Jacob Merkley is the Founder and CEO of Story Tyke, a free bedtime story email subscription for busy parents. As CEO, he focuses on helping families discover and love Story Tyke. His goal is to help millions of parents all over the world increase bonding time with their children through easier storytelling. He is a proud husband to the girl he met in an elevator and is the proud father of three kids under six. His education and career pursuits have included a BS in accounting, an MBA, and over ten years in accounting, sales, and business management.
What is Story Tyke all about?
Story Tyke is a free bedtime story email subscription for busy parents with 4-8-year-olds. We remove the need to create a new bedtime story from scratch or search for one online by delivering a story right to the inbox at 6 p.m., Sunday through Thursday.
We believe that every child needs a chance to explore their imagination while living in a highly visual, digital world. By simplifying the creative process, we help busy parents initiate imaginative bonding experiences with their children. We deliver original bedtime stories right to the inbox, bridging the gap between modern parents and traditional storytellers.
Right now, our team of critically acclaimed children’s book authors are producing original bedtime stories that are delivered to parents in 29 countries.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
My education includes a Bachelor’s in Accounting and an MBA. I started my career in GameStop’s corporate accounting group. I didn’t go into accounting to be an accountant. Instead, I wanted to understand the numbers behind how companies operated. My dad fostered that desire in me since he ran his own company growing up and pushed me to learn how numbers could help facilitate sound business decisions.
After GameStop, I moved into sales, where I was a top producer for an accounting and finance recruiting firm in Phoenix. Unfortunately, the Coronavirus pandemic impacted the recruiting industry, and I hopped out to start a new business—the 11th that I had created in a span of 7 years.
During the summer of 2020, amidst another failed business, I became more than frustrated about the entrepreneurial process. After working some 12 hours one day, I was tucking my oldest daughter into bed, and she asked me for a new bedtime story.
After a long day, coming up with something new and creative seemed difficult. So, I turned to Google to find a story to read out loud. Unfortunately, I found poorly designed websites with ads everywhere! Though, the bigger problem was trying to wade through thousands of bedtime stories on hundreds of websites to find the perfect one to read to my child. Deciding which one to pick was overwhelming. Plus, I found most of the stories to be of low quality.
I spent almost thirty minutes browsing different sites and apps for the best story. My search took so long that by the time I settled on one, my daughter had already fallen asleep! The mass amount of story options pushed me into a state of inaction and cost me precious bonding time with my child.
That night, I realized how cool it would be to have a bedtime story delivered right to me. I wouldn’t have to create a story from scratch, and I would have to spend time searching for one. I searched long and hard to find a bedtime story email subscription.
There wasn’t one, so I decided to build one myself!
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
Early on, we decided that we would have a marketing program to offer cash, rewards, and activities for parents who shared us with other parents. We knew that especially moms that enjoyed Story Tyke, would tell other moms about this cool new bedtime story subscription. It was a no-brainer marketing channel for us.
We came up with amazing rewards that parents were excited to start earning. Within a week of launching the referral program, it was clear that we had a massive engagement, with lots of sharing happening. But we quickly noticed that our website code was not registering referrals. They weren’t giving credit to those that had referred another parent. This tech issue quickly became a massive problem, with lots of subscribers emailing us because they weren’t getting credit for their referrals. The website code issue was a minor fix. In all reality, it was a small error, but one that cost us time, reputation, and capitalizing on the energy behind a subscriber wanting to refer us. I know we lost out on future referrals because of this issue.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
Our biggest mistake was not getting our service to market quickly enough. I am a perfectionist at heart. I like a finished product going out to the customers with a nicely wrapped bow.
The problem with being a perfectionist is that your product or service is never fully finished. I learned that it’s more valuable to push out a subpar product to get quick customer feedback than to hold on and wait until you are proud of your product. We created the product that we thought our customers would want during the first month or so of our journey, but we were dead wrong. Finally, when I got over my perfectionist nature and pushed out the product, we realized that the product we had created in our minds a month ago was more closely aligned with the customer than the product was at the time we launched. We now follow the mini-launch sequence approach, where we launch quickly, get feedback, then launch again.
Our second biggest mistake was not evaluating high-quality subscribers from the very beginning. Naturally, there are marketing channels that produce higher-quality subscribers than others. We didn’t fully understand this principle, but we learned quickly that advertising in other email newsletters brings much higher-quality subscribers into the fold than Facebook marketing does. We are now being more diligent about evaluating high-quality subscribers by:
- Utilizing UTM parameters to track marketing sources, and
- Tracking what our subscribers are doing once they subscribe (how many times they open in their first week, the first month, etc.)
