What kind of customer base have you built so far?
We've got a couple of hundred subscribers and we've been profitable from early on, so we're pretty happy with that. But I'd say it's been a slow burn. Dollar Shave Club offers three products but we wanted to start here with one, and then get feedback from customers about what we'd offer next before doing a harder push into the market. It is a low-margin item, though, so we have to be pretty careful with our marketing spend.
What channels have you found have worked for getting your message out to consumers when you're on a small budget?
We've focused mainly on social media. Instagram in particular has worked for us, which is interesting. Obviously we initially thought our target market was men, but it's actually been a 50/50 split. Although the brand is male-focused, women seem to quite like it and what it supports - I guess for the same reasons I do.
We've also had high conversion rates from radio advertising. I would have thought converting someone from radio to an online business would be hard because often you're listening to the radio in the car where the two mediums are quite disconnected. But we gave it a go and have had good success.
What's been challenging about setting up a business like this?
Certainly trying to get the e-commerce side of it running smoothly initially was a nightmare with a subscription model. One-off transactions are easy to set up, but we had to try a number of solutions early on to make sure managing regular subscriptions was simple and smooth for customers. When we've set up websites for a number of my other businesses in the past, we've led with 'what is it going to look like?' and then focused on the back end later. With a business like this there are three areas that need to come together smoothly in a transaction - courier, despatch, and e-commerce - but we didn't focus on that back end first, and we should have.
I still feel now that we learn something new every couple of weeks. We were about six weeks into the business, for example, when we had a package returned due to an incorrect address. It looked horrendous, and that gave us an insight into the condition our packages could arrive in. We'd done test deliveries to ourselves, which had all arrived perfectly, but after that insight we quickly came up with another solution that means products arrive in a much stiffer box.
The feedback process is also really important in these kinds of businesses. A lot of the other businesses I've set up are service based, where I think it's easier to get feedback than with a product based business. A business can live or die based on the feedback it gets so coming up with a model that gives us the most honest feedback we can gather is what we're working on now.