Micael Widell made sure that everyone brought something home from his arsenal of experiences.
For me was the pointer that
“> 50% of your funding should go to marketing”
I’ve actually built an ecommerce myself. www.inEar.nu
I did it last summer, and a big component why was to learn to make websites. I was mind-boggled by the amount of people who are self-learned web-designers. The programmer at one of the Startups I was an intern for said that he sold his first website before being able to make websites, later going home and learning to do it. Indeed even Daniel Ek (founder of Spotify) did the same thing as he reported at the interview at Tech fest.
However the main purpose of making the site was of course to make a profit. But I wouldn’t regret making it if it didn’t. The outcome?
When I had the cheapest prices on the market, I usually got around 3 orders per day. I did this even though profits where non-existent to create an awareness of the brand. When I later increased the prices, I got nearly zero visitors.
Everything Micael said made sense to me and just hammered home the belief structure I’ve gotten through the experience! An ecommerce is a place where you want real
people to spend their real money. You can’t expect them to do so without good branding and marketing.
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Over the past year, a big reason of being an incomplete online-entreprenour was the lack of knowledge regarding the importance of marketing.
inEar.nu was one example, I have another example (which I’ll share later perhaps). Now I won’t make the same mistake with
Studieportalen.nu and StartupJournals.eu ! (not yet launched)
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Something I remember from a recent seminar by JT Foxx (Worlds #1 wealth coach) on branding.
“Prada can buy a bag for 50 dollars, put their name on it and sell it for 5 000 dollars.
Would that work if you write your name on it instead? Most probably not.
Why? Because of branding!”
And not even a great product saves you the effort of marketing/branding! E.g Elon Musk gave 20 $ to the first users of Paypal. Up to an amount of some billions! (If I remember
correctly)
So always expect to put a lot of effort in marketing and branding and make place for it in your budget!