Building the foundations (Part 1)
Do you start building the market or formulating the product?
I was reading Justin Mares’ TRACTION, and it is in this book where he advocated that the best way to build a brand is to start marketing while you’re building a product. To gain traction, he believes that the market first needs to be reached and primed for your product, so you have a community to validate your product against. It’s the same thinking that founders have when they try to establish a community behind their products as they build it. For someone like myself who is starting this on top of a full-time job, this means splitting the 3-4 hours per day downtime I have between these two areas. 50/50 split between marketing and product development. This will be a challenge.
Building out marketing
This is the part where I struggle the most and I would argue to be more difficult than creating a product. For me, what made it challenging for me is my lack of clarity about who my market is. Without being able to properly identify this, marketing is a lost cause because the market really defines what channels will need to be used and what content will be generated. Initially I was leaning too heavily on second hand marketing research—reading up on the next big food trends and checking Google Trends, and not doing first-hand research. This has led me to pivoting the product too many times.
My initial market was busy people like myself who wants to eat healthier options but find themselves skipping breakfast because of the prep work. Instant oatmeal and granola bars are the alternatives, but IMO, the market is already saturated with so many good alternatives. RxBar, Flourish, and Quaker Oats were already doing a good job keeping their markets share. While a new player may still enter, it will be a competitive space that I chose to further niche in.
I searched for growing communities on reddit in my attempt to find a niche, and found the r/nootropic community to a ripe candidate. People in this community were very active and they are willing to spend if the quality is great and is research-backed. This community also intersects quite a bit with a new market called bio-hackers. These are people who make intentional efforts through their diet to improve their total wellbeing.
With a different market now, I built out the basic marketing materials to validate my hypothesis: there is market for smoothies that cater to professionals who have a hard time concentrating on their work.
To validate this, I set up a landing page using Squarespace and had Google Ads to get potential customers. This approach has worked well for me when validating the job portal website, so I thought of running the same playbook.
I created the packaging using Adobe Photoshop and some packaging templates from PSDmockups
Stock photos from Unsplash and Adobe Stock (I accidentally forgot to cancel my free trial here. Don’t copy me and be diligent in canceling or else Adobe will charge you for cancelling too early in your contract).
Copywriting was purely done by myself, but critiqued by peers. I referred a lot to examples on marketingexamples.com and getscrapbook.com. I also could have gotten more help from tools like CopyAI as well.
The results
Week 1
The first week was dismal with a very high bounce rate. Upon further inspection, I found out that my site was loading so slow, to the point that it would not even load for a majority of people who visit it. Some tests I did was to ask users to load it if they get a link of it on Facebook Messenger or Instagram. While the page loads when you type in the URL, it does not load when the link is opened on these channels. Another useful tool I found PageSpeed Insights. It gives you a preview on how majority of users would have seen your landing page
To fix, it I hired a guy on Fiverr to optimise my site. Initially I was thinking of DIY’ing this but I also know that I already spent too much time creating the design and building out the landing page on my own, and optimising sites is also outside of my domain of expertise so I deferred to people who do this for a living instead. Within a day, my site’s desktop speed went from a 23 to a 84. Not bad.
Week 2
With the same Google Ad and landing page and a little tweak on the landing page’s messaging, I watched in anticipation for better results this week.
CTR ended up around 14% which was amazing by CPG standards. However, those clicks are not converting. There were 0 conversions in 2 weeks. This tells me two things:
The ads are not reaching the right market. Looking into the keyword themes on my ads, this seems to be the case.
The messaging on my landing page is weak, and is not resonating with my market.
In short, I don’t actually understand my market, and for me to do that, I need to be genuinely interested to be part of the nootropics community, a market that requires a lot of research to be able to target properly. These people value research a lot, and I just don’t think I’m interested enough in doing that. I realised that my market needs to be a market I am a part to reduce the effort on my part. And so, I go back to the drawing board to figure out who exactly my market is.
Building the product
Creating a product is fun. I spent countless hours in the kitchen just experimenting with food and tweaking the flavor. If you know, you’d know that I can eat anything and will eat anything. I mean it. My partner himself wouldn’t even eat the things that I will still eat even past the expiration date, or things that may not look so appetising (maybe except balut?). Any food that passes the sniff test and small bite test will do for me.
First iteration of the product was just a healthier variation of instant oatmeal with a nootropic twist. I bought multiple brands of oatmeal from Quaker Oats to Nature’s Path, and other oatmeal alternatives like muesli. What I didn’t like about them was the dismal serving size, the fact that I have to microwave them and wait for 5 minutes (at one point the oatmeal overflowed from the microwave), or that I can’t have them cold if I want to get it fast (these would have been overnight oats). For flavours, I made a shopping spree at a bulk market and bought a little sampling of each their natural powders. It was a long process of mixing and matching flavour profiles until I found one that I really liked.
The second iteration was a something that solved these pain points, and it meant turning instant oatmeal into a different product—oat smoothies. It took me a while to get to the idea of using the term “smoothies.” I started with “oat mix” to differentiate what I have. There were already a lot of competitors in the smoothie space, and I’d like to differentiate. But there’s a counterargument from April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome), customers want something they’re familiar with and smoothies are something my customers are already familiar with. They can anchor to smoothies, they can’t anchor to oat mix. I need to position my product as a smoothie.
I retained the flavour profile and ingredients, but now it’s easier to make and consume. You just add water and chug. Easy.
Creating the product is one thing, but getting it to the hands of customers is another. My next focus then is really knowing who my market is, and figuring out how to get to them.