Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

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Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com

They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time.

Now I have it running independently on a GoDaddy VPS and all the static resources are on Amazon CloudFront. It is much faster.

My wife says the designs we have are out of date and we need to make some newer designs. This involves going to Target, looking at the greeting cards, place mats, napkins, and other nick-hacks to get ideas. Also, Pinterest is great for design ideas! Then, opening up InkScape or a D3 console and creating SVG color-in templates in the site's specific format.

   +-----------+--------+
   | Mon (desc)| Sales  |
   +-----------+--------+
   | July      | 128.70 |
   | June      | 227.45 |
   | May       | 124.65 |
   | April     | 301.50 |
   | March     | 274.40 |
   | February  | 287.35 |
   | January   | 415.25 |
   | December  | 128.70 |
   | November  | 175.65 |
   | October   | 188.60 |
   | September | 132.75 |
   | August    | 330.25 |
   | July      | 343.20 |
   | June      | 297.45 |
   | May       | 505.90 |
   | April     | 351.30 |
   | March     | 484.05 |
   | February  | 188.60 |
   | January   | 248.50 |
   | December  | 38.85  |
   | November  | 155.40 |
   | October   | 89.85  |
   | September | 209.65 |
   | August    | 179.70 |
   | July      | 299.50 |
   | June      | 329.45 |
   | May       | 229.50 |
   | April     | 279.45 |
   | March     | 419.15 |
   | February  | 249.45 |
   | January   | 149.70 |
   | December  | 119.75 |
   | November  | 199.60 |
   | October   | 109.75 |
   | September | 99.80  |
   | August    | 99.80  |
   | July      | 70.80  |
   | June      | 25.90  |
   | May       | 25.90  |
   | April     | 38.85  |
   | March     | 0.01   |
   +-----------+--------+

I looked at your site briefly. Great idea, similar to patio11's Bingo Card Creator site. Are you doing any A/B testing at all? I think you should be able to ramp up your sales by being more active managers of the site, instead of it being something passive. But even patio11 didn't want to manage bingo cards forever.

Also, the number of template available seems very low. From your home page, if you add up the numbers under "Categories", you only have 10 templates to choose from? You need to get that to 100. Seriously. This is like a business card creator site - you need lots and lots of choices, and people will buy.

Not many want to custom design a complete cupcake wrapper themselves. Just pick a nice baby design and add text to it for the baby name.

Email some of your customers and ask them how you can improve.

My 2 cents. Congrats on the success, and good luck!

Thanks for the tips! There are actually 41 canned designs http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com/Wrapper and users do share some of their custom designs which can then be edited by other users.

But, it's been on my to-do list for over a year to build a wizard on top of the custom designer with a step 1) choose a design, step 2) upload photo, step 3) enter text, type of experience.

Nice business there! I'm curious, if I may ask, where do you get most of your traffic from?

I get nearly all the traffic from Google. AdWords never worked for me. For a few months I got a lot of great traffic from Cake Central. They have a cupcake forum [1] which is hyper-relavent to my site. Also, I reviewed myself [2] in their reviews section, and it sat in their sidebar feed, getting the placement of a $1000/mo ad, until it fell off.

[1] http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-forum-33.html [2] http://cakecentral.com/products/cupcake-wrapper-creator/revi...

Ah! I remember this site. I thought the idea was neat. I heard on a podcast there's a niche for wedding handkerchiefs actually. Maybe look into that. Cupcakes have gotten popular at weddings.

This is why I'm not an entrepreneur. I could have never, even in my wildest dreams, imagined there would be a market for cupcake wrappers or wedding handkerchiefs (whatever they are).

You may be able to find someone on oDesk or something to make a bunch of designs without you having to do it, might be worth paying for a long term gig which will give you fresh content you can use.

Any success marketing on Pinterest? Seems there'd be a gold mine of home/crafty/DIYers who would be interested.

You might try instagram as well. Here's an instagram account I follow (I have a corgi) that is doing really great marketing. They usually a few posts per week, occasional shots of various products, link to website. I thought it was brilliant.

link: http://instagram.com/corgistagram

Why on Earth are you hosting it at GoDaddy? Throw up a Linode or something.

It's written in Windows technologies. Their Windows VPS prices are good.

Have you looked at Azure? I know they dropped prices fairly recently, not sure how they match up to GoDaddy though.

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