Hey!

Long time lurker and learner on this sub, inspired by all the many great stories I’ve come across. Often when I’m feeling least motivated I revist this sub and always leave feeling inspired - so I’m hoping this post can do the same for some people.

No, I’m not a millionaire, and yes, this could all come crashing down tomorrow, but I seem to have figured out something that works consistently - and most importantly - can scale.

There’s quite an interesting backstory about how this business came around, but I’ll share that another time if anyone is interested.

So, let me share you what I was doing to make around 2k per month, and not even breakeven.

Firstly, I was selling exclusively on google ads, with a ROAS of around 1.7. I could only achieve this by selling our products at a razor thin margin, so I was actually losing a bit of money during this time. This went on for about 6 months, from January 23 until July 23. Throughout this time I’d dabbled with ads on Meta but nothing ever really took off - because I didn’t understand the importance of creatives. An image of your product alone is rarely going to work.

In June, I tried a new method. I created a video showing off our best selling product. It was a simple video, but highlighted all of it’s key features. It wasn’t super professional, I mean I was literally on my bed with holding the product and showing it off becuase the bedsheet was the only semi-decent background I could find.

Anyway, the day after I ran this video on Facebook and Instagram, I hit £290 in a single day, with an AOV of £72. The whole WEEK before this I only managed to do £300 with an AOV of £27

I didn’t change anything, and the next day, I did £469 - my best ever day before this was £300 but I was generally happy if we managed £100 in a day, so this was mindboggling.

The next day - £816!!! Each of these days I was only spending £40 on ads, so to get back £816 was truly amazing and more than double our previous best day by some margin! The best part was, we hit that figure by about 2pm, and then hit our facebook daily spend limit - otherwise who knows much we could’ve done in one day! For a few days the ROAS was around 10-15. Months later, I still sit around a 3-5 ROAS each month which is very profitable for us, and way better than the 1.7 we used to get via google.

This all started all in July 2023, and I managed to hit nearly 12k for the month. My previous best month was 3.8k - and I broke-even. Because this 12k was our best selling product that had a healthy margin, I netted about 4k that month.

I fully sold out of stock in July, and had to wait a month for new stock. I was ‘open’ for only about 5 days in August - but still managed around 4.5k - my second best ever month.

Since then, we’ve had continuous struggles with maintaining stock because the lead time is 60 days, and I simply haven’t got the working capital to buy enough of the stuff.

That said, here are the numbers by month since my new advertising strategy in July:

- July - £11,937.10 - AOV 45.06

- August - £4335.85 - AOV 44.18

- September - £20,567.70 AOV - 46.76

- October - £25,053.33 - AOV £47.40

- November (MTD 24th Nov) - £35,557.62 - AOV 48.39

We’re on track to do about 45k in November which to me is faily mindblowing! My goal is 100k revenue per month consistently which will be around 30k net per month. I come from a low-income background so this would be pure insanity to me.

All of this was only possible because of my advertising strategy on Meta. I watched countless videos and tried different things for MONTHS, but when I found what worked, I simply repeated the process and increased the daily budget. It’s not complicated and I’m 100% confident you can do this too, you just need to find what works and then scale it.

I’m confident I can continue to scale this because every time I increase the advertising budget, the revenue follows. We’re simply bottle necked by stock levels. A pretty good problem to have if you ask me.

Anyway, I hope this shares a little of what is possible. Our business isn’t anything particularly new, it just uses a new advertising angle. If you want me to go into more detail on anything then I’ll do my best to reply in the comments. For obvious reasons, I will not be sharing our products on website here.

  • admajestyB
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    1 year ago

    Nice write up! For it to be more beneficial to the readers here, would be nice to get some granular details.

    • Did you test multiple variations of the video you found working? Tried different hooks?
    • Are you starting to experience ad fatigue with that one video you scaled? Or are you scaling multiple videos simultaneously?
    • What prevented you from securing a loan or investment to fund inventory / prevent the fulfillment constraints?
    • Is the November sales increase partly due to a strategy shift or purely due to the typical Q4 increase in consumer spending? Does what you sell have an element of seasonality?
    • Do you run ads to a landing page / advertorial, or straight to a typical Shopify product detail page? Anything you’re doing to increase conversion rates?

    I think answering these specifics and “talking shop” might be beneficial to everyone here and something concrete they could take away. Obviously non pressure to answer. - Simon

    • maxmilnerOPB
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      1 year ago

      Great questions! Allow me try and answer them.

      1. Nope! The first one did quite well. Now that the hype has died down slightly and we don’t hit the 10 ROAS we did for the first few days, so i now test a couple of videos each week. Not all have worked well.

      2. Some yes - but they still perform well so i still run them. As said above I introduce new videos regularly. I also now run a couple of image ads now our brand is a bit more known.

      3. Not wanting to give up equity, or risk a loan. This all happened fast and I thought it could end quickly. I knew after a few months of being this profitable our cashflow would be much better - and we’ve reached this point now. I’m also considering an exit in a few years and want to retain equity. I may consider investment for US expansion as we only sell to UK currently.

      4. Yes we’ve been capitalising on BFCM. When we released our BF sales we did 3.5k in one day. Also propensity to spend is generally a bit higher in q4 anyway. It is not a seasonal product though, and we were trending up and up before q4. I expect q1 24 to be slower though.

      5. Most ads run to a ‘collection’ page - as we offer a core product along with bundles so the customer gets to see all that’s available. I’m doing my best to improve CRO all the time with images, gifs, web speed, guarantees, free shipping etc.

      Great questions Simon, much appreciated!