Fab.com does $1.3mm revenue in first 30 days | Hacker News Reader

Fab.com does $1.3mm revenue in first 30 days

betashop.com

31 pointsnateberkopec44 comments

Congratulations, that's an incredible success and I think you've been very lucky. If you don't mind, I have a couple more questions:

* How good are the margins? How much of that is profit?

* How are you guys financed? VC or bootstrapped?

* How long have you been going at it? You launched 30 days ago, but I presume you've been working on it for quite a while before that.

* And lastly, how big is your core team?

* Oh and for the sake of trivia. How much did you shell out on the domain, fab.com?

Hah! We were previously operating a different business/product as fabulis. I got sick of telling everyone who to spell it, so I went out and negotiated to buy Fab.com, and got a great deal on it!

Come on man, ballpark? :)

Answers are as follows:

* Margins are really good, above 25%.

* We are backed by angels and VC's. I've also personally invested.

* We pivoted our business earlier this year. Before, we were a social network for gay people. In February we started anew as a design site. We built the site from March to May, then launched June 9th.

* Our team is: About 25 in development and UX, 20 on the business side - mostly in buying, production and merchandising.

Hi Jason, nice site and congrats on the numbers. I consider the design community to be tightly knit, and it seems you've tapped it well from your viral conversion numbers. How do you see this business scaling up and avoiding a ceiling in the near future once you saturate on that design community?

Thanks. Appreciate the comments.

We agree that the social nature of the design community has really helped spur our growth. Our viral coefficient is off the charts for an e-commerce site. A lot of that has to do with people loving to share their latest design inspiration/find.

We think this will scale up nicely because everyone aspires to have good design. Not everyone is a design junky but everyone likes to have some design in their life. Apple is a great example of a brand that has capitalized on that. Also Target, Ikea, etc.

For many, design is a lifestyle. That will always be our core audience. But for the mass consumer, making design objects approachable and affordable is a huge market.

I've got to say that that is an epic pivot. I'm somewhat fascinated about:

a. When you knew it was time to pivot?

b. How much time you spent on your social network before moving on?

c. How much code/idea reuse there was between the two ideas?

d. How did you decide on what idea to pivot to?

Here's my blog post on the pivot. http://betashop.com/post/3741657155/when-to-change-your-game...

I've always said that if you can't gain some considerable traction in 1 years time, it's time to move on and try something else as there are lots of good problems out there to try to solve. We stuck to that 1 year rule with the old fabulis.

We threw away all the old code.

Hey everyone. Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com here. Happy to discuss and answer any questions.

Went to your site. It's absolutely NOT clear what you're selling and why I should care. You need a much better landing page.

hmmm ... we've had incredibly high conversion rates on our landing page. Always looking to improve it though.

I should also note that we constantly test and rotate about 10 different landing pages, optimizing towards the ones that convert best.

It really depends on how you measure conversions. If you measure actual sales, that's the way to go.

If you just measure signups, I can come up with a page that will convert 100X better in a second. "Get $1000 when you sign up".

That's interesting. However, in the design community fab.com seems to be spreading by word of mouth, so in my own case, I signed up eagerly on a recommendation and I don't recall spending any time reading what the landing page said. Is there any way to account for that sort of signup?

Alternatively, that might be the reason it converts well. It's the old game of casually hiding what exactly it is you're doing and encouraging nosy people to check it out or ask for an invite (Forrst did/does this quite well). If they showed exactly what you get once you sign up, people may be less likely to sign up if it's not what they expected. They're less likely to unsubscribe once "in" though ;-) I say "may" because this definitely doesn't work for all types of site or list but it could be the ticket here.

Yeah, I'd be curious about what an unclear landing page does later on in the funnel - do users from these landing pages convert to purchase less overall?

What's not clear about this?

http://fab.com/about-fab/

I'm not a member, but from what I can tell you gain access to below retail cost of high design products. Sort of a Woot for the design savvy set.

I'm talking about fab.com, the main page. Most people will not click on "about" link, they will just leave.

The main page is just as clear to me. I clicked on About to confirm I didn't have an incorrect impression.

"Fab.com features daily design inspirations and sales at up to 70% off retail."

That pretty much sums it up. It also got me to give them my email address.

That's my point. They are not selling "design inspirations". They are selling designer products, and it would be nice if they specified the types of products they are selling.

"Design" is so generic, it can mean many things - a desktop wallpaper, a skin for Firefox, a knitting pattern.

I guess it has different appeal for different people. I immediately understood it and signed up. Sort of a Cool Hunting with a purchase button. Right up my alley.

