Candy Japan April Income Report | Hacker News Reader

Candy Japan April Income Report

candyjapan.com

110 pointsmicrypt78 comments

I've been following your posts since you started with the business. Have to say that I'm impressed by your tenacity in keeping this fun idea going.

Now, your marketing copy is all over the place. The layout is so hard to follow. Things are just too spread around, and the eye cannot follow an easy reading path.

Put everything into two columns, side by side. Put more pictures, and more information. Get a smaller third column on the right side for the testimonials.

Also, your headline is not bade, but it has nothing under it for me to read . The job of a headline is to get people reading the copy. You have no copy.

The big ugly green button is akin to a car salesman handing you a buying contract for a brand new car before you even shake hands. Get that out of there!

I believe that if you did a video of you hand picking specialized candy for your customer then sales would improve. People are not buying the candy, they are buying the experience. Let them see the process through a camera so they can relate and live out their Japanese fantasy. In fact, do a 10 minute long video of you shipping for candy. Put all the different candies and give out your opinions. Talk to Japanese people, and have them share their favorites. You could even try and get the best selling candy manufacturer into letting you do a little tour of their factory.

There are so many neat things you can do that will turn this into a 10K business ASAP.

Good luck!

PS. Shoot me an email to rm at innovafy dot com

Hi, thanks for the feedback. The current layout is the result of lots of playing around with the site. Testimonials and the video had a big impact on conversions, so they are front and center now. I guess I might be biased from looking at the site a lot, but to me it seems pretty clean.

I think it needs to be clear exactly what step I want the user to take to join, so that's why that huge big green button is there. It's also not half bad looking in my opinion, although depends on your browser since it uses some recent webkit CSS stuff.

Factory tour / other kind of video back scenes content is probably a good idea. Since the current video works, it may be that that would work even better. Even before that though, I've been thinking of experimenting with a video that would just explain the service in simple terms.

You have a lot of ideas, have any for how to bring in traffic?

Have you tried targeted ads on reddit? Maybe for something like /r/snackexchange? I just spent $30 on a test ad, if you're interested I can share the traffic stats with you.

Hi, yes actually I tried exactly that. It cost me $60 / customer, which is over my lifetime value so I discontinued advertising there.

Here's my stats from the attempt: http://www.bemmu.com/stats-from-advertising-candy-japan-on-r...

Things might be different now, the page was less optimized back then. I might try again later, but I'm really hoping Reddit would just lower their minimum daily spend. Right now they have no advertiser there at all, I'd love to advertise if it was just a tad cheaper.

Nope, you're experience mirrors those of mine. It's hard to convert redditors; in part due to neglecting the self-serve platform. With that said, $60 to bring in a brand new customer isn't that bad.

Maybe it would be cheaper to hook up with a subreddit mod and run a give-a-way. $50 worth of candy for a front page post sounds like a better value :D

Wow, didn't even notice the sidebar before. Just contacted the admin to see if there's a way to get in there.

Personally, I really like the design. The only thing I would do would be to slightly increase the line-height on your copy. It should make it slightly easier to read (I usually aim for about 1.5em but some prefer slightly less).

Better now?

For what it's worth, I love your design and the strong call to action.

Looking at the front page, I didn't really experience the problems you describe. I had just two issues:

1) The photos of the candy should really near the top and visible without scrolling -- 'candy' is not a term I come across often, so I wasn't completely certain what was being sold. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I don't bother with videos unless the product has already interested me.

2) My eyes skipped past the price completely. I was actually about to write here that they left it out, finally spotting it only when I went looking.

...the green pay button was fine for me -- not particularly ugly or dodgy looking.

oh yes, have some random Japanese person pick stuff and ask them to say eg "from whatevercity, greetings to the rest of the world. I am Mr x and picked some of my favourite candy for you. this one is called sgggddtgcf, it tastes like qetffhh. the bright green one is a bit special, be careful. -- I hope you will enjoy them!". show the shopping/picking. ask cute Japanese girls if men are most of your customers. maybe do that once per month. maybe personally address some of your customers in it (ask before).

that movie inside my head ain't stopping. :)

I think Japanese people are very camera shy. For example on social networks in Japan, most don't show their face in profile pictures. I did meet one guy who was the total opposite, so I managed to make a video with him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb7PP2z3nnw

The thing with these videos is that I need to make two per month, and I'm not sure how I would source that many people to agree to appear in the videos.

But yeah, it would be pretty awesome if I could figure out how to pull that off.

Email me

rm at innofvafy dot com

If anything we can talk about ides and maybe find something that works.

Candy is hardly a gendered product, and foreign interest in Japanese culture and food isn't either. Adding gendered advertising in such a way is unlikely to gain many new leads, but will certainly limit the audience dramatically.

