How I reached 3.7 million people posting canvases to YouTubers
Flashback to 2017. I'd just launched my first ever startup selling canvas prints. Sales were dwindling. And I needed to get eyeballs on my product in the run up to Christmas. So:
- I tracked down 10 YouTubers who did regular mail unboxing videos
- Posted customised canvas prin
Trending on Indie Hackers
3.7 M ?
That's impressive
Thank You!
Did it convert? Did you end up making money?
In truth sales numbers were bad. We must have only sold around 15 canvases of the back of these views. That meant conversion was absolutely awful, about 1 / 1000. Now you might think, "with such awful numbers, this whole thing is a load of rubbish. The traffic they got from YouTube was complete junk etc ..."
But, in spite of not making any money, I still think there's an interesting marketing lesson here. My theory was that our landing page converted incredibly badly. You couldn't just click "buy", you actually had to write a custom tweet yourself. Which took thought, We had built an editable tweet onto our website but I'm not sure people really new how to use it properly.
For example one person who bought our canvas didn't edit the tweet at all, and just bought the explainer placeholder tweet and I refunded them .
Although we messed up on the sales I think that if someone had a landing page which they know converts well got the same amount of traffic this would have worked.
But this all happened a few years ago, I'd come straight out of uni, and I wasn't a good enough businessman yet. This failure helped sharpen me up. From now on every idea I do is properly validated. So we don't run into the same mistake as this.