Parenity Brand Startup Journal | Entry #2 | Week Ending Jun.28/24

Parenity is a solopreneur brand (read about it here) being built from the ground up by me, Rob Bond. For other entries in this startup journal, check out the startup journal category on this site, or if you want to just check out the previous post (in this case it’s a giant catch-up post), you can find it here.

And if you don’t feel like reading every single thought, here’s the blog post condensed into a short video:

Tik Tok is a Strange Bird

Over the last month or so, I’ve been diving into, more than I ever have in my life, video content posting. I’m posting everywhere that Metricool will allow me to connect to. I started off throwing a lot of everything at the wall just to get a feeling for what I should be spending my time on. While I feel I now have a better grasp on a workflow I can sustain, and what content does best, I cannot for the life of me figure out TikTok.

When I started off, my videos were getting 600+ views, and comments, and follows, and it was very exciting. A few videos down the line, though, and I got stuck at 0 views on a few. Then I’d get 100 (which is still low); then 2. Ok so I’m not banned exactly, but from what I understand, I’m supposed to get 200 views automatically just as a starting point of the algorithm’s testing. So what happened? What changed? There are a million TikTok gurus out there who will tell you exactly what you need to be doing, or what you’re doing wrong. But let me tell you something: nobody has a clue. I guarantee their content-assessing AI is glitching the F*** out.

Starting from there, I’m still trying to figure out how to correct course. I’ve seen a few conversations and videos online suggesting that situations like this require starting a fresh account, and I may eventually do this if my next attempts fail to get me back in the 200+ views club. I don’t doubt that there’s some flag that got attached to my account as I was trying out my first slew of video concepts and now I’m stuck blindly jumping through hoops I’m making up myself (or getting from gurus) to course-correct so I don’t have to give up my “parenitynow” TikTok handle.

Another mystery with TokTok is, well, everything. They don’t like duplicate content, but they LOVE you to jump on trends. Use that song that everybody’s lip-syncing to! Use that hashtag that’s blowing up! Post videos under a minute! NO! OVER a minute; TikTok likes that now. Post 4x per day! No, that’s too much now. If you check out TikTok’s trend discovery page, it is FULL of people being dancing monkeys for the Algorithm. It’s really pretty absurd, and I hope I can get enough of a following without ending up looking like a tap dancing fool.

The really frustrating part of this is that it’s forcing me to waste time figuring out how to get back on track, and cater my workflow to TikTok’s whim of the day, when all the other platforms are really behaving as I expect a creator platform to behave. Take that trending sound example, even. I can’t select/add these songs easily into my video without posting directly from the TikTok app, which kind of blows up my Metricool multi-posting workflow. Of course this is by design. I really hope I can just get my account back to “good enough” and cruise along on my own schedule from there.

Content Creation for Small Business can be Confusing

My gripes above aside, I really have been having fun creating content, and dusting off my editing skills, and it’s been really fun including my kids in the process. Something that’s challenging me now, though, is figuring out how *and where) to structure different types of content.

Parenity has a YouTube channel, and it contains a lot of fun shorts about family life and just general non-serious, sometimes-helpful “stuff”. But there’s also some business stuff in there, primarily in long-form content, where I talk about the type of stuff I talking about right now: experiences/discoveries/difficulties in starting a small business. But I don’t want to limit either the long/short sections to JUST a certain type of content.

Should I create separate “Parenity Biz” accounts on all platforms to avoid confusing the algorithm? I really don’t want to, as this, to me, would just make it confusing to find us, and it would spread my limited creation resources too thin resulting in very sparse-looking accounts.

For now, I’ll shut my brain off on this and stick with the status quo.

Alibaba & Product Sourcing

We’re producing our flagship “Adulting Done Bright” product right here in Canada. But I have some additional products I want to offer on our website as impulse-buy items to increase our average order value. For these, it makes most sense to buy them overseas to maximize Parenity’s profit margins. This bothers me a little, and maybe one day I can move to local manufacturing, but I really need to keep my costs low in the early stages of this bootstrapped venture.

