A Review of Black Friday Weekend Numbers £££ and Scaling Up - Doc the Journey Ep 76

Yo, Black Friday. Currently don't know what I'm filming in this video. Basically Black Friday for us isn't a typical Black Friday. You might notice that athletic greens, Huel etc don't do Black Friday. That's not to say we're not doing it, but last year we discounted way too much. Doesn't really fit the subscription model. Our gross margin is normally like 60 to 65%. As in like after product, shipping, fulfillment, transaction, everything proper true gross margin class. Here we it, it came down to like I think it was 45 in November, December or something kind of chasing revenue and subscription growth and didn't make sense. We're not doing that again this year. Yeah, it's basically acquisition focused but acquisition focused at the same price. So we are doing some bundles that are like better but it's more with the intention of people trying new flavors, new products like Rainbow Dust, Astrodust and gummies. Different flavors etc. At the same usual price or more so 39 pound being our hero price which is pretty expensive. We're more expensive than most of our competitors now. But I think the fact we've been able to hold and maintain that price is a good thing. It's testament to the reviews, the quality, the retention, all that sort of shit. So yeah, we're currently like what, 15 hours into black Friday expecting a big push this weekend. But yeah, like I said, we're not going for major discounts. Not like it's definitely be a record day and a record weekend but some brands do like fucking 3% of their annual revenue on Black Friday. Like we'll be nowhere, nowhere near that at all actually. Tell a lie. No, we won't be. Yeah, it probably more than 1% but you know over the year that, that's not, it's not a big, big boost compared to some brands. So yeah, just kind of surf scaling, seeing what opportunity there is in the evening to push harder. I think we'll be probably 3x up on last year for the weekend, which is a decent place to be, give or take. Just pretty much what we are for revenue on the whole compared to last year. And yeah, my main focus is retention and acquiring subscribers and that's been pretty solid. I think December could actually be bigger than November for us because obviously we're pushing a lot of offers after Black Friday into the start of December and Christmas period and then January even bigger. So I think it should be November, December, January even bigger than that. So yeah, that's kind of what's going on with Black Friday. Right now. Maybe I'll check in and give an update on how it actually went. Most our ads are pretty much evergreen. Did some specific stuff. If you go on our website, we've got a lot of bundles but it is mainly bau business as usual, but with just a few extra things and obviously buyer intent is there. A lot of people have been waiting for a discount. Probably seen we're not doing a huge one, we're just doing slightly better offers for the same price. So I guess that's kind of a discount. But it's not literally a discount, it is the same price. Yeah. I'll check in tomorrow and then Sunday and Monday, see how it's gone and talk about plans for December, etc. Etc. So catch in a bit. We are scaling. Probably not as much as I thought. Actually I'm starting to send the office. We did obvious offers. We did don't. Didn't fucking make sense. Which was kind of expected given we haven't really done offers. But still be a record month. I think next month could be better. And we're still like 3x up on last year for Black Friday at least so far. So maybe it's a decent result. I don't know. This is weird. So I can see myself filming. It's like filmception. See how fucking shit I look. Yeah, maybe I'll check in properly once Black Friday's actually done. But yeah, the brief, I don't think you spent enough to be honest. We're kind of unsure how these would land on Black Friday, these offers. So we weren't spending that much on Meta, Google, etc. Obviously email list and everything performs pretty well. But yeah, I'm just gonna tell the agency to throttle the out of it the next few days basically and try and have a bigger day. And also because I wear our returning customer revenue lands is every day because that's just the way Skio works that we use for subscription. But we do have massive days usually at the start of each month. Just seems to be where stuff's landed. So we'll have like 40k in returning customer revenue per day for a few days, which adds on to new customer revenue, which obviously helps for like decent days in general because you get your start from 40k not from zero. So yeah, that didn't happen today because it was like a normal day. A normal subscription day is like 20 to 25k normally in terms of returning. So yeah, we'll see what that looks like and I'll update you in a bit. Peace anniversary date night vlogging for the first time since 2018. Just me in this video. Can you put your hair up? Is that better? I need a trim all the time. I've gone blonde, but when it's not short on the sides. Looks shit. It's kind of fresh, this light. Right, Catch you in Black Friday in a bit. Yo, check in Sunday Black Friday weekend. What is going on? Just replying to my mate about how things are going. Phil, Everyone on Twitter says things are perfect. We're like 2 1/2 x up just about on Black Friday last year. Black Friday weekend last year so far. But if I'm honest, I feel like it felt a bit soft. I said the other day, I mean today is probably going to be a record day actually. Weirdly because we've got a lot of returning customer