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BOS COFFEE: Weekly OKRs – July 30th
OUR MISSION: To fund the release of every rehabilitated orangutan back into the rainforest – one supporter, and one cup at a time.
Q3 OBJECTIVE: Establish BOS Coffee as a suitable replacement for supporters’ (AKA customers) existing home coffee.
- KR: 50 new supporters a month – 60%
- KR: 30% monthly returning supporters – 60%
- KR: $2,000 a month in sales 100% <- this is my feeling we will hit this goal
PRIORITIES THIS WEEK
- Getting shipment out. DONE. Happy to say that we got all newsletter shipments out on-time.
- Why do people buy our coffee?- IN-PROGRESS. Learning the process. Set up interviews with friends. The #JTBD Method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzezRI9KNKY
- Improve transactional emails. IN PROGRESS. I’m keeping a close eye on this to better all transaction emails.
- Subscription errors. IN PROGRESS There is a bit of complexity with PayPal and our software. Causing me a lot more work. Exploring a fix to streamline.
NEXT 4 WEEK PROJECTS
- RETENTION: Implement a wide range of automated engaging customers emails (Welcome, Abandon cart, Birthday, etc.)
- CUSTOMER EXPERINCE: Improve Product Packaging with Logo Stamp & Box Insert
- CUSTOMER EXPERINCE: Update website with copy and smoother flow
- OPERATIONS: Set-up shipping to EU
NOTES: As you can see, objective & key results are constant, but projects are changing to hit the objective. This week I focused on #jtbd interviews. Before talking with our customers, I want to experiment with the method on friends. My goal is to understand how the coffee in their kitchen ended up there. When I wasn’t preparing for interviews, I was fulfilling orders and tweaking our software to be more automated.
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BOS COFFEE: Weekly OKRs – July 23rd
OUR MISSION: To fund the release of every rehabilitated orangutan back into the rainforest – one supporter, and one cup at a time.
Q3 OBJECTIVE: Establish BOS Coffee as a suitable replacement for supporters’ (AKA customers) existing home coffee.
- KR: 50 new supporters a month- 50% chance of success
- KR: 30% monthly returning supporters – 20%
- KR: $2,000 a month in sales – 80%
PRIORITIES THIS WEEK
- Newsletter sold 1,100 EURO worth of coffee. DONE. Thursday & Friday busy fulfilling orders
- Redesigned all transactional emails. DONE. Better communication and flow to track orders from payment to delivery.
- Add package tracking. DONE. Every customer can now track their package via DHL.
- Create FAQ: DONE. This will evolve into something very useful.
- Customer experience tweaks to the Website. DONE. Bunch of small changes that add up. You can see changelog here: Changelog – BOS Coffee (orangutan.de)
- Re-engaging existing customers strategy. IN-PROGRESS. Heavy research into automating post-purchase retention email with MailChimp.
- Post-purchase customer survey – IN-PROGRESS. We need to know what motivated people to buy our coffee. Researching JTBD Method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzezRI9KNKY
NEXT 4 WEEK PROJECTS
- Set-up JTBD Survey
- Test Influencers Marketing
- Set-up Instagram Shop
- Test giveaways & Contests on Facebook & Instagram
- Reach out to Gorillas or Flink
- Green Banking Rewards program.
- Setup Amazon Store
- Press release
- Set-up shipping to EU
- Secure first retail
- Improve Product Packaging
NOTES: I’m radically focused on user experience and retention. There’s no reason we can’t deliver a great experience. Next, we need to find out what motivates people to buy our coffee. Demographics are not enough. The amount of orders we got in is showing me where our fulfillment needs work.
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BOS COFFEE: Weekly OKRs – July 16th
OUR MISSION: To fund the release of every rehabilitated orangutan back into the rainforest – one supporter, and one cup at a time.
Q3 OBJECTIVE: Establish BOS Coffee as a suitable replacement for supporters’ (AKA customers) existing home coffee.
- KR: 50 new supporters a month
- KR: 30% monthly returning supporters
- KR: $2,000 a month in sales
PRIORITIES THIS WEEK
- Secure first retail NOT DONE: Got a request from a store. We are talking. I need to work out pricing structure with roaster & BOS.
- Re-engaging existing customers strategy: NOT DONE: Watching tons of YouTube videos to create a retention strategy plan to execute on.
- Improve Product Packaging NOT DONE: Submitted designs for BOS approve. This will be a process. Baby Steps to awesome packaging.
