UPDATE #81
April 17, 2020
What a six weeks it has been.
We hope everyone is staying safe an optimistic. In these trying times we feel very fortunate that Moment is an internet only business and that our culture has always been remote. We've been able to stay safe, keep everyone employed, and move our purpose forward.
No doubt our industry has been affected. Customers buy photo, video, and travel gear because they are going to take a trip. Let alone the impact on consumer spending for expensive products when millions of jobs are lost.
Most of the brands we sell have seen revenue drop 20-40% over the last month. Retailers are either physically shut down or have frozen open to buy dollars. Even Amazon revenue has dropped to nearly $0 for everyone as Amazon push out ship dates for non-essential products. All of this had us very concerned three weeks ago.
But over the last two weeks our evolution from a product company to a retailer has clicked. We have had our best two weeks of the year. Comparing site results the last two weeks to the previous year...
- Sessions +133% (640K vs 274K
- Users +179% (470K vs 168K)
- Transactions +111% (8K vs 3.8K)
- Sales +63% ($977K vs $601K)
Traffic from…
- Social +330%
- Advertising +320%
- Email +250%
- Referral +99%
This has resulted in 3rd party revenue growing to 30% of our revenue.
Why are we up?
There are four main drivers.
1. Sales By Brands
The world is on discount for the foreseeable future and as a retailer we get to take advantage of it. Not only can use Moment gear discounts, but discounts from the brands we sell makes everything easier...email conversions, advertising returns, etc.
2. New Affiliate Platform
We launched Partner With Moment (pw = youin?) to media publications. Over the last three weeks we've created partnerships with sites like Wired, Wirecutter, Gear Patrol, Future Publishing, etc. Beyond bringing us traffic and direct revenue, they are improving our SEO rank. High quality traffic makes all of our search and shopping bids cheaper.
3. Brand Partnerships
Everyone needs to shift to online marketing tactics so they want to partner with us. We've been running lots of micro campaigns on social with different brands who are driving us traffic. Like this DJI x Andy To giveaway brought in 33K sessions, 75% of who were new users. Getting @moment into feeds like DJI matters. Before this downturn it was much harder to create these relationships.
4. Video Lessons
Not only are video lessons selling but some of the biggest creators now want to work with us. Creators have lost work overnight and video lessons drive real revenue, which means we can partner with creators who were previously out of reach. We are planning several new productions to start immediately once travel restrictions lift.
// The overall is that we have no idea what to expect in the coming months. At the end of last year we made a series of cuts that lowered our overhead spend. We took another step a month ago to cut any non-people spend we could find. And although we're running the business off of a much more conservative plan we're optimistic about our position in the market coming out of this recession in growth mode.
BUSINESS UPDATE
Revenue is down -3% over the previous 12 months. Our recent success will need to continue if we want to show year over year growth. We are sitting on about $260K in backorders that we expect to ship here in April.
The one category growing right now is work from home, so we launched our own WFH Store. It's all affiliate links to start but it opens the door to new categories we can enter and new partnerships we can start. If these categories hit we can then look at stocking them.
The one channel still impacting everyone is Amazon. Despite being in stock with our gear, they have pushed out all shipping dates to later months which dramatically lowers conversion rates. Although we expect these numbers to come back we've gone form $29K per day last year to about $4K per day this year.
We have reduced our inventory levels by 21% from $6.9M at the end of the year to about $5.5M at the end of March. We were fortunate to end the year with too much inventory as it allowed us to continue without any supply chain interruptions. Although Asia was shut down with COVID-19 we were largely unaffected.
We are all in on lessons. We have doubled the team size to four and are planning our our next eight productions with creators who collectively reach 4M followers. We're also changing our production locations form international to domestic so we can produce these at a faster, cheaper rate. Coming out of the summer we should have a premium catalog of video lessons.
The team is holding steady on customer service. All of us now contribute about three days per month. It's enabled us to maintain a high NPS score despite everything going on. We've also shifted a lot of our content to be more inspiring, keeping creatives creating.
A new test we launched this week is an email class called Learn Mobile Video In 7 Days. Over one email per day we teach you how to shoot better videos on your phone. We've already acquired over 25K emails in the first few days at less than $0.15 per lead. Each email includes a few products so we'll learn quickly how these email customers convert into paying customers.
If you missed it, previous updates can be found here. (password: #shotonmoment)
Thank you,
Marc & The Moment Team