We were lucky to catch up with Steffa Mantilla recently and have shared our conversation below.

Steffa, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?

With covid, there’s been a lot more uncertainty with my clients in regards to their job security and how they want to handle their personal finance. Generally, people are becoming more money-conscious and conservative in their spending. I’ve seen an increase in people wanting to save up an emergency fund and pay down their debt.

My business model has shifted so that I’m creating more digital products to help people with these new goals. People enjoy visuals to track their goals, especially if they’re large monetary ones. So I’ve expanded to create a variety of financial goal coloring charts and money trackers.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started Money Tamer after I quit my job to become a stay-at-home mom. I had always been interested in personal finance and used my family’s debt payoff journey as a jumping-off point for starting my business. Originally, Money Tamer started out as a blog but has now expanded into offering digital products that help people keep track of their budgeting, savings goals, debt payoff, and more.

While I was on maternity leave, I realized that I didn’t want to miss out on the majority of my child’s day since my prior job was long hours and you worked holidays and weekends. After I gave my notice, I started growing my online presence during my child’s naptime. It took a lot of hours to grow Money Tamer into what it is today, but I now have the flexibility to adjust my schedule around my family’s needs while still pulling in an income and helping people at the same time.

The Money Tamer brand focuses on helping families get the information they need to start working towards their financial goals.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Since my business started out as a webpage, there was very little capital needed to start it. My time was the limiting factor in the initial two years of the business. I purchased a domain name for 1 year for $9 and then paid $7/month for website hosting. Then I used WordPress and a free theme to build my website.

There was a lot of self-teaching that I had to do in order to learn SEO, marketing, accounting, and everything about running a profitable blog. Because while anyone can start a blog but if your intention is to earn money from it, you have to go about everything with a business mindset.

While my blog was getting off the ground, I did pet sitting with Rover for around 2 years for immediate cash. I have a background in animal training so I was able to find clients that were fine with me bringing my child along on dog walks or cat sitting visits. I used this money to help with my family’s budget and also to pay for a few online business courses which ended up helping me grow my business faster with less of a learning curve.

But since I was the full-time caregiver to my baby, I prioritized his care first which made time the hardest resource to come by. I’d wake up early and work during naptimes. So my business had a slower growth than many other bloggers who started around the same time as me but everyone’s journey is different.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

I knew that creating physical products wasn’t the direction I wanted to go since there’s a lot more moving parts. With that in mind, I focused on digital products that I can sell as instant PDF downloads. I started selling on my Shopify store attached to my website. I’ve branched out to offer the same products on Etsy in order to tap into their market.

Shopify is great if you have your own audience already. Your profit is higher through Shopify since the fees are less than Etsy. If you don’t have an audience yet, Etsy is a convenient place to start since almost everyone knows about Etsy. People go there to find items. The con is that while customers see the products you’re selling, they’re also seeing related products from other sellers on the same page. On your Shopify store, it’s only your products and not your competitors. Not every market is found on Etsy either. Depending on the product you’re selling, it may not do well on Etsy since they have a very specific clientele.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://moneytamer.com
• Other: https://shop.moneytamer.com

Image Credits
CJ Mantilla Steffa Mantilla