TL;DR: More samples should be available on Thursday.
We’ve had an interesting few days! Our Black Friday sale went quite well, much better than last year, and Saturday and Sunday the orders kept coming in… then Monday happened.
One of our Keto Chow users (and the guy that started me down the rabbit hole that is using avocado oil) posted to the /r/keto subreddit some pictures of himself and his girlfriend and their transformation doing Keto. He also did a shout-out to Keto Chow which he says has been instrumental in helping him do keto effectively.
The thread went a little nuts, traffic to our site went a little nuts, orders for Keto Chow went a lot nuts. I posted on the thread:
In case there was any doubt that /u/JohnnyRockets911 is NOT shilling for Keto Chow: there’s no way I would have told him to post this on the day we were doing free shipping plus a sale on the sample bundles =)
Problem with all this is, now I can’t tell what’s the result of Cyber Monday, what’s the result of the Reddit thread, and what’s a combination of the two! Yes, it’s a good problem to have =) By 2:00 pm, the 8 foot bed of our pickup was completely full and orders were still coming in faster than we could ship them. So we called it a day and will ship the rest that came in today.
Now, as for samples: The “Sample all the Things” bundle sold out last night, it was based on the number of Chocolate samples we had remaining. The bad news is that it can take weeks or even months to get more. The Good news is: I ordered more a few months ago and we are supposed to be getting them on Wednesday afternoon. As soon as we actually for realsies have them on a truck I’ll mark the samples and the sample bundles as back in stock so they can start shipping out on Thursday.
Hi Chris!
Wow, that’s the best kind of bad news for a business, eh? :)
I just wanted to drop a quick note, and let you know that … based on my own experience of having similar “unexpected growth pains”.. the best thing you can do is *communicate* with your customers. Be honest with them. Communicate frequently with them.
When I started my business, all was great… then I got some very unexpected “shout outs” from a customer on a popular (at the time) website, and BAMMO I was in way over my head. Like normally I had maybe 1k customers, and suddenly I was staring at about 5k brand new signups. I didn’t know what to do. I ended up trying to please everyone, and made a mess of things. I pissed off existing customers, disappointed new customers… because I was too proud and stubborn (and greedy) to be honest and communicate the reality of things to all of them. I should have stopped more signups from happening, told the existing ones it would be a while before I could set things up to provide the service they were expecting, etc..
Anyway.. just my 2 cents. I know you’re on the verge of quitting your “real” job, and I hope the previous weekends bump gives you some good feeling about ketochow and the product’s demand and spot in the marketplace. From your post, it sounds like you are already on the good track of excellent communication and being real with yourself and your customers about what is happening.
Congrats!!
Thanks for the timely advice. The best result of the bump is I have a nice fat chunk of cash flow to do the 50% down for the next (far larger) batch I’m planning on for Keto Chow 2.1 – I was a little worried I might have to take out a small business loan to cover it but I won’t need to now.
The biggest problem is this ate into the inventory I have so I’m going to need to kick production into gear about a month earlier than I expected. Don’t want to run out!