Hi Indie Hackers, my name is Ian. I'm the co-founder of sixa.ch, an online marketing agency with a focus on SEO and based in Zurich, Switzerland. First of all, I like the well-written startup stories, personal insights, and the friendliness and spirit of the Indie Hackers community – your effort and spirit are truly inspiring!
I think it is now a right moment to share our startup story, the good and the bad, which has been a continuous process for the last five years. It all started back in the summer of 2013 when my two co-founders and myself were big fans of digitec.ch, nowadays the biggest e-commerce site for electronics in Switzerland. We loved the easy-to-use search and filter capability. In 2013, e-commerce claimed just 4.8% of all sales in Switzerland, and there was no comparable e-commerce site for sporting goods and sportswear. The stationary and small niche shops sold their products for 50% over the European price - very disappointing for Swiss customers.
As self-appointed "digitec kids" and sports addicts, we saw a great opportunity to create something big. The idea of sportspot.ch, e-commerce for sporting articles and sportswear with European pricing and a UX inspired by digitec.ch, was born. We started with extensive market research, where we wrote down all kinds of sports brands, popular sports in Switzerland, and, most important, shops and sellers in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and Great Britain whose reseller pricing was aligned with our pricing conditions. We started to connect with these shops and created a comprehensive list of 25k products, with their essential variations, collected product images, and defined pricing. In the meantime, we also started to create mockups of the product page, category page, and the filter capability.
Core features
With the clear vision in mind to help our customers find their desired products, we built a custom filter for every category page based on the product attributes. We not only focused on the conventional filters, like color or size, we expanded it to also include various other attributes. The best filter capabilities are worth nothing if the customer doesn't use it, so we connected the filters to the customer's body measurements and profile information, which we collected once a customer created an account. That's the point where all the magic happens. Once a customer logged into their profile, we used this data to enrich and autofill the filter. The customers who signed up were not only able to find the perfect fitting product based on the presorted filter, they also had the chance to get a life-long discount of 10% once they enriched their profile. This feature allowed us to improve the user experience and also to cut down the return rate, which is the number one profit killer for most e-commerce sites.
Selling to proof our vision
During the development of sportspot.ch, we were already asked by friends and family members if they could buy products. Since we were active member in squash and floorball clubs, we decided to create two product catalogs, one for squash and tennis and one for floorball and hand them out to our friends. Soon they started to buy our products, and we also had some sales to strangers caused by word of mouth marketing.
Registering our company
Nearly nine months after our initial idea we registered our company, sportspot GmbH, to meet the legal requirements to open a bank account and set up an online payment gateway. As first-time founders, it was a long and tough process to gather all the documents and legal signatures, while there was no step-to-step guidance back then.
All went fine ... until
All went fine until we received a mail from a known importer of floorball articles in Switzerland. The company told us that we have to stop selling our discounted products and to advise on who is selling it to us. At first we were shocked, but after some days we told them that we won't name the seller and that it is legal to buy products in foreign countries instead of buying from Swiss importers. It got even more severe once they forwarded it to the brand itself, to reach out to all the sellers. We knew that this wouldn't have a right end and decided to buy the products from them.
Our approach of buying cheap in foreign countries and reselling the goods for a reasonable price in Switzerland was suddenly dead and not a business case anymore. At first, it didn't seem to be a problem at all since our core vision, to build e-commerce for sporting goods with a customized and deeply integrated filter, was still achievable. Rather than the foreign sellers all around Europe, the Swiss sellers were not willing to send our orders directly to our customers, since all of their customers (stationary and online shops) had to buy products on stock. Considering that there was no way out of buying products on stock and building an enormous warehouse with nothing more than $20k in our bank account, we were done.
Gut feeling and hard decisions
After all these setbacks and a couple of heavy discussions, my co-founders and I agreed on setting more realistic goals. With our new goals, we went back to the drawing board to draft a plan to focus on just one niche and double down there. We checked the whole product catalog and aligned it with our core feature—a comprehensive filter paired with the customer data—and finally decided to build it all on the smaller compression sportswear niche.
Back then, compression sportswear was just used in marathons and triathlons, or, in some cases, by professional athletes, but the trend to wear among amateur or semi-professional athlete existed. This niche convinced us to buy a small stock of $12,000 in products. Right after we received the products, we participated at some of the biggest marathon and triathlon events in Switzerland to sell our products and promote our upcoming shop. It was an excellent experience to be back selling!
Launching sportspot.ch
In July 2014, days before our official launch, our self-developed shop had all the features working, the payment gateway was working, and our products in stock had been updated. However, three significant parts of our launch strategy were still missing: proper accounting software, an inventory solution to manage the stock, and well thought-out marketing strategy. Most of the accounting and inventory management software solutions were client based and not as affordable as cloud solutions nowadays, so we bought an inflated solution that was soon outdated. We bought far too many packaging materials, but it seemed reasonable back then – another mistake that cost us some valuable days of a runway. Also, our marketing strategy was weak; it was just a newsletter that we sent out to our friends and colleagues, as well as flyers, announcing that we were launching. We don't know anything about SEO, Google AdWords, or Facebook Ads; unimaginable, but it was a black box to us.
