It just don’t work - a recap

Hey everyone,
a friend of mine and me started an online shop for e-cigarette-liquids last year in October as a side project. We both are neither smoking or vaping, but we thought the margin there is good to build a premium liquid services and have the flexibility to create a nice product with a great customer service. A recap.

Who we are

We’re both 22 years old (21 back then) living in Berlin. He was a trainee in software development back then. I’m working full time as a full stack developer and studying BI in parallel. So I was responsible for at least the hole IT part and also for creating an „online brand“. He was responsible for the content and all the stuff we needed to be aware of having an online shop from the legal perspective and so on.

That was our plan

Back then we hosted some nice evenings together with some friends and were smoking hookah. I was searching for a service which would deliver various tobacco to us to taste them, maybe in a monthly subscription or something - but I couldn’t find something. I started investigating and found out that you just got a small, fixed price with those tobacco, since there’s a tobacco tax. So there isn’t really a chance to build a premium service with. Some time flies and I thought: „okay, but what about e-liquids?“. There was the margin you need to create a premium subscription service so I asked my friend to join me building a platform for it.

After 1/2 year with a lot of learnings, development, investigation and all that stuff we’ve launched our landing page which was a success for us since we’ve collected around 30 emails just via Instagram and Facebook posts without having a foot in the market.

After 1 month of refinement we finally launched the website (Version 1.0) and made it to around 20 registrations within the first 2 weeks I guess. Pretty good for what we’ve expected. But no order.

The journey

So we started creating a „liquid box subscription“ (Version 1.0) with an option for a single order too. We started with 10ml liquids and over the time we added two other, more popular, kinds of liquids to our „warehouse“ (we don’t have a real warehouse, we just order from the wholesale on demand).

We took some nice pictures for instagram and the feedback, at least on the pictures, was very good. But the conversion from instagram to a real customer wasn’t really given. Some registrations, that’s it.
When we started back then, we’ve created a big website providing a lot of features to - in the end - just order some liquids. The flow wasn’t that clear for a third one, but we were excited about every feature we’ve added and thought: „dang, that’s it, who else have this?“. At least the feedback which had lead to us was: „I don’t really understand where I can create my order - I just want to have some liquids“. A learning, we had to change something.

At some point we were also starting to corporate with some influencers on Instagram which didn’t brought us the results we hoped for. I guess we were too nice with saying (like): „Hey, we’d like to send you a liquid box and would love the see a posting about our product“. Well, they were thankful but not very useful since they didn’t invested more than 1-2 sentences and that’s it. Another learning.

We’ve started overthinking our solution and started to simplify it a lot. We began with features, which we’ve simply removed or designed in a better way. But at least, we ended up rebuilding the hole website and relaunched it last Sunday (Version 2.0) in a very simple, straight-forward version. So from last Sunday on we no longer provide liquid-box subscriptions and don’t limit the user with the kind or amount of liquids he’ll put into his box. We also don’t ask the user for any data anymore - he can just order as a guest and all the data we need to deliver the box is collected by PayPal.

In general we made some clicks from instagram, but since today we’ve just made it to 5(?) orders in total (I really mean in total, since last October last year). Which isn’t such a pain, since it’s just a side project - but when we think about the time we’ve invested it’s kinda frustrating like: „wtf else should we do to get another order?“.

Also, we’re now having a „flexible“ pricing structure - we minified our margin, since we don’t really want to make a living out of it - and calculating the prices based on the shopping cart. So with every single new product in your shopping cart the price will go down for the next one. With this „feature“ we’re now a lot cheaper from the first product on than all the other online shops - and I thought that could be the thing. :-D

Summary

As I said it’s kinda frustrating. But at least we’ve learning a lot and it’s also good to have a practical part to the university’s theories - since I tried to apply some things learned in the university to this project. At the same time I was also able to understand stuff better based on our project.

For the next project we both would know how to get started in a more efficient way. And we also know, that we wouldn’t create a product in a market we don’t really have to do with since we’re no smokers/vapers and don’t care about stuff like this in our freetime. I’m „burning“ for programming and creating nice UI’s, but that’s the more simpler part on such a project and also not the main topic. So I’d create a SaaS as a next project for example - something I care about.

I’m still unsure about how to spread the word, creating an audience - all that marketing stuff. I guess we would have some more orders when I would know how to get users to the website - since I’m still thinking that we’ve, at least since Sunday, a good product and a „simple as fu**“-journey. I’d appreciate any idea or advice if you’ve one - not to bring the project alive but for extending my personal knowledge. 😊

Yesterday I sent out a newsletter to our registered users from „Version 1.0“ (around 70) and told them about our relaunch.

I’ve started to seeing this project as a big „learning project“ - also with trying out stuff since I think it won’t go any further anymore.

Summarized: it was a learning and still is since I won’t really give up. But I’ll not investing much time anymore since I’d like to focus on other side projects I’d like to start - with all the practical learnings in my „backpack“. I also read that at some point you’ve to say „good bye“ to your baby, and I guess it’s time for that in the near future.

If you want to take a look into it (also if it’s only available in german) go for it at https://liquidkurier.de. Otherwise this is just something I wanted to share with you.

Sorry if there’s something you don’t understand since I’m continuously trying to improve my english.

Best regards from Berlin,
Vince