- Set-up Facebook Shop & Pixel DONE: Shop is live. Tracking everything with a FB Pixel via server side API
- Set up package tracking with DHL –DONE: Orders now are being charged for DHL with tracking.
- Finalize Anthony & BOS relationship DONE: We had productive meeting. I’m thrilled. All my attention on hitting these OKRs.
- User Experience: DONE: Increase page speed by tweaking and removing imagines & plugins
NOTES: We can do a much better job on user experience and retention. I am focusing on this in July. What is the point of getting new supporters if we can’t wow and keep existing? Taking the baby step approach. One tweak at a time. And we finally got a thermal printer.
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Playing with Amazon Sales Center
A few weeks ago I started playing with selling on Amazon for a Brand I’m building. There is a lot to learn before you can sell as a Brand on Amazon. Yesterday I made my first sale yester while I was on a boat with the family. It was for a vacuum cleaner adaptor. Today I’m sitting at a café fulfilling the order. Its all coming together.
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Why is being alone scarier than failing?
I set a goal to launch five ideas in 2021. This would atone me for failing to launch past projects and help me get over my fear of launching in public. But somehow this morphed into “launching five of my ideas with other people.”
Before the New Year, I approach someone I worked with on Gvbck to join me on my Sharescrption idea. But after two weeks, it was clear that the partnership was not working. I’ve been here before. Sadly plenty of times. I know what someone who is not committed feels like. There is a simple test…. stop calling.
And that is what I did three weeks ago. I stopped calling. If he calls me we have a different problem. But if he does not call me I’m right. Not committed.
He has not called me in three weeks. In that time I built and launched Sharescrption from scratch. And it’s making sales.
The most important question here is not why didn’t the partnership work. It’s how did “launch five ideas” morph into “launch five ideas with other people.” I’ll need to do a little soul searching to answer that one. This is a generational problem. Like my father before me, Barba’s have more success when they go alone. Yet, they do everything they can to not be alone. Why is being alone scarier than failing for us Barba’s?
Another thing COVID has forced me to accept is that I can do a lot more alone than I thought I could and it’s way faster. Going forward I’m going alone.
Keeping the thumb in the photo #Wabi-sabi. -
Use what you have
Yesterday I bought the domain for the “all in the family” project. Now I need to set up our email for my partner and me.
Last year, I bought additional licenses and force people to use Microsoft Office. I had to write a blog post to help our sales guys connect Outlook to HubSpot. What a waste of time, especially since the product we sold was wrong. 2020, so many hard lessons.
But not in 2021. We use what we have. I will only consider using new software when what we have doesn’t work anymore.
Look, I don’t know if this is the right more, but the restrictions and doing less could reduce the pain of failure. Also, doing less cuts down on my tendency to feel good doing busy work.
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How to set up HubSpot Sales on Outlook in the Browser.
This post I’m sending to my sales team. It’s a step-by-step how-to guide on setting up the HubSpot sales app on Outlook.com in the browser.
The HubSpot App allows us to:
- Add New Contact from Email Address
- Insert Emails sent and received to that contact in HubSpot
- Track email opens and clicks.
NOTE: If you’re not on my team, make sure your Microsoft admin has integrated HubSpot into your Microsoft 365 account.
Step 1:
After you create a new message click on the three vertical dots on the bottom.
Step 2
Click on the HubSpot Sales – Sales Tools
Step 3
Log in to your HubSpot account and pin the HubSpot app to your sidebar. Every time you create a new email you will see the app.
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We now have 3 pilot partners, but not so fast
Focusing all my attention on sales is paying off. We are starting to see a true “product-market fit”. We now have three worthy pilot partners wanting to work with us. These new partners are charities, not businesses. The problems that charities want solved are different than those of businesses. The app we built during the pandemic lock-down solved the business problems of our first pilot partner. This means we need to invest more time and money into building something new.
We need to find more partners to reduce the risk of building the wrong product. Believe me, I’m itching to get started working on wireframes. Building stuff is what I love to do most of all. It is very tempting to say, “One partner proves there are hundreds more. Let’s build it fast before someone else does!” But I will never make the same mistake I made with our last partner.
We need to find more partners like the ones who said yes to reduce the risk of building the wrong product. Or, worse yet, something no one wants. We need to justify the investments we will need to make to update our current app. We also need to confirm that this can one day become a sustainable business.
I will continue to focus on speaking with charity partners. Learn more about who they are and what they want. We need to be more certain it’s worth investing more time and money in launching a pilot.
