Lessons learned pre-launching a profitable productized service (Design4Merch) in less than 34 days. entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

Hey guys,

I’m back with good news and some new lessons I have learned after successfully pre-launching our services startup.

Background

We pre-launched unofficially our service around 2.5 weeks ago. It was not easy but we reached our main goal and got our first 12 members on time. We help people launch and grow an impressive apparel brand or Merch on Amazon business for an affordable monthly fee. We believe a huge sales driver is quality over quantity, and that’s exactly what we offer.

What we learned during this time….

• It’s incredible the number of people out there who consider themselves as “professional designers”. Some of our customers requested to fix some designs they received from Upwork. I’m not going to publish those designs here for obvious reasons but they were pretty similar to this one. Be careful when hiring a designer guys.

• We created multiple tiers with strict turnaround times in order to set expectations for our potential customers.

• It’s a bad idea to promote our service through a lot of different channels because, at this moment, we can’t scale aggressively and we don’t want to lose any potential customers.

• You have to research how to prices your services correctly before launching. That’s the main reason why we have thin margins...

• I still don’t know how to use Google Analytics or my Facebook pixel effectively and I believe learning how to use them could help us a lot.

• Copy plays a huge role in the customer acquisition process.

• Sales play a huge role in your business. You need to get your prospected client to focus on the future your service can provide them AND you need to get them to focus on their current state of affairs.

• I tried reaching 10 different productized services authorities for feedback and none of them responded but I won’t give up on his.

• It was not easy reaching 12 customers. Responded to +70 invite requests but got only 11 paying subscribers. That’s around a 17% conversion rate and tons of emails sent and received.

• Being a founder without a salary feels weird but that’s normal. Every day I wake up at 7am and go to bed at midnight and get paid $0 for it.

• After testing different payment tools, we decided to choose Chargebee. They let you connect your PayPal account and set up a super simple payment gateway to receive all your payments. They have a pretty cool dashboard to see your MRR and other key analytics. If you start some similar business, you should check their website.

Next steps…

• I’m confident we can still scale up to ~20 customer without compromising our turnaround times or our overall designs quality. If we manage to get 8 more customers I’ll have to start looking into hiring more professional illustrators.

• We are planning on opening 10 new spots every month and increasing our prices by 10% each month for our future new customers starting next month until we find a sweet spot for our prices. This way we can scale in a healthy way and have better margins. What do you think about this?

• We need to increase our revenue in order to reinvest into some help with our SEO, Social Media, Analytics and customer support.

Customer Acquisition Strategies

• We are planning on guest blogging “how to” guides on different websites. For example: “5 Steps to launch an epic apparel business with shopify” or “Researching Merch by Amazon Design Ideas”. What’s even better, we can target any niche in the world this way! For example: “How to start a successful Pomeranian stuff store thanks to POD services”.

• Facebook Ads: Find this very interesting but I’ll wait until I have a larger budget to try this.

• Youtubers: some pretty smart redditors advised us to get in touch with different Youtube channels and influencers and offer them to design their apparel and merchandise. We already built a 100+ emails list but haven’t found time to contact them.

What I learned here

There’s a lot of people on /r/entrepreneur who are supportive, caring and helpful. They took minutes out of their free time to share some great advice and tons of support.

Reddit is a fantastic place to validate an idea. There are literally thousands of subreddits where you can validate your next idea.

Finding your idea

What “small” service or product can you create that can solve a huge pain point?

Find out what your competitors are selling, can you do it better? There are other similar services but they don’t focus on:

a) Illustrations b) Apparel and merchandise stores

Also, ask yourself; would I pay for this? If the answer is no than you should probably go back and brainstorm some new ideas.

Tons of growth in front of us

Thousands and thousands of persons are launching their stores every day thanks to Shopify or Woocommerce. Also, more and more people get accepted on Merch by amazon each month. What’s even better, any online store in the world can sell shirts or other apparel along their core products. Do you sell “tiny cinder blocks”? Then why not sell a shirt saying “Nothing is impossible with the right attitude and some tiny cinder blocks”. Not the wittiest tag line but you get the point, right?

Anyway, we are very excited to have reached this point. If you are looking into building a productized service and want some advice, please let me know.

Sorry if I mixed a lot of different topics here but I want to help as many other redditors as possible. I will see how this venture goes and will post my progress here. Thanks a lot for your help guys. You are all awesome!

Cheers,

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