Dear Fellow Rodinhooders,
I am not an active Ask’er in the forum nor do i actively respond to anything asked but YES i start my day with therodinhoods.wpengine.com. It elevates the entrepreneurial spirit in me and connects to lot many fellow entrepreneurs who are as psychic (no offence please) and focussed as me for their concept. No matter how negative and non – supportive your surroundings are in your journey- Alok and TRH’s just keep you motivated all the times. I really thank you for being there on planet. 🙂
I have been working on my project right from 15 Aug 2013 and its been quite an interesting journey so far with my small start up baby www.puremart.in. Yes, i don’t have kids but PureMart is more than a Baby, Love and above any relation of love for me and my partner.
I have been through many bumps in this journey and excited, ready for years to come and pass through any hurdle i face to nurture my baby smoothly. i.e. www.puremart.in.
Being a pharmacist by profession i learnt all what it takes to run an e-shop or e-commerce concept. It’s interesting, challenging and quite depressing at times when you don’t get enough support when you need a supporting hand to guide you. We have served so far to around 1500 families in 27 states 130+ cities and 2 Union Territories as well with a satisfaction rate of 98% and we loose 2 percent coz of shipping partners. Now i understood the pain of big e-com’s when they started their own shipping hands to save cost and any delay.
Still i believe i have not reached to all those e-buyers who are available in cloud. Since PureMart is totally bootstrapped as we learn and grow- we reached to many digital marketing guys who can help us make our presence felt, other than adwords , SEO / FB / Twitter and trust me they asked huge leap of money which is just a dream for me to spend at this moment.
I don’t want to give up if i cant sail the ocean now- all b’coz of funds rather i want to take help from all of you at TRH’s to help me by connecting with genuine start up friends who are also here to nurture their baby start up’s with a vision to make a remarkable start up.
I look forward to read my post tomorrow morning with some exciting helping hands.
Pure & Healthy Regards is what i say while signing off.
Sahil Verma
An entrepreneur from J&K 🙂
asha chaudhry
actually we’ve got lots on trhs sahil…!
abhik prasad
pawan deokule
abhinav sahai
sanjay shenoy
deep malhotra
vishal mehra
if you check our digital media section – you’ll find members who could possibly help you. also pls go through old posts in JOBS – there will be relevant ones for you!
feel free to use the search engine as well!
Abhik Prasad
hey, thanks Asha 🙂
Sahil, I understand your pain and also your frustration at being told to ‘spend money on advertising’ when you are bootstrapping your business.
Paid media is definitely useful but ‘earned media’ works better in the initial stages when you don’t have an advertising budget.
You have already sold to 1500 clients in 30 states so you must be doing something right 🙂
You also have a very niche mix of products and there are couple of things that you can do. (If you aren’t doing it already)
– Offer a regular monthly / bi monthly package: I am not kashmiri but am married to one. As you must already be aware, they always have a stock of almonds / kehwa etc at home which is usually purchased in bulk from a ‘trusted source’ in the local city. Also most of the oldies consider themselves ‘connoisseurs’ in recognizing the best stuff which is why they usually buy from a regular source. Folks like my wife are more forgiving and are open to buying stuff from other sources.
So if you focus your messaging on authentic stuff from J&K, of consistent quality delivered on a regular basis to your home you could build a base of regulars. Try this locally in Jammu.
Send me a mail at abhik@experiamedia.com or call me at 9999 334 995 and we can chat about this and other stuff in more detail.
cheers and don’t give up 🙂
Pawan Deokule
Dear Sahil,
Asha, may have suggested a few names like mine, but I think she is the expert here driving a blog from 1 to 10000 registered users at almost zero cost. 🙂
Firstly, congrats on setting foot into ecommerce with Kashmiri Indian dry fruits. Its a nice simple and transparent website with basic details and you also have a nicely written blog that spells out the passion you guys carry for your business.
While we are entrepreneurs, there is no free meal for any of us! Hence the helping hand that you are looking for; may only stretch based on what you have to offer in return. Digital marketers who may have quoted have their own overhead costs which becomes part of their quote. Hence most of the advice that is given for free may always be available on the internet already!
So lets just concentrate on what you have and have done so far, so we make your future attempts more successful without outside help:-
Your website is your online shop, try and equate it to an offline store. It must give out product information and offers at the entrance and not hidden inside pages. For instance your loyalty program “PURE CASH” is the best offer that should be placed upfront. You might want to put up the offer as a banner even.
Cross check the technical issues like site loading time and SEO through free services on the net and inform your website service provider to make changes.
Blog: While you have started the blog with a few blogs, it is important to keep at it and connect with other bloggers who may share your passion for dry fruits. Your blog will always beat your website in being a quick SEO gainer. For this you need to have content and better content than your competitors. In other words a blog a day keeps your products in viewer’s minds for good.
Social Media: Similar to blogs social media is an important tool to providing quality content and sharing it with your friends and ask them to share with their friends. You must have an objective for your social media efforts before you begin to share content. For instance if you intend to gain sales, do not bother about the number of likes on #facebook or followers and lists on #Twitter but WHO? is connecting with you and sharing your content may be more important to get you the desired effect.
Email marketing: Connect and keep a frequency of connect with your 1500+ customers and build emails that bring them back to your website. #email marketing is one of the most important methods for ecommerce companies to gain loyal customers.
Cost efficiency: If you are spending 2% on logistics, you are one of the least spenders on logistics. Perhaps you can look at other areas within the product procurement and packing where you can save cost. Keep a certain fixed amount out of the cost of production for marketing, Perhaps even Rs. 0.25 p per 250g product can be set aside for marketing efforts and you can sign up for a Google Adwords program.