For some reason, the "testimonials from random Japanese people" idea seems rather unsettling to me. It makes it feel exoticized, touristy, and fake.

I'd say you could do some serious work on your site. I have no idea what amazing candy could be sent. Your site is very bland for a site about CANDY. I really like the idea and I think you would totally increase conversion if you actually did some selling of what you're giving (GIANT PICTURES OF CANDY LOOK AT THIS AMAZING CANDY IT COULD BE YOURS TWICE A MONTH). Videos are cool, but I don't see a single beautiful picture of candy on your site.

Also, based on the demographic of people who will want candy from Japan, perhaps toy with the 8-bit nyan-cat-anime-retro geek-style vibe? Cute rainbows and hello kitty and all giant eyes and all that. Perhaps do huge detailed 8-bit renditions OF THE CANDY.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I agree that might be cool, although would need to test it against current. If you know someone who could such a mockup for me, let me know. The current site was just designed by myself, I wanted to do more cute / sweet style design, but couldn't come up with one that I was satisfied with. You definitely have a point here.

Update: added some example pics

It's candy and it's japanese... that just conjures all sorts of images of a super high tech factory run by cats and magic. I'd love to see a candy envelope being stylised packing animation in the background or off to the side. It could look amazing visually and would explain the concept instantly.

Another idea: Let your customers comment on the "past candy". Let them rate it and share it and talk about it.

I like how you've used my IP address to tell me that delivery will be free 'even to the United Kingdom'.

May I suggest using the same code to also convert the price from $23.95 to the users local currency as this will help increase conversions. £15.10 feels a lot less than $23.95!

Other than that, great idea and I wish you all the best!

That's a great idea, I get this gut feeling/fear though that it might introduce some extra complexity. I might be able to do that at least for EUR/USD/GBP but I suppose have avoided it until now to keep things simple. Will have to think that through more.

Sure. I see your PayPal subscription is $23.95 per month - which is fine, there's no need to change that. I'm just thinking from a UI perspective you could try using money.js (1) to show to the user the current price in their local currency:

Mystery sweets from Japan for £15.10 ($23.95 USD) / month

(1) http://josscrowcroft.github.com/money.js/

I get a similar 'even to Australia' message, and damn do I appreciate it. As an Australian I find myself avoiding online purchases because shipping costs routinely run more expensive then what I want to buy, unless you want to wait 30+ days for your item. It's a fantastic personal touch that just makes me instinctively like the service and want to show my friends.

Hope he has an exclusion list for countries the post office don't post to. Whether it is political or temporary due to natural disaster.

I was surprised not be greeted with high quality photos of examples of past candy. To see any of your product I need to find the 'past candy' link then decide on which unfamiliar product to click on.

Yes, also intuitively to me it would make sense to have such photos, but I found the same thing as Manpacks did (http://mixergy.com/manpacks-ken-johnson-interview/) that showing product photos on the main page lowers conversions. It seems people are in it for the surprise factor.

P.S. This is not untrue for software in many cases. Some products get a big boost out of screenshots. Many don't, and instead get big boosts by e.g. showing pictures of users or the team which wrote the software. (Whether a screenshot helps is surprisingly uncorrelated with my subjective impression of which products are "pretty", even given that I have less artistic sense than a mole rat.)

Any tips btw. for content I should have on the site for SEO purposes? Even though I rank for the generic term "japanese candy" and also some specific candies, I haven't been able to convert people except those searching for the site specifically (http://i.imgur.com/OnVIF.png)

Hate to say it, but I suspect that showing photos will put some customers off because the products don't look substantial enough.

I realise that there are overheads and that your service is presumably aimed at people with a high enough disposable income.

$2k per month profit (before tax) is not bad. There are some costs that cannot be avoided per order but imagine as volume grows, so will efficiencies. This model looks like the mens shaver business. Can see this working for any niche - shavers, stationary, fruit, nuts...

How can we see earlier blog posts?.

I started this to learn and to provide some basic source of income in addition to software, so it has worked well for that purpose. It has involved writing more software than I expected, though!

Earlier posts are at http://www.bemmu.com/ with currently no easy way to see only the Candy Japan related things. I was still feeling a bit undecided where to put them, wondering if it's a good idea to expose customers to income-related posts.

Absolutely awesome blog. Pretty sweet ( excuse the pun) execution of an idea into a profitable business.

Do you think you automate the packing and shipping?

It's already outsourced, which I'm very happy about since it was very time-consuming when we did it ourselves. I've gradually grown a nice relationship with the nearby supermarket, it's almost a drop-ship operation at this point, although I do still meet with them face-to-face every week as our process isn't totally perfected yet.

If you mean automated as in having robots do it, that would be fun, but moving oddly shaped objects from sealed bulk packages into narrow envelopes isn't a very easy task to automate that far.

