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Viv Conway: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy
[Ad]: Today's checkout features Viv Conway, co founder of Girls Get Off, a bold and very creative sexual wellness brand that's built a cult following across Australia and New Zealand. Today, Viv shares and I can't believe I'm about to say this, why she bought a vulva Costume, the customer service tool that transformed her operations and the book that's helped her scale without losing her sanity. A very quick content warning. You've probably guessed this one's a little bit saucier than your average e commerce chat, so if you're listening with the in laws or with toddlers, maybe circle back later. Viv, welcome to the checkout. Thank you so much for everything that you shared in our main episode. You shared How Girls get off came about during COVID Some of the challenges that you've had with a female friendly sexual health brand, as well as some tangents that we went down around Instagram content and creature cocks. But we are here to learn more about you. I'm not sure if we can learn more about you after the last one, but I think we've got five quick questions. Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Viv Conway: Okay, you're gonna love this one when for part of our Instagram content we have light vulva costumes and when I moved to Australia I was like oh, I really need a costume over here. So. So I put on airtasker. Can someone make me a vulva costume? And I was met by the most lovely lady who insisted I go to spotlight with her to pick out the Colors. I said, look, mate, I'm creatively challenged. You just pick whatever colors you want for the lips. And she's like, no, no. This is so exciting for me. All I ever get to do is tailor people's pants. So, yeah, I followed this lady around Spotlight so she could pick colors. And I'm like, yes, whatever. Sounds good. And use that costume for a lot of content. So that would probably take the cake.
[Ad]: Well done. That's fantastic. I've got nowhere to go with the vulva costume. Number two, which retailer has most inspired you recently?
Viv Conway: Okay, I've got two brands that have really inspired me lately. First of all, I mentioned them earlier, but ryanair, I love their Instagram content. And another brand which is a little bit different as well is this brand called I think they're Love Sense. And they found a whole new way to build their sex toy brand in the industry. So they were the ones who. They get featured in a lot of porn with, like a wearable toy that, you know, makes people go crazy. But they also. And this made me cackle in the sex toy shop. They have this technology in them which means you can connect into the chat room. So on things like World Orgasm Day, everyone can orgasm together. Well, they have something for everything now, but I found that inspirational because I thought there's all these sex toy brands out there battling to do something different and get noticed. And they have really nailed that.
[Ad]: Wow, that's fantastic. Again, I don't know where to go with that.
Viv Conway: They're not very E commerce specific. I'm sorry for the letdown. But you know, something a bit different.
[Ad]: It's something very different. And I think we can all spice up our chat rooms and our customer service. All right, number three, name a piece of tech that you or your E commerce business couldn't live without at the moment.
Viv Conway: A Hands down ChatGPT. I just am obsessed. Especially the deep research function. Insane. And other than that, Gorgeous. I was recommending Gorgeous to someone the other day and we didn't have Gorgeous for a very long time. We only got it because we were about to outsource our customer service. And it was probably one of the biggest facepalm moments I've ever had in this business. Going, why on earth were we even still using email? It was so inefficient. And Gorgeous just sliced the time in half, which has been huge for us.
[Ad]: Was there any feature in Gorgeous that
Viv Conway: we were like, oh, of course, the macros. You know, I remember in the gap we had between the last person finishing and the Next person starting. I was on holiday Japan. Every morning I'd have to get up and do the customer service. And then we implemented Gorgias. And I was like, are you serious there? I am going, hey, no problem. Just send me a video of that and I'll get that sorted for you. And typing the same thing out every time. Those macros where it's just automatically auto fills. Oh, my goodness. Incredible way we go. Yeah.
[Ad]: How good. I use ChatGPT deep research in researching you and girls get off as well.
Viv Conway: Did you really?
[Ad]: Yeah, it was great.
Viv Conway: That's such a good idea.
[Ad]: Yeah. It's lifesaver just to add, you know, I do my own research and I do my own looking around and then I plug in what I've got and I go, what else? What else is there? And that's where I found around the secondhand market.
Viv Conway: That's so funny. Yeah. And ChatGPT could be a whole other tangent. That's just so exciting. Have you tried Operator yet?
[Ad]: Not yet.
Viv Conway: $200 a month plan. Pretty amazing.
[Ad]: I'm just a poor podcaster.
