marketing, bootstrappingA few years ago I noticed a gap in the market for VERY high quality hand processed printing services (EG photos, artwork, posters), low quantity, high quality, good margin.
I set up a basic but working website, and it worked but wasnt particularly profitable, primarily because I was running it as a side-line. Basically it would pay for its own Adwords costs. I then sold the equipment & business and moved on…
Anyway, I am now in a position where I can invest in better equipment and spend a couple of months working on a decent new website, branding, UX etc etc and want to give it another go, but properly. There is still a gap for this sort of service in the UK, aimed at photographers, artists etc who want to display or sell their work.
My question is really, how can i kick the new business into hyper-growth? I am not able to throw thousands of pounds at advertising, so need to make the most of what is available free or cheaply (Bootstrapping??)
My re-startup plan:
Get the equipment in place and the process refined
This is basically where i got to last time, it sort of stagnated at this point. Now comes the hard bit, growth. Ideas include:
Contact art & photography magazines & websites and encourage them to try the service for free.
Before you do anything, and I mean anything, you should focus on this:
Contact art & photography magazines & websites and encourage them to try the service for free.
Do it for 3 months. If they buy from you, have someone else print it. Even if all you earn is $1. Why? You need to validate the business before you invest your money into it. Every other thing in your list can be done if this works out.
Honestly, you ask something, which has no true answer. I try to throw in some things that could work and which are within your budget.
Lead generation: I see your only channel, right now, is AdWords isn't it? You already, have some kind of recommendations concept. I think, you really should get into "affiliate" as publisher. Here you got to introduce some advanced tracking mechanisms, but this could scale quite nice.
Customer satisfaction: As you said, you want to have a close relation to your customer. By introducing a web service, a close connection is quite hard to accomplish. You could offer some kind of support chat (like tawk). Customer satisfaction comes from quality of your service and "additional costs" a user has to pay. Additional costs could be produced by waiting, errors in you software, etc. all the things, which could have a negative influence on the relationship of you and your customer. You need to keep these costs as low as possible.
Customer Loyalty: You already mentioned E-Mails, which distribute news about your services and offerings. Have you thought about other incentives, like mass discounts and some kind of stamps system: After creating an overall revenue of over 100$, get a discount of 10$ coupon.
Please remember, of course there are other possibilities, but you asked for things, which could be achieved relatively easy. Also think about different measures for different customer groups.
Other channels could be commercial over any media, creating a own community which focuses on certain artistic contents, creating online content (either an own blog or get into writing for other media sites). Get in touch with possible distributors of your service (small groceries stores, etc.) and offer them to use your offerings as addition to their own.
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