Startup Progress Launched May 1 2016

[ejames]

You are taking action and sharing it with others! Awesome
I hope everything goes as planned and even better!

Thanks Julia,
this is why I like this forum everyone has a similar mindset and pushes each other to better and better everyday even if its a little.

 

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[Lanefaster]

Hey @ejames, your thread really started interest in me for a while back. You haven't posted lately, how's going?

 

[ejames]

Hey @ejames, your thread really started interest in me for a while back. You haven't posted lately, how's going?

Did post last week since i wasnt feeling well.

Here is the progress report for week 7.


Users: 448
Total listing : 137
Messages : 269

I would have accomplished more if I wasn't out for like 3 days. I also had some other set backs with the booking system, although we completed the technical implementation we were using a sandbox account for testing. Turns out braintree requires alot of documentation on your business which takes awhile to process (they have an underwriter) which has set us back by 2-3 weeks.


On another note we are seeing alot of interest in following our startup progress. We got a few VCs following us on our twitter page and someone also inquired if we had an affiliate opportunity. Hopefully this is a good sign.



Goals for this week:

Start drawing up technical requirements for the internal CMS tool/Property management system (This is part of revenue generation model)

Sorry I haven't been active on the forums lately been super busy.


Progress update weeks 8/9
Users : 503,
Listings : 155,
Messages: 276.



Things have slowed down in terms of getting traffic to the site which was a deliberate plan.

After going over the plan in detail with my partner we decided its best to slow down on certain types of marketing and get even more focused on our target niche which can help use checkmate (strong moves with the queen).


We are waiting on a couple more proposals (should have them by this week) for direct response college marketing. So far the average proposal is around 19k for a 3 month campaign.

Our college marketing strategy has 3 parts.



1. College brand ambassadors to help spread word of mouth + college flyers.

2. Set up meetings with student housing coordinators. Maybe we can come up with a mutually beneficial agreement. We will see.

3. Law of large numbers at play here. We are getting around 10k postcards this week to do mass mailings. We can blanket by zip code to landlords who want to rent their rooms out to students and not deal with the headache of actively trying to find new tenants. We plan to do these mailings twice a month which will set us back around 3500 -4k per mass mailing. If we get even .5% response we will be cleaning up. Remember these rooms will be permanently listed on our site and we are collecting monthly recurring fees from the landlord(property management) and as well as students who are booking the sublets in advance.



We cut or google and campaign and our FB ads to focus on more on our offline efforts. Our google campaign was doing pretty well, one of our ads had a conversion rate of almost 20% problem is transactions are happening off site since the booking system hasn't been launched as yet.

 

[ejames]

Sorry I haven't been active on the forums lately been super busy.


Progress update weeks 8/9
Users : 503,
Listings : 155,
Messages: 276.



Things have slowed down in terms of getting traffic to the site which was a deliberate plan.

After going over the plan in detail with my partner we decided its best to slow down on certain types of marketing and get even more focused on our target niche which can help use checkmate (strong moves with the queen).


We are waiting on a couple more proposals (should have them by this week) for direct response college marketing. So far the average proposal is around 19k for a 3 month campaign.

Our college marketing strategy has 3 parts.



1. College brand ambassadors to help spread word of mouth + college flyers.

2. Set up meetings with student housing coordinators. Maybe we can come up with a mutually beneficial agreement. We will see.

3. Law of large numbers at play here. We are getting around 10k postcards this week to do mass mailings. We can blanket by zip code to landlords who want to rent their rooms out to students and not deal with the headache of actively trying to find new tenants. We plan to do these mailings twice a month which will set us back around 3500 -4k per mass mailing. If we get even .5% response we will be cleaning up. Remember these rooms will be permanently listed on our site and we are collecting monthly recurring fees from the landlord(property management) and as well as students who are booking the sublets in advance.



We cut or google and campaign and our FB ads to focus on more on our offline efforts. Our google campaign was doing pretty well, one of our ads had a conversion rate of almost 20% problem is transactions are happening off site since the booking system hasn't been launched as yet.

Not much to update
Week 10:
USERS : 523
LISTINGS: 161
Messages: 289


Goals for this week.

Hire a person in the Philippines to answer phone calls. We got our flyers done last week, just need to make a few more changes and start handing them out this week.


Have a great week everyone!!! Keep pushing!

 

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[ejames]

Not much to update
Week 10:
USERS : 523
LISTINGS: 161
Messages: 289


Goals for this week.

Hire a person in the Philippines to answer phone calls. We got our flyers done last week, just need to make a few more changes and start handing them out this week.


Have a great week everyone!!! Keep pushing!

Progress Update Week 11.

Couldnt wait for Braintree any longer so i redid the booking system last week to work with stripe which we launched!!!!



Here is our stats for last week

Users : 550
Listings : 168
Messages: 296

We also got our flyers finally settled on what the final flyer should look like.

What do you guys think ?




So goals for this week.

Need to find someone to hand out our flyers for our targeted areas. Heck I might even be out there on Saturday to get the ball rolling.

On a more technical note I need to create a cron job to update landlord status and check for expired listings. We will need to do this to remind landlords to keep their calendars up to date and that landlords with up to date calendars will have a higher priority in the search results.

 

[ejames]

Nice, sounds like you got it handled, keep it up and us posted

Sorry I havent been active lately super busy.

Last month we did about 10k.


Anyway ill post the details later. 2 days ago we did 15K and more to come.

Its been super hectic.

 

[StevieB]

I'm just curious how you plan on monetizing this as that can make or break the business.

 

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[11elf]

Sorry I havent been active lately super busy.

Last month we did about 10k.


Anyway ill post the details later. 2 days ago we did 15K and more to come.

