Jacqueline Snyder and Minna Khounlo-Sithep have taken the business world by storm. Whether they’re teaching women how to grow their businesses, sharing tips on their popular podcast, or expanding their own reach, the women of The Product Boss know the only limits they have are the ones they set for themselves. Learn more about these powerful, smart women and how they’re using their knowledge to empower other women.
You both offer a stellar amount of business knowledge. Tell us about your businesses, and what you do.
Co-Founders and Co-Hosts: Jacqueline Snyder and Minna Khounlo-Sithep
Jacqueline Snyder and Minna Khounlo-Sithep are the combined force behind top-ranked The Product Boss Podcast. They teach business owners how to grow and scale their physical product-based businesses. They do this by leveraging multiple sales channels and using organic marketing strategies with a like-minded community around them. Jacqueline and Minna are physical product-business experts. They’ve quickly grown into a 7-figure online business by teaching other business owners via digital courses, coaching, and masterminds. They strive to help female-founded businesses not only survive as business owners, but also build businesses that hit over $1 million in revenue, yearly.
Jacqueline and Minna are both minorities and first-generation Americans.
Minna’s family are Tai Dam refugees that escaped Vietnam. They were invited to resettle in Iowa by Governor Robert Ray. Her parents worked in the meat production factories and Minna is one of 4 daughters. She was the first to graduate college and earn her Masters in Business from Drake University.
Jacqueline’s family immigrated from the UK and Israel in the 1970s. Her paternal family fled Morocco in the 1950s due to antisemitism. They found refuge in the newly formed Jewish State of Israel. Her Maternal grandmother was evacuated from London during World War II. She was sent to live in the countryside at the age of 4 and had to hide that she was Jewish. She attended church with her host family. In search of a “better life,” her parents both immigrated to the US in the ’70s. Jacqueline is one of 5 children and the first to attend and graduate college with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts.
In addition to The Product Boss, they each own their own businesses. Jacqueline Snyder is a fashion designer by trade and a business strategist. She is also the founder and CEO of Designer Consulting Co-Op and has over 12 years of experience coaching start-up fashion apparel and accessory brands.
Minna Khounlo-Sithep has over 15 years of entrepreneurial experience. She has her MBA and is the owner of Lil’ Labels, where she sells waterproof daycare labels. Lil’ Labels currently sells on multiple platforms, including Amazon, Walmart and Jet. Minna is an Amazon expert and has helped many fellow business owners start and grow on Amazon.
How did you build, then scale your brand? What does it entail? Also, what about your popular podcast? How does that fit into the brand?
The Product Boss has been able to scale their own successful business. In fact, it only took them 2 years to hit their first million-dollar year. In that time they also launched 5 digital courses. They have 5,000+ students currently enrolled in their digital courses and an online community of thousands of people.
The Product Boss Podcast has been ranked an Apple Top 100 Business Podcast and an Apple Top 10 Marketing Podcast and it continues to grow with half a million downloads to date.
While they are proud of their business’s growth, they’re most proud of their students. Under Jacqueline and Minna’s guidance, The Product Boss students transformed their businesses and lives. Combined, their students have generated millions of dollars in revenue.
The Product Boss was born out of a need. We recognized the gap in the digital course, coaching, and the podcast market.
Jacqueline and Minna are avid podcast listeners and serial entrepreneurs. As members of an online business community of high-performing businesswomen, Jacqueline and Minna struggled to find fellow entrepreneurs that understood the intricacies of product-based businesses. They listened to business guru’s teach about funnels, marketing strategies, and sales growth, but none of it applied to the physical product business owner.
In 2017, Jacqueline and Minna led a business panel on Multiple Streams of Revenue for the fashion industry at the Los Angeles Textile Show. This was the foundation of their now signature course “Multi-Stream Machine”. At the end of the panel, they sold spots to their virtual mastermind. They sold out while still at the conference! They knew they were on to something. In January of 2018, they launched the Product Boss Podcast and created a waitlist for their next round of Masterminds. They have now expanded into digital courses, coaching, and continue to facilitate Masterminds.
