How Jouvan Quit His Job And Grew His £7500/Month Content Membership Business For Nail Technicians
Full Name • Published February 26th, 2024
ABOUT
Jouvan Johnson
Co-founder, Clawgasmic
Founder, Educated Rebel
From Ireland, UK
Side Hustle Started in 2020
Former Full-Time Job
Former job as an Internal
Communication Specialist
Full-Time Business in May, 2021
SIDE-HUSTLE STATS
25
Hours Worked Per Week
£7500
Revenue Per Month
2
Founders
0
Employees
$200
Startup Cost
6
Months Before Profit
Main Growth Strategy
90%
Net Margin
Table Of Contents
Quitting Your Job To Grow A Content Membership Business
In May 2021, Jouvan made the biggest decision of his life.
He wasn’t happy working at his job, when his side hustle, which he grew with his wife, Chantelle, was showing promising growth, earning £500 a month.
It was a perfect opportunity to quit his job and go all-in. Except, Jouvan and Chantelle had a baby on the way.
Despite being a risk-taker all his life, this was a little too risky in his eyes.
But with the support of a 14-year-long partner by his side, he took the leap with just a few months in savings. Today, Jouvan and Chantelle earn over £7500 a month from their membership website, which teaches nail techs how to grow clients and create new looks.
Jouvan shares how they scaled the content business with social media growth strategies that gained 126k Instagram followers, their current marketing and sales funnel, and much more.
Coming Up With The Idea
Where did you get the idea to start a content membership website for nail techs?
My wife used to be a nail technician. She worked 8 to 10 hours a day full-time, and then Covid hit. It hit her industry hard. At the same time, we were about to have our first child.
She was on maternity leave, so we needed a plan. Now we had a new child coming, and she couldn’t return to work.
In that period, I was working as an internal communications specialist at an insurance broker. But I’ve always dabbled online, whether I was creating a WordPress site for people or selling software through affiliate marketing. So I figured,” Let me use my skill set and see what we can do online.”
We started building an Instagram following around nail art and nail technicians because we always wanted to build a business together. And I said,” Why don’t we try and do an Instagram Live, but a paid Instagram Live?”
So she charged people £10 to join, and she would do a tutorial on how to do a look, live on Instagram. We created a new account, added everyone who paid, and then went live for an hour.
We made a couple hundred pounds from that.
Your First Customers
When you decided to host a paid Instagram Live, how did you gain a following that was willing to pay?
Going back to before she had worked in her own salon, she was working in a salon for another company. She had a boss, managers, and everything before she went out to pursue entrepreneurship.
She was planning to branch out into entrepreneurship with someone else. But that opportunity fell through. So to cheer her up, I was like,” Let me create a WordPress blog so you can showcase the things you do because you love doing nail art.”
She was like,” I’m really grateful for you, but what am I going to do with this website?”
I taught her how to put her content out into the world. This was just to get her spirits back up until she wanted to launch and do her own thing.
She started learning how to blog, and off the back of that, she got invited to London Fashion Week to do nails there.
Then it just snowballed from there.
When Instagram came out, we jumped on Instagram to share what she was working on. The nail niche is small, but it’s big at the same time.
So we were creating content, and there were some nail tech followers that found her from that. And then, some of her former clients still weren’t allowed to go into a salon because of COVID, so they wanted to learn tips on how to do it themselves at home.
The customers were a mixture of those sorts of people. But yeah, it was years of creating content and just dabbling in the market.
Growing Your Side-Hustle
After some initial success, how did you turn this into a full-on membership business?
So after the customers got value through the live lesson, we deleted everyone from that Instagram account to try and do it again.
And I asked Chantelle,” Okay, what happens to that footage after?”
She’s like,” Oh, it just disappears. And it’s done.”
I was like,” Well, there’s a bit of a demand there. Maybe we can utilize it to build something long-term.”
At first, the idea was just to cover her maternity pay because she was self-employed. But I thought,” Let me put a membership site together.”
The first version of it was built using podia because it allowed me to spin up something quickly just to test the concept. We charged everyone £14.99 for a monthly membership, and each week, they would get a new tutorial and have the option to contact us.
If there was enough demand, we could scale it rather than have people pay for content once and lose it afterward. So, I took a week off work to build it and make some branding around it.
And yeah, we launched it, and it started working. People started coming in and joining, and then we just scaled from there.
Getting 100k+ IG Followers
With Instagram as your main marketing channel, what strategies led to you to grow to over 100k Instagram followers?
The number one thing I would say is consistency. It’s always, always going to be consistency.
But the algorithm also always changes.
When I’m talking to Chantelle, my wife, I always say,” What does the algorithm want?” They want people to stay on a platform as long as possible. So if we’re giving content that is useful to the person and they’re watching it, and interacting with it, that’s going to keep Instagram happy.
We’ve taught enough people about promoting their nail business online to know that a lot of people look at Instagram as a one-way channel.
People only think about posting and expect to get followers back. But it’s a social network. A lot of people miss the aspect that it’s social. That’s a key part of it. So early on, we were very much reaching out to the community, and connecting with other people.
