Origins #36 — The Responsibility Is Real
By: Julian Samarjiev
Tags: Business Development, Marketing, Online Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media

Origins #36 — The Responsibility Is Real

Delivering value and creating reactions with the product, while building relationships

The last week prior to launching our online store, we put in a lot of effort to make sure that everything works fine, mostly payments and that the product inventory is displayed correctly on the website.

We also approached testing the website, the same way we did developing our product. We had people from our community go on it and then communicated the feedback.

Thanks to all the people who took the time to help us out!

Feelings

I felt a very strange sudden rush of responsibility, minutes after the store was live. All the work and content produced so far, was pointing towards this day, on which we start shipping the product we’ve been working on for a while.

After some self talk, I managed to ease the tension and come to an understanding that it’s a false sense of a milestone event, as it is just the beginning, instead of an end goal that has been accomplished. So, thinking through it, I was able to get back into a more stoic mindset, ignore the self-imposed “importance” of the event and mentally move on to the next tasks at hand.

First Shipments

Luckily and thankfully we’ve been keeping people in the loop about what we are doing, while also building relationships through the podcast and other social networks. To many of those people, we sent out samples of the product, while it was still in development.

A very good sign was that many of those early testers, liked the product so much, that during our first days of operation they bought a few shirts.

This enabled us to go through the whole process of accepting an order and fulfilling it, making sure everything works and do so in a volume that is manageable, but not overwhelming.

Having an established relationship, also allowed us to check in with them and ask how the payment process was, what the automated emails from our system look like and other customer facing communication.

As of the day of writing this post, those initial shipments are traveling towards their final destinations and we’re eager to ask about initial reactions to a now finalised product + packaging.

With the web store, everything has been very smooth so far, which gave us the green light to mentally step into the next stage of building this brand, which is figuring out how to market the product and get more people to hear about it.

Online Marketing Strategy

As I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we think about marketing in two ways, short-term/transactional and long-term/brand building one.

We consider that in the short-term, in order to start generating some volume or orders, Facebook Ads will be our main mass marketing channel.

Our expertise and interests naturally lie more into creating and investing more time in the long-term projects, which would be creating content and building relationships.

So we’ve decided that we will outsource our Facebook marketing efforts to an agency, or a person, which would enable us to focus on brand and relationship building.

We played with some Facebook Ads, before launch, but we realise that in order to be effective there, we either have to invest a lot of time to learn it, or get someone who knows what he’s doing. We choose the latter, which opens up time and focus to work on our naturally stronger points.

That’s what we are currently up to, looking for a partner to take care of our online marketing efforts. We will let you know how that goes ;)

Marin’s story on the DULO Instagram. Sourcing the community for knowledge ;)

If you know anyone, or are someone who might be interested in working with us, let us know ;)

Thank you for your time! Please give a few 👏 and/or leave a comment. It means a lot us and helps other people hear about our journey!

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