What do you do when you can’t find the right shirt? Well, if you are Jianya Zhang, you can start a company.
Tanya and her partner Wesley identified a gap in the market: a lack of well-fitting dress shirts for slim men. So in 2018 they launched a very niche business called Agile manufacturing.
In this interview, she talks about how she validated the idea and initially spread the word about the company. She shares details on finding the right suppliers, identifying your company’s core demographic, and using search engine optimization (SEO) to expand your business reach.
Tanya’s story is very inspiring. Before becoming profitable, she quit her day job to focus entirely on her dream, and with her current six-figure income, everything seems to be going well.
Watch the full episode
Tania begins by sharing her background and experience working in creative roles, before sharing how she decided to jump off the corporate ladder and start a company.
She noticed that her partner and those around her were struggling to find slim-fitting dress shirts suitable for work. After validating the idea, she founded Nimble Made in 2018.
She had no experience in the fashion industry, but she dove right in.
Tanya talks about developing a marketing message, working to validate their idea and create a community, and how they quit their day jobs after six months to devote themselves full-time to the company, even though it wasn’t yet profitable.
Nimble Made’s revenue reaches six figures, and the site was viewed more than 90,000 times last month.
Tanya shares how they drove their brand story and initially promoted their company, resulting in numerous features in leading publications.
Once the business was successful, she talked about how they scaled the business and were able to offer over 40 different types of shirts to customers, and how they spent their marketing budget on paid advertising on Facebook and SEO.
Tanya then talked about their SEO efforts and how she used ChatGPT to accelerate growth, sharing how creating customer personas and figuring out your core demographic were the real keys to successfully marketing your product and determining what content to write. She also discusses how to use artificial intelligence to create content for blogs.
In the final part of the interview, she talked about diversifying the company’s revenue through the use of a YouTube channel, display advertising, affiliate marketing, and email marketing.
She also shared her thoughts on quitting her job to focus on the company full-time, her worst-case scenario, and how she planned to explain the experience to future employers if things didn’t work out.
Topics discussed by Zhang Danya
- Why she decided to start her own company
- How the idea for Nimble Made came about
- How she achieved this goal in the first place
- How she found suppliers
- Early stage of growth
- Current statistics
- first press
- Expand business scale
- Her SEO strategy
- Application of artificial intelligence
- Other marketing channels
- email marketing
- Cultivate customers
- quit the job
