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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

I am presently scaling a client on Shopify who started at a 30k a month ad budget. Today we scaled past $8,000 per day (So a little under 250k a month). I fully expect and we'll hit $500,000 a month in ad spend for them monthly probably in the next 2 weeks. The combination of increased screen time and major companies pulling ad dollars has cratered media prices, and in the process, created a once in a decade opportunity for DTC brands that have cash on hand and are ready to scale up production. This announcement from Shopify themselves surprises me not at all.

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I'm seeing the opposite. I'm seeing clients who are able to turn off a $30k/mo ad budget and instead seeing sales double based on such an increase in organic traffic from strong SEO.

Yep, we also got a massive spike in organic traffic as well possibly due to stay at home orders.

What are they selling?

It's in the semi-custom home goods category. Can't get more specific than that.

I sell wall maps: https://ramblemaps.com

Just started 3/22. They aren't exactly flying off the shelves. We're getting good traffic but conversion rate is very low.

Would you expect a business like mine to be doing well in this climate? Since we're a new business it's hard to tell if it's our product or the market that is our problem.

As someone who's not a skier, the descriptions are a bit confusing. I read through most of the page thinking this was a service where I could pick any place and you would make a map of it (which would be really cool actually, although I have no idea what would be involved in doing that), and then when I got to the bottom, there were suddenly options for a bunch of places I've never really heard of.

If you're marketing only to skiers, I would make that more clear from the beginning (like, put a picture of someone skiing at the top). Alternatively, I would actually consider buying one of these even though I've never been to these places just because they look cool, but in that case I'd want more information about why you chose these places and what makes them interesting in particular.

(and the maps do look really nice! Actually, this is making me wonder if you could integrate with Strava or something and overlay the details of your trip on top of the map, but I'm not really the target market for that, so I don't know if that would work well or not).

This is purely anecdotal but I'm buying as little as I can to not overwork mail carriers. I just moved into a new place and I have no art and while it's not critical to me it's something I'd typically start buying right now but I've literally only bought necessities (plunger, detergent, soap) and haven't even looked at actual house stuff.

Not sure how common my quarantine shopping style is but I doubt I'm a rarity.

The art is super cool. Hopefully it gets more attention once this is all over.

I'm glad you like it!

And you're not alone, my last credit card bill was 1/4 my average. I'm hearing similar things from friends.

My business isn't obviously a bad one for a stay-at-home scenario, but our product certainly isn't a necessity either.

I think, as others have alluded, this particular market might be tough with mountains being closed down. I have an aerial photograph of Burke above my workstation and a few other maps on my walls -- I always purchased them shortly after forming a connection to a place. That's just my anecdotal experience of course!

For marketing, are you also placing them on location? If so, I can likely help with placement in Burke Mountain Hotel. Edit: my email is in profile

I agree with you. Our timing wasn't great. My own experience lines up with yours.

And thanks for the offer re: Burke. I'll hit you up for the connection!

There is something about the aesthetic of the maps that doesn’t appeal to me, at least as they appear in the photographs. They almost look like they should be tilt-shifted models a la Game of Thrones intro, but they are flat, so maybe some dissonance there?

I also don’t get what options I should be buying, and feel like I may not be the target market because I don’t appreciate the copy about the materials used (which I wouldn’t think would necessarily be the same people who like mountain cartography or are climbers.)

Obviously, take a tire-kicker’s feedback with a massive grain of salt. And I can tell that a ton of effort and love has gone into these, which is appealing.

Critical feedback is hard to come by and appreciated. Thanks!

Those look great, but it seems like that might be a tough market for a while. I think most skiers (at least the ones I know) are still really bummed about the shortened season and probably aren't looking to shell out some cash for something that just reminds them of that fact.

Thanks for taking a look. I'm glad you like them.

Yea, I was suspicious of how these would do so late in the ski season and that was before a global pandemic happened.

The plan was never to just sell ski maps, so we're thinking expanding the product line is the next move. Hopefully this line does well once colder weather returns.

Those are rather nice. Have you thought about pivoting to mountaineers? I don't ski but I pore over peak maps and wouldn't mind a couple of 14ers on my walls.

We're most definitely interested in broadening the market and expanding our locations.

Near term plans include Cascade Volcanoes in the west and Mt. Washington in the east.

These are beautiful. Happy to give you a free chat if you're looking to get pointed in the right direction marketing wise. My email is in my profile.

Thanks for the offer. I shot you a note.

I don't think the economic climate has hit the part where people are budget constrained yet.

had a look. it's ok, but not really my thing. your target market is really niche, you need to target them instead of the general public.

If you're doing furniture, you should be in good shape. What I'm hearing from friends & family is that since folks are spending lots more time at home these days, plans for replacing old and tatty furniture are being made.

I am not being judgemental, rather trying to understand how you get fish of that size with your far-from-well-designed website (from your profile), and far-from-rich marketing contents. Is that luck? Or, your lack of time to work on your own presentation?

Again, I am seriously not being judgmental, I am curious.

You aren't wrong it's been on my list forever to work on my site. FWIW some of the best media buyers I know though literally don't have websites.

I've been doing Facebook ads for 9 years. My team and I are a white label agency so we do the media buying for creative shops, designers, content marketers, etc. So I didn't land any client. I partnered with the folks that did. I got the partnership by putting out a ton of content on Youtube (Over 20 hours worth), through doing a 30 episode deep podcast on running an advertising agency, and being super helpful in a number of Facebook groups, Linkedin groups, etc. for years.

Tl;DR Content Marketing + Networking

It looks good to me.

Putting out relevant content and networking is where it's at, too. Even if your website actually was bad, you'd probably be fine.

I used to get a lot of work for web design without a website. I had a resume with good references and urls leading to good work samples. That's the stuff that counts. There was no shortage of jokes about not having a website though, and everyone thought they were the first person to tell me 'the cobbler's children go barefoot', haha.

I actually like your website

It's very direct and no nonsense

I'll get in touch with you. Let's see if we can do some work together

You are being judgemental, even if you claim not to be. GP, I think your website is well designed, fwiw.

Then the website must be breaking on my side, even though I cannot see any error (neither in Safari, nor in Chrome), only a couple of warnings. This is good for GP to fix the issue, I guess.

Incredibly judgmental.

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