We write a new business update about ever three to four weeks that is shared with our board, investors, and Moment team members. These are not status reports, instead they represent a chronological journal about what we’ve learned in building Moment. Writing these updates forces us to think about what we’re doing, what’s working, and what isn’t.
Below are updates from 2017. You can read updates from 2018, 2016 and 2015.
What a sprint to the finish.
The last week of the year was a microcosm of how we've grown in 2017. We hosted a thank you sale the last week, used trickle email campaigns, and a countdown timer for when the sale would end. All tactics we didn't have in 2016.
It resulted in the last week of the year being up 588% year over year.
A full recap of 2017 is coming in the next few weeks but overall we feel good about our results. We grew 1.7x, ended with $1.5M of cash in the bank, and demonstrated the second half of the year that we can be profitable month over month.
BUSINESS UPDATEWe ended the year with $8.3M in sales. That's up 70% from the previous year. About $300K of potential revenue was recognized in January instead of December because the year ended on a weekend, therefore we couldn't ship the product until January.
We added 35.6K new customers in 2017, enough to fill a medium stadium. New customer acquisition accelerated YoY to 1.6, up from 1.4 the previous year. Adding more customers at a faster rate is a good sign for us.
With increased sales brought in a lot more emails. We handled 30.9K conversations in T3, up 123% year over year. That almost matched the 145% year over year growth in revenue over the same period. A lot of this was driven by people asking about their pre-order, when it would ship, and why we were two weeks late in shipping.
We learned in T3 that sales count down timers really working. Making it big and obvious at the top of the website when a sale is ending, dramatically increases conversion rates. The last day for our holiday sale peaked at a 17% conversion rate by the final hour. We saw the same thing happen the last week of the year.
Freefly launched a new gimbal called Movi. We helped them launch it with this video and this giveaway. They don’t ship until April but we’ve had almost 110 orders for $40K in pre-orders for their product. The giveaway added 50K emails (most ever) on 160K website visits. The combo of launching a new product, video, giveaway, and pre-orders with another brand, worked.
We continue to learn more about content and what works to convert customers. We recently started creating photography guides that combine both a photo and a video. This "How to take low light portraits" was one of our best guides yet, bringing in over 10K sessions and 20K video views. This is a theme we plan to continue going into 2018.
We just got back from our latest offsite to Port Angeles, WA. A full update is coming in the next update, but we hit 68% of our goals. This was the best trimester performance we've ever had and a trend we look to carry into 2018. For what it's worth, we're half way into January and we've already done 2.2x year over year.
Every year we host an annual holiday sale. It's a 4-day sale where everything is 20% off, which makes this our most important shopping event of the year.
Going into the sale we always try to learn from the prior year making improvements in our execution, offerings, and services. This year's four-day sale resulted in $1.2M in sales on 9.8K orders from 132K sessions. Comparing that to 2016 where we saw $392K in sales on 3.2K orders form 57K sessions. Overall we saw 200% revenue growth on only 100% growth in traffic.
This year's sale confirmed a lot of what we already know...
We are a holiday business. 25% of our YTD sales have come in the last two weeks alone. By year end we estimate the last five weeks of the year will represent 35% of our revenue.
A timed discount represents a powerful reason to purchase, which we see validated by conversion rates that rose from 2% to over 9% during the sale. The addition of sale countdown timers at the top of the website drove the conversion rate over 18% in the sales final hours.
The drivers bringing in traffic are equally important coming out of the sale. We are currently running this $7K giveaway and a series of co-branded lightning sales like this to keep the holiday purchasing going.
Being in stock matters. We had a record number of new products available which helped to maintain our average order values over $130, up 20% from last year. This was our best season of having new gear in stock for new devices.
BUSINESS UPDATEWe've recognized $6.4M YTD with about $1M in back-orders that we still need to ship this month. Our Galaxy cases, new wrist straps, and DJI accessories are all shipping this week. The largest holdout is our iPhone X photo cases which start shipping by the 20th.
Comparing revenue (what has shipped) versus pure sales we continue to see that being in stock and shipping every order on time has a dramatic impact on the end result. In 2017 we did enter the annual sale with a handful of key products still on pre-order, which gives people room to cancel before we eventually ship. In total sales for T3 (sept-dec) we're at $3.8M compared to $1.2M last year.
