@therpgfanatic Hey Carey! Great job with this crate! Question: just briefly, how did you get started on this idea?

@jbutlerxviii Thanks Johnathan. I recently started publishing books under an imprint, Martell Books ( http://martellbooks.com/ ) and they have been selling well, so I thought I would get more serious about it. I started publishing a children's horror series called Creep World ( http://creepworld.com/ ) and this is a little different. Most of my books are aimed at adults, so I can leverage Facebook ad targeting very easily to generate sales. But kids are not exactly easy to directly targetly on Facebook, especially young kids. You can only target their parents. So, while researching how Scholastic originally marketed Goosebumps in the 90s, I realized much of Scholastic's success penetrating the market is via mail order catalogs distributed by school teachers. But originally, Scholastic published monthly youth magazines. This caused me to remember things like Sweet Pickles and Little Golden Books from my own youth, which were sold via a monthly mail order subscriptions my mom signed up for because she wanted to encourage me to read. I also noticed that monthly subscription boxes are still a popular method of distributing books to youth, but most of them seem to be aimed at children age 3 to 6 and are shipping picture books. There is not much aimed at older children age 8 to 12, which is where I think the encouragement really needs to come. While Monster Crate is not specifically aimed at boys, I think it is something that many boys will be attracted to because boys tend to like stories about monsters, ghosts and zombies. I know as a kid I used to spend a lot of time reading about such things. Nationally in the States, boys tend to be way behind girls in reading so they need extra encouragement. I felt creating a "Halloween in a box" filled with two scary tales and related items might get a child that age excited, boy or girl. As for the items to include aside from just toys like monster action figures, I remember how you could order all kinds of things from ads in the back of comic books. A lot of these products are still for sale, so I think I can include them in the boxes -- like monster toys that grow in water, instructions on how to build rayguns, devices for magic tricks and so forth. Some of this stuff can be very educational.

@therpgfanatic Nice! What was the process behind talking to suppliers? Did you have a working relationship or contacts already? I ask because I'm researching my own subscription box and would like as much information as possible!

@jbutlerxviii There are some pretty detailed writeups on building a subscription box startup, way more detail than I could rely here. Here's some links: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepr... http://subscriptionschool.com/gu... http://www.mysubscriptionaddicti... http://jamesonmorris.com/how-to-...