Interesting. Packaging and shopping seems to be your biggest pain point and cost. Reduce these and you have an easier business to manage and can focus on getting more customers.

Good luck. I imagine there are other goodies from Japan you can offer.

No robots, but rather outsourcing.

Edit: just read your recent post on face book adverts. Really clever. Would you share more details on conversion numbers.

Long story short, I am not planning to expand my FB advertising efforts at this point. In my best ever campaign I managed to get 6 conversions after spending $280 which is getting close to breaking even, but not quite there yet. Just to reach this almost-breaking-even point I've spent probably close to $2000 on various ad networks.

Another one that came close to working was bidding on SMBC comics ads through Project Wonderful.

Yup, www.graze.com for healthy snacks in the UK

> Yup, www.graze.com for healthy snacks in the UK

Yeh, there are many others offering fresh/organic/luxury/quality items delivered to your door. Wine has also made a comeback (forgot the name of the recent big US startup).

Graze have a great website. Will offer some inspiration to others looking at getting into similar businesses.

'What a great subscription based business' is always my very first thought when I read news from Candy Japan. And every time I try to come up with a similar idea matching my region but I don't find any.

And these income reports are clever Marketing.

And every time I try to come up with a similar idea matching my region but I don't find any.

I did the same, but my idea didn't really work. Too bulky and sensitive to the shipping delays.

What, flowers from Holland?

No, pastries from Portugal :)

That's a marvelous idea.

If they are the same as those I once ate in Barcelona—really tiny, perfect details, like small artworks and excellent shape and colors—you should go for this.

Question is: how long is the durability. Probably you have to find expensive delivery services for food with a cold chain distribution.

But the idea is good, I never saw such pastries somewhere else again. Are they the same in Portugal?

EDIT: I found a link (think it was Bubo): http://www.cocoonbarcelona.com/blog/favourite-pastries-barce...

They're actually rather different: http://saltofportugal.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/pasteis-de...

But yes, it'd be hard to keep them fresh while not inflating the costs too much (I don't expect them to be sold as expensive delicatessen).

I imagine fresh food would have a bunch of weird import restrictions.

Pastries do sound troublesome. Even with candies I have to avoid sending anything crumbly or containing chocolate or otherwise they will take severe damage during some trips. For example many postal systems are automated and move mail through conveyor belts that can sometimes crush items.

Pastéis de Belém, heh?

That was my first idea, but it's actually a trademark[1] owned by "Antiga Confeitaria de Belém Lda", and I didn't want to get involved in ugly legalese.

[1]: http://oami.europa.eu/CTMOnline/RequestManager/en_Result?tra...

It's true there is marketing benefit from HN. Not just directly, but many bloggers read HN and sometimes feature the service because of that (btw. if you're thinking of doing that, you can reach me@bemmu.com).

For what it's worth I hadn't heard of you guys until this post and I just signed up. I imagine I'm not the only one.

Thank you! So far there have been 23 new subscribers today that I would attribute to this HN post.

Anyone tried the same idea but with Asian stationery? There's always been a huge array of crazy stuff when I've browsed stationery sections of department stores in Thailand, China, etc. I'd try it myself, but I think there'd need to be someone on the ground with direct, cheap access sourcing the product.

Lightweight, should be cheap to ship, etc.

Crazy stuff at stationery sections? What do you mean exactly?

Asian stationery is often pretty peculiar. Bizarre and cutesy characters, Engrish slogans, colour combos and so on. I think someone could put together packs of pens, pads, erasers, etc and have a crack. Wish I were over there to try it.

Would partner with someone who was there on the ground and handle design and so on if anyone was interested.

Jetpens.com does this but not as a subscription model.

Hey cool, that's a great idea for another subscription club I could launch off the current code/customerbase.

First thing is PayPal fees, after which we are left with $6895. We are switching from PayPal to accepting credit cards directly through WireCard + Recurly, but that will likely just raise our costs a bit (but will hopefully improve conversions).

This interests me the most. Could you shad some light as of why you switching knowing the cost will go up. You say it will improve conversions, but #1 isnt PayPal still the most well known payment system over the web, and #2 dont they offer payment via regular credit cards?

What you trying to do here, is replace better option with narrower one for all customers. If anything, you should add Google Checkout, as I got used to using it over PayPal (and sometimes wont convert) because PayPal got me real mad couple times in the past.

Instead of redirecting users to PayPal and requiring them to have PayPal accounts with credit cards linked to them, I can directly ask for their credit card information. This is how it should look after the Recurly integration is complete: http://imgur.com/SHC0a

I am now paying PayPal $339 / month.