Outside of revenue loss, the biggest impact of preorders is the added customer service levels. The entire team shares in the workload which allows us to scale in crisis, but it's still a taxing weight on the team. The positive is that a 200% growth in orders year over year only resulted in a 130% growth in email volume. The biggest culprit, of course, was a dramatic rise in what we call "order fulfillment" emails, which are emails received after they order and before we deliver. Next year we'd like to dramatically grow sales while continuing to decrease emails per order.
When looking at revenue sources over the last month, the biggest impact on 2017 has been the increase in brand awareness along with email execution. Moving to drip email campaigns had a significant impact the last month as we continue to improve at acquiring customers.
Going one step further we've seen that YouTube has become our best channel. From 25K subscribers four weeks ago to 40K now, we're seeing that the creation of video content plus video ads are working to reach new customers. We see this reflected in our exit interviews as a key channel people use to learn about Moment.
Looking at our latest campaigns we see that new product announcement themes bring the most traffic. We will continue to develop this theme further, especially as we dive deeper into photography learning content.
The best news of all is we're going to end the year with about $1.5M in cash and zero debt. In 12 months we've re-introduced our entire product line, used our loan to maximize inventory purchases, and will end the year with more cash than we started.
iPhone X has arrived. Even though it's just a phone, it is arguably the most advanced camera ever made. Good news for us, is that our gear already works with iPhone X so we can capture immediate sales. Our lenses work. Our Case is available for pre-order. And a new Battery Case is going to be announced 11/14 for pre-order.
It seems obvious in retrospect but it has taken us years to learn how to launch our capture products on time with each new phone. From the products to the content to the commerce we're getting faster at capitalizing on launch day. Comparing our results to last year, both in dollars and percentage growth, we see just how important it is to have compatible products to sell. Last year our products weren't yet available for purchase, which had a dramatic impact on weekly sales. This year we're in stock or just a few weeks away from shipping.
BUSINESS UPDATES
We crossed $2M in Q3 for the first time. We continue to see week over week improvements crossing $50K in a single day this past week. If you look at the revenue run rate since June, when we launched Moment 2.0, we are tracking towards $8.5M in annual sales.
In order to reach $10M this year we need to hit $6M in T3 (sept-dec). When you put our revenue it in the context of $6M we have a ways to go. But if you compare the business year over year to the same eight week period we're up 225%.
What's been encouraging about the recent growth is it's not just based on more sessions, but also from improved conversion rates. The site continues to make small improvements and we are getting better and better at giving people a direct reason to buy right now. Having more products and providing an incentive to purchase are both working.
Our best channel right now is YouTube. We've doubled our subscribers in the last month to 22K. But more importantly we've been learning what works to drive the channel. We're shipping timely vlogs (reached over 250K on this video), boosting those vlogs with ad dollars to grow search ability, creating lightning sales with the videos to drive purchasing, and then carrying forward the vlog theme into personal commercials (like this one). We see the results in watch time, engagement, and checkout questionnaires.
Content tied to giveaways continues to perform. October was a record number of total readers and repeat readers to the Momentist. A lot of it was driven by our last giveaway that included three weekend experiences, three influencers who each created a Momentist location guide, and six brands who contributed to driving awareness. Each of these brings a whole new audience to Moment, while increasing social counts across the board. We're already working on 2018 campaigns, to hit one per month.
We launched a new Case with Google and their Pixel 2 camera. This was the first time we collaborated with a major phone maker to ship a new product the day of their announcement.
Pixel has minority market share, but this was an important milestone for two reasons. First, Google is pushing the envelope with mobile photography and this enables us to dominate a niche phone. Second, it demonstrates that mobile photography is a real accessory category with Moment being the only gear for camera lovers.
Best of all you can buy Moment directly in the Google store when you pre-order your Pixel 2.
BUSINESS UPDATEQ3 was our first $2M quarter. This is another important milestone as we look to break $10M for the year.