Can you tell us more about your brand and how it works? What are your goals?
The goal is to help small creative physical product-based business owners. But, we focus on female-founded businesses. Mainly because we’re both mothers, we understand the challenges of juggling business and family. We believe women need support and resources that help them with balancing these roles.
You often hear about women CEOs “having it all” and managing everything, and they make it seem easy. But they forget to mention all of the people they hire to help them. We as women have been convinced that we have to do it all and do it all by ourselves.
We want to pull back the curtain a bit on the struggle to balance everything and show how to pay for help if you need it or can afford it. For example, I’ve paid someone to do my grocery shopping for years (thank you Instacart). Minna pays for someone to cut her vegetables (thank you pre-cut vegetable section at the grocery store). You can get extra help in simple and affordable ways and still be a great business owner and mother and wife.
We also want to help amplify women’s voices. We find it important to give them a platform to reach more people, even as small start-up businesses that may find it harder to get access to audiences as large as ours. We’ve also really focused on diversity and all women including BIPOC.
TPB offers free weekly workshop-style podcast episodes to our audience. Our goal is to help as many people as possible as they navigate through small business, entrepreneurship, and physical product-based business. This includes makers, manufacturers, drop shippers, and retail store owners.
The goal is to help them grow initially as solopreneurs, then guide them through building a team. The majority of our most successful students are 100% self-funded and operate their businesses from home, or have their own studios and teams manufacturing their products.
Since TPB started, we’ve had small mastermind groups of product-based businesses. These are groups between 5–12 people. We intimately coach and support them in the format of a Mastermind group. Currently, we host two groups.
Here are the Masterminds we provide.
THE TOP MASTERMIND
A MASTERMIND FOR BUSINESS OWNERS WITH A YEARLY REVENUE OF $250,000 TO $1,000,000+
A true Mastermind among peers. A group of multiple multi 6-figure to 7-figure business owners joined and facilitated by Jacqueline and Minna. Leading small teams (hiring and firing), systems, scaling, and buying back your time are frequent conversations.
THE CLIMB MASTERMIND
A MASTERMIND FOR BUSINESS OWNERS WITH A YEARLY REVENUE OF $70,000 TO $250,000
Our Signature Program — a unique combination of group coaching and masterminding. Designed for product-based businesses with yearly revenue of $70k to $250k. For the entrepreneur that is ready to grow their business on more platforms to multiply their sales and increase their visibility.
We also offer digital courses for entrepreneurs who are self-starters and want programs they can work through in their own time.
Since January we have had 5,000 students take our Year of Content Course. We give them prompts on how to create engaging content for their audience and customers without sounding too sales. Oftentimes these business owners don’t know what to say to their customers other than buy now or sell. We give them ways to connect with their customers. This leads to sales, but also creates genuine authentic relationships. We believe people buy from people. In times like these, people continue to support small businesses, especially ones they know, like, and trust. That’s created by showing up and using our content course.
We also created a course as a direct response to Covid-19 and how it changed the landscape for small businesses. When in-person was shutting down, we needed to help our community pivot quickly, get online immediately (even without a website), and keep selling. We launched the Survival Kit Course Bundle where we taught them our framework to pivot and sell.
THE SURVIVAL KIT BUNDLE
CREATIVE AND ALTERNATIVE WAYS TO PIVOT AND SELL YOUR PRODUCTS ONLINE, NOW The exact framework to learn how to transition your business strategy, so you can sell and market more online…so your business can pivot during a crisis and ultimately survive and thrive, with or without a website.
Shows and Markets are canceled “In-Person” is on hold, and stores aren’t buying. Whether your primary sales channels were online, in-person, wholesale, or a good mix of it all… EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. And honestly, while change sometimes feels scary…creativity and innovation are born in times like these.
We also taught them the secrets to working from home using our DONE METHOD. It was a huge transition working from home with the kids and partner home as well.
We also have our signature course Multi-Stream Machine. The belief goes that a millionaire is a millionaire because they have 7 streams of income. We believe the same goes for successful product biz. They need multiple streams of revenue to grow and be successful. They cannot grow and be a stable business on one platform alone (remember when Amazon shut down non-essential items, retail doors closed, markets were canceled?) They always need multiple revenue streams and we teach them how in this DIY course.
