First Store.. 1 day away?
Our side project, Elvenda, is a B2B dropshipping platform. You sign up as a supplier and receive orders, or sign up as a dropshipper and get a ton of new products.
It’s pretty cool. It’s a totally different take on a model that’s been done before, so we’re interested to see how it goes once we land a few stores.
We’re laying the tracks as the train is coming along behind us, which is a fun kind of stressful. I’m still coding up critical parts of the app – you couldn’t filter products until yesterday. But of course, the clock is ticking and we need to validate this idea, so we can double down or get on with our lives.
Tom, the other half of the project, is emailing customers like crazy trying to get them to try out the platform. We’re not just building this thing in the dark, we’re talking to people who are excited and who want to use the project. Without looking at the numbers, it feels like 10 emails leads to 2 ongoing conversations leads to 1 person who creates an account.
We’re super happy with that – we’ve got no social media presence, no google search presence, not much content, and the app is pretty barebones. Hopefully that metric just gets better over time, and hopefully we start ranking for some organic long tail terms over time too.
Tomorrow is the day that we’re going literally knocking on doors. Tom and I both used to work for an ecommerce store, and we’re going in together for a chat and hopefully walking out with our first connected store (who also has thousands of SKUs, so it’s a heavy hitter). Then out for a burger to commemorate our first store.