We have our work cut out for us in reaching $6M in T3. To the positive, we have product in market for every major new phone. To the netagive, we need to keep driving awareness on a weekly basis. We will need our recent daily sales to continue in order to have a shot at the number. Since the launch of Pixel 2 we're averaging close to $30K per day. *note: Amazon sales get updated once a week, which is why they are flat in the chart below.
NPS is up to 54, an increase of five points since the introduction of Moment 2.0. The biggest improvements were seen through product quality and customer service. While the largest detractors are coming from shipping and battery case software. Our target is still to reach an NPS of 70.
When it comes to product reviews we are seeing our highest reviews ever, nearly 5 stars on Amazon. Now we just need a lot more reviews.
We have also gotten more granular with our customer service data, using both primary and secondary tags to better understand why customers are emailing us. We're also tracking our own efficiency as to how many emails it takes to resolve an issue.
We've been testing a series of YouTube tactics around iPhone 8. We launched four different videos in the past week that collectively reached over 200K views. We tested different types of content, advertising to extend distribution, and lightning sales to improve conversion rates. High level conclusion is that YouTube ads are very effective at increasing video views, subscriber count, and top of the funnel impressions. These ads also increased organic traffic which we believed was correlated to more people searching for Moment. We are building a similar campaign around Pixel 2, to be launched once their press embargo lifts.
We're building our way towards one giveaway per month. These campaigns not only engage our community but they are the fastest way to grow our audience size. The last campaign, #myfourblockradius, brought in a record number 3,800 submissions.
Ahhhhhh (Ujjayi style).
The last two months just need a collective exhale. Updates have fallen by the wayside as we powered through shipping all of Moment 2.0, managing 5K Kickstarter orders, and dealing with every kind of "you're not going to believe this" manufacturing story.
We can't run the marathon at this rate but there are definitely going to be times when all we can do is pick up a shovel and just dig faster. The last two months have been one of those phases.
We shipped more projects, gained more customers, and drove more revenue than any previous period. Next week we head to our next offsite, collectively tired but excited about the potential for T3.
BUSINESS UPDATEWe are on track for our first $2M quarter. This puts us at $5.6M for our trailing 12 months and puts us in position to go for $10M this year. This is a big stretch goal for us but pushing hard to give ourselves a chance.
Our T2 stretch goal was $2.5M and we'll come a little bit short of our goal, but not by much. We averaged over $20K per day in collective sales which is 2x our sales rate before shipping Moment 2.0. The new product line has been well received while selling Moment 1.0 at a discount has enabled more people to buy Moment.
Our biggest struggle in T2 has been the battery case. Initial reviews have been the best we've ever had, but it's been a battle to get this product out the door. To summarize the pain... first, we were a month late. Second, we have been in a battle with shipping companies justifying why we aren't a dangerous good. And third we've been shipping new case software and app versions to fix connection and battery reading levels. We went with the aggressive route to ship as fast as we could, following up with software updates. We're just now fully in stock with the product and can start marketing it heavily.
The App is making progress. Good news is we shipped more versions in T2 than ever before, the bad news is most of the effort was around the battery case and fixing bugs. We plan to shift our app focus to several iOS 11 features as we expect T3 to be big for the app. Lots more upside here without enough software engineers to get everything done.
Customer service levels have crushed us in T2. Kickstarter fulfillment always brings a lot of questions but being late with battery case only added to the issue. We made a series of improvements in the last few weeks to provide customers with delivery updates to help cut down on the email volume but overall the system has to continue to get more efficient and automatic.
As we go into new phone season we announced an upgrade guarantee. The purpose is to give customers confidence that Moment is going to support their device from here until the end of cell phones. We also announced this program knowing that our product already works with some big time phones yet to be announced. We'll be at our first phone launch in T3.
We started a travel company and completed our first trip to Juneau, Alaska. The biggest insight was that other brands wanted to get involved in the program and give away tickets on the trip to their audience. With the announcement, we created a giveaway between some relevant brands that gained over 10K email addresses and $6.5K in sales from the emails collected. We are working on 20 trips for next year and some big sponsors to partner with us on the program.
We doubled down on our influencer marketing program to better on board and engage the creatives we work with. Lots of learning about how to maximize new product introductions, but this an effort we're going to continue to improve upon as we go into T3.
