#Launch a Candle Business and Sell Products on Shopify | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

secretlifeofmoney · 2 years

Text

Are you looking for work-from-home business ideas? a wise concept

Renting office space, warehouse space, or commercial real estate may be extremely expensive for a startup company. In contrast, many chances for home businesses are quick and simple to launch.

But with so many home-based business opportunities available, which one should you take into account?

Some start-up costs for home-based businesses are substantial, while others are as low as $29. Additionally, some home companies are simpler to launch if you can convert a spare bedroom into an office or workshop; other home enterprises may be successfully managed from your dining room table.

What do you think is your finest home-based business idea? This post will examine 10 of the top home businesses you may launch right away.

10 Profitable Home Business Ideas You Can Start Today

There are various ways to launch a home-based business; nevertheless, the following are ten of the most doable options:

1. Promote handcrafted items

2. Launch a drop-shipping business.

3. Launch a print-on-demand business.

4. Buy goods in large quantities and promote them online.

5. Buy an existing ecommerce business

6. Launch a subscription box business

7. Provide teaching online

8. Launch a service-based business

9. Promote digital goods online

10. Increase your monetizable internet audience

And if you want another way to make money online

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE TRAINING

1. Promote handcrafted items

Are you a home maker who loves to create? Why not sell your handcrafted goods online if you enjoy crafts or the arts? You could, for instance,

• Create jewelry.

• Create candles.

• Create handmade cuisine.

• Create works of art.

• Make furniture pieces.

• Create and sew apparel.

• Knit apparel and blankets.

Selling handcrafted goods is a fantastic way to transform any creative hobby into a work-from-home business opportunity.

To start selling handcrafted goods online, there are two primary approaches:

• Market your products on a website like Etsy.

• Using a platform like Shopify, start your own online shop.

Nevertheless, you may easily sell across both platforms using Shopify's interface with Etsy.

If you're interested in starting a home company, make a list of all the things you could do. After that, look up what other individuals are selling online.

2. Launch a dropshipping business

Consider establishing a dropshipping business from your home if you enjoy the prospect of owning an online store but are unsure about what to offer. Additionally, this is a low-cost home business concept.

With dropshipping, retailers may sell things without having to buy or store them first. Instead, retailers collaborate with dropshipping suppliers that take care of inventory management and customer direct deliveries.

See the dropshipping business model in action in the graphic below:

Really nice, right?

The coolest part is that with dropshipping apps like DSers, establishing a dropshipping business online is as simple as 1-2-3.

Here's why: By signing up for Shopify, installing the DSers app, and searching for items to add to your shop, you can utilize DSers to start promoting dropshipped goods online right now.

And if you want another way to make money online

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE TRAINING

3. Launch a Print-On-Demand business.

Similar to this, you might launch a print-on-demand business from home if you enjoy producing art and eye-catching designs but don't want to build your own items.

With print-on-demand, a form of dropshipping, you may market goods that are imprinted with your artwork, such as:

• Clothes, such as T-shirts, hoodies, leggings, and yoga pants.

• Footwear: flip-flops, boots, sneakers, etc.

• Accessorize with jewelry, watches, phone cases, purses, bottles, face masks, notepads, and other items.

• Household items, such as cups, towels, bedsheets, pillows, blankets, and throws.

• Works of art, such as magnets, stickers, and wall hangings.

• Electronics: Speakers, headphones, etc.

To launch your work-from-home business concept, create a Shopify account and install one of the following print-on-demand applications:

1.Printful

2.Printify

3.CustomCat

4.SPOD

5.T-Pop

6.JetPrint

7.teelaunch

8.Gelato

9.Gooten

10.Printy6

4. Buy goods in large quantities and promote them online

Purchasing goods in bulk, or "wholesaling," and then selling them individually is another way to sell things online.

The cost-per-unit of items can be reduced when you buy them in bulk as opposed to separately. Then, when you sell each item separately, you may raise the price to establish a profit margin.

So where can you acquire wonderful products in large quantities?

Start by looking for items on business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce sites like Handshake and Alibaba.

After that, you may use Shopify to build an online store where customers can purchase your goods.

Additionally, you might buy goods in bulk and sell them to merchants in smaller amounts rather than selling them individually to consumers. This practice is known as wholesaling.

5. Buy an existing ecommerce business

You may always purchase an existing home business opportunity via the Exchange marketplace if you don't have the time or the desire to start a home-based business from scratch.

This platform makes it easier to buy and sell e-commerce businesses in many markets. Additionally, you have the option of purchasing an established business or a young one.

Although it may appear difficult at first, this is actually rather simple.

Start by looking through the Exchange listings for home-based business possibilities. Consider contacting the buyer of a business you like to learn more when you find it. After that, Exchange will assist the exchange if you decide to buy the business.

On the other hand, you may create and promote ecommerce businesses on Exchange if you want to start businesses but aren't interested in seeing them grow to their full potential.

Businesses can also be "flipped," or to put it another way, purchased, improved, and then sold for a profit.

6. Launch a subscription box business

Why offer one thing at a time when you can sell the same customer a package of items each month? This is what companies who sell subscription boxes, like Birchbox, do.

Additionally, Google Trends demonstrates the surge in interest in subscription boxes in recent years:

Thanks to the recurrent income produced by continuous purchases, this home business concept is a great method to increase a stable income.

Almost anything may be sold as a subscription box, including:

•Makeup

•Clothes

•Fashion accessories

•Indie records

•Books

•Homeware and kitchen gadgets

•Information products (such as up-to-date industry reports)

•Food, such as snacks or sauces

Additionally, you may rent the goods instead of having to sell them. Haverdash, for instance, rents clothing.

7.Provide teaching online

Consider sharing your expertise via online video calls if you have in-demand skills or knowledge and a gift for teaching.

Languages, math, science, and business are common courses taught online. However, there are no restrictions on what you may instruct in, so you could also teach DIY, music, or even sewing!

Depending on their degree of expertise, most online teachers make between $10.18 and $39.87 per hour, according to PayScale.

You may connect with students and organize your lessons using any of the many online teaching platforms, including:

•VIPKid

•Tutor Me

•Tutor.com

•Yup

Additionally, there are several feature-rich online teaching platforms available to support you in creating outstanding virtual learning environments, including:

•Moodle

•Canvas

•Blackboard

8. Launch a service-based business

There is a huge demand for digital services, requiring the hiring of almost every type of professional, from designers and engineers to digital marketers and doodlers.

Here are 20 service-based home businesses to take into consideration if you're unsure of what services you can provide:

1.Graphic designer

2.Web designer

3.Developer

4.Transcriber

5.Translator

6.Marketing writer

7.Resume writer

8.Photo or video editor

9.Social media manager

10.Digital advertising manager

11.Data entry clerk

12.Virtual assistant

13.Bookkeeper

14.Accountant

15.Career coach

16.Life coach

17.Marketing consultant

18.Management consultant

19.Finance consultant

20.Calligrapher

These home business concepts all have different possibilities for revenue. Therefore, be certain to do your research before selecting the ideal service-based home business concept.

