I thought no-one would bother filling out contact details / CC number without getting to a desktop first. After looking at your data and then checking my own analytics, I'm wrong.<p>Even for Candy Japan, I see 13% of conversions from mobile, 12% from tablet. And this despite the site not being designed for mobile at all. Sounds like fixing my mobile side might actually be a great opportunity for getting some more conversions.
The fact that these boxes keep turning into successful small businesses is amazing to me. Especially when this box already has a competitor that I thought of as soon as I figured out what it is.<p>The article wasn't as insightful as I hoped. Though I'm pretty impressed by that growth in 3 months. You often see things like SaaS growing much slower. I see people talk about taking years to scale to 20k in monthly recurring revenue and they did it in 3 months. I appreciate that they shared their story but it seems like mostly they built a following by sharing dog pictures on social media. Maybe that's the lesson?<p>They did drop some info about AdWords not working which sounds like the targeting might have been weak or just not good for their target audience. The 100 conversions from a 10,000 person email list is very low for email. Most lists outperform any other media in conversion rates from my experience but those lists are filtered before people even join. It sounds like they have a bunch of people that simply like dogs and decided to join the mailing list. I could see why the conversion could be so low in that case. I still think focusing on a better mailing sequence is an easily hanging fruit to attack but it looks like social is working for you. It would be interesting to see churn numbers in a few months.
I like the acquisition success story, people bash on Facebook ads but they're probably the best online channel when you have a very specific audience you want to target with high reach (dog owners, UK&I)<p>Just doesn't work as well for retail products / subscriptions when your audience is not necessarily ready to buy, and you just end up with worthless likes and no conversions.<p>For instance, FB targeting women 25-35 for online clothes shopping probably results in lower conversion rates than Google, even though the audience demographics could be the same, because search translates to buying intent.
This looks like such a good place to work. I love dogs and all doggie related things make me happy. No wonder you guys aren't having trouble getting customers.
Great post Niall. Just wondering what groundwork you had laid down before the 90 days. Also, staggering numbers on the Bow Wow Times site. Do you think it's mainly down to the fact that people just love dogs (and articles about dogs) or is there anything you guys did that would be replicable for other B2C markets?