Content development has taken a back seat in T2 as we focused on seeding and shipping product specific content. With Moment 2.0 we had to re-do all of our getting started content across 12 products and a new app. In addition, we rebuilt the content on our shop pages which took time. This content matters for customers and ensuring the best experience, but impacts the numbers for the Momentist. What really drove readership the past month was better integration of our content through out the Moment shopping experience.
We are excited to have Kevin joining us on the Moment Team. We built Contour together and he came on board to take over our app design and development. When not chasing two young daughters around, Kevin can usually be found riding bikes or boards down Pacific Northwest hills. You can find him @kevkor just about everywhere.
We're off this week on our next off-site, kicking off Trimester #3. You can read about our last offsite here (password: #shotonmoment).
If you missed it, previous updates can be found here. (password: #shotonmoment)
Thank you,
Marc & The Moment Team
It's good to be shipping.
Launching and running a Kickstarter is exhausting but shipping might be even worse. Over the last three weeks we have shipped 12 new cases, four new lenses, and a new lens adaptor with two different suppliers across two warehouses, while using airplanes and boats to move the product. To add to the shipping complexities we received 7,150 emails alone in June, up 62% from the previous month.
Despite the stress of delivering we've managed to maintain a customer service happiness score of 85/100, reduce our first response time 3.5 hours, and reduce our overall response rate down by 27%. The whole team starting their day by answering 5-15 emails has made Kickstarter a massive team effort.
Best of all, the initial response to Moment 2.0 is higher than any previous launch. You can see the #momentgear feed or find YouTube reviews like the one below.
The next six months are going to be big push to finish out 2017 on a positive note.
BUSINESS UPDATEWe're at an estimated $2.7M in sales year to date. We say estimated because in getting Kickstarter orders out the door we haven't had time to update our metrics database to show the full value of each order shipped. Instead our revenue metric only shows "add-on" revenue to kickstarter orders and the shipping of all our non-kickstarter orders. It's a long winded way to say sales are about $2.7M, YTD shipped revenue is about $2.2M, and June will end up around $700K for the month.
Biggest upside to revenue is each Kickstarter order is average $17.65 in "add-on" sales. That increases average Kickstarter value by nearly 13%. Hopefully this trend continues as we fulfill the rest of these orders.
The last week has seen a dramatic rise in sales. Our goal is to maintain average daily sales of $20K and the last seven days alone gives us hope we can maintain this rate with Moment 2.0. and This Trimester we are making lots of small improvements that we believe will keep growing awareness and increasing conversion rates.
The biggest driver to last week's growth was YouTube. Being featured by a few YouTube stars drove 114K sessions, up 294% year over year. The YouTube impact was even greater than the social data suggests because organic searches saw the same spike with each video posted, showing that people watched it on YouTube and searched for Moment.
We are in the process of closing out Moment 1.0 products. Three days ago week we dropped prices on V1 Lenses and Cases. Additionally, we implemented bundle pricing when V1 Cases are bought with a V1 Lens. Early data from these two changes is showing a 36% increase in V1 Cases sold per day, and a 29% increase in Total V1 products sold per day.
Outside of the demands in shipping, our biggest setback has been the Moment Battery Case. We announced last week that we are a month behind and thankfully almost all of our customers are patiently waiting for the new case. It comes down to the complexity in selecting the female lighting connector and the stringent test requirements in making an MFI product. Thankfully Apple has been helpful in getting this product over the line so we can start producing. We let our early backers know through email, the video below, and a Kickstarter live event.
We continue to refine what content is working. Explain level, especially photography guides, are translating into revenue. While YouTube is our fastest growing channel. The combination of written photography guides and YouTube videos is something we want to start experimenting with. Of all channels, YouTube is the one channel that is already over our daily average goal.
If you missed it, previous updates can be found here. (password: #shotonmoment)
Thank you,
Marc & The Moment Team
Next week we start shipping Moment 2.0. This represents three years of learnings about what customers want in their pocket. Physical products get better with every release and we believe these products can deliver a 5 star experience.
The New Lenses and Cases start shipping next week and will be fully in stock in six weeks. Battery Cases are going through final testing before mass production, expecting to ship in July.