Multi-Stream Machine is the only implementation program of its kind that not only shows you exactly how to get onto multiple revenue-generating platforms but also teaches you how to grow a sustainable product business with effective systems and more visibility and more sales.
We helped hundreds of students 2x-4x their revenue in months, not years, by using our framework.
We have one student that had $3k in revenue per month when she started with us. After working with us over the last 18-month in our Masterminds, and taking our course, she is now generating $30k per month in revenue.
Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?
We help women break through their own glass ceilings they have set for themselves.
We have realized that every major business book we refer to or were referred to is written by men. Oftentimes the books written by businesswomen are more about memories.
Women are looking for help with growing. Many times a business created on Etsy as a hobby or side hustle turns into a full-blown business with little to no outside funding (besides a few that use platforms like Kickstarter). The information out there, including podcasts, were either “makers gonna make “ podcasts that lean into always being the maker of your own products, and not selling out-thinking Etsy and Farmers Markets and craft shows are the only way to go. Or you’d see podcasts created by women running huge corporate companies, but the story and the journey seem too distant and out of reach for our community. Ours shows, even during a pandemic, can help you continue to grow your business (fortunately from home,) and continue to sell so you can grow and support your family and business.
Our groups are one-of-a-kind. It’s hard to find Mastermind groups that are geared towards creative physical product-based female business owners. Especially ones that take a holistic approach to start, growing, and scaling a business that typically starts from home.
Understanding how to scale their handmade products, or make their first hires, or grow their teams is where we can help guide them. We care about how to create the best experience for their families, their employees, customers, and themselves. We talk about how to let go of mindset beliefs that create their own glass ceilings. Together they begin to realize they can grow to become six-figure businesses or seven-figure businesses. We show them the only limit is the limit/ceiling they create for themselves. These women typically pay themselves higher salaries than what they would get in corporate jobs or as teachers or whatever they did before. Oftentimes their husbands are also able to leave their full-time jobs and help with the family business. They are creating legacies for their children.
We want women to feel empowered and that these goals are possible for them. When we ask a female entrepreneur what revenue she wants to reach, she says $100,000. She has set her own ceiling. We want her to believe that instead she could and can reach $100,000 months! That she could have a 7-figure business. That she can hire and manage a team. That she can still pick up her kids from school. That she can still have dinner with her family. That she can do it all. But she can’t do it alone…she needs a strategy. Community. Help. Life Hacks (like having someone grocery shop for her).
We show them that even during COVID when people said to stop selling, to keep selling. It is her responsibility to keep her business operating and growing and employing people. When the big guys couldn’t pivot, she could. When the big guys let go of their employees, she was able to hire them. When people were getting government assistance, she was still contributing to the economy because she did not require assistance. When Amazon could not ship or fulfill, she could and did.
There is power in the small business female entrepreneur. She just needs to know her power. Utilize it. And break through her own glass ceiling.
Did you face challenges building your brand? What everyday challenges do you face? How do you overcome them? What about COVID-19?
The biggest challenge was to have the foresight for our audience, community, and students during an unprecedented time. As leaders, our community looked to us for guidance, so we had to stay up to date and as knowledgeable as possible. We had to find the answers. If we couldn’t find the answers, then we needed to create solutions for our community.
We had to navigate retail environments closing, brick and mortars pivoting to online, in-person trade show canceled, and so much more. We had to invent new ways for our students to show up for their customers so they could keep their businesses afloat.
We also needed to show up for our audience and community more than we ever did. We went live daily on our social media platforms and in our online groups.
We also had to change our entire launch schedule for our digital courses. Our signature course, Multi-Stream Machine, was no longer relevant in April of 2020. That course teaches multiple platforms including Amazon, wholesale, and in-person trade shows. Amazon was only shipping essential products, retail doors closed, and in-person was canceled. The digital course did not apply to product business owners at that time.