Recurly charges 1.25% + $0.10 / transaction + $69 / month. WireCard charges 2.75% + $0.19 / transaction + $24 / month. My total cost from these would then be about $473 / month. If I can get ~20 new customers because of this more convenient payment method, then it was worthwhile.

I'm also expecting some increased life happiness from having to deal less with PayPal (the interface is sloooow).

And how are you going to handle SSL encryption for your checkout/cc page? Going to use a separate hosting service for that part?

I see that you're running on App Engine, hence the question...

HTTPS works for appspot domains, so I thought I'd redirect them to bemmu1.appspot.com for the checkout. That wouldn't exactly inspire confidence in the service, but just until App Engine gets around to adding proper support.

Roger that, that's what I thought you might plan on doing. Let's hope they solve the SSL issue soon -- since I'm also a fan of GAE!

Btw, thanks for sharing, it's been quite inspiring to read.

I think some customers (like myself) would be more hesitant to use a non-PayPal option on your site. With PayPal, I can easily cancel at any time. I would be worried that by directly providing you with my credit card number, it would be harder to cancel.

I might have direct credit card input as the big default button and a smaller PayPal link for those that prefer that. I will have to continue supporting PayPal indefinitely in any case since I have all subscribers there now.

I love it, but I'm really curious about taxes/export-import-duties/regulations, FDA, etc. I guess I always assumed there'd be some strict rules that would make starting this kind of business kind of hairy. Not so?

I'm far from expert yet on this, but as I understand it depends on whether you are the one bringing the product into the country or not.

For example if I were to go to an anime expo in the US to sell candy there, then I would need to clear the customs and comply with FDA regulations such as the list of ingredients that have to appear in the packages.

But when I am situated here in Japan and people order things from me from all over the world, then they are the ones who are clearing the customs. However when the shipments are really small, customs is not a problem for the person receiving them and many countries have limits where you never need to deal with customs if the order size is small enough.

That's interesting, but I would think it would have limits. Would you be able to send small amounts of a drug that was legal in your country to a country where it's illegal? I suppose you'd only be subject to the laws of your country in that case, the buyer would be subject to the laws in theirs?

Of course, we're talking about Candy.. I'm just intrigued by the idea of shipping-worldwide subscription businesses in general.

Yeah, I suppose if you mail-ordered illegal drugs from abroad it would be you who gets into trouble, not the person sending them if they were perfectly legal in their home country unless the country in question had specific rules forbidding sending such items.

I am at least a bit encouraged by jlist.com et al. doing direct-sending including food items from Japan for years apparently with no significant problems.

I heard that the Kinder Egg in Germany isn't sold in the US because it has a toy in the center and would be considered a choking hazard by US safety standards.

I realize right now it's just a small operation but if you hit it big, what are the approval hoops that you have to run thru for stuff like that?

Having tried Japanese candies (and deserts in general) while visiting Japan, I'm very surprised that this actually works.

When it comes to sweets and deserts Japanese taste is so different from what's popular in the west. It might be interesting but I'm not sure I'd want to pay for a continuous supply.

French/Belgium products might appeal to western taste better.

Other than that - Good luck!

Because it is different than what is typically available, there is a market for those who have developed those tastes which isn't being served in a lot of places.

I think that's exactly why it works, because you get to try something different. Before living in Japan I did some holidays here and it was one of my favorite activities to just buy random things from kiosks and vending machines and to be surprised with new tastes.

Have you thought to tap out the Japanese Expat market as an advertising/marketing opportunity?

That might include Japanese people living abroad, students, workers living in the middle east for 12 months, etc

The service could very easily appeal to people living abroad and wanting a reminder of home every month.

I might try it, but wouldn't they have friends who send them items? It's very common even inside Japan that relatives send food items to each other, and I the Japanese expats who I knew in Finland were also getting items sent to them by their parents.

I agree with mendable, I feel like your service is very convenient, much more so than having friends send you things.

Perhaps it isn't an issue at this scale but for exporting food products aren't there any regulations / paperwork to fill in? I'm sure I remember hearing the US were getting stricter re: this. Perhaps this is where your missing deliveries are going.

I should be OK as I am not the importer of the candies, rather the people receiving them are. Still, I try hard to be on the safe side so I've contacted FDA twice to ask if there's something they'd like me to do, once via physical mail and once by email and got ignored both times.

If I started doing the importing on US side myself in bulk amounts, that would be a different story and would involve at least filing FDA prior notices.

I feel like your landing page is too "corporate".

Candy Japan is about the emotional experience. The design should reflect that!

I agree it's not that "sweet". I wonder what would be a good example of the kind of site design I should be aiming for?

Hmm, first General Motors and now Candy Japan pulls their ads from Facebook. How is Zuckerberg going to stanch the bleeding?

Without my $250 / month they might have to cancel the IPO :)

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