social media, our website, in our ad campaigns, or even when you receive our products. Rather than focusing on just increasing our followers, we focus on engaging our community at every level. We don’t want community to just be a buzzword that we use on social media, but something that we build from the inside out. Once you understand the needs of your customers, then you can create social media content that specifically focuses on those needs. For example, we create a lot of educational and inspirational content on our social media platforms. Although that may not translate to direct sales right away, it serves our community’s needs and over time that community will continue to grow and engage with us.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

When I first launched Inside Then Out, I was also working at Facebook full-time. Although it was very difficult to manage both, I loved what I was doing and felt very aligned with my purpose. For the first two years I kept my job even as my business started to scale. Facebook was also my first job out of college and I wanted to learn as much as possible from that experience before going on my own full time. I decided to leave in September of last year a few months after my brand made its first $1M in total revenue. Quitting was a little bit scary, but I also believed in myself and knew that if my business was doing so well while I was managing a full-time job, I could only imagine what I would accomplish if I put my full focus into it. Looking back I am so grateful for that experience because it taught me so much. Since quitting I have had the opportunity of hiring employees of my own and didn’t realize how much skills I would be using from my time at Facebook to apply to building my own brand and managing a team.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.insidethenout.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidethenout/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/insidethenout
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/67118899
• Twitter: https://www.tiktok.com/@insidethenout?lang=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@insidethenout6114
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@insidethenout?lang=en https://www.pinterest.com/inside_then_out/

Image Credits
Rebecca Goddard, Rafael Taveira