revenue on the 1st of the month being Sunday the 1st of December. I also think tomorrow could be a record day again, but largely propped up by returning rather than new customers, which obviously is generally the focus on Black Friday, at least for a lot of brands. And it should be for us being two and a bit years old. So yeah, I was in Slack earlier saying, do we need to do something else tomorrow? But ultimately, like, what is the goal with Black Friday? For me, it's not ship loads of old stock. It's not necessarily have the biggest, you know, have a day that's 20 times bigger than anything else normally for us, really the pro focus this month was just subscription acquisitions, obviously new customer acquisition, but importantly retention, not pissing off existing subscribers. So we did a massive discount and you know, people have been paying 39 pound a month, which is like 18,000 people before we went into Black Friday period. Yeah, it's not good. So you have to think about not just chasing revenue for us, but yeah, subscription and retention and reactivating old Churn subscribers as well. So yeah, record month November was all in all. I did a report earlier. I like to do a little autistic OCD report which I send out to some of our angel investors and the VCs as well as a more in depth one like financial pack later in the month. But I. But yeah, I do think our, I mean our German story is starting to scale. I haven't touched on that really much yet. That's done pretty well in November. I mean like pretty much on par with our first month in the UK two years ago. So I think that's a good sign. Much less competitive market, massive market, hard one to crack with different languages and so on. But yeah, I honestly do think we need new products. I think that's the biggest thing holding us back right now. I mean, I tweeted about this and I won't gonna ramble about this specifically just now, but I tweeted about this about an hour ago. This sort of topic, you can do all the marketing tactic offer stuff you want, but at the end of the day, which market you in is uk, Germany, us? How big is the UK market for semi niche mushroom coffee? And ultimately that's going to dictate how you can scale at a sustainable cac? Is one thing saying can you scale is the market there? Yeah, it probably is. But if the CAC's 100 quid, that makes sense. You know, if the CAC's 50 quid, it does make sense. For example. So yeah, we're working on a lot of new products but obviously the thing with products, especially in food bev supplements takes fucking ages. Like from idea to launch, probably six months. I even stock productions three to four months, which is pretty standard to be honest. So we've tried to make it quicker. But I guess, yeah, I'm not doing general store drop shipping like I used to. Sometimes I think, fuck, I should be doing general store drop shipping and not this stuff, but make life easier because I could just launch a new product tomorrow and figure out like more scale. But yeah, new products definitely the biggest unlock. Thinking a bit about the American market and everyone says, why not do America, you know, rise everyday dose four sigmatic mud water. All the big boys in our space are there. There's pros and cons to that. It's proven, market clearly works and it clearly worked for them, so why couldn't it work for us? But at the same time, I don't know. We've literally never run an ad to America. The strategy has been uk. We just launched in Germany, like I said, as well as generally across Europe. But that's to a UK website for the past year and then Germany for the past month, specifically with a localized website. That has been the strategy. I don't know if that's the right strategy. I suppose maybe I can talk about this in a separate video. But yeah. Anyway, this is meant to be a Black Friday update. I don't want to ramble too much on other stuff. Cyber Monday tomorrow, 1st of December today. It's kind of weird because it's fallen in December, half in December for Black Friday weekend. So obviously for everyone. So November is still a record month, but obviously would have been more of a record month if Today and Cyber Monday were In November rather than December. And then, yeah, we're doing Christmas offers. Kind of just roll forward a lot of what we've done with slightly different messaging, slightly different options, different imagery, etc. For Christmas. And then the big one for me really is January. That's our best cohort from the past two years in both 23 and this year so far. So, yeah, a little check in. I'm wearing the single jumper that I currently own right now or the single jumper that I have possession of right now. And yes, on the night, bit of prep for tomorrow. I have two new people joining full time tomorrow. So we've got creative strategist joining full time based in London and a retention manager which is a huge, huge one. So yeah, bringing them like laptops and tomorrow do onboarding with two other members of the team. So that'd be cool, get some in person time for once, which is nice given I'm naturally a bit of a nomadic recluse probably like most people that watch this. And yeah, I'll let you know how Monday went. We'll do a dive, a deep dive, or maybe not a deep dive, but a summary of the total Black Friday weekend next week and then, yeah, crack on with some. Some other videos and some I want to go over. So back on the YouTube, subscribe to the pod and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace. Oh wait, I wasn't meant to do that. This is probably a clip that I'm gonna do more of tomorrow. My gimbal's gone