Viv Conway: We're not missing out on anything yet. It's still very buggy, but it'll get there. It'll be amazing.
[Ad]: Awesome. All right, cool. Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Viv Conway: I love the book Traction. Have you heard of that before? There's a book called Traction and there's also Get a Grip. I can't remember which one is the actual, like, almost the textbook, and then one's like the fable, I guess. And it talks about the EOS operating system. I think it's Entrepreneur operating system. So if you're someone who feel like you're getting a few more staff on, or you just, like, don't really know how to manage people, we were really in a spot. Having never really managed people before or run a business this size, where we found that, you know, like, what are they doing? Or like, wait, what's. Who's in charge of this? And it was just all a bit all over the show. So EOS is just a system based on what's worked for thousands of businesses before. Sets up your, say, your weekly, monthly, daily meetings, having everyone accountable for different things, how you set up that accountability, how you place people in the right seats and what their roles should look like, and how to eventually get to the stage where you as the business owner could, you know, sit on your beach in Bali and have your scorecard to see the health of your business and to check that Everything's going well. So if anyone's into like operational stuff, you're feeling like you're getting headaches as you're growing. Highly recommend.
[Ad]: Awesome. Great recommendation. We talked a lot about creative work in the main episode. Do you find yourself easily in the operational process zone or is that a stretch for you?
Viv Conway: Do you know what, it used to be more of a struggle when we had more staff. We now early on I think it's just, you know, I think your brain just thinks I need more people, I'm gonna get more staff. And it's pretty normal progression. But what we've learned is that actually by having contractors while we're still so small, paying a little bit more, paying for people who just like know exactly what they're doing and like we can change that arrangement on short notice when something doesn't work anymore. Cause our business is always changing, actually suits us way better. So now we really only have three of us on the main team and then we work with different contractors. So operationally there's actually not that much that needs to happen in terms of like checking in with people, you know, monthly catch up, seeing how everyone's doing that all, you know, everything now can just be managed by Slack and we've just got super competent people. So it used to be more of a, like a challenge, but then now I guess we've band aided that if you like, in the meantime. But I think that's a pretty common thing that a lot of startups will face, like employees versus contractors and stuff. Like it's a hard balance to get and especially when you're small and for even things like admin, splitting that out to admin and customer service and having those as two different roles because often we want to lump things together because you come from a place of being quite jack of all trades, but not a lot of other people are necessarily jack of all trades. And it's also way riskier to just have one person on that. So by having those separate contractors as
[Ad]: really worked for us, it's almost the founder's fallacy, isn't it? It's kind of like because a founder feels like they can do everything and they've done everything at some point in the business's life, it's like, oh, someone else can do, come in and do this pile of stuff. And it's like most people actually focus on one or two things. Founders are a bit different.
Viv Conway: Yeah. And another thing I've had to learn in that space is when you are the person who goes out and does you know, you don't ask questions, you'll just go and find the answer. But now it's like, that's not a good use of your time. So now I feel like such a needy person just saying to my VA all the time, jackie, can you go and find me this? Can you look up in Shopify and see what this was? Can you do this? And it's changed my life. I feel like to get to a certain stage, you've got to be the person who does everything. And then I don't even like, you know, look at some Shopify analytics or put stuff into tables. I'm like, just get my VA to do it and life's good, you know, I'll make more videos.
[Ad]: There we go. All right, last one I've got for you, Viv. What is your biggest challenge today?
Viv Conway: Our biggest challenge will be around the revenue piece and, you know, getting through the economic time, but also finding something that is going to be more scalable for us. So while we don't have the luxury of just feeding the meta machine more money, we've kind of got to find something that works for us. And that could be retail, which we've just about to start, that could be, you know, more influencers in a certain space. Like, we've got to figure out what those things are for us that are going to unlock the new customers at, like, the lowest price.
[Ad]: Love it. Viv, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. Been brilliant chatting to you and thank you for everything that you've shared.
Viv Conway: No worries. Thanks for having me on.
[Ad]: To hear more from Viv, jump back into episode 512 where Viv shares how girls get off turn bank rejections into front page news, why TikTok hates their toys but still gives them millions of views, and how their community of 40,000 fans now drives product innovation. From vibrating butt plugs to waterproof proof freak sheets. There you go. All the things you never thought you'd say as an E commerce host.