Consider registering with a freelancing platform like PeoplePer Hour, Upwork, or Fiverr to get started.

You might also build a website and use networking and pitching to independently obtain clients.

And if you want another way to make money online

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE TRAINING

9. Promote digital goods online

If you've perfected a certain subject or talent and don't want to offer a service or teach online, you might compile your information and expertise into a digital product.

A great home business concept is selling digital goods since, like dropshipping, there is no need to find suppliers, maintain inventories, or send out goods to clients. A digital product is also free to reproduce once it has been produced.

What kinds of digital goods can you sell, then? These 20 things to think about:

1.Courses

2.Videos

3.Ebooks

4.Written templates (résumés, scripts, marketing emails, etc.)

5.Spreadsheets

6.Photos

7.Fonts

8.Icons

9.Logos

10.Graphics

11.Illustrations

12.Animations

13.Graphic templates

14.Overlays

15.Editing presets (for videos, images, or audio)

16.Software

17.Online tools

18.Membership sites

19.Audio (music, samples, podcasts, etc.)

20.Research (statistics, reports, etc.)

10. Increase your monetizable internet audience

If you enjoy writing, you may grow an online audience focused on a certain subject or market and earn money from them.

If this home business concept appeals to you, you must decide how to attract customers. Nowadays, there are several strategies to gain followers online. For instance, you could:

•Grow an Instagram following

•Build a YouTube audience

•Create a blog and grow your readership

•Grow a Twitch following

•Build a TikTok following

How can you generate money once you have a sizable fan base or a lot of website traffic? Basically, there are three methods for making money from an internet audience:

• Sponsorships by brands: Receive payment for promoting a brand's goods (also known as "influencer marketing").

• Affiliate marketing: Spread the word about a business's goods or services in exchange for a commission.

• Sell goods: Produce and market physical or digital goods to your target market.

For instance, Adam Enfroy created a blog where various software items are reviewed.

FAQs Regarding Home Based Business Ideas How can I launch a small home based business?

Unsure about how to launch a small business from home? 8 stages are listed below for launching an online business:

• Choose an online business model that works for your business.

• Define your target audience.

• Recognize the issue your business is trying to address.

• Know your competition and how you stand out from them.

• Select a sourcing approach that your clients will like.

• To ensure payment, set up your payment system.

• In the simplest way imaginable, test your business concept

• To begin advertising your business, establish a marketing plan.

How can I use home business ideas to earn money?

Ideas for online home businesses can earn money in a variety of ways. Aside from building affiliate links and memberships, you may also charge per product. Once you have chosen your business strategy, you can begin to come up with the ideal home business venture and launch it.

Conclusion

If you are considering beginning a home-based business, you must know that you still have to work hard if you wish to be profitable. You may make money from home, but there is no magic formula or get rich quick scheme that will guarantee your success. However, with the appropriate preparation and work ethic, you can succeed at a home-based business and find income opportunities that fit with your personal goals.

And if you want another way to make money online

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE TRAINING

#moneymotivated #makemoneyfast #how to earn money #self impowerment #money #motivation #business

0 notes

samanthasmeyers · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

With five years of marketing experience under her belt, she launched her store on Shopify as a side hustle. It’s blown up since then, allowing Georgia to turn peppery products into her full-time gig.

To manage growing demand, she relied on an ecomm agency that promised her 7X ROAS. But the $3,000 monthly retainer didn’t make sense, especially since she wasn’t even close to matching that in ad spend.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Georgia knows you don’t need to be a spice savant to creating marketing campaigns that bring the heat—you just need to know what converts. Read on to learn how Shopify landing pages can help you transform your ecomm sales from mild to five-alarm hot.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

Tons of companies that sell on Shopify send traffic from their paid campaigns directly to product pages on their website. And, sure, that works well enough for some of ’em. After all, your site gives people a high-level overview of your product offering that landing pages usually don’t.

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Let’s say you’re running a seasonal campaign around Black Friday. You’ve got all your Facebook ads set up and ready to go. You hit the red launch button, and… oh no. Your relevance score is crying for help because you’re sending people who clicked a Black Friday ad to a generic product page.

Not only that, but you’re creating an awful experience for visitors. The place they wound up doesn’t match the ad that they clicked. They’re confused, maybe even frustrated. You can kiss that conversion goodbye.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Pushing shoppers to a run-of-the-mill product page isn’t ideal since the page probably wasn’t designed to address their needs specifically. The best way to drive ecommerce sales is by pairing custom landing pages with highly targeted ads or emails to help you reach a specific audience at a specific time with a specific offer, encouraging them to take a specific action.

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

Landing pages let you perform A/B testing at a level of granularity that most ecomm platforms don’t allow, helping you validate their effectiveness and optimize as you go. By tweaking your messaging and tinkering with design elements, you can squeeze even more conversions outta your campaigns.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

The product pages that come pre-packaged with themes on ecommerce platforms are meant to be modified to suit your brand, but most businesses just add their content and start sending traffic. That means lots of ecomm brands show up the same, with product pages that lack distinguishing features or meaningful detail.

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

We’ll be the first to admit there are plenty of head-turning product pages out there. The trouble is that most of these pages have been custom-built by specialized teams who speak Liquid code—and that’s reflected in their cost.

Then there’s the time commitment. Say you’ve decided not to run a Valentine’s Day campaign, but then you have a last-minute change of heart. Your dev won’t appreciate your call at 3 am, asking ’em to put together a product page. (And your designer, copywriter, and other team members won’t be throwing you a party, either.)

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

Most product pages come with tons of distractions: site navigation, links out to reviews, multiple calls to action. There are plenty of ways for visitors to wander off in the midst of making a purchase.

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Best practices for Shopify landing pages are a lot like any other landing page best practices: message match, context of use, that sorta thing. Still, there are some specific things you can do on your Shopify pages that’ll give them that extra oomph.

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Sell the benefits, not the features. Converting in ecomm is all about the benefits of the product. How does it improve your target customer’s life? Think through all of the potential benefits of your product (even the obscure, less tangible ones) and make sure you’re highlighting them on your landing page.

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Stun ’em with a video. If it makes sense for your brand, also consider using video on your landing page. Marketers who include videos in their campaigns often see conversion rate bumps of 34%—and with loads of other benefits, it’s a wonder more brands aren’t getting out their camcorders.

Use psychic triggers. Familiarize yourself with concepts like social proof and scarcity. For example, you might wanna include messaging around time-based (“only for the next 24 hours”) or product-based (“only 10 left”) scarcity to drive landing page conversions.