So it appears that I(and many others on HN) are just not aware of this type of design culture as evidenced by my not understanding what "Cool Hunting" meant. I had to google that too!

Ah, that makes sense. I get too many emails from architect and designer friends about these sort of products that it's easy to assume everyone does. Some other sites in a similar vein:

http://www.betterlivingthroughdesign.com/ http://uncrate.com/ http://svpply.com/ http://breathemodern.com/

just curious, knowing that it's designer objects, would you actually be interested? I tend to know a great deal of people who completely fetishize the idea of consuming "good design" from end-to-end. So this type of customer would be delighted to find an awesome knitting pattern or candlestick or cheese board. They'd probably be into a great desktop wallpaper too, if there were a truly original / useful concept for that.

We've tested numerous variants on language/messaging and this converts best to subscribers + purchasers so far. Always testing though...

It didn't sum anything up to me. Actually, I didn't have any idea what "daily design inspirations" might be. I still wasn't quite clear about it after reading the first paragraphs of the about page (after which I concluded it can't be anything I'm interested in). Perhaps the problem is just me being a foreigner, but I hope people would start adding a "About in plain english" page on their sites ;)

I understood immediately. I am well connected to their target audience.

For those not in their target audience, I could see how it could be confusing.

"Fab.com features daily design inspirations and sales at up to 70% off retail."

We've A/B tested many other variants and this far out performs all else.

it's not really clear if it's design as in clothes or design as in couches etc.

"Our entire reason for existing is to empower more and more people to embrace great design. Great design is everywhere. It's that perfect pencil, your favorite messenger bag, the headphones you use at the gym, the chair you're sitting at while reading this, and the art on your walls. Great design exists in every country in every product category and at every price point. We eat, sleep, and breathe design."

Sounds like not clothes (which is tough for these types of sales anyways with sizing and inevitable returns issues), but everything else. If you've been to the MoMA store in NYC I expect there would be a lot of similarities, though not at a discount.

I agree. They are apparently doing very well on word of mouth alone. I didn't even see the about link, I was just staring at this big signup form and some pictures of needle point.

I must say, since I was expecting things like plastic injection, aluminum milling, and circuit board construction, the needle point definitely was effective at resetting my expectations! Still, I was confused by the tag line, as I still had it in my mind that it was a place for designers (albeit, now they're needle point designers in my head) to hang out, not for people to go and buy things.

EDIT: Now I see that it's not needle point, just regular paper art. The signup banner projects dots over much of the background, making me think it was needle point.

> I must say, since I was expecting things like plastic injection, aluminum milling, and circuit board construction

Must be the HN demographic. I thought the same thing, too.

Really can't help but think that their sales and conversion data is stronger evidence than your hunch.

Sorry to sound like a chime here but I too was unable to determine what it is you were offering. Having not heard of Fab.com, I assumed association with the laundry detergent sold in the US. After seeing the landing page, then I assumed design as in web pages or Wordpress Themes. I apparently am wrong on both accounts.

I say this as a business owner who actually has includes the word "Design" in the name of my legal entity.

I did not bother to look for an About page. I gave you the free minute I had at the time. You do have a nice looking layout though.

No, you're just not their target launch customer. It was clear to me from the get-go that they're the flash sale version of DWR.

Congrats on the launch/pivot/revenue/etc

I have to say as a designer this site seems like a nice change of pace....Looking at design porn all day that I can never afford can be a real drag and a turn off from the industry in general.

Having a place to go where I can put my ooogling where my wallet is definitely nice and the domain name (for whatever reasonably priced means) is very sticky.

Are the order size limitations influenced more buy the capabilities of the designer/distributors or on keeping with the Woot like discount feel?

This is similar (I think) to the kunstsupermarkt (art supermarket) projects in Germany and surrounding countries. Great to see more competition, and online too.

it seems like similar to Groupon, they monetized an existing audience.

Seems like the recipe for success is to start off with an existing audience that you can market to.

Similar to how Zuckerberg had all those emails prior to launching facebook.

Actually, no. We only have had less than 5000 our of former social network members sign up for the new Fab.com design site.

How on earth did you get the word out to that many people? Virality? Please explain...

More than 50% of our members joined via viral invites -- from emailing friends, twitter posts, facebook posts, etc.

We think it is because of the social tools we weaved into our site + the social nature of design itself.

What top 5 methods of paid acquisition worked best in getting so many members so quickly.

The ONLY effective method of paid acquisition for us thus far has been highly targeted Facebook ads, and they have been extremely effective.

Facebook is far and away the most powerful way to target people socially based on actual interests (likes) vs. just casual searches (goog).

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