I created an Alibaba account a while back and was able to use it to get some quotes, but I did not end up feeling confident with any of the interactions with the various quoting companies. I did not feel like if I placed an order, I would receive what I was describing and requesting.

For this reason, I’ve decided to engage a product sourcing company to help me with the quoting and the complicated freight arrangements. I asked some of the ecommerce Facebook groups I frequent and came away with a contact that seems to be pretty dialed in and helpful so far. I’ll keep you all posted on how this relationship progresses.

NPN Wait Times

I was just given a harsh reminder that although our flagship product’s formula is ready to go, we still have to apply for our NPN(Natural Product Number) from Health Canada. I didn’t have it in my mind that it would be this long, but apparently it can take 4-6 months to receive!

I don’t have the mental bandwidth at the moment to assess what this means for our launch schedule or income needs right now, and hey, at least I feel a little less rushed in terms of dotting all I’s and crossing all T’s. It also buys a little time to find the right suppliers for our cross-sell items.

After I received this reminder, I checked with the lab, and they verified for me that the United States doesn’t have any such natural product regulations as long as we adhere to labelling requirements. That’s a relief; one less thing to do there. Another silver lining, the fees for the lab’s help in registering for the NPN are actually lower than I remembered them mentioning previously. Sometimes things go in the right direction!

I Got the Ol’ Shopify Partner Account Going

It had been a while since logging in after being employed in a full time gig for many years, but I reactivated the Shopify Partners account. A partners account is really intended for design and development agencies and professionals who want to build a business around the Shopify ecosystem, but if you understand it and can navigate it, it does allow you to work on a store and theme code without fear that a paid plan is going to kick in on you before you’re ready to roll.

I have the Parenity store in place, and a fresh, up-to-date copy of Shopify’s Dawn theme installed (which is very nice since we were kinda stuck working in a years-old, heavily-modified theme at my previous job), and now the tinkering can commence! And as I mentioned above, I’ve got a little more time than I even want to get things locked in on this front.

Kinda Excited about Social Snowball

In the world of ecommerce, I feel like I’m pretty well-versed in what’s fluff, and what’s worth building into the budget. But there are a LOT of Shiny objects out there, and one is never 100% safe from shiny object syndrome. So far, Social Snowball doesn’t feel like just another shiny object. It’s an affiliate marketing app that was featured on a recent episode of Kurt Elster’s Unofficial Shopify Podcast.

I won’t break down the entire platform here, but essentially, this app takes a modern approach to affiliate management for ecommerce stores, squashes discount code leaks along the way, and smartly rolls auto-enabled referral rewards into the mix, allowing you to enlist your happy customers to spread the word about your brand, and get paid for doing so. They seem to have streamlined and brought together 2 parts of online marketing that should have always been working together.

Our Shopify site isn’t up yet, but I was excited enough after hearing the episode mentioned above, that I emailed social snowball right away to see if I could secure myself an extended trial period of their platform for Parenity. Ani at the company was very helpful, and I’m hoping this ends up being one app that starts paying for itself well before we have to start paying for it!

Incorporation

Pina at goodlawyer.ca has been helpful in getting Parenity registered as a corporation federally. For whatever reason though, even though Parenity is registered federally, I still have to register with the province of Manitoba, and of course pay them a fee. And Pina tells me that MB is just about the only province that requires I head to the companies office in-person and drop off the papers. Good ol’ MB!

Regardless, all the steps are done now! I have a corporation number, a business number, and probably a few other numbers floating around out there. As a side note, TikTok wanted copies of the documents that all of these numbers exist on. I was going to provide them, but I’ve learned it’s better to stick with a creator account vs a business account for as long as possible, anyway. TikTok silliness aside, once I receive the final certificate in the mail, I just need to forward a copy to Pina, and Parenity is a fully-existing entity!