Stay relevant by launching fast. The timing of your ecomm campaigns is huge. No one wants to hear about your New Year’s sale in February, so get crackin’ on those landing pages and launch your next campaign yesterday.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

One quick look at their website is all it takes to understand why this landing page is vital to their marketing. The homepage does a lot of things—explains who the company is, where they’re located—but there’s no obvious way to find and purchase their products.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

Even the individual product pages bury lots of key information within collapsing bullet points, making it tough for visitors to find out what the products do or how to use them. And while these pages look pretty slick, most ecomm marketers could spot ’em as Shopify templates.

Imagine you get a promotional email from The Lee Clinic advertising a site-wide discount. You click the link and find yourself on the page with their list of products, or even one of the specific product pages. What do you think would do a better job of getting you to buy—that, or this landing page?

The Lee Clinic’s landing page (built by Webistry) does a fantastic job of summarizing the product benefits in a super attractive way. The design isn’t just gorgeous—it’s congruent. Clean. Simple. Professional and eye-catching. Really, it’s just a treat to look at.

And check this out:

This clever section asks visitors what their main skincare concern is, then presents them with a product designed to address that very issue. The Lee Clinic is tying the customer problem directly to their solution. (And this technique can work like magic when you’re retargeting visitors later on down the funnel.)

Also, notice the add-to-cart slide-in on the right-hand side of the page. This minimizes the steps to checkout, making the buyer journey faster, simpler, and smoother. There’s no redirecting to the website, so the entire checkout process can be completed within the landing page. Sweet.

Ready to run email marketing campaigns that’ll blow your subscribers’ socks off? It’s easy—just add landing pages to the mix. Check out how you can drive more email sales by sending your shoppers to dedicated post-click landing pages.

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

They’ve got an awesome landing page (another from Webistry) that does a great job of showing off their product in an attractive way. It’s sexy. Slick. Simple. An alluring invitation, if I were so inclined.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

Yes, it’s gorgeous and jam-packed with persuasion elements, but that’s only half of it. It sustains the shopper’s experience. It lets them remain on the page, adding items to their cart without ever having to leave. Compare that with the online store on their site, where the user would need to click out and navigate through multiple pages to achieve the same objective.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

Visually, there’s not a huge difference between the two pages. The real change is in the copy: the general landing page highlights a product feature (they’re “long-lasting”) while the Mother’s Day page speaks to the benefit customers can derive from that feature (making your partner feel special with an awesome gift).

The Mother’s Day page has some other things working in its favor. There’s a site-wide discount with an established deadline, plus messaging that indicates there might not be enough of these candles to go around (“while supplies last”). It does a good job of establishing scarcity.

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

The brand has a great-looking website, but like lots of storefronts, it has a ton of elements that distract visitors from making a purchase. There are all those menu items. Multiple calls to action. Different features and incentives like blue light lenses, buy-one-get-one, and philanthropy.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Can you see the difference? Here, DIFF tilts its messaging on its head. The main site really focuses on their humanitarianism, and that’s great—it’s what their brand is all about. But here, the copy is all about the value to the customer. There’s no mention of charity. It’s all about making the sale based on the benefits of the product.

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

Whether you’re putting together a business-as-usual campaign or creating something special for an upcoming promotion, you’ve got urgent deadlines that you’ve absolutely gotta hit. That means you need to be able to get slick, super targeted pages up fast.

Forget custom coding. Armed with a powerful landing page builder (like Unbounce), you can adjust everything like Neo in The Matrix—drag, drop, and publish. And with more than a hundred quick-start templates, you can get going right this minute.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/shopify-landing-pages/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#Digital Marketing

1 note · View note

dcpwebdesigners-blog · 2 years

Text

5 tips for starting an Ecommerce business

When it comes to launching your own eCommerce venture, the options are endless. From building a mobile-responsive website to building a brand that customers trust, there are a lot of things to take into consideration.

However, the most daunting task is probably the one of choosing the right path to take. Ecommerce websites are becoming more and more common as more people shift from brick and mortar retail to online merchants.

They allow you to sell your own goods and services as well as resell the products of other companies. However, launching an eCommerce website requires a lot of time and dedication. If you’re looking to start an eCommerce business, you’ve come to the right place.

Keep reading for everything you need to know about starting a shopping website.

What is an Ecommerce Website?

An eCommerce website is a digital platform that enables consumers to buy and sell products and services.

This format is prevalent in the marketplace because it allows businesses to sell their goods and services online.

Also, eCommerce can be used to manage company inventory and has the capacity to accept online payments.

A lot of businesses choose to use eCommerce websites to increase their sales. In fact, it’s estimated that online shoppers spend over £693 billion in the UK every year.

There is plenty of room for growth so why not take a slice of the pie?

How to Start an Ecommerce Website

There are many different platforms you can use to start an online eCommerce shop for your business. Some popular platforms are Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce.

Personally, I like to use WooCommerce as this for me is the most cost-effective solution. unlike Shopify, there are no monthly fees and you also own the website.

Here you can view some example websites I have created for my clients using WooCommerce:

Pure Sanity London - Luxury Candle Shop

Unik Pik - Clothing Shop

Ger Group - Sealent Products

Bubsy Bu - Baby Products

Alva PC - Computer Components

As you can see when viewing the above projects, the websites load fast, and look different, but are all built using WooCommerce WordPress Plugin.

Types of eCommerce Websites

A subscription website is the best choice for companies that sell products that are not available all the time.

A subscription website allows customers to subscribe for future products or receive them as a gift on specific occasions.

Examples of subscription websites include wine clubs, gym memberships, diets, fitness programs, etc.

An eCommerce marketplace is a website that allows sellers to list their products or services for sale.

You can view some examples above of Market Place eCommerce stores.

These websites are very popular because they allow sellers to easily set up their products and manage their sales from a single location.

What do I need to build an eCommerce Website?

This is the most daunting step of all. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll have to decide on your website’s architecture and the layout of your pages.

As mentioned above I like to use WooCommerce and WordPress for building online stores.

You will also need to select a suitable hosting provider to run your website project.

What is the hosting for an eCommerce website?

The hosting for an eCommerce website is the computer system that allows you to store, share, and use the content as part of your website.

It’s what allows you to share content like images and documents as part of your website.

Many hosting services will let you choose between shared and dedicated hosting.

Shared hosting allows you to host multiple websites on a single server.

Dedicated hosting allows you to host many websites but the hosting server is dedicated to only your web projects.

At DCP we host our website on a dedicated webserver to ensure maximum uptime and a fast loading website.

Shared hosting is the most affordable type of hosting. It’s also the easiest to set up and use.

The speed of shared hosting is usually very limited, but this does depend on the hosting provider, some are great and unfortunately, some are poor.

Dedicated hosting is usually more expensive than shared hosting. It’s also usually the most reliable type of hosting.

The speed of dedicated hosting is usually very consistent and reliable.

Conclusion

Launching your own eCommerce business is undoubtedly one of the most challenging tasks people can take.