The first phase of the Moment journey has always been about making the phone a better camera. In the coming months you will see us introduce new services and a second category of products.
BUSINESS UPDATESSales are at about $2.5M year to date. The final number is a bit vague until we get Kickstarter orders into the system and shipped. At a high level it looks like backer drop off rates have been under 3%, which is a much lower rate compared to previous campaigns.
Recognized revenue is at $1.6M. April and May financials will suck as we wait to ship all these pre-orders. Q2 numbers should be solid at the end, assuming we can ship a large majority of these orders in June.
Being on a pre-order status has had a negative impact on the sales of our v1 products as we get close to shipping v2. During the Kickstarter campaign we were averaging nearly $20K per day. Post campaign our daily sales hit a low point of $9K per day before rebounding the last two weeks to $14K per day. Once in stock we're expecting daily sales to surpass our $20K per day campaign levels. Pre-orders on a weekly basis are now greater than v1 sales.
One assumption we've always wanted to test is price point. Once v2 begins shipping we can test aggressive price points on v1. We especially want to see what happens as we get closer to $50. Is there a new segment of customers we aren't reaching who won't spend over $50?
Improving physical delivery of our products has one of the biggest impacts on our conversion rates. We recently moved our Hong Kong warehouse onto the Landmark platform. The timeline to delivery internationally is longer at 5-11 days but the cost is significantly cheaper. The result is a lower check-out cost for international customers. Traditionally US conversion rates were 2x better, but over the last three weeks that gap has dropped to nearly 0. This continues to prove that lower delivery costs dramatically improve conversion rates.
We launched our first Moment Trip. It's to Alaska and it's taught by the amazing Dan Rubin (@danrubin). This is the first product in a series of services we'll be launching that live at the intersection of place and learning. You'll see us introduce full service trips like this one to personalized audio tours that a single person can experience. You can read more about the trip here.
We continue to iterate on our different content series. Our learning content (called Guides on the Momentist) are working. From written content to YouTube videos it's the one form of content that is converting into immediate sales. The rest of the content is an entertainment form of content that extends brand reach but doesn't have the same immediate revenue conversion.
In adding our first analysts to the team we are getting a lot more granular on tracking, measuring, and forecasting. A lot of work is going into cleaning up our data and dividing channel segments across the team so everyone can have a direct impact on growing the business. One of the programs we're most excited about is robust affiliate program with our top referral partners.
Over the last two weeks we ran an experiment on landing pages alongside our graduation promotion. Testing the theory that dedicated landing pages for specific keywords and campaigns will drive better conversion rates. We're seeing promising results with conversion rates over 6% for those sessions.
This is our 50th update in three years. I can't say thank you enough for your continued support throughout this journey.
Much of what you have seen publicly is 'Moment the phone accessory company'. What we hope to deliver on over the next three years is a transformation into a mobile photography products and services company. The accessory lens on your phone was simply the entry point into the market.
We still have a long ways to go, but we are more excited than ever about the opportunity in front of us.
In this update, the only ask I have is to receive feedback about how we can improve. You can reply directly to this email with any ideas you have. Whether it's how I can make these emails better or what products we should be making, and/or how we can better win the market. I'd appreciate hearing from you.
BUSINESS UPDATE
We changed the Moment URL from momentlens.co to shopmoment.com. With the URL changes we also moved the Moment website from Wordpress/Woocommerce to Craft CMS. We're only a few weeks into this transition so not all of our data analysis charts have been updated.
We completed Kickstarter with 5,149 backers on $767K raised. Over three years and three projects we have raised $1.5M on Kickstarter, which accounts for 13% of all time revenue. Kickstarter is our second largest channel.
We wrote an updated guide for succeeding on Kickstarter in 2017. The Kickstarter playbook has changed over the past three years from community building to e-commerce. Help sharing the article is always appreciated.
In total sales we're at about $2.2M for the year with over $93K in pre-orders already. Our daily sales have dropped now that the website has both current products and pre-order products. During Kickstarter these two categories were split across two different websites. Now that they are together, it is causing people to hesitate before purchasing. We begin shipping our new at the end of May.
