Getting the ball rolling

[DStark]

Happy New Year to all!

I hope that everyone on the forum had a great holiday and that 2018 is off to a fantastic start!

I introduced myself on this forum a while ago but was starting and stopping this last year. I kept from posting anything because I felt no use in writing if I wasn't doing anything about my situation. I figured I would start after I had begun taking consistent action everyday and thus would be in the correct mindset to provide progress updates.

During 2017 I was trying to get a product introduced to the retail market but could not find a manufacturer state side. Reason I needed state side manufacturing is because if I ordered the product from Europe, the shipping costs were to high because of the tariffs on flammable goods.
If I got the concentrate shipped here I had trouble finding a chemical tolling company that would dilute it because it is a "new" product and people are hesitant due to lack of knowledge and understanding of the science behind the product.

So I kept working on finding a company and low and behold the last two months I found two companies that produce similar products. One is in the USA that doesn't produce exactly the same product but a similar one, actually two, which is great because of another niche I discovered in which the second would be a great fit for. The other is in Canada which produces the exactly the same product that I was getting from Germany.

During this time an old customer from my families business, it was the same industry that I am doing, contacted us looking to buy. They were out of business but introduced me. I was working on getting everything together, trying to get samples and test it to make sure it is something I feel comfortable selling. Well that sent me on overdrive trying to get it together, got a sample for the customer and sent it their way to see if it would work for them before they buy any.

Then another customer from my family did the same but are looking for the product I get from Canada. I told him that am still working on getting the sample to test but if I like it I would send a sample for him to test and if he felt the same I would get an order together for him.

Along with these two I have been working on an ecommerce site to focus on a single niche, the marine industry. There are many uses for this product but I am using an idea that my mentor suggested and that was creating a website for each niche instead of making a jack of all trades product. I am doing most everything in house with the idea that if I teach myself to code, market, copywrite, etc. I will learn skills that are marketable so no matter what comes of this I have profitable skillset.

So after that long winded introduction I figure this is where I will start my progress thread. Kind of already started but the ball is rolling and I can make plans and keep this post up to date. Hopefully I can provide some insight to others because this forum has provided me with tons and helped pull me put of a very bad headspace. I can truly say I don't think I would be able to have started entrepreneurship again without some of the great posts on this site!

Here is to a bright and exciting year my friends and may it be full of greatness for all of us!!

 

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[DStark]

Weekly update 1/8/2017:

Currently waiting on a sample from the company in Canada to try.
Last week I finished an e-commerce website to focus on the water craft industry. I am not really happy with how it looks and plan to keep working on it but I wanted to get it up and running.

Also created a Facebook, Instagram and Twitter account for the brand.

Setup a paypal account to receive payments and got the first round of labels that I plan on using. I wasn't really happy with the labels so I went in a redesigned them and will hopefully get the new ones in tomorrow.

I created an Adwords campaign with the goal of driving traffic to the site.

The only license I have left to get is the county license which I hope to complete Friday when I have off.

I setup a MailCheat(Chimp) account and a lightbox to start collecting emails.

Goals for 1/8/18-1/14/18:
- As soon as I get the new labels, take product photos by creating a makeshift product lightbox. Put these on the website
- Create Amazon seller account
- Take care of the county business license
- If I get the sample from Canada, try it and see if it performs to my expectations. If it does ship to past client of family business to see if he likes and wants to order his first case.
- Create Facebook contest with goal of getting 100 page likes.
- The Adwords campaign ends in a week so I will look at results, determine which performed the best and focus on refining keywords ( A/B testing)
-This is the major one, get my first sale!

 

[DStark]

A little late on this update but with my current job things can run a little slow. Here is what has happened over the past two weeks:

I reached 100 page likes with people not in my friend list which is what i wanted, now currently going for 200.

Created a promotion that did not do anything. I used the promotion idea of getting to 500 page likes and the winner would get a free bottle of the product. People would like the post but not the page. The promotion where i stated that this was a brand new product and if people would help us by likeing the page got a 5% conversion on page likes where as the promotion got less than 1%. I have the target market currently at 40-45 year old males who have interests in boating, yachting, etc.

The company in Canada went completely silent on me. No returns on calls, no sample, nothing. The last two weeks have been searching google for manufacturers that produced what I was looking for. It came to the point where I started researching how to make it myself. I started pouring over research papers and other online databases on how the process works. I still continued to call other manufacturers as I did this. I am a nuclear engineer with little training in material engineering and chemical engineering so it was a bit of a pain but I did gain greater understanding of what is going on. As I was at my wits end I called on a company that was selling what I was looking for. I asked if they were a manufacturer or distributor and the woman said they were a distributor for a company in Arizona. Called as soon as i got off the phone and got in contact with the lead engineer. We chatted over the specifics and what his company is trying to do and they are apparently one if not the only manufacturer of this in the United States. I purchased a liter of the product and it will get here next week to try.

My Ad-words Campaign fell completely flat too. I don't know if my bids were to low but none of my ads were showing so the bright side is I didn't spend any money but I have to figure out why nothing happened.

Amazon account was created, I found a better theme and used some coding knowledge to get it close to how I want it. I took product pictures with a homemade lightbox but they did not turn out how I wanted so I think I will get one from Amazon that has a lot of positive reviews and try again

Over the course of the next two weeks the goals I set are as follows:

1) drive traffic to the website. I am not getting any traffic and any traffic I do get bounces. I am going to do this by starting to work the Facebook/Instagram area by writing articles and blog post to my intended market. I also want to contact bloggers in the niche and will be sending out samples to get there input and hopefully get some word of mouth about the product to their audience.

2) Get a listing on Amazon to get another avenue of sales. I don't want Amazon to be my main road but I figure it cant hurt starting out.

3)Get another A/B Ad-Words campaign going to drive traffic to the site.