You will have to spend a great deal of time, effort, and resources in order to achieve success. However, it is worth it. It is possible for you to make a living by selling products or services you provide. It is just a matter of doing what is necessary.

The article above contains key information you need to know about starting an eCommerce website. However, it’s important to note that there are a lot of other things you’ll have to take into consideration before you can begin your venture.

A great way to start is to research the market and see if there are any eCommerce opportunities in your area that you can take advantage of or simply build a website around something that you are interested in and you will have the enthusiasm to succeed.

If you are not sure where to start then take advantage of our free web development consultation service.

Article by Pankaj Shah: DCP London Web Designers

#Ecommerce #webdesign #webdesigners #london #dcpweb #dcpwebdesigners

0 notes

narcisbolgor-blog · 7 years

Text

The 20-Year-Old Making Unholy Amounts of Cash on Meme Bibles

When Jason Wong moved to the U.S. from China a little over a decade ago, he learned English and adopted American culture largely, he says, through memes.

Eleven years later, Wong is in the midst of building an entire ecommerce empireplus a product innovation labbecause he helped write the Bible on it.

His business, called Dank Tank, sells meme-themed merch like fidget spinner-shaped bath bombs and meme-themed candles while simultaneously acting as a meme-consulting shop for large corporate clients and venture-backed startups.

Its most buzzed about product, the Holy Meme Bible, which is an activity book featuring the year's most notable memes, was something Wong launched on a whim last year after coming up with the idea over Thanksgiving dinner. He ordered mockups online while sitting at the dinner table, set up a store on Shopify, then proceeded to market the product via Tumblr where he had over 1.2M followers.

The cash began flowing in immediately. Wong was raking in thousands of dollars by the day. The Holy Meme Bible ended up making Wong $300,000 in just over a month and this November he launched its sequel: The Holy Meme Bible: The New Testament. The updated book features 70 pages of meme-themed activities like crosswords, guessing games, connect the dots, and more.

"People love meme products," Wong said. "They're already familiar with memes digitally, of course, but once they see something meme-related in real life it makes them want it more."

Wong is not the first person to sell products based on memes and online fads. This has basically been the backbone of Urban Outfitters merchandising strategy for years. Recently, big time social media influencers have begun to partner with manufacturers to sell viral internet-themed merch.

Just last year, The Fat Jew introduced his controversial White Girl Rose ecommerce store and app, which he promotes heavily on his social channels. Erin Yogasundram, a young fashion influencer on Instagram, made a name for herself because of her online store Shop Jeen, which sells clothing and accessories made for kids who grew up on the internet. Some current Shop Jeen products include a tee shirt emblazoned with text message bubbles, emoji-covered iPhone cases, and sweatshirts that read "internet mom", "internet dad," and "text me back."

But Wong says he doesn't want Dank Tank to be just another trashy online store built on fads.

"What I want to make is a destination for meme products, but sophisticated meme products, he said.

Wong believes there are plenty of meme products out there for so-called normies, or non-web obsessives, but "I think the market is still lacking" for the more advanced meme consumers.

"The whole idea for Dank Tank is to integrate memes into products that haven't traditionally had memes. We are trying to tap into products that aren't typically memeable. Tee shirts and things are not unique," she said.

In other words, anyone can get Netflix and Chill screen printed onto a pair of sweatpants, but it takes a lot more time and creative energy to produce the types of products Dank Tank hopes to launch, Wong argues.

Some products the company is currently exploring include a meme encyclopedia set that looks similar to an old-school Encyclopedia Britannica, giant meme pool floaties, a meme makeup palette, and a meme cookbook. For the cookbook, Dank Tank collaborated with notable chefs to produce a slew of meme-themed recipes. Some foods featured are the "Netflix and chili", a the "floor is lava" cake, a "Trump executive order"which is really just an orange chickenand the famous Fyre festival sandwich recipe.

Many of Wong's products allude to memes and internet jokes with a little more subtlety. There's a popular joke on the internet that packets of ramen seasoning look like condom packets. Dank Tank, oc course, introduced a line of Ramen condoms. Wong says he hopes to sell a lot of these around Valentine's day.

Currently, the business is made up of just two other full-time and seven contract employees. Wong runs the company out of his apartment in Irvine, Calif., but travels to China to meet with factories and production managers.

"Every day I wake up, go upstairs to check email, talk to my team, and take care of day to day business," he said. He says his day usually starts late because he often speaks to his suppliers in Asia via phone overnight. Not because hes 20.

"The price you get from suppliers for speaking Mandarin versus speaking English is radically different. Being able to speak Chinese gets you access to a whole different price list," which Wong, who speaks Mandarin himself, says has significantly helped him.

Dank Tank is on track to make $1 million in revenue by the end of the year and Wong hopes to expand the business beyond mainly ecommerce and consulting in years to come.

"The name Dank Tank came from the idea of a think tank. This will be the world's first meme-focused think tank," he said.

More From this publisher : HERE ; This post was curated using : TrendingTraffic

=> *********************************************** Originally Published Here: The 20-Year-Old Making Unholy Amounts of Cash on Meme Bibles ************************************ =>

The 20-Year-Old Making Unholy Amounts of Cash on Meme Bibles was originally posted by 11 VA Viral News

#11 VA Viral News

0 notes

kennethmontiveros · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages published first on http://nickpontemktg.blogspot.com/

0 notes

annaxkeating · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

from Digital https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/shopify-landing-pages/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#digital marketing

0 notes

josephkchoi · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages published first on https://nickpontemrktg.wordpress.com/

0 notes

jjonassevilla · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/shopify-landing-pages/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#SEO

0 notes

raillingfarrell · 2 years

Text

How Can Shopify Store Conversion Rate Be Optimized?

The key indicator of how well and efficiently your eCommerce business is operating is its conversion rate. Landing on the homepage, browsing the product list, agreeing to the pricing, and adding the purchase button to the cart are all steps in the process of convincing a potential customer to click the buy button and proceed to the checkout. You may include elements that push the buyer one step closer to making a purchase at each stage.

You'll be able to increase your conversion rates if you can monitor these statistics and consider how to optimize each phase of the buying process, from click-through to purchase. Conversion rate optimization is the name of the initiative.

7+ Best Shopify Buy button Apps in 2022

Best Shopify Facebook Store Examples & How To Start Selling?

54+ Top Shopify Electronics Themes for 2022

11+ Top Shopify Mobile App Builder Apps for 2022

How To Build & Start A Shopify Pets Store?

How to Launch Aliexpress Dropshipping on Your Shopify Store?

How to Launch a Candles Company and Sell It on Shopify

19+ Checklist for Shopify Store Launch

34+ Top Shopify Upsell Apps for 2022

How To Launch A Shopify Store Without Any Funds

How Can I Launch My Own Shopify Store?

For Shopify Stores, How Do I Turn Traffic Into Sales?