To overcome this, we pivoted very quickly. We created a brand new course bundle that taught product business owners how to pivot and continue to sell during the shutdown. We offered them marketing ideas and strategies to lean into selling locally. We showed them how they could sell online even without a website. We taught them how to navigate working from home while their kids and spouses were home as well. We helped them navigate getting through Covid-19 while managing a team that works from home. We even gave them future trends to look to as this global pandemic shifts consumer buying behavior and spending. The response was incredible and we helped hundreds of businesses survive.
By showing up for our community online and helping them through such a tough time we were able to form a significant bond with our audience. And by teaching our students how to pivot and continue to sell during these times, they not only survived, they thrived.
April of 2020 was a record-breaking revenue month for our students. One student sold $30,000 of yarn in one day. Another student who typically has an average monthly revenue of $12,000 per month hit $40,000 in revenue in one month selling planners. Another student had back to back six-figure months in April and May selling pottery. Consumers spent their dollars with small businesses online and our students were there to meet their needs.
By leaning into the ever-changing landscape of small businesses and getting creative, we were able to create an incredible digital course and community even during a pandemic.
How do you handle the finance end of the business?
The Product Boss was started with an idea, the price of a plane ticket and hotel, and our ability to create a business from just an idea. We sold our first Mastermind/Group Coaching Program from the stage with no website. Our first investments were into a Zoom Pro Account (back in 2017 before everyone knew Zoom) and buying our domain name. We registered the business and were up and running. TPB made just under $100,000k in its first year of business. 2.5x its revenue the next year. And is on track to hit our first $1,000,000 year.
We are completely self-funded.
What do you see in the future? Where is The Product Boss headed?
Our biggest goal for 2020 is to continue to grow and stay profitable despite all of the pivoting we have had to do. We want to continue to show up for our community and audience and grow the bond we’ve created over the past four months.
We want to stabilize our product offerings. Our marketing plans, Masterminds, and digital courses have shifted since we first planned them. We’ve had to be reactive vs. proactive during Q2. But as we all shift into a new normal we believe that we can stick to our new plans and continue to provide education, support, and community to our product business owners.
At the end of 2020, we want to look back and know that we helped the economy by supporting small businesses, that we offered support to business owners and helped them provide for their employees and family. We showed that with a bit of adapting, courage, hope, and hard work a small business could survive a global shutdown during a pandemic.
The future of The Product Boss is to grow and help as many small product-based businesses as possible. We want to grow to a multi-million dollar business that is run by two first-generation American women and a team built of women. We want to continue to help women support women. In a time of cancel culture, we saw women cutting down women. We wanted to step in and instead help elevate women and lift their voices. If we don’t take care of each other if we don’t look out for each other, who else will? We will be here to help women globally.
What message would you give to women looking to create something and start making a living through it?
You can start a service business with little to no money. You just need to pitch yourself and get your first client. You can figure things out along the way. It is not the same for physical product-based business owners. They have to develop products, test samples, order raw ingredients, product packaging and sit on finished goods. They also need to sell to customers be it in person, through wholesale, or online. There are a lot more obstacles for product biz to overcome than service. But you absolutely can create a small business if you know your customer well and know their needs. If your product meets their needs, and they let you know by purchasing from you, then you have the start of a business.
We also believe in organic marketing for product-based businesses. Often, they don’t have the budget to pay for ads teams or have money to invest in ads. We strongly believe that you can grow to a seven-figure business without ever paying for ads. In fact, several of our clients and students have done just that through organic marketing.
We teach marketing strategies that have our client’s needs in mind. We teach them how to show up for their customers and grow their email lists in person. We teach them how to reach more customers and grow visibility using other people’s platforms. We teach them how to continue to show up for their followers and customers through email marketing, utilizing social media platforms, and working with micro-influencers to grow their business. This is all possible. Never at any other time in the history of mankind have we had the ability to reach customers and consumers globally for free. By utilizing social media, youtube, Pinterest, you’ve got a lot of options. We want to pull back the curtain and let people know they can do this.
Company name: The Product Boss
Email Address: hello@theproductboss.com
Website URL: www.theproductboss.com
Instagram URL: www.instagram.com/theproductboss
