How to scale and automate a business from 0 to $20k in 10 days

This is a story of how marketing and automation scaled an idea to a front page listing on Shopee, a nice bit of pocket money, and a seed to a new business.

I’ve been reading about online businesses for a while now, and really couldn’t believe how some people can sell items that are in no way necessities but fun to have – and make a killing.

I’m talking about disposable plates, overpriced bottles, apple knock-offs, face-mask holders.

In fact, I would secretly laugh at people for buying such products. But the world is a big place, and one man’s trash is another’s treasure.

What I thought was trash, turned out to be a profitable endeavour.

Stewart, who’s good with connections, has a friend who just so happened to produce some products for the quarantine, think of face-mask accessories, sanitisers etc, and they needed a way to market it.

At first, Rachel, my partner posted it on some Viber groups and her network. Things started building up and at one point she was spending the whole day messaging clients giving product details and taking orders.

At some point, she noticed a ceiling: posting on Viber every few hours and handling all these messages is a big hassle, and the reach in the Viber communities were around 10k users. Imagine that the population in the Philippines is 14 million! Leading to –

Optimisation #1: Broadening Reach from 10k potential reach to 300k

So, I helped by creating a facebook and instagram presence with a few images of the product catalog.

A day later, we had 2 post views.

I’ve never done ads before, but I thought I’d just try and jump the gun, $2 budget – targeting housewives that love to shop online. And that’s where the world of ad spend opened up to me. We quickly jumped from 2 profile visits to 12000,

Now, I was able to reach up to 100k people a day depending on how much I was willing to spend.

(If you’d like to know details, send me a message, I’d love to share how we got to the front page of Shopee,

Sales started flooding in, lots of inquiries! And a lot of headache for my partner Rachel, who now got a few hundred messages that she had to process, leading to…

Optimisation #2: Automating processes

There are a few topics that could be automated:

• Inbound messaging and FAQs
• Handling Orders

Auto-messaging and FAQs

The first step we took was create an autoresponder. This way most of the messages could be answered without the need for human intervention. https://manychat.com/ helped a lot with setting this up and really saves Rachel at least 4 hours a day in not having to check and respond to messages.

Handling Orders

The initial method was as follows:

Customer sends an inquiry -> Rachel collects order details -> collect payment -> check stock -> Pack order -> call courier -> coordinate pickup.

So then we decided why not simplify this process by outsourcing the order handling to Shopee? (Or any other e-commerce platform than can handle all order handling and logistics). Now the flow looks like this:

Customer messages -> FB/IG redirects to Shopee -> customer places order->

Rachel checks all orders on Shopee -> packs orders-> calls courier->Shopee handles the rest.

We decreased Rachel’s work from 5 steps to 3 steps! Now from a full-time job handling orders, she just needs to pack and ship out. And this is even further automated when packing is done by a packing team – which will be done next.

Optimisation 3: Data Analytics and Reporting

At the start, as many traditional business do, the sales were written on a piece of paper, then it evolved to an excel sheet, and then to a semi-automated google sheet.

We can now pull data from our Shopee for sales, FB for ad-spend and put it all in one place where we can make informed decisions on what to do next to optimise the business.

The sales look quite healthy, but the return on ad spend was a bit erratic. Leading to the next step:

Optimisation #4: CRO Conversion Optimisation

There are lots of ways to improve conversion depending on your goals. Facebook allows you to optimise your targeting based on your goals: it could be that you want more traffic, more likes on your page, or in our case more sales conversions.

By getting the exact demographics, that you want to target, you can increase your conversion rate:

In this case, we wanted to target Female shoppers between 25 and 45, the perfect target for these kinds of products.

Conclusion

So what did I learn from all of this?

1. Digital Marketing is fun.
2. There are opportunities everywhere, as long as you search for it.
3. I want to generate more value for the people around me.

Thanks for reading! I hope this was interesting. If you’d like to have a chat, please send me a message! Maybe we can find some treasure together.

-R