Progress Update No. 7 - Buried in Work

Lasers & Lowering Packaging Costs

First off, a new PO has gone in for more packaging and this one is special.
Now that I have strong confidence in the quality of the product, I can increase my order size and access better technology and pricing.
For previous lower MOQs, I was limited to digital printing of my pouch packaging. This had higher unit costs and some limitations.

But now I can put in bigger orders (i.e 10,000 units and up), I can use what's called rotogravure printing. This uses cylinders to print, but by far the most interesting bit is that the unit cost drops substantially. I'm talking 3-4x cheaper! 

The other good part is that you can do cooler stuff such as laser etching around the tearline. This gives the pouch that nice smooth opening experience rather than the jaggedy ripping (followed by fetching of the scissors). 

Hitting 300 5-star Reviews

Earlier this month I also hit a small milestone of 300 5-star reviews for the Omega-3 product 🎉🎉.

It's good how they add up slowly and it's nice that after many rounds of small improvements, customers are consistently very happy.

First Ad Production Case Study For Tiny Cult

Switching gears now to the new ad creative production offering under the new company, Tiny Cult - I published the first case study a couple of weeks ago. 

It was about the results we got with one of our trialler DTC brands and how the new paid social ads we made for them gave their account a nice boost.
This was a bit of a test to see whether people engage with this type of content and how effective it might be.

It takes quite a lot of effort to produce these, but it did end up being the best piece of Linkedin content so far. 

Proper Tiny Cult Website Incoming Shortly

Work has also begun on a proper website for Tiny Cult. 
It will be a gamechanger once that's ready as the current crappy placeholder is bothering me!

Linkedin Posting Doing OK

I put some effort into making some semi-regular Linkedin posts. As you can see, it is possible to rack up quite a good number of impressions. But from the graph, it's all about consistency. 
In the future, I will likely build some more resources and systems around this to post more regularly.

Unexpectedly Good SEO Traffic

When I started the blog DTCforever.com I never really expected SEO to be much of a thing.

But the other day I checked out the Google Search Console for it and was pleasantly surprised to see a solid amount of traffic coming into the very first blog post - "AI Image Generation For Ecommerce Product Photography".
I think it helps following some of these steps I outlined before about ranking a new site quickly, because other sites I've created haven't fared so well with their initial posts.

This is mostly because I've inadvertently ranked number 1 for "stable diffusion product photography".

🌯 That's a Wrap 🌯

Coming up, the big focus is on Tiny Cult. The early stages are a bit more work to get things off the ground and the first bit of momentum is always the hardest. 

The good news is we are done now with trials and one-off projects and we're into the next phase now which is making kickass paid social ads for great brands on a regular monthly basis. I'm hiring more people to handle the increased workload, whilst building out systems and SOPs as a foundation. 

I've also got a couple of blog posts sketched out to do with my own DTC brand Healthy Yeti and some of the work done there - esp. about the price changes I made a couple of months back. 

Also, I think I'll do these roundup-style Progress Updates once a month from now on as that feels achievable to stick to.  So...until next month!

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