Its been super hectic.

any update on this @ejames
Really curious hows it going for you ;-)

 

[eTox]

any update on this @ejames
Really curious hows it going for you ;-)

I second that.

 

[jwhisk]

I second that.

Thirded. Maybe he's too busy with success to bother with a forum.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

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[ljean]

Site is down, he probably pulled the plug.

 

[ejames]

any update on this @ejames
Really curious hows it going for you ;-)

Yup last month we did around 300k gross.

So far for this month we are at ~110k as of yesterday.

Sorry i havent been posting weekly. I am super swamped.

 

[eTox]

Yup last month we did around 300k gross.

So far for this month we are at ~110k as of yesterday.

Sorry i havent been posting weekly. I am super swamped.

Well, now that's some nice progress. Congratulations

 

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[Young-Gun]

Yup last month we did around 300k gross.

So far for this month we are at ~110k as of yesterday.

Sorry i havent been posting weekly. I am super swamped.

This is AMAZING dude. You're saying the site is now doing $300k in revenue a month? WTF? What percent is profit? Is that life-changing income for you?

There must have been a HUGE spike in your growth rate.
Can you tell us where it came from so we can learn from it?

I feel a little confused at parts, like things just come together so well for you.
I think one big difference is I've always bootstrapped, and have never had any cash to spend *before* I'm bringing in revenue.
I've also never had a partner, always on my own.
And I don't really have any "connections" in business or money.

So, this may be a function of that, or of you being able to spend $x,xxx on marketing that I've never been able to do.
In which case, awesome, it's cool to learn how I could deploy more money on marketing and advertising (once I have it).

I would love to know more in detail, it's really inspirational.
Did you change the website URL? I'd really love to see how it looks at this point, but the previous link isn't working for me.

 

[lowtek]

site showing down for me as well

No facebook activity either

 

[ejames]

site showing down for me as well

No facebook activity either

EJ Gift Cards | Buy & Sell Giftcards Online is down ? Its up for me

 

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[lowtek]

I mean the your new roommate website. I must've skipped the post with the gift cards. My bad!

Congrats on all the success bud, keep it going!

 

[Duy Skye]

EJ Gift Cards | Buy & Sell Giftcards Online is down ? Its up for me

Your project has too many delays, especially with regard to answering emails and very late payment service. I see a lot of bad feedback on your site, you should fix that

 

[ColbyG]

Did your roomate finding company just pivot to buying giftcards?

 

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[ejames]

Your project has too many delays, especially with regard to answering emails and very late payment service. I see a lot of bad feedback on your site, you should fix that

hi thanks we are working on it. We are getting a ton of orders. We need to hire more people

 

[ejames]

Did your roomate finding company just pivot to buying giftcards?

Yeah total pivot. Actually the main goal was to do yournewroommate.com but i think it failed the law of need.



The gift card website started off as a side hustle but now is our main focus since there is clearly a huge need for people to get cash out of their unwanted gift cards. Its been over a year now and we are still in business and growing.

Whats really cool is that the most cashed strapped people/consumers can make you rich

 

[AdamMaxum]

Yeah total pivot. Actually the main goal was to do yournewroommate.com but i think it failed the law of need.



The gift card website started off as a side hustle but now is our main focus since there is clearly a huge need for people to get cash out of their unwanted gift cards. Its been over a year now and we are still in business and growing.

Whats really cool is that the most cashed strapped people/consumers can make you rich

Surprising since there are more than a few of these websites out there already. Would definitely be interested in hearing how you're driving visits to the site and all that. Thanks for sharing!

 

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[ejames]

Surprising since there are more than a few of these websites out there already. Would definitely be interested in hearing how you're driving visits to the site and all that. Thanks for sharing!

Yup they're plenty of other sites out there however i think the key to our growth is our marketing which is the queen i believe. Bad customer service but awesome marketing can drive growth until we have enough to fix whatever defects we may have in our service.

We are currently working on fixing our customer service issues.

We are driving traffic in a number of ways.

Organic,
PPC,
CPM,
and Organic via reviews.

 

[ejames]

Yup they're plenty of other sites out there however i think the key to our growth is our marketing which is the queen i believe. Bad customer service but awesome marketing can drive growth until we have enough to fix whatever defects we may have in our service.

We are currently working on fixing our customer service issues.

We are driving traffic in a number of ways.

Organic,
PPC,
CPM,
and Organic via reviews.

SO i just did the math. Looking at our bank statement from Sept 2016 to August 2017 we did about ~900k in rev.

We are shifting strategy and focusing on customer retention.

 

[Duy Skye]

You should integrate more payment methods than the transaction fee will not be too high, such as payment gateway: perfect money, wmtransfer, bitcoin.

 

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[Duy Skye]

Please reply to my message, I have waited many days for that

 

[Duy Skye]

It looks like the ejgiftcards.com gift card project is showing signs of fraud. I have traded on it many times successfully, but I had trouble getting paid with them, I have contacted them many times but did not receive any response from them. I have been waiting for answers from them for almost a month but have not received any response from them. This is evidence of that problem.

 

[Duy Skye]

Tell me how low the seller rate affects the orders, while it has been completed that why the payment was not received but the answer is that the seller rate is low and not received. pay ?
My seller rate is 56.34%, why get the answer "Your seller rate is very low"
I think your actions are seen as a form of scam on a large scale. Please give me a satisfactory answer!

 

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[ejames]

dude half of your cards go bad. We are not in the business of losing money.

 

[Duy Skye]

That is not half of the bad gift card, I have sent you 39 gift cards but only 11 cards have problems so why you say one more, it is almost half again and if the gift card If the gift is not paid, then the other gift cards are also not paid lun? Is that a scam? please give me the correct answer.