#Shopify Store #Conversion Rate Be Optimized #shopify store #shopify #ecommerce #avada #2022

1 note · View note

roypstickney · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

0 notes

itsjessicaisreal · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/shopify-landing-pages/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

0 notes

reviewandbonuss · 4 years

Text

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

And check this out:

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/shopify-landing-pages/

0 notes

topicprinter · 5 years

Link

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with DShawn Russell of Southern Elegance Candle Company, a brand that makes southern inspired candlesSome stats:Product: Southern Inspired CandlesRevenue/mo: $20,000Started: January 2016Location: RAEFORDFounders: 1Employees: 3Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello! My name is D’Shawn Russell and I am the founder and CEO of Southern Elegance Candle Company. I started the company 4 years ago as a side hustle to make some extra money on the weekends and to get me out of the house. But it quickly grew to much more than I expected.Southern Elegance Candle Company is all about loving and living in the South. We created home fragrance products that all have a southern theme to them and all of our fragrances are based on Southern agriculture. Apple? Check! Pine? Check! Cotton (or course) Check! Missing the Southern Sunshine? We got a fragrance for you. Our core group of customers are women that live in the South or people that appreciate Southern culture.Our flagship products at the moment are our candles. We offer three different sizes; travel tin, mason jar and large tumbler. We also have wax melts and room spray. But, we will be slowly rolling out new products over the next year to include an apparel line.I started the company at our local Farmers Market making about $200 per weekend. We now average about $20,000 a month in sales through our retail site, wholesale site and Faire. Most of our income comes from our wholesale accounts. We were able to branch out from our core Southern states and are currently in stores all over the US.You can check out our brand story video here: Southern Elegance: Candles Crafted In The SouthimageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I started Southern Elegance right after my son was born as a hobby. Initially, I made a bunch of random bath and body products in addition to the candles. When I decided to get serious, I looked at everything and decided to just focus on one product and chose candles because they had the potential to be the most profitable. I chose a niche that I could speak authentically about. My ideal customer was easy to identify because it was basically me. (But, don't use that a marketing strategy. It just happened to work in this case) I was born and raised in the South. I LOVE living here and couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I created a company around all the things that I love to do.I was working in education at the time and I absolutely hated it. One day walked into work and quit my job to make candle making a full-time career. I had absolutely no background in sales, manufacturing, marketing or anything business-related. I basically had no clue as to how it was going to work or if this was even a viable plan. Everything was a learning curve, and I spent hours learning a new skill then implementing it.With very limited resources, (basically no money) I went to the school of Google and Youtube. I took some online classes on Branding and Wholesaling. I hired a business coach and I literally hit the streets selling. For the first year, I would sell my candles at any Church function, fair, festival, school bazaar… I did not care. I sold candles outside in the middle of the summer and the dead of winter. I also sold on any and every online platform that would accept me. Etsy, Amazon, Faire, Modalyst, Houzz, etc. All the money I made went back into building the brand, I was lucky to have a husband to pay the bills but it was tight financially. When I finally felt comfortable I approached stores to carry my products. And we slowly built a base of stores to sustain the company.Eventually, I moved my retail site to Shopify and settled with Faire for wholesale.Interview with Candle Science about the beginning of Southern Elegance Candle Company!Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Making candles isn't that difficult, melt some wax, add fragrance and color, pour in a jar and let harden. But, my first candles were terrible! I had to use local items. So I had wax and fragrance from Hobby Lobby and jars from Walmart. I quickly realized this wouldn’t work because (1) the quality was horrible and (2) you can’t scale a company buying supplies from local retail stores. So, I researched local candle supply companies. CandleScience became my main supplier. They were local and carried professional-grade products. I was also able to buy very small quantities in the beginning and now I order pallets. I am not able to buy direct from glass and wax suppliers so CandleScience serves as the middle man as my company grows.When I first started in my home, all I had was two pots and my stove. After a few months, I bought my first large wax melter and moved into the garage. Two months after that I bought another melter and started looking for my first space outside of my garage.imageMy GarageI live in a small town (approximately 5000 people) so the manufacturing space wasn't available. My first space was a small restaurant. We stored fragrance in the former freezers and wax in the former deep fryers. At the end of that lease, we moved into a slightly larger retail space. But, we covered the windows with paper and a coming soon sign because the area wasn’t zoned for manufacturing and we didn't want anyone to know what we were doing. We had supplies delivered to the back door and prayed no one would check to see what we were doing. After about a year of stress, a real warehouse space became available and we moved into it.Unfortunately, I had no idea how to set up a real candle business because everything up until this point had been ad-hoc. So I went back to the school of Youtube and watched every video I could find on manufacturing candles. I would stop the video and study them frame by frame. I used this information to set up my current space. We have 4 zones; An office area, a production area for each product, shipping and receiving area and finally an area for storage of supplies.imageYou can watch the process of how we make the candles here: Behind the scenesDescribe the process of launching the business.I didn't have a traditional launch. It was more of a slow-rolling out of the business. I quit my job and had to hurry up and figure out if I could make money doing this. So, I started selling at any event that would accept me. I really didn't have a cohesive plan and had no clue about E-commerce or how it works. I basically was shooting in the dark.After wasting a lot of time, energy and money going to events that didn't include my ideal customer, I narrowed down the types of events that I would attend. That allowed me to at least make some money on the weekends at Farmer’s Markets and local festivals. Hauling candles is hard and heavy and I soon got tired of that. The setup and breakdown is hard on the body and I was tired all the time.I decided to build a website and set it up using Big Cartel. Back then, they had a free plan if you had under 10 items. I created a basic site that I could send people to buy stuff when I wasn't on the road. It had ZERO personality but it worked.After about a year I moved to Woo-Commerce to have a more serious presence on the web. I chose Bluehost with Woo, again because it was cheap and I wasn't making that much money from online sales. I was doing my own photography (which sucked), printing my own labels and designing my own website (which was very basic). The website was hard to manage with all the Apps that I needed and security was a constant issue. It was constantly crashing so I eventually moved to Shopify.I still didn't understand how to drive people to the site and really made sales through the website. I was bootstrapping everything and was still broke. I had to make some changes. I chose the fanciest FREE theme from Shopify. I