With the new website we have been scrambling to get conversion rates back up to previous levels. We shipped the website early in order to get pre-orders up. We have been pushing through post launch bugs to remove, making lots of small conversion rate improvements along the way. Currently we are focusing on SEO, checkout, and product pages.
The two biggest channels impacted in switching URLs have been organic search and paid acquisition. Organic is down as we have to bring over 300 Momentist posts by hand while setting up redirects, sitemaps, and seo for all the website pages. Paid is down because we turned it off while we fixed bugs that were hurting conversion rates.
We are getting a lot more granular on revenue channels, shifting to team ownership by channel. We believe this will help the whole team by tied to specific numbers they can improve on a daily basis. Email is one of the channels we want to get even better at. From open rates to clicks to revenue.
We are heads down bringing Moment 2.0 products to market. Case and our new lenses will be shipping by the end of May, followed by Battery case early July. Manufacturing is always hard and we've had plenty of ups and downs throughout the journey. The light at the end of the tunnel is that these are the best products we've ever made. You can read our updates here.
Moment Films Season 2 has launched. It's part of our focus to create more and more video in 2017. Moment Films represents our inspire level content while the Moment vBlog, Product Updates, and Learning Content are much more explain level content series. We are adding a second filmer to the team with short form content being our next big push.
We are excited to welcome Melissa Li to the team as our first financial analyst. Originally from Seattle, Melissa ventured to the NE to study at Dartmouth College and remained in the Boston area since. While not working she’s most likely skiing or dreaming of skiing (if winter is over). You can find her @melissali93.
We made it over the funding line!
In three campaigns we’ve now raised about $1.7M, making Kickstarter about 18% of all revenues. Although their platform is about community they have really become a distribution channel. Each campaign on their platform is similar to a late night infomercial, which we see reflected in really long “time on page” data.
This campaign has made us better at e-commerce than the other two campaigns combined. We set our funding goal too high, losing momentum between the $300K and $500K raised points. But the benefit of slower growth is it forced us to get much more more granular on UTM tracking, understanding channels, and focusing on what was working to drive conversions.
Our data before two weeks ago is imperfect, but it’s clear that the shopping team is winning. The Moment website, emails, and Facebook ads are driving the most conversions. The content team’s effort has improved the depth and quality of the page, but hasn’t directly lead to a lot of new backers. Outside of our main YouTube video we haven’t produced any content that has gotten external lift.
BUSINESS UPDATE
We posted our Q4 and 2016 year end analysis. Overall we grew the business by 49%, passing $5M in revenue on 10K new customers. We improved our supply chain efficiencies, turned inventory into cash, and continued to keep overhead low. We lost 8% in 2016, down from the 13% lost in 2015. Although an improvement we are looking to run Moment right at a 0% profit line. We did invest heavily in the new products the end of 2016, which are now live on Kickstarter.
You can read the full analysis here. (password: #makemoments)
We are on pace for another record Q1 in revenue. Not counting any Kickstarter pledges we should have another $1M quarter. What’s difference this year is that we are now selling Moment across three channels in the Moment Website, Amazon FBA, and B&H. Amazon FBA sales we upload once a week but in March it now represents 1/3rd of our sales.
Adding in Kickstarter sales we’re over $1.5M for the quarter. We won’t break our Q4, 2016 record of $1.75M but we’ll be close. This campaign has taught us that we need to be designing and announcing new products faster as the awareness lift from new products also improves sales on current products. Since the campaign we have averaged nearly $20K per day in total sales.
We have been ramping our Amazon FBA channel. Different from Amazon retail, Amazon FBA means we own the inventory and the page. Amazon holds the product in their warehouse and customers can receive free Prime shipping. Our goal for this semester is to reach $5K in daily sales on Amazon. We averaged $4K last week. We have just started in their “exclusives” program, which is the marketing arm of Amazon FBA. The biggest negative to Amazon is we receive zero customer information, making post purchase marketing non existent.
The Momentist continues to bring in new visitors. We still want to get a lot better at email capture and the quality of content emails we send. The content team has been driving all their traffic to Kickstarter so our readership numbers are down the last 30 days.