Doing this helps us evaluate whether specific advertising sources were a good source for us regarding high-quality.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I’m a big fan of reading. I read educational content often. Lots of content about strategy and what not; however, I’m also a big fantasy reader. I spend 30 minutes to an hour each night reading fantasy. For me, there is something about getting out of this world and into another one that enlightens me. It’s an exciting part of my day because I get all sorts of business ideas as my head clears from the day’s stress. I also think it’s essential to have time to decompress from the day, and by doing that daily, I find my production stays high.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish I had known how hard it would be to find subscribers (for others, customers). Even though my newsletter is a no-brainer for parents who want to bond with their kids and help them imagine, it’s still hard to get my service in front of parents. Online influencers, online advertisings, referral marketing, all of it costs money. I wish I had known earlier on that it would cost as much as it has!
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
The most effective marketing strategy for us has been advertising through other email newsletters. Given that we are trying to find parents interested in receiving content to their inboxes, advertising through other newsletters makes sense. Those subscribers are high quality and are more likely to open our emails and refer others to Story Tyke.
The second most effective strategy has been launching a referral program. This referral program includes cash rewards, custom pillowcases, story charts and stickers, matching t-shirts, a premium activity newsletter—to remove the need to search on Pinterest—and an all-inclusive family staycation.
This program has quickly become 18-25% of our monthly growth. The rewards are relatively cheap, garnishing an average of $1.14 for each new subscriber referred. As we continue to promote the referral program even more to our current subscriber base, I’m fully expecting it to drive 25% or more of our growth.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Hands-down, I would start another newsletter. I know there is a lot of hype around developing the next biggest technology. Even service businesses have made a significant return. But with only $1,000, I would start a newsletter. They have incredibly high-profit margins because the overhead is incredibly low. You can start the business with your laptop and run it from anywhere in the world. My advice is to find a niche that is over-served—yes, I said over-served and not under-served—where you can condense information, tips, or training into a highly-digestible and fun newsletter. Due to the saturation online these days, I think there are many niches that are untapped at being the person to condense and deliver right to the inbox.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
My best piece of advice is to have resilience and pivot quickly. What do I mean by that? Business is tough. It can be a grueling grind. I can’t say that I have even entirely made it yet. But I am a bit closer to my goals because I have consistently been resilient in the face of problems. I keep grinding it out day in and day out.
I also think it’s important to pivot quickly. I have started eleven businesses that have all failed. Story Tyke is business number twelve. The first eleven businesses were failures, and they all failed for different reasons. But, I learned a valuable lesson during the first few businesses I started. I thought the business idea was worth working on and forcing people to become fans because I thought it was awesome. Sometimes you can push and educate people to like what you are doing, but the best businesses are ones that instinctively and naturally fit into someone’s life or business.
Those first few businesses I started, I hung onto too long. I burned through too much capital, and I should never have done that. If I have too much resistance towards people who even like the product or service, I move on. If there is too much competition, but people like the product or service, then I either need to get investors or pivot to a more niche with less competition.
Don’t be afraid to pivot when it makes logical sense for you, and don’t hold on to things when the reality is that they aren’t going anywhere. Sometimes you have to give yourself a harsh reality check and then move on! It’s the life of an entrepreneur. What is your favorite quote?
Besides the obvious social media tools available, what are the top 3 most useful tools or resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
What is your favorite quote?
Growing up, my dad ran his own business. He was a very hard-working guy and earned every dime that he made. During my teenage years, my dad started quoting a poem that has stayed with me over the years. It’s a poem that I think he embodied well, and one that I’m trying to embody as well. This poem (close enough to a quote) is from Les Brown:
“If you want a thing bad enough to go out and fight for it, to work day and night for it, to give up your time, your peace and sleep for it.
If all that you dream and scheme is about it, and life seems useless and worthless without it.
If you gladly sweat for it and fret for it and plan for it and lose all your terror of the opposition for it.
If you simply go after that thing that you want with all your capacity, strength and sagacity, faith, hope and confidence and stern pertinacity.
If neither cold, poverty, famine, nor gout, sickness nor pain, of body and brain, can keep you away from the thing that you want.
If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it, with the help of God, YOU WILL GET IT!”
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can reach out to me by visiting my website www.storytyke.com and on Facebook or my email—Jacob @ storytyke.com. I’m not a big social media guy, so I don’t have a Twitter account and I think I only have three or four posts on my Instagram account. I’m most often on Facebook though.
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