started having boxes and labels printed professionally. I found a Facebook group that had photographers that would exchange products for photos. I went to Upwork and hired a copywriter to review what I had written. And finally, I took an online class for FB ads.Then I began to see the turnaround. Then another class on Email marketing and google ads really rounded out what I need to start seeing sales. It was trial and error and I wasted money learning but eventually saw results.As online sales grew, I stopped doing the festivals and now totally depend on my online sales.As far as my wholesale side, I did several trade shows and have worked with Reps and really feel like they are pretty old school. It costs a ton of money (around $10,000 per show) and requires a lot of time and energy. (plus commissions) For the same price, I could run some paid ads and take my chances with my retail site for about the same return. (And never leave my couch) It’s just easier to go straight to the consumer now with social media. In addition, we do almost $100,000 in sales with Faire, so it doesn't make financial sense for us to continue to do trade shows. So, moving forward we are going to focus on growing our followers by creating engaging content. If new accounts approach us, we have the margins and systems in place to accommodate but it will not be our primary focus.imageBefore and afterSince launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Below are all the things I WISH I had done when I first started. I am only recently able to see how all this fits together.Social Media Use your social media platforms to drive traffic to your website. Make your posts engaging and relevant to your community. BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY through social media. Facebook groups, Facebook business pages, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Make sure people know what you do and what you SELL. Don't be afraid to sell… don't beat people over the head with constantly trying to sell them stuff, that gets old… but provide information and entertainment and then ask for the sale. Always eventually ask for a sale. Remind people of what you are selling and give them a reason to buy it. If you don't have time to post every day, use a scheduler like Buffer.Capture emails: Once you engage your customers, capture an email so that you have a direct link to them. My one regret is that I didn't get emails at the festivals. Literally, thousands of people slipped through my fingers. Have some type of pop-up. I used to spin the wheel for almost a year and now we recently changed back to a regular pop-up. Run contests and giveaways… always engage in some type of activity that is capturing emails. We are currently using Privy, but used Justuno also.Email Marketing; Once you get those emails… send out emails. My first emails were terrible. I eventually got better. And now I have someone that designs and sends them weekly. Stay in contact with your people and continue to provide relevant content. We used Mailchimp but recently switched to Klaviyo.Paid ads (google, FB, Instagram): This is the hardest part. I took classes and I know I will never be as good as a professional. I know the basics and can run a decent campaign. Yes, I lost money in the beginning. But, I learned what worked and who to target based off the losses. I've hired firms that lost just as much of my money as I did, so I don't feel bad. Ads are hit or miss. But, I know enough now to know if a campaign is being profitable and I know the right questions to ask any firm that may be running my ads.Retarget: You know how those ads follow you after going to a site? It works. Do it a lot.imageHow are you doing today and what does the future look like?In the big scheme of things, we are doing pretty good. The doors are open, taxes and people are paid. We are still in business and not in danger of going out of business. We have a strong wholesale business and a growing retail business. But, I think we are just scratching the surface.Southern Elegance will develop into a lifestyle brand. Now, before you roll your eyes (which I would have totally done at that statement last year), let me explain. If you create a community of like-minded people and create products they like, they will begin to trust you. And in turn, you can sell anything. Although we sell candles, what we really sell is a community. We sell culture and a sense of belonging, candles just happen to be the product. We are really going to focus on serving our community/customers in the coming years by leveraging social media.In 2020, we plan on introducing Southern-themed apparel. If that goes well, then bath and body products. Once we build the community, we can sell them anything that supports our mission of celebrating Southern Culture.The future looks like world domination.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Choose your partners carefully and trust your gut. I made very bad decisions by going against what I thought I should do and listening to “experts”. I lost a ton of money by hiring a fancy firm to run my Facebook Ads. Their results were on par with my own except I didn’t lose thousands of dollars per month paying them.I also lost money by paying a fancy firm out of NYC to do my social media. I do it myself now using Buffer to schedule, my free pics, and recipes & memes from Pinterest. A custom collab with a celebrity cost me almost $10,000 in time, inventory and design fees. I still get pissed when I look at those containers… but it is a reminder to trust my gut. If a mistake has to be made, do it early and cheaply. I’m glad I made those mistakes while small and it wasn’t too disastrous.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Shopify Easily the best place to have an eCommerce site.Privy Capture emailsJustUno Capture EmailKlaviyo Run email campaignsBold (Discount, Loyalty Points, Upsell) A better User experience on the websiteOrder Printer Makes the orders look pretty and less genericTax Jar Sale tax is a pain!!! This makes it so much easier.Yotpo Collect Reviews and use them on social media and marketing campaignsAffiliatly If you decide to use affiliates. It’s simple to set up and use.The Social Sales Girls Teaches you how to get reliable, predictable income when you build it the right way on eCommerce platforms. (FB ads, contests & give-aways for email, email marketing, etc)Lucky Break Consulting Assists with Smart Business Strategy for makers and designersimageWhat have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?All my books are on Audible. I listen in the car and whenever I have downtime.The Purple Cow by Seth Godin Explains why you need to stand out in a crowded market place.Clockwork Mike Michalowicz Helps to teach you how to automate the business processes.Crushing It: Inspirational stories from the experiences of dozens of entrepreneursTribes by Seth Godin: It’s our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. Find your tribe and make some money.The Blue Ocean Strategy: Blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand.You are a Badass: Create a life you totally love. And create it NOW, Make some damn money already.Start with Why: it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.The E-Myth (Highly Recommend) Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.Profit First (Highly Recommend) Offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Do it. Start something. Screw it up. Fix it and then make more mistakes. Rinse and repeat. There have been some spectacular mistakes made by myself… and I learned a tremendous amount from them. And I just kept on trucking. Mistakes happen and usually don’t doom a business. Learn as much as you can and do as much as you can for free...BUT don’t be afraid to pay for knowledge. Google and Youtube can only get you so far, then hire a coach. Take a class. Find people that know how to do what you want to do… and PAY them to do it.Eventually, you have to pass off roles and responsibilities, hurry up and do it as soon as you can afford to. Don't be like me, at the cardiologist wondering what’s going on with your heart. The Doc was like “Stress, it’s gonna kill you.”imageWhere can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebook Business PageFacebook GroupInstagramPinterestTwitterEmailIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

