How I launched a product in 10 days
Early this year I decided that this year I wanted to learn how to make businesses which could eventually create income passively.
My objective was to launch a business, any business. Well, nearly. The criteria were
- Could be done quickly
- Required muscles I hadn’t developed
- Was political in nature
I needed to be able to launch quickly, because if it had taken too long I would have talked myself out of it. I’d started several projects recently that went nowhere. I’ll wager you know the feeling, or have before.
I wanted to learn something new about starting a business. I’ve done the technical side of a SaaS startup before, but this project was to sharpen the saw. The best way to ensure that I stayed clear of tunnel visioning on the technology was to make a non-software product, however I wanted to leverage my training in web development and operations. Thus was born the idea of e-commerce.
I also wanted to ride the wave of the existing political climate. Every cycle there are tons of products that sell in high numbers and this year seemed particularly exciting. I started to write it off as played out but I eventually thought I had a solid idea to go with.
The idea? Gummy candies in the form of a penis with The Donald’s head on top sent as a prank gift by mail. (Aside: If this sounds awful don’t worry, it was short lived.)
Pre Launch
As this was my first business venture in a while, I needed to register an LLC with the state. This structure made more sense for me than a corporation because I wasn’t taking outside investment, I wouldn’t have shareholders, and I wanted be financially isolated from the business. I used a service provider to do the legal work for me. It cost me 4x as much as doing it by hand but I saved a ton of time.
Then I did research on similar businesses. I was already a customer of https://dicksbymail.com/ and found other mail order prank gifts like “glitter bombs” and chocolate poop. It looked like people want to mail out gag gifts ordered online.
Before running the idea by customers, I needed to explore the feasibility of getting inventory. Ordering custom made candies online was proving difficult and negotiating with suppliers offline was too far out of my comfort zone. I did find a candy 3d printer I could buy, but at $10,000 it was a non-starter. Eventually I found a company that would do prints at $20 a piece. It was a far cry from the “bag of dicks” I had in mind, but I decided it would do if the supplier would dropship the product.
At this point I thought the idea was worth testing and it was time to go to work on the landing page/sales site. I’ll save the details of this for another day, but I did my best to keep it simple and leverage existing tools. I used aws and open source software to build and host it.
To launch a product site, I needed imagery of the product. I decided to forgo concept art of the product or a 3d model in favor of a simple cartoony logo. I wanted the logo to express the idea in a visual way and to provide the trademark of the other products I was already dreaming of adding to the line up. I went to reddit, posted a gig, and found a cartoonist immediately (tons actually). I worked with, let’s call her Susie, for a couple of days and paid her $50 for something that I thought was good enough.
As I built the website and worked with Susie, I learned that the vendor wasn’t a fan of my product and I wasn’t willing to start a food services business. Around this time, one of my buddies, looking at a rough draft of the site, thought the logo was hysterical and passed it around the group. Everyone got a kick out of it. I thought the logo might actually stand on it’s own and decided to print stickers instead.
I rewrote the copy from tongue in cheek terms targeted at pranksters into very plain terms that spoke directly to those who wanted to share their distaste for Trump. I applied for a copyright on the image, and I ordered 100 4” die cut stickers from an online distributor.
The Launch
Having never sold a product to consumers before, everything from this point on was new territory. My only preparation came from years of reading HN and countless blogs by people with more experience than I have.
I started simply by telling my friends on Facebook that I had decided how I was going to fight back against Trump. That drove ~30 people to the site and was responsible my first sale! A friend of a friend snagged up a 5 pack, my highest margin offering.
I got a couple of people to post to social media for me including a politically charged cousin and a feminist with a couple thousand twitter followers. This did not lead to a noticeable change in traffic.
Then I started posting on subreddits. Reddit has a 10 minute cooldown timer between posts so it took the better part of an hour to get it up to the few places where I thought an NSFW political sticker would be appreciated. This drove another ~70 people to the website but generated no sales.
To be honest, I was hoping that social would work as a free channel. Word of mouth drives down the cost of customer acquisition which drives up margins, and mail order stickers need all the help they can get on margin.
Next I turned to ads. I took a shotgun approach and started on google, facebook, and reddit. Then I went to bed. The next day, reddit was showing itself as a clear winner. I paid less per impression, they generated a better click through rate, and were able to generate enough impressions that I didn’t have to wait a week for my budget to get consumed. I moved my google budget to reddit and decided to target different segments as, despite reddit’s click through rate being the best, it was abysmal.
My wife and her friend took posters that, while appropriate for protesting, were essentially ads for the website to the Denver women’s march this morning. People loved the signs, and many pictures were taken. I’m hopeful that this might drive some organic traffic.
Now I’m waiting for inventory so I can start my next marketing plans which involve giveaways and mail outs to the press.
Takeaways
- You get what you pay for from contractors
- You can’t learn a whole new field in a weekend
- You have to target your ads correctly.
- Launching a simple e-commerce site is by no stretch, simple.
Which topics would you like to explore? Let me know in the discussion on Hacker News
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