One of the improvements we have made to tracking content results is to group our story categories into campaigns. This enables us to see what “categories” of content our readers are engaging with. In addition we have also split acquisition channels for new versus repeat readers. Social and email are our biggest traffic drivers. Referrals and search have the biggest upsides.
We have also realized over the last two weeks that content drives a lot of traffic to the rest of the website. We have gotten much more granular on UTM tags across all our channels whether posting a story or commenting on it. YouTube is the channel with the biggest future opportunities in growing our audience and customer base.
What a first eight weeks to the year. Our Kickstarter project is 2.5 weeks old and about to break $400K. The campaign still has 39 days to go and we’re on pace for about $800K. Our stretch goal is break $1M.
We still need help to get this campaign over the funding line. 15 seconds of your time would go a long ways.
1.Back The Project here.
We are now supporting iPhone 7/7+ and 6/6+. This week we are announcing Google Pixel/XL.
2. Retweet or quote on Twitter.
You can retweet this or make your own. We’re looking to be one of the few companies to go 3 for 3 on Kickstarter.
Thank you for your support!
BUSINESS UPDATE
We are now selling Moment across four channels, passing $1M in sales the first eight weeks of the year. That roughly puts us on pace for $7M this year. We would love to break $10M this year.
*note: we don’t recognize Kickstarter revenue until we ship (Q2/Q3) and we are still in the process of updating our analytics tool to show sales from all four channels.
What has surprised us the most about being on Kickstarter is that our existing sales have not tanked. We figured the introduction of new products would bring existing sales to a halt. Instead the announcement of new products has only increased overall sales, now averaging about $15K per day. This tell us that next time we should go faster in designing and announcing new products.
A full Kickstarter recap will come after the project, but additional lessons we have learned:
Battery Case
Case
We have been testing Amazon FBA the past month. Getting setup on the platform is a giant pain in the ass. It has taken nearly six weeks to find a work around so that each lens can be a single page on their website. When we started each lens had 15 different pages (i.e. one for each device). This would be like posting a small t-shirt on a different page from medium t-shirt, etc. On the plus side, being on Amazon is making us better at e-commerce. It forces you to compete, diving into the details around keywords, positioning, imagery, and price. Their platform has a lot of upside and we’ll be interested to see how it goes over the coming weeks.
We hosted our latest team off-site. It was one of our best off-sites yet, leaving with a deeper understanding of how we win, grow our business, and work more efficiently. We hit 60% of our goals for the first time as we’re learning to make better goals with clearer measurement with less changes mid semester. We posted a detailed analysis of the week here. (password: #makemoments)
We wrapped up Season 1 of Moment Films. This was our first serious video project, which consisted of 16 short films, all shot by different creators. We reached over 538K views (mostly on Facebook) with an organic cost per view of $0.12 and advertising cost of $0.01 per view. We are launching Season 2 in the coming weeks, applying the key lessons learned from the first season. This time we want to test if 90 seconds works better than 60 seconds, if social teasers drive more views, if referral codes entice the creator to push the film more, and if we can get more YouTube views. You can watch Season 1 here.
Content continues to make progress in reaching more readers every month. Our Momentist numbers in February are down as we are pushing all of our content efforts to the Kickstarter campaign and away from our own website. But overall our weekly process continues to improve as we better learn what content works with what audience.
The shopping team is currently moving the whole site off of WordPress/Woocommerce and onto a new platform called Craft Commerce. We have maxed out performance on the current platform and the only way to make speed and shopping improvements is to move. While making that move, one of the key learnings over the lats month is that what we place “above the page fold” matters. A few months ago we tested putting add-on accessory products below the add to cart button, i.e. below the fold. Our items per order dropped significantly. Moving those accessory items back above the fold has resulted in some of our highest attachment rates ever.
We have maxed out our NPS performance with the current products. Improvements to shipping and service have definitely helped, but the only way to make a step function improvement is to ship these new products. Generation 2 products take into account all the small user experience issues that customers wanted fixed, including a lens cap in the box, a better mounting interface, no dark corners, and more reliable cases. For example, the issue of some iPhone 7/7+ customers experiencing dark corners took our January numbers down, something that no level of service can correct.
WE’RE BACK ON KICKSTARTER
Today is a big day for us.
The first phase of our journey was to make your phone a batter camera. Unsexy, the lens on your phone was the best place to enter the market because it enabled us to work with the best photographers in the world, build the foundation of our brand, and learn how to acquire a customer.
We believe these new products enables us to complete across the entire phone accessory market with power, protection, and lenses.
2016 should end up around $5M in revenue (including retail) on 40% year over year growth. That brings us near the 50K customer mark, a milestone we have worked hard to reach.
A full quarterly analysis will be coming soon, but a few big takeaways:
+ Our entire product roadmap needs to be built around the spring and holiday guide seasons. Our latest capture products will launch every spring. Our “next category” of products will be our holiday line-up.
+ Motivation to buy trumps everything else. For all the work that goes into optimizing a shopping experience, we validated that motivated customers will buy regardless. Holidays, offers, and upcoming trips convert higher than any website changes.
+ Forecasting down to the individual SKU is still really hard. We did way better this year in not running out of our core products but we still got some of the mix wrong, especially in buying too many cases.
+ Content works to grow our audience size. Market to market community building is too expensive. People are still the foundation of our content stories, but mobile photography is global which means geographic markets grow and shrink based on the overall awareness that Moment drives.
+ The teenage years of team growth is hard. While growing from 12 to 20 people this year, we managed to make process improvements to better execute across the whole team. But now it’s time for the team leads to take the business to the next level. Marc was doing too much of the work, picking up a shovel to dig instead of enabling.
NEED HELP
Still working to claim our YouTube /moment handle. Any help with YouTube is appreciated.
We are launching Gen 2 of our capture products (new cases and lenses) again on Kickstarter the first week of February. We will need everyone’s help to back the project and help promote.
BUSINESS UPDATE
We ended December just shy of $1M for the month on 6K new customers. That brought us to $1.75M for the quarter on 10K new customers. All four of those numbers are all time highs.
January is starting off a little bit slow as we hit the end of 2016 with everything we had. We also sold out of key accessory products that are bringing down our average order values. We expect January to be modest growth as we work to turn on our Amazon store, an ambassador program, and restock key accessories that sold out.
Adding our first US warehouse continues to prove that people want cheaper, faster shipping. The conversion rate ratio between US and International reached as high as 5x during the peak holiday season. Adding Amazon FBA in the coming days will offer Prime shipping for Moment products for US customers. Next we’re working to move our international warehouse in-region, to reduce the tax and shipping shock our customers experience at check out.
Emailing our NPS nine and ten customers we sent them this survey to help us fill in the gaps between the data. From the responses we were most surprised to see that 28% of customers bought be cause of a referral while 10% bought because of YouTube. YouTube direct traffic is almost zero to the Moment website, which demonstrates people discover us on the platform and then search for the brand.
Dani has taken over running the content team in 2017. Currently content is bringing in over 25% of all new visitors to the website. Pushing out a story per day, consistent social sharing, and the use of IG stories is definitely working to increase engagement and click through rates.
Last year we debuted the first season of Moment Films. We believe being great at video is critical to winning the market and therefore we started investing in a seasonal program to create short films with different influencers. The goal of the program is to learn the whole process from the content creation through to marketing the content. Still finishing up Season One we’re already learning:
+ Video has a long tail. Films continue to be discovered and grow in viewership over time.
+ Consistency in marketing and advertising matters a lot. The tighter each launch is, the better it does.
+ Videos with infamous YouTube creators have higher organic traffic because people discover the film when they search the creator’s name. Creator names are still bigger than Moment’s name, especially on YouTube.
+ We have to tie our advertising efforts to the same campaign tags so we can see the complete ROI on each film.
All of these learnings are going into the Season 2 program, which we hope to launch at the end of Q1.
We are capping out on the performance that wordpress/woocommerce can deliver. It’s a great platform for shipping content, but the size of our database (photos/orders) combined with the large number of plugins required to run the website are preventing us from delivering a fast experience that is bug free. We aren’t anywhere near the 1-2 second page load times that customers expect. Andrew has taken over the shopping team in 2017 and is working to fix the platform over the coming months.