Our launch in mid-July was a success; no bugs that held back our customers and we also managed to sell some products. But, there was still that bad feeling about all the inbound sales and the missing strategy to reach out to new customers.
A couple of weeks later and tons of Google searches done, we learned how to build up a keyword-set, create a Google AdWords campaign, and create neat text ads. At this time, we were already running low on cash, and the AdWords campaign wasn't satisfied at all. We had to find another marketing channel where we don't spend that much each month and still have outbound sales. SEO seemed to be the perfect marketing channel for us. However, we had to answer the question, "How can we rank on the first page for all the important keywords and how long does it take?". It all started over again, and we improved our URLs, enriched our content, bought expired topic domains and linked to our most important landing pages.
Caused by the negative cash flow and upcoming expenses, we immediately needed another source of income. During our development of sportspot.ch, we were always asked by colleagues if we could help them build websites and consult them on online marketing. My two co-founders reached out to these prospects and gathered some life-saving contracts. We enjoyed working for these clients and soon reached the top positions on google.ch even for keywords with a hard competition.
Time went by fast; it was already early 2015, and we didn't manage to get traction on sportspot.ch although we ranked on the first spots on Google. To decrease the loss as much as possible, granting discounts on our products and selling it for a reduced price on Amazon was our primary focus. Sportspot.ch was shut down in August 2015.
Made a virtue out of necessity
The SEO consulting and web development business was more successful and far less cash intensive. All it took was our passion, time, and discipline. To attract more qualified outbound leads and look more professional forced us to perform with an entirely new name - our second startup, sixa.ch, which is our core business since then was born.
With a clear focus on SEO, an attitude to deliver more than other agencies and pure will to succeed, we built our first service based business. Turning from selling physical products into selling custom-built SEO services was tough. Our approach to building up valuable links for our customers was unique in Switzerland and made our brand more recognizable. Soon we connected not only with our customer's network, but we also managed to work with established agencies in Zurich. Small contracts were getting bigger, and our hourly rate went from $80 to $100 and soon to $140. We cared about our early customers and guided them from simple content strategies on their Wordpress sites to more complex technical SEO audits. Our core growth came from our keyword guarantee which was built-in in our monthly recurring SEO service, where our customers just had to pay the monthly fees once we reached the agreed position for each keyword.
All of our early customers loved our startup story and the attitude to start over again, but once our contracts got bigger, there was the mystery about our legal company name, sportspot GmbH, which didn't match our website "sixa.ch" and confused most of the leads, so there was an immediate need to change the legal business name and legal business reason. All went smoothly this time. We managed to move our bank account and accounting software. We streamlined and automated our billing process, which decreased the time spent doing repetitive tasks.
Raise the bar
In this ongoing process of attracting new customers, learning from them and building a more valuable service, we learned things that we never could have known during our first startup. The constantly changing environment, the daily challenges and the different goals of customers widened our point of view.
Based on this knowledge, we also had to update our service and overall branding. We divided our services into six parts: search engine optimization (SEO), search engine advertising (SEA), analytics, conversion rate optimization (CRO), marketing automation and social media marketing (SMM). Dividing our service allowed us to show our competency and sell it without further explanation. Showcasing and explaining how we work and what the customer would get, strengthened our brand. We implemented our brand experience, not only on our site, but we also brought it to our business cards, e-mail signatures and most importantly to our offers and invoices.
Building a perfect fitting tool
As our projects got more complex, our requirements increased and this had a direct impact on the tools we used daily. We were familiar with tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Google Keyword Planner, Majestic, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpfox, and Hotjar, but our need for comprehensive keyword research and keyword insights weren't satisfied. For us three, it was pretty clear that there had to be an appropriate solution where we could monitor the progress over time, whether it's a small website with 50 keywords and 10 pages or an e-commerce with 100k keywords, deep keyword-sets, and several million pages.
To be more concrete—our newest idea "curv.io" was born. The next logical step followed: building a SaaS tool to "reveal hidden keywords, rankings, competition, and traffic" was evident to us. We started with simple paper drawings and expanded our ideas quickly to interactive Sketch wireframes. We also decided to build curv.io on MeteorJS since we already had some experience with this framework. Since only one of us is a professional coder, building our product on top of reliable APIs to avoid the developing overhead was part of our strategy.
Building a more advanced MVP before shipping it to the public was obvious to us, which was against the typical "launch and ship fast" concept. Maybe it is typically Swiss to launch a product only after several iterations and when it is close to "product-market fit."
Starting our closed beta
We would like to invite all members of the IndieHackers community who are interested in daily keyword tracking and knowing their competitor's rankings and traffic. Be part of our closed beta for curv.io which is starting in the coming weeks.
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