First Idea: How to Build a Koji Chamber site
Hey y'all!
After spending a bunch of COVID unemployment time catching up on reading, I had a good talk with a buddy who recommended I check out indiehackers. After some inspiration and racking my brain a bit, I realized I have experience in a niche but growing community - koji. For the uninitiated, it's a specific type of mold that's grown on rice and is one of two primary ingredients when making miso, soy sauce, and sake. There's a lot of literature on how to build curing chambers for charcuterie out there, but not nearly anything for koji chambers, where you can incubate and grow the mold on your rice.
I went ahead and bought kojichambers(dot)com, put together a parts list with anecdotes/gotchas about each bit, and then linked to a specific item using an amazon affiliate link. It's an incredibly simple website. I don't expect this to ever make money, but nonetheless it would be cool to see something come of the idea.
For marketing, I linked the website to reddit.com/r/koji and also from a blog post of mine that's the first result on google for "pearled barley koji". I've had about ~100 visitors today, but don't know where to go from here. All of my experience has been in B2B SaaS working on distributed systems, so I'm totally out of my comfort zone.
Specific Questions
- Should I start reaching out to vendors stating that I'll gladly advertise/discuss their product (e.g. koji spores, books, etc.) on my site?
- Would this be something worth creating a mailing list for to track the folks I could sell to? Is it too early to consider that?
- How much does SEO matter? I like fantasizing about how my thing will be full of great information and naturally rise to the top, but that's probably not super realistic.
Super excited for you ⚡️ well I just learned about koji today thanks to you, so thanks for that!
How much does SEO matter? I like fantasizing about how my thing will be full of great information and naturally rise to the top, but that's probably not super realistic.
SEO is a game & a long haul one
These days it's about site speed, mobile-first, and 'clean' design with nice, easy code...the dream. Minified JS and CSS are two things that people are focusing on along with useful content to boost rank.
Generally speaking, you've already gone some way to making that happen with your links - also, linking from Medium back to your website will help for sure. Winning (very legit) links that come back to your site will be beneficial.
Would this be something worth creating a mailing list for to track the folks I could sell to? Is it too early to consider that?
Never too early for a mailing list!
It sounds like you genuinely want to create something that is useful, and interesting. Literally that it the easiest and best way to build brand loyalty, which is in short supply these days. Because you wouldn't be so overtly trying to sell.
Email lists are by far the best sources of customers and the best way to convert sales + repeat sales in the long run. For context, I used to have a tiny 500 mailer from my etsy, and after just 1 year, consistently had 10% conversion at least + repeat customers.
Thanks for the reply!
I spent lunch thinking of ways to produce content while also scratching my itch to learn more about the space (amateur fermentation), and I think the best path would to just reach out to professionals in the industry, so chefs using koji and using linkedin to chat with people on the more industrial or scientific side of things.
On a side note, looks like some of those amazon affiliate links have already converted to purchases and I'm genuinely surprised/giddy that this is kind of working.
No worries, I had some miso for lunch haha.
That's awesome - partnerships are the way forward!