0 notes

lookingatinterestingthingsf-blog · 7 years

Text

Invisible unicorns: 35 big companies that started with little or no money

Joseph FlahertyContributor Joe Flaherty is director of Content & Community at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor: Theres no shame in a $100M startup Overdosing on VC: Lessons from 71 IPOs Venture capital is a hell of a drug, and its possible tooverdose on VC, but for most founders that is a champagne problem. More often the question investors hear is how do I get a VC to back my startup? These founders arent worried about how overcapitalization will make their IPO prospects trickier theyre scrambling to get someone, anyone, to sign their first term sheet. Theres a widespread belief among founders that venture capital is a precursor to success. VC is a common denominator of the most successful tech startups, but it isnt a prerequisite, especially at the early stages. Entrepreneurs can prove out quite a bit with little to no capital. Capital wont make your company insightful. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? To help illustrate how startups can move forward, here are 35 examples of companies that started with a few thousand dollars, or even just sweat equity, and went on to become exemplars of what I call efficient entrepreneurship. Many of these companies have subsequently earned billion-dollar valuations, some even have billions of dollars in revenue, but none started with anything other than what would be considered a seed round. Most of these startups raised money from VCs, but only after they established the fact that their success would come with or without a wire transfer from an investor. Even now, many of them arent widely known they are the invisible unicorns of the tech industry. So before scrambling to schedule meetings with investors, read these stories. They provide a counterbalance to the VC-centric outlook held by many founders, and provide alternative ways to think about funding. What follows are brief and simplified descriptions of these companies (categorized by approaches they share) and links to stories where you can read more about them. Remember, taking venture capital should be a choice, not a compulsion. These companies show how its done. Figure something out, then ask for money You dont need venture capital to get started in most industries if you can solve a real problem for customers and charge money for it. Here are three ways to think about this: Automate your workflow The easiest way to build a useful product is to automate some part of your daily workflow. This will ensure youve got proven demand for what youre building and a pre-existing funding source for your project. MailChimp: Co-founder/CEO Ben Chestnut was running a design consulting business in the year 2000 and had a stream of clients who wanted email newsletters created. The only problem was that he hated designing them. So, to spare his team the tedium, he decided to build a tool that would streamline the process.MailChimp, a $400 million run rate business, was born. Lynda: Lynda Weinman started as a teacher in need of tools to instruct web designers in the late 1990s. The offerings at bookstores were bland, so she began producing training films that better educated her students. Tutorial by tutorial her company helped software developers and designers improve their skills. She spent two decades building a content library and tech assets that had enough scale to entice LinkedIn to pay $1.5 billion to acquire the company. Start with a capital-efficient product Many entrepreneurs make frontal attacks on industry leaders, usually resulting in failure. This is especially true in the case of hardware. Instead of trying to compete with a company like Apple, these scrappy startups filled the gap left by RadioShack and built businesses worthy of respect and emulation. AdaFruit Industries: Limor Fried started her DIY electronics e-commerce empire as a student at MIT by assembling DIY kits comprised of off-the-shelf parts. Fried merchandised the same building blocks found at electronics stores, but also crafted quirky content that made the prospect of soldering a replica Space Invaders cabinet seem reasonable. Now she has 85 employees and earns $33 million per year. SparkFun: Similar to AdaFruit, Nathan Seidle started SparkFun out of his dorm room by selling electronics kits and oddball components to a coterie of engineers who wanted to explore exotic new sensors and systems. Now his e-commerce empire employs 154 and has revenues of $32 million per year. Solve an existing problem and leverage an existing business model Startups dont have to be particularly innovative in terms of business model. Building a better mousetrap on top of a more modern technical platform, or with a UX layer, can be enough. None of the companies that follow reinvented the wheel, but all wound up creating real value. Braintree Payments: Exchanging money online, without being fleeced by fraudsters, is one of the oldest problems on the web. All parties to a transaction happily agree to pay a fair tax for a superior experience. Braintree built a better tech solution and survived on the proceeds of those transactions for four years before raising $69 million in two rounds of venture capital, which preceded an $800 million acquisition. Shopify: Shopifys founders were looking for a shopping cart solution when they were starting an e-commerce site for snowboarders. Unable to find one, they decided to scratch their own itch and built a bespoke solution on the then red-hot Ruby on Rails framework. It turned out to be a perfect solution for plenty more people, and the founders ran the business independently for six years on the revenue they generated. They ultimately raised money from VCs and later IPOed, which rewarded them with a billion-dollar valuation. Self-reliance rules Many entrepreneurs waste their time playing CEO, crafting a strategy and drawing up a dream org chart for what their business might become. Dont do that. Instead, figure out what you can do, today, to advance this idea using only the resources you have. Ipsy: Sending boxes of makeup to amateur beauticians has become a growth industry thanks to pioneers like Birchbox. YouTube star Michelle Phan didnt have first-mover advantage, but she leveraged her online celebrity (8 million+ YouTube subscribers), relationships with cosmetics brands and <$500,000in seed funding to build a subscription box startup that generated $150 million in revenue before raising $100 million in VC. Capital wont make your company insightful. ShutterStock: Jon Oringer was a professional software developer and an amateur photographer. He combined this set of skills and used 30,000 photos from his personal photo library to start a stock photo service that is currently worth $2 billion. His capital efficiency paid off and ultimately turned him into a truly self-made billionaire. SimpliSafe: People scoff at the idea of trying to bootstrap a hardware business, but SimpliSafes Chad Laurans did it. He raised a small amount of money from friends and family and then spent eight years building a self-install security business, literally soldering the first prototypes himself to save money. Eight years later, the business has hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of millions in revenue and $57 million in VC from Sequoia. Everyones money is green Funding doesnt always come millions of dollars at a time. Founders can scrape together money from grants, incubators and angels, or even pre-sales. The savviest entrepreneurs design their business model so they collect payment before they deliver their product, turning customers into a source of growth capital. Tough Mudder: Track & field entrepreneur Will Dean turned $7,000 in savings into a company with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The secret was pre-selling registrations to races and then using those funds as working capital to construct the electrified obstacle courses that have made Tough Mudder a global phenomena. CoolMiniOrNot: CoolMiniOrNot started out as a website where geeks could show off their ability to paint Dungeons & Dragons figurines. Eventually, the sites founders decided to design and distribute games of their own, leveraging Kickstarter as a channel. They have run27 Kickstarter campaignswhich have raised$35,943,270million dollars of non-dilutive funding. Game on. Sell! Sell! Sell! Usually the best source of capital is a customer, and selling has two benefits. First, you make the cash register ring immediately. Second, you quickly learn what resonates with customers and can use those insights to refine your offering. Scentsy: DNVBs are hip, but they are over-reliant on twee launch videos and Facebook ads to drive revenue. Scentsy sold candles at swap meets when they couldnt afford to buy ads. It wasnt glamorous, but it did give the founders a solid grounding on the messages that resonated with buyers now they have more than $545 million a year in revenue. CarGurus: This app leverages data analytics to help customers find the best deal on used cars, but the companys CEO credits its $50 million a year in revenue, and profitability, to hiring a sales team early in the companys life cycle. Nearly half the companys 350 employees are busy making sales calls, not writing software. LootCrate: LootCrate had more than 600,000 customers and $100 million in revenue before they raised institutional capital. Part of the reason they were so efficient was that the company started charging customers from its first weekend in existence. The founders were at a hackathon, set up a landing page, collected orders and used that capital to buy the geeky goods that would fill the packages. Be miserly with marketing Startup marketers might not want to waste time with unmeasurable brand marketing. Efficient entrepreneurs need campaigns to be additive, immediately. Wayfair: The home goods e-commerce company was profitable from its first month of operation because they skipped brand advertising and bought up hundreds of domain names that were exact matches for common search terms. This model kicked off a decade of profitable growth until they ultimately raised a Series A worth $165 million shortly before going public and earning a market cap that is currently over $4 billion. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? Cards Against Humanity: With just $15,700 in funding from Kickstarter, the Cards Against Humanity team built a business that grossed more than $12 million in its first year. Theyve also sustained their brand with a series of canny marketing stunts, selling cow poop, cutting up a Picasso, digging a big hole representing the ennui of a post-Trump America, then selling Trump bug out bags and simply asking for money. These promotions arent cheap to run, but they make enough money to defray costs while earning a disproportionate amount of free media. GoFundMe: Viral marketing is dismissed, rightfully, when it is tacked on to a business model, but it can be a powerful driver when properly integrated into a business model. Paired with hyper-efficient conversion rate optimization (CRO), it can be unbeatable. The founders of GoFundMe were able to use these twin forces to bootstrap a business to the point where it was valued at ~$600 million. Efficiency > Capital Startups are often measured by how much money theyve raised. Its more important to ask how efficiently those companies use the capital. Efficiency doesnt mean penny-pinching, but instead, finding entrepreneurs who orient their business around a technology or business model that is intrinsically more effective at multiplying capital. PaintNite: The idea of combining Monet and Merlot has been around for a while, but the founders of PaintNite wanted to make the model more cost-effective. While their competitors relied on a slow, expensive franchise sales model, PaintNite paired art teachers with existing bars that wanted to sell wine on weekdays and created a business that did $30 million in revenue the year before it raised venture capital. Plenty of Fish: The dating site was founded in 2003 and didnt change dramatically regarding functionality or aesthetics over the next decade. Other sites had more features, flashier graphics and copious amounts of venture funding, but PoF was free and spent most of its resources fighting spam accounts. As with Craigslist, Plenty of Fishs biggest asset was its reputation as a well-stocked pond. The company iterated on the product over time, but never needed massive infusions of capital. Ultimately, the company sold for $575 million. Mojang: The masons behind Minecraft never raised any venture capital, employed just 50 people and earned nearly a billion dollars in profit before selling to Microsoft. The Swedish studio never got sucked into fads like Zynga-inspired social spamming and predatory microtransactions. Minecraft grew by charging users a flat fee, resulting in a $2.5 billion acquisition. Fortune favors the boring Boring isnt a value judgment. Many of the most impressive, successful companies that managed to grow without capital thrived by solving acute, if somewhat dry, problems. If you solve a hard problem, customers will happily fund it. SurveyMonkey was founded in the dot-com bubble of the 90s and though it wasnt as disruptive as peers like Kosmo, it was more durable. It survived the dot-com crash and steadily grew into a nine-figure run rate, only raising $100 million 11 years after getting started. Protolabs does for plastic injection molding what Vistaprint does for business cards, and is currently worth $1.2 billion. Cvent, worth $1.3 billion, builds event management tools and Textura, acquired for $663 million, handles construction management neither typically considered a hot or hip market. Grasshopper is a phone networking company that had 150,000 customers and more than $30 million in annual revenue, but no VC on the books, and was eventually acquired by Citrix. Epic was founded by Judith Faulkner in 1979; the Wisconsin-based electronic medical records provider may be the largest bootstrapped software company operating today. eClinicalWorks was founded in 1999 when the mantra was get big fast, and many of its contemporaries crashed and burned. By focusing on excelling at the dull, yet profitable work of managing clinical data, the company survived and now employs more than 4,000 workers and generates $320 million in annual revenue. Unity became a backbone of the mobile gaming industry by focusing on all of the unsexy aspects of game development, like cross-platform compatibility and bump mapping. They went years without raising capital, but now have a valuation over $1.5 billion, and are more successful than the majority of branded game startups. GitHub took the pain out of version control and became a critical part of the tech ecosystem before raising capital. Qualtrics started as a tool to administer surveys for schools and businesses in a basement in Utah and now employs 1,000 and rakes in $100 million a year, profitably. Blessed are the unfundable Sometimes raising capital is almost impossible. Weve seen companies with tens of millions in revenue, triple-digit growth rates and other advantages struggle to raise even small amounts of money. Fortunately, these startups tend to prevail in the end, despite this apparent disadvantage. Atlassian: One of the benefits of building a startup outside Silicon Valley, NYC, LA or Boston is that there isnt much VC available. This may sound like a curse; after all, how could it be helpful to have no access to capital? It can be a blessing in disguise. This kind of isolation prevents you from daydreaming about what youd do with millions of dollars and forces you to make happy the paying customers you do have. Atlassian, based in Australia, bootstrapped its way to a $4 billion market cap. If it had easier access to funding, they might have found themselves chasing low-quality growth and gone under before they figured out how to scale efficiently. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. Campaign Monitor: One of the odd features of capital-efficient companies is that their first rounds of funding tend to be eye-popping sums that look more like proceeds from IPOs. This is the case for Campaign Monitor, whose first round of funding amounted to $250 million. Sydney-based Campaign Monitor didnt have easy access to venture capital, so they bootstrapped the business and built a unique technology that offered superior email analytics to companies like Disney, Coca-Cola and Buzzfeed. Time will tell if raising a quarter billion dollars helps or hurts the company, but it is certainly a validation of the progress theyve made so far. The Trade Desk: While he had a unique view of how to power the programmatic advertising industry, founder Jeff Green started The Trade Desk late in the funding cycle for modern adtech. This overcapitalization of the market, combined with investors getting burned by bad performers, made every round of funding a struggle throughout the life of the company. Green was a consummate startup CEO, who raised only $26.4 million in venture capital during the companys first six years and turned it into a billion-dollar business traded on the NASDAQ. How? By embracing the constraints of having less capital, focusing on the highest return activities and building a culture of innovation powered by ideas rather than infusions of capital. (Disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor in The Trade Desk.) VCs arent perfect, and even the best miss out on ideas that seem like sure things. It is shocking how common it is to hear founders talk about how they couldnt sell investors on an idea that went on to become a billion-dollar business. AppLovin founder Adam Foroughi sold his business for $1.4 billion, but found it hard to raise venture capital, even with serious revenue. I couldnt find anyone to give us an investment at what I thought was a reasonable starting point valuation (maybe $4 million or $5 million) and, by the end of our first year of operations, we were profitable and doing over $1 million a month in revenue. The rest, as they say, is history. Takeaway: Avoid designing your business around VC Too many founders orient their businesses around venture capital from day one. Startups used to figure stuff out and then ask for money. Today, they ask for money to figure things out. Outside of drug discovery or aeronautical hardware, this is usually the wrong decision. In fact, making progress without resources is the best way to get VCs to take an interest in your company. The companies mentioned above chose not to raise money for protracted periods of time, but when they did, they had their pick of investors and could set the terms. Our advice isnt to try to bootstrap a business in perpetuity. Venture capital has powered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Zappos. Just remember that you dont need a penny to get started. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. So the next time a VC tells you they pass, remember these three principles: Its possible to get a tech-enabled business off the ground with no capital. Its feasible to scale a tech business rapidly with very little capital. Its often in the founders best interest to limit the amount of capital they take. If you know of some other companies that self-funded their way to an extraordinary outcome, please let me know.

0 notes