Starting 7 months ago bootstrapping, 1500 is not a bad number, in fact it is a good base point to grow from, if you get the above efforts right you could grow by 3x to 4x. With this growth in sales over the next 3 months you should be able to afford a support team who can bring you the next 10x growth point.
Trust I have answered sufficiently to ameliorate your frustration. Wishing you all the best!
Sahil
Thank you Abhik Prasad , Pawan Deokule and Asha chaudhry for motivating and connecting with awesome rodinhooders. Indeed i got my piece of cake what i was looking out from TRH’s this morning.
Abhik: Great to know you have a soul mate from valley and indeed pleasure to read the word “Kehwa” in this forum where people hardly know about it. Now coming over to ‘connoisseurs‘ who already exists and those who are looking out for a expert advice while authenticating the real stuff – we are actually trying to fill out the gap here. Being from valley- i born and bought up in Saffron fields. We use to play hide and seek using walnut trees and Almonds Orchids. I shall be happy to serve you and your family if given chance.
Lets talk about business now- I will be connecting with you shortly to discuss more we can do together for PureMart.
Pawan: I really loved each piece of advice and recommendation from your end. We shall be rolling over the changes soon and all the advices will be taken up wisely. One help bro- give me your contact details or email id to connect with you.
asha chaudhry
errrr pawan….. i don’t think alok would agree with you on the “zero cost” factor. we burn a lot of money to run trhs both online and offline!!!
🙂
Pawan Deokule
Sahil,
Glad that the suggestions were helpful. You connect with me here on rodinhoods apart from email: pawan@digicat.in .
Pawan Deokule
LOL!
Surely not. I did say “almost zero”…besides what is your advertising budget for Rodinhoods? 😀
Abhinav Sahai
Asha: Thanks for the recco. I know I took quite sometime to respond but I guess you understand the startup life 🙂
Sahil,
I liked the way you’ve asked for help. Lots of people feel bad about asking for help but I believe as entrepreneurs this is one quality we should build – not think before asking for help. After all it costs nothing 🙂
Anyways, here’s what I think:
1. Make sure you get some basics right. Do some quick performance and SEO audits using:
Go through the reports generated through these tools and share them with your web developers. Make sure your website is healthy and scalable.
2. Upgrade the Google Analytics implemented on your site. Use “Universal analytics” – get more insights on your traffic – understand their interests better and you will be able to serve some better content and maybe personalized deals which might bring them back to your site or maybe force them to recommend it to their friends and family.
3. Now when it comes to actual marketing – I believe there are a few things that you can do. Attached is a presentation which lays down a few things that you should be able to do on your own AND without spending precious startup money. To help you understand better, I’ve also attached a spreadsheet which will show you as to how will your increase sales numbers look like when you do those activities.
Please feel free to ping me on abhinav [at] niswey [dot] com if you have any questions regarding the plan or the numbers, will be happy to “help”.
P.S. Was in Kashmir about 6-7 months back and just loved it! The best thing was the Kashmiri Kehwa, haven’t found something even close to that in Delhi 🙁
Sahil
Thanks Abhinav for detailed help. Insights are pretty helpful and scalable as well. Drop in your contact details . i will get in touch soon.
P.S: Pure and healthy kashmiri kehwa is avalaible at http://www.puremart.in with all ingredients…
Abhinav Sahai
Sahil, I already gave my email id above. Here its again: abhinav@niswey.com
Madhu Vadlamani
Hi,
Hope I can be beneficail on what your idea is… Do reach me@9975154634 or madhu.vad@gmail.com
Abey John
Some more suggestions:
Conversion optimization:
1. The connection to Kashmir is not bold enough on the site. Under your logo add something like Authentic Kashmiri dry fruits or something. This should show up on every page. The visitor should realize within the first 3 seconds of hitting your site what your site is about. Yes, 3 seconds, that’s about all the time you have to grab a new visitors attention. Some say it is 1.5 seconds. But being India let’s say we have 3 seconds.
2. Add a chat box. Olark or something similar. If anyone stays on the site for more than 10 seconds pop up the chat box and ask if you can help them.
Visitor acquisition:
Facebook and Twitter. Build a fan base on FB using paid ads if needed. Borrow the money from your chacha, chachi, bhai, behan etc if you don’t have it. I was going to suggest at gun point but being Kashmir I think we’ll leave that out. 🙂
Take a look at what Nirogam is doing on FB. Follow a similar content style. Find a health connection for each of your products. Have exclusive offers one the FB page. Limit it to one a week. Post ‘walnuts will make your nuts strong’ (okay okay couldn’t resist!) type posts multiple times a day… at least 3.
Don’t bother about other channels just now.
Other suggestions in the thread are also great:
1. Email marketing. Offer email only exclusives deals. Offer incentives to signup for the newsletter.
2. Props to Abhik for the subscription service idea. For a fixed price per year deliver an assortment of fruits every month. You insulate the customer from price fluctuations. The upfront cash will help with the cash flows. You can have special upsells to this crowd.
Focus on identifying health food and dried fruit nuts. Am sure there are at least a few million around. 🙂
Some other observations:
Your title tags need some work. Not a whole lot…. actually forget it. Don’t touch the title tags. Being a little off makes Google gives you a thumbs up.
Switch to dc.js for Google Analytics. That is with demographic and interest tracking. You can use this data to fine tune and refine your audience targeting on FB.