One of our major things early on was highlighting other people’s work. If you’re highlighting something useful that someone has done, that person will be happy about it. They will want to show their friends that they were highlighted by this nail tech company and interact with it a lot more. That was an early hack that we used.
Now it’s consistency and creating useful content. We are also trying to understand copywriting and principles like the first five seconds of a video, how to grab their attention, offering value, and keeping people interacting with us.
I had a framework that I would have in the back of my mind. When we’re creating content, we ask ourselves,” Will this get someone to stop? Will this get someone to share it on their Instagram story? Could this get someone to share this with a friend?” And if you have some of those questions in mind when creating content, a lot of times it can do well. Some people just want to go viral, but it’s not very useful.Marketing & Sales Funnel
At this point in your business, what does your marketing funnel look like? What’s your product offering?
It’s great to have over 100,000 Instagram followers for this brand. I’m going to continue to build a big following on my socials. But I’d much prefer 10,000 email followers because it’s way more profitable.
People say email is dying. But when you sign up for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, they all ask for your email, so they know something. It is the most valuable medium.
This year, I want to push more to build our email list for each one of our brands.
The first email is one where we give away something free. But with an email list, not everyone is going to buy after the first time they see the offer. We want to give them something of value for free and then want to follow up with more emails.
We actually send daily emails now. My wife does it, and it’s edutainment, meaning the emails are entertaining while educational at the same time. So it’s not just buy this, buy that. They actually get value from the email itself with an opportunity to buy something or to go check out our podcast.
In terms of the actual funnel, when someone subscribes to our email list, there’ll be a welcome video I recorded of my wife telling you a little bit about Clawgasmic and the free gift they’re getting.
Then, they can click a button to go learn more. This leads to the sales page for the actual offer. Right now, the offer is £18.99 a month, or they can pay for a full year and get a 20% discount. But if it’s their first time seeing that sales page, it gives them an opportunity for a free trial.
If they take the free trial, I’ve created an upsell about nail techs getting clients and a client-getting formula, normally £49, but they get it for half price.
Then there’ll be another video where we say,” A lot of people, when they join us, will stay for a long time because of the amount of value we provide and for the one-on-one weekly calls that we do. So I want to give you a one-off opportunity to sign up for a year for 40% off.”
This gives us the one-time opportunity to try and recoup the sale through the funnel. Whether they take the yearly or not, then they go into our funnel. That’s the process.
Revenue + Earnings
On average, how much do you earn from Clawgasmic each month?
It fluctuates, but we make just over £7,500 a month.
Since launching, we’ve built multiple streams of income. We’ve got an app, a podcast, and more products in the pipeline.
We also do brand deals because we’ve got a big following on social media. Brands reach out to us to pay for Instagram posts and Instagram Reels. Our podcast has a pretty good following, so we get ad slots in the podcast. We do some affiliate offers as well, which have done pretty well.
On top of that, I’ve started educatedrebel.com to share my experiences, stories, and what I’m doing in my business because I know it’s really helped us as a family. We’re working together full-time now. We homeschool our child. We love it. It’s created a lifestyle I’ve always wanted for us, so I want to share it with people.Why You Quit Your Job
What made you ultimately decide to quit your job? How much was Clawgasmic earning at the time?
I think we might have been around the £500 a month mark.
Chantelle was my girlfriend at the time, and I was telling her that I just wasn’t happy. She told me,” Maybe we should try and go for it. This is working. If you’ve got more time to dedicate to it, maybe we could actually create something out of it.”
I’m a risk-taker. If it were just me, I would have happily quit and taken the risk. I’ve done so many wild things that I know I’ll figure it out. But I have a little child now that’s only a couple of months old. And Chantelle wasn’t working. It seems too risky.
But she said,” Well, maybe don’t quit this month. You can get this month’s pay, and then you can give a 30-day notice. So we would have a few months to survive.”. So yeah. There definitely wasn’t a full-time income at all when I quit. But I said in the worst-case scenario, I’ll do whatever it takes to make it work – Deliveroo (UK version of Uber Eats), or whatever. I’m going to make it work.
And she could see that change in me. She’d been with me for, like, 14 years. So she’s been with me through all the crazy times—not working and having a job for a couple of months. She said,” I could see the change in you.” So we just took the risk.
I handed in my notice, and I was like,” It’s go time. I’ve got to at least get to a point where it replaces my income.”
And that’s what we did. We took the risk, and then, God willing, it worked out.
Tools & Softwares
What tools do you use to run your business?
WordPress for the website. Web hosting costs about $25 a month. The actual software to create the app is Buddy Boss, which costs about a thousand dollars a year.
Where Can People Find You?
Where can people find you and support your business?
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, and you want to create a more lifestyle business, come see me at educatedrebel.com. I’m not talking about a massive tech startup that needs investment, something that you could start alongside your job for an hour or two a day.
I really want to share this journey and give people practical advice, tips, and training on how you can go from not knowing exactly what you want to do, to finding out and creating something that, within months or years, you can start transitioning from your job.
You might even utilize some of your knowledge and the things you enjoy. Everyone thinks they don’t know anything. But there’s a lot, you know. And, hopefully, I can help you draw that out and utilize that to create a more lifestyle business.
