(abandoned draft)
Last week, I wrote about my own journey as an ecommerce retailer and how we built our business from cringe-inducing MS Paint mockups to a $100,000 side-hustle. It really resonated with the folks at /r/entrepreneur, garnering 813 upvotes and 240 comments.
This week, I want to take it a step further and talk about what we’re going to be doing to try and grow from $100,000 to $1,000,000 in revenue. Specifically, we’re going to talk about how to 10x our marketing effectiveness without spending too much time on it. That means getting a bigger ROI out of our marketing efforts and spending.
1 – Run better meetings
Realize that good meetings are critical and you can’t fuck around w/o meetings
Over the past 4 years, apart from the critical operations like passing orders along and such, we’ve been doing everything in a very ad-hoc manner.
We knew from day 1 that we didn’t want to spend too much time on the business. After all, meetings are for corporate stiffs, and we’re cool entrepreneurs who don’t need no meetings, right?
Wrong.
Good meetings are supposed to SAVE you time. They remove guesswork from the equation. They get you aligned on what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and why you’re doing it. They keep you focused. They get you more motivated.
It’s also tempting to think that you don’t need to be all “formal” about your meetings when it’s just one or two of you – that’s for big teams, right? Again, wrong. You should build great habits early on when you’re small and it’s still easy to change things up.
Moving forward, we plan to meet every week to have a proper 1-1 and update one another on what’s going on. We’re adopting the best practices we’ve picked up at RC.
We’ve already managed to clear a ton of backlog (mostly to do with accounting) in our last two meetings, and I anticipate that within a few more we’re going to be increasing the volume of what we can achieve.
This point/subsection is all about getting really effective at achieving all the other points, which is why it comes first. It’s the meta-skill.
http://www.bhorowitz.com/one_on_one
Meetings should have finite time. Time is the most precious resource and should never be wasted.
Meetings should have clearly defined agendas. If you can cover the entire agenda within less than the allotted time, it’s okay to improvise and explore new ideas and so on, but get the agenda out of the way first.
Everybody should walk away from a meeting with clearly-defined Next Actions. It’s important to have a framework for deciding what the next actions should be. This is discussed in the following subheader, Framework
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ONE person should be responsible for each thing. It’s hilarious how, even with only two people, it’s easy to say that something “should” get done, and that “we should do it”, and then find that each person kinda-sorta assumed that the other person would do it, or just let it slip.
Where possible, digest information ahead of time.
Focus on learnings, not activity (h/t brian balfour)
2 – have a framework for thinking about ROI
The worst meetings are when people just argue pointlessly about something, get frustrated with another.
The 2nd-worst meetings are when people are brainstorming and coming up with all sorts of things. Because then you’ll have a massive list of ideas… then what?
Once you’ve gotten out all or most of your possible ideas, it’s time to rank them in order of priority. How do you prioritize?
After some experimentation, we’ve settled on the ICE framework. Every task is given three variables – the Impact we believe it’s going to have, the Confidence we have that it’s going to work, and the Ease with which the task can be done.. We give each variable a number value out of 10, and then multiply the three numbers together. We can then sort the tasks by the final score, like so:
Or, alternatively, we could sort it by any of the other variables, depending on which variable you think is most important. When you’re starting out, you might want to sort by ease, then pick the highest score from there:
3 – Put together a clear roadmap
Alex ferguson quote – if you’re well prepared, well-rested, know what you’re doing, etc you’re more than halfway towards winning
A lot of time can be wasted without a clear roadmap. You do different things every week depending on your mood, tasks sit around unfinished for weeks or months. You want to decide early what you’re going to do, and then move forward according to that plan at least 80% of the time. Sometimes opportunities and interesting things crop up that you’ll want to be receptive to, but you don’t want to have no plans.
It’s relatively easy to come up with a massive list of things to do, it’s harder to figure out how to prioritize them and how to allocate your limited resources (especially if you’re doing this part-time!) towards achieving them.
The roadmap actually involves several different overlapping calendars:
- a product roadmap (new t-shirts, other products)
- a content roadmap (blogposts, media interviews) and
- marketing roadmap (social media campaigns to run, ads to test, etc).
Pic of roadmap
To do this well we also need to be good at estimating how long a task is going to take, and how much effort is required.
Links
2a Ecommerce product roadmap
To continue to grow as a brand, we’re going to have to come up with new product lines. We’ll probably always keep our most popular t-shirts alive as part of a “Classic” collection, but we’ll also slowly cull the bad performers and experiment with new ones. ashhhh
An important part of new releases will be all about how we hype it up. We will need to have some sort of theme around each new collection that we release. The smart thing to do will be to do tie in with local fashion influencers and do limited edition releases. We’ve already built some relationships with people informally in the past, so it’ll be interesting to try and tap into that more explicitly.
Refining our brand aesthetic. Our brand so far has emerged and grown in a very organic way, which is another way of saying we didn’t really do very much to deliberately make sure that it’s coherent and consistent. We’ll be sitting down to do a brand exercise – to describe what our brand has been so far, and what we want to do in the future.
2b Ecommerce content roadmap
There’s several parts to this. There’s the content on the site (copywriting, product pages, about page), content off the main site (the blog, social media).
There’s also two ways we want to approach the whole thing, which overlap significantly. We want to have quality content (as measured by how well it resonates with our niche), and we want to have content that has good SEO (as measured by search traffic).
We already have a sense of what people search for. “Singapore t-shirts”, “Singapore funny t-shirts”, “Singapore pop culture t-shirts”, and so on. We can also branch out into “Singapore gift ideas”. There’s surely more that we haven’t even thought of yet.
2c Ecommerce marketing roadmap
SEO projects
Search is huge, and pretty much the highest ROI thing for any ecommerce business. Even if you start purely on social (as we did, on Facebook), you’ll want to tap into that sweet search traffic. Global search volume is super-massive.
asdg