Hello everyone long time lurker and I finally felt like I had something to share that would add value to r/entrepreneur. I just launched my new company, Anemone Wellness (http://ift.tt/2tt1wl1). We are a CBD/Hemp health supplement company. We created and manufacture our own custom blends. I thought it might be helpful to detail all the steps I've been through over the last 6 months to move from ideation to execution and launch of a physical product. I am happy to answer any questions or clarify anything. I always find it most helpful to add as much detail as possible so I apologize for the amount of content, but hopefully it provides some value to you all.
Research & Ideas I usually come up with ideas based on problems I have personally encountered, or I find a technology that I can bring to a new industry, or I identify a new trend that can be capitalised on.
I came up with the idea for this company due to a personal problem I had and a new health trend that was brought to my attention. I struggled with anxiety and found that the hormone balancing and relaxation properties of CBD ( Cannabidiol ) helped immensely not to mention the anti-inflammatory aspects of CBD helped me recover quickly after strenuous exercise.
For the research, phase I knew CBD was the answer to a lot of common problems from things like psoriasis and muscle inflammation to anxiety. After determining that CBD was safe to use and legal to ship, I then needed to identify the competitors and how I could set myself a part.
My main competitors were focusing on the CBD exclusively. These would be things like the Stanley Brothers Charlotte’s Web Tinctures, edible gummies, hard candies infused with CBD. I knew based on this I needed to add something extra so I started looking into the benefits of tea. Tea leaves and other herbal remedies have a lot of synergies with CBD. I then started to build different remedies using common and uncommon ayurvedic herbs and thought I would infuse the teas with CBD.
With this idea, I again resumed research to narrow down my competition. I found several companies that offered hemp teas that had the benefits of CBD (and other terpenes), but it was not mixed with other herbs and didn’t focus on using them as potential remedies. There was only one true competitor and they were relatively small. They had tea blends that were focused on flavor and not remedies, but they were infused with CBD. At the time I thought having only one direct competitor was great and I could easily surpass their minimal SEO.
Moving forward I found that the reason they used strongly flavored tea blends was that CBD does not taste great in it’s raw form. It has a strong grass like smell that is a little overwhelming. The taste is pretty mild if you use high quality CBD, but the smell is still quite strong. Unfortunately, most herbs used in these remedies either do not have strong flavors or if they do they are equally unappealing. Tea was looking less and less like it was a good option.
So I again went back to the research phase. I looked into pills, tinctures, and powders. Pills was my first thought as they are swallowed and don’t have to be tasted. I held a small focus group (mostly friends, family, and a few people knowledgeable about the industry). What came out of this were two things. The first, tinctures were in high demand in the dispensaries, but not in health/wellness stores as there was too much competition. The second, was that pills “just aren’t sexy.” I decided to go with the powders. There has been a lot of talk lately about superfood powders, etc so it seemed like a solid choice. All this research took me approx. 30 days with a total of probably 20 hours or so.
MVP Once I decided that I wanted to start with powders I began working on the company itself. I knew from my previous startups I wanted to automate as many processes as possible right off the bat. To start I needed vendors, licenses (LLC and CA seller's permit), packaging, logo/designs, accounting/product tracking software, and of course a sales channel.
Vendors I looked at several vendors that supply the ayurvedic herbs I needed for my remedies. I found that the companies that required an EIN and had an approval process to have the best deals. For example, 1 lb of Chamomile (non USDA Organic) from a wholesale vendor that didn’t require any vetting was $25, while USDA Organic Chamomile from the one that required the licenses was $14.75. Finding these vendors was relatively easy as this is a well established industry.
Where I ran into a lot of problems was sourcing my CBD. There were no vendors out there that required much vetting if any at all. Not only that, but I wasn’t even sure what kind of CBD I needed for my products. There are CBD powders, oils, isolates, water soluble formulations, etc. In the end I found that water soluble CBD formulations would work best for my powders even if they were more expensive than the other kinds of CBD available.
Packaging For packaging, I used 99designs to run a logo contest. Once I had the logo designed I created a basic label for all 5 of my products using photoshop. The labels aren’t the greatest but they will work for an MVP. Once we have some revenue coming in then I will pay for a professional redesign. The actual packaging we are getting from clearbags.com and the labels I print from my office printer.
Accounting/Product Tracking For now I am using CraftyBase. It's a software designed for people who manufacture their own products. It allows us to accurately track our expenses, margins, and inventory, as well as create invoices for our wholesale sales.
Sales Channel For sales I looked at Magento, Shopify, and Wix. I have built sites on all three and felt Shopify would be the easiest and quickest to set up. Shopify was also the only one that had an API linked to craftybase so all of our sales would automatically subtract from our inventory and it would alert us when we needed to make a new batch of any given product. Again, once we are making decent revenue we may switch over to a custom designed magento site to help lower our transaction and hosting fees.
Finding vendors, packaging, running the design contest, setting up craftybase, and creating the shopify site took another 30 days putting in about 2-4 hours a day.
Last month I ordered our first batch of CBD and 35 lbs of herbs to create 12 units of each of our 5 products. Once I created the units, I made sure our sample packaging looked good with our labels etc and then I ordered the packaging for all those units which then took about a week to arrive. I then labeled and packaged everything by hand for this first run.
If we get a large account right off the bat or somehow we become super popular I have talked to several suppliers that can take over manufacturing and packaging so we can scale with any volume.
Launch Our launch was planned for over a month ago, but a few days before launch shopify notified us that our account had been shut down due to our products being against their terms of service. We had to find a new payment processor asap. I called over 50 payment processors and merchant accounts with very little luck. The most affordable one wanted a $1,500 setup fee with a minimum $500 fee per month PLUS 10% per transaction. This caused us our month delay while we redesigned all of our labels packaging and formulas to use a full spectrum hemp extract instead of a CBD isolate. With the hemp extract we were able to use Amazon Pay and a few other services that have allowed very specific hemp products on their sites. We still cannot use shopify's gateway so they charge us an extra 2% per transaction on top of their monthly fee and Amazon pay's 2.9% per transaction.
Finally we were able to launch to friends and family on Tuesday. The goal of this launch was to increase our social media presence and start getting our name out there. I wasn't hopeful for any sales, but we ended up making 7 sales on our first day for a total of $1,200 in revenue. I feel we had a very successful launch and now it's time to sustain our sales.
Moving forward
I plan to add our products to multiple sales channels over the next few weeks (mainly Etsy and Amazon). I want to get our products on FBA so all of our sales can be shipped and managed by them. Once those are all setup I will start running online ads. I have to be careful with these as Facebook, Instagram, etc don't allow hemp products. I am also building up a sales team to do wholesale across the US. I have interviews setup for next week.
Thanks everyone for reading! This is also an updated and expanded cross post that I wrote for openlaunch.io. If anyone has any feedback on our website, http://ift.tt/2tt1wl1 I'd really appreciate it. I have just had friends and family clicking around making sure it all works. Again, I'm happy to answer any questions!
[link] [comments]
from Entrepreneur http://ift.tt/2ttx2zg
via IFTTT
add adsense to blogger
how much money do bloggers make? can blogs make money? make money off ads how to get money from blogging? best websites to make money blog adsense income earn from blogging website ideas to make money how websites make money?
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario