2003: From Near Failure to $1M in Online Sales in 10 Months
PS: How I Turned a Doubting Customer into a Raving Fan.
“We did it, we just hit a million dollars in online sales – in nine months!”.
Talk about a come from behind victory. This customer pushed our team and platform more than any of our other customers. They had a retail store and the e-commerce website we built for them had thousands of products.
But it was almost a huge failure for my business.
Ten months earlier the conversation went like this:
“You said we would launch our online store at the end of the month. Now you’re telling me you need more time, but that is not an option. It has to happen, or we’ll need to get attorneys involved”.
Happy Sunday Friends,
This is a PS. A personal story linked to GSD.
I tell these personal stories in hopes it encourages you to push through the messiness and get stuff done!
The GSD Way speaks to this idea of leading through challenges and seizing opportunities through action.
You are a leader. Right?
We can agree that leadership is a choice, and not always a job title. Right?
How do you lead when you aren’t sure?
Some context will help as the rest of this letter tries to answer that question with a critical moment in my leadership and entrepreneurship journey.
2003 is the year Chicago won an Oscar, Madonna kissed Britney Spears at the Video Music Awards and Finding Nemo was the highest grossing film that year.
MySpace also launched in 2003 as well as WordPress which aimed to help people build their websites “easily” but it would be years before it was “easy”.
Back then, web development was hard.
This isn’t a new spin on “when I was a kid, I walked 5 miles through the snow to get to school each day”. It’s just a fact. This was a time without social media or YouTube and more questions than answers when it came to how to make the web work.
Leading through blind spots
During this time I was in my early twenties and figuring things out as I went.
If I sought advice from other mature business leaders, they had no idea how to offer advice because they didn’t understand web development, how the internet worked, online business models and they had limited ability to understand staffing challenges or project challenges. Concepts like an e-commerce platform, Software as a Service, and full stack developer were foreign to most.
It was all a black box to outsiders.
All problems start somewhere
Blazing a trail to build sophisticated websites and an e-commerce platform was a journey with no GPS.
I had very few maps to follow and had to make my own map as I moved forward.
Unlike today where you can build a fully functional website on Shopify in one day, back then it was a very big project that would take months.
We were doing things few had done before.
So, when my customer forced me to declare a launch date for their online store, I made my best educated guess added two months and mistakenly let him negotiate me to move my date up two months.
I let it happen because I didn’t know better.
We had to build new functionality in the e-commerce platform, design their website within our platform, determine a way to extract product information from their inventory system, and build out their entire product catalog and create copy and pictures where needed while working in partnership with their team through the entire process.
It is what it is, so let’s get to it.
The way I was raised formed this perspective I’ve had nearly all my life; The answers aren’t out there, they’re in here.
So when the customer told me they were expecting to launch in 30 days or attorneys would get involved, I had to come up with a solution.
The answers are in here…
“Just Keep Swimming” – Dory in Finding Nemo
In this case the only way out was through.
My team was already working long hours so more hours wasn’t the answer.
Today I would apply my vision, intention, means framework but back then I only had the intuitive version of this framework and a lot of motivation to not fail.
Today, these instincts are well honed in typical product people and there are all kinds of case studies, articles, YouTube videos and training courses that surface plays in the playbook for challenges just like this.
But none of that was available then.
We needed a better plan.
No doubt you’ve had a situation like this where everything comes to a halt and needs clarity, yesterday.
You must take stock of the situation and look for pathways forward.
This is what I did:
Reviewed our contract promises and all the work left to do.
Listed everything that needed to be done to deliver on the contract terms.
Listed my perspective on “critical to success” items.
Sorted tasks into high priority and high impact.
Worked with my team to understand how hard or easy things would be.
Everyone gave time estimates on tasks, projects, remaining work.
Defined all engineering items that depended on other work not done yet.
Identified what could be traded off or made into a smaller version that was less complex.
Created a rally cry and made it clear all would focus on this common goal despite the other important things on our plate.
With this clarity, I returned to the customer to collaborate on the successful launch.
It was important to enroll them in success and I needed their team to be committed because we needed there follow through at many points.
I approached it like this:
Introduced the distinction of “launch readiness” and closing out phase 1 versus phase 2 bodies of work we could do after launch. No language like this existed in our contract so I had to inspire them to see it this way. They did.
Took the pressure off “what the contract says” to focus on defining what it meant to go live with an online store. This was focused on creating a vision in the context of their business earning customers instead of redlining a document.
Painted a picture of a customer coming to their website and making a purchase and each thing the shopper would need to do for that to happen. I showed them how much of that process was already complete and clarified what was not ready yet but would be ready by launch.
Confirmed what they believed was critical to them and their business and team to launch in terms of functional aspects and their internal process of fulfilling their first order.
Detailed what I would need their team to do to support my team and made it obvious this was a partnership not a one-sided heroic lift for my team.
We both brainstormed around what we could both do to succeed together and what we would both have to do to enable success. This included what we already learned with them and many changes to how his team was working to support my team.
Through that process, the real fear came out.
I learned that they had tried three times before to build an online store. Three times! Each attempt failed and was a complete financial loss with those web companies charging them but not delivering. (Sadly, not uncommon during this time).
In his mind, he saw the same pattern.
But I broke the pattern when I turned the problem into a plan.
He was more than twice my age and he told me it reminded him of when he first started out in business.
He created a product and bought the first manufacturing run and things got real when he single-handedly unloaded an entire 18-wheeler of product into his garage, hallways, living room, bathrooms, closets and attic.
Staring at all the boxes made him realize he needed a better plan, and it was time to get to work figuring it out. He saw this as my “staring at boxes” moment and I was doing what he would have done.
Respect.
Three-week sprint
Over the next three weeks five of us moved into his office.
We setup cafeteria tables as makeshift desks.
We lugged in our laptops and bulky computer towers and 17 inch CRT monitors.
We answered questions and made things happen.
We were fully present and addressed every challenge head-on in real-time.
No missed calls, no three days to reply to an email, no misunderstandings.
All blockers were addressed as they came up.
GSD, get stuff done, was the answer.
With the clarity on work, who was responsible for what, and an explicit launch list, we didn’t work longer hours, we worked with intention, focus, and made every day count.
New things were quickly sorted into “critical to launch” or phase two work after launch.
In the spirit of problem solving without finger pointing. We ended up doing manual data entry on a thousand products to cut engineering scope on export and import functionality. This allowed our engineers to focus on store an platform work instead of an external system.
We ended up doing digital pictures instead of waiting on manufacturers to mail CD-ROMs of product images and their staff being stuck.
We moved less popular brands, products and categories into phase 2 work to better prioritize a successful launch.
The Big Innovation
Around all this was one critical feature I was bullish on making sure we completed despite how much engineering scope was being introduced into our ecommerce platform.
I knew it would be powerful and drive sales.
Getting to launch was great, but the outcome we needed to focus on was sales not just a live website.
The innovation I had in mind was to address a problem they would have.
As a retailer, they had a wide range of popular brands and many products had requirements on how they were displayed and priced. This applied to online stores.
Going off price list was a big no no.
If they broke the MSRP and changed the list price, they would lose their distribution, licensing, and reseller deals.
This meant no advertising discounts and no listing price cuts as a way to sell these products.
If the price online was the same as in store, how would they sell more product? This is a problem Amazon has long since solved and countless others. But twenty years ago it was not.
My role as product manager, not just business owner, was to make good decisions on what to build and what not to build in the platform.
I studied the agreements and brand deals and had an insight.
We would build functionality that didn’t exist in online stores.
Inspired from my time studying eBay, I could see a user experience where an online shopper could react to our pricing and influence the purchase.
“Make an Offer”
This is how it worked. The customer would land on a product page with an item they wanted. They would see the image and details as well as it’s list price. Let’s say $399 was the price. Instead of just an option for quantity and “add to cart” they were presented a “make an offer” button along side the “add to cart” button.
Clicking “make an offer” allowed them to fill out two fields; one for their email address, and the other for their suggested offer price. Often, people would offer a reasonable price like $375 for a $399 product.
The platform automated all of this once they submitted the offer. Here is what would happen.
This prospective customer email and their offer price went into a list for the store owner on the admin page and emailed them immediately.
From this internal email or on the admin page they could click one button to accept this one-time price and my platform would email a direct checkout link to the customer that would expire after it was used or within 24 hours.
There was another button the admin could push to suggest a more appropriate price which also used the same email and checkout experience.
This allowed the store owner to maintain price integrity, not promote any discounts, and still make deals and encourage purchases. It also did some cool sales and marketing stuff by applying scarcity and time bound offers as well as a feeling of getting a deal which drove reciprocity and return purchases.
It was a great feature and somewhat addictive to the customer. He said he got a little buzz off of each email and clicking the accept offer button. And there were hundreds of them every week starting shortly after we launched.
With our very detailed and deliberate plan of attack, with total transparency and emphasis on shared success we did launch on time.
We ended up working on many more projects with this customer, but this single feature accelerated their online business to earn more than $1 million in online sales in their first year.
It was a success on all accounts and I learned a lot about managing clients.
Shine a light
Experiences like this were instrumental in my belief that everything is figure-out-able and the answers are inside us even when we are unsure.
Today I have frameworks, models, and hundreds of launches behind me but they all come down to the same patterns.
Be a map maker.
Turn ambiguity into clarity.
Do what you say you will do.
Act like an owner and do hard things.
Create value. Focus on what is valuable.
Keep your chin up and make every day count.
Trust and empower the team to do what you cannot do by yourself.
Projects fail when you are missing one of these three: vision, intention, means.
Whatever is in front of you, I hope this encourages you in some way. If you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out.
#GSD
I appreciate you,
Justin