all fucking bunny. Oh shit. Yeah, I'll update tomorrow. See you later. Yo, I am in the CO working space for once. The one I've had a membership with membership four for about a year. We had two new starters this morning. We did like a mini boardroom thing next door. Not boardroom, just booked a room because we don't actually have a fixed office. And yeah, it's good to do in person I think when new people are. Jo did like a full team call, which I do every Monday. Maybe I'll do like a day in the life at some point. But yeah, and I'm working from here for the rest of the day. Very busy week as always. Fuckload of emails to go through. I'm using that fixer AI thing which is meant to do your emails, which does seem to help a little bit because I'm terrible at just keeping up with day to day admin stuff. Many, many calls on Mondays I do one to ones with, well, not most of the team but like people that Report directly to me as the head of growth, head of Ops, MPD Manager. They're the three I do one to ones with on Mondays and then yeah, we had obviously third day black Friday yesterday. Pretty strong. We're nearly like 3x up on last year for Black Friday period, which is pretty good. Kind of what I expected. Cyber Monday today, change the office slightly, which I'm a bit nervous about because it might piss people off because slightly better offer today but I think that's what most brands do. Wearing a very saucy shirt as well because I was trying to be smart meeting people in person. I do like getting out of just working home all the time but I do find when I'm in a place like this I just don't know. You don't have your fridge, you have to bring food in with you or buy shit food. Coffee's not as good. Quite distracting being around people. So I think there's definitely pros and cons to remote. I'm definitely like remote first in my opinion. But I think when new people are joining it's definitely valuable to do some in person stuff. So yeah, kind of weird for me being here because my plan was to leave, leave London and this is near where I used to live in the power station was to leave London like a few months ago and I seem to have found myself back here because I need to be here for a few things and I'm not really sure where the I'm living right now, so that's a whole other issue. But yeah, all in all, Black Friday seems to be going pretty well. We need to smash December then we're going to pull back an acquisition definitely a bit, bring CAC down, focus on blended rice efficiency, get the margins up. Yeah, I think December should be similar to November because we'll have more returning revenue because we acquired a lot of new subscribers but less new revenue. New customer revenue for sure because we're going less hard on acquisition. But then January is the big one. So yeah, a lot of onboarding today with new people, a lot of admin to hire people and do all that. But like once they're set up and going, it's definitely like massive, massive ROI when you get the right people on certain things. We had a creative strategist join today and a retention manager, both super important. I think the retention manager is one we should have hired in hindsight like six to nine months ago. But you live and learn, so yeah, their full focus is reducing churn improvement, retention Ltd etc. So yeah, first time Vlogging in public to some extent. My hair looks fucking weird as well. I get super self conscious because there's a massive screen here. You can't see it. I'll probably get to the point where I just walk around with a camera. I think with this camera I've got the new one. It makes it way easier because it's less admin to set up, so there's like no excuse not to film. And I'm in a pod anyway, so no one can see. But yeah, maybe I'll do like a day in the life, something like that. Going forward, I have to pick an interesting day because most days you just sat at the desk all day and then going to the gym. Probably like most people in the space. But more vlogs to come. I'll update full BFCM and other bits that are going on. It's pretty chaotic time. A lot of good shit, but also a lot of pretty fucking stressful things. Some major problems that I tweeted about recently, which are definitely not helping me sleep well at night right now. But that's just the founder's journey, right? The. The arc of trying to scale. So, yeah, catch you next. One secret filming in the office. You don't want to be on this too. Charlie doesn't like being in contact. My last company I shied away was probably because they had like 3 million followers on YouTube and I was like, absolutely not immediately any of that because they. They get like weirdos who start stalking you around. I get a lot of that. Yo. So we finished Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. I'm being way too transparent on this. I said it was slightly soft, 2.7x up on last year, which is like decent enough. I think the period was pretty soft. CAC was pretty good. It's like our main metric, really. Like I said, we didn't do any crazy offers, to be honest. We just built a lot of momentum. Subscriber acquisition was flying, focused on retention and reactivation, which was pretty strong as well. But yeah, 2.7x. What does that leave us? It's about the same as we're up on last year. Slightly less. Yeah, we're more like 3x and a bit up on last year revenue wise. And Black Friday Sad Monday was like 2.7x. So all in all, decent enough, period. Probably would have done some things differently in hindsight. I think consumers are really looking for more discounts. We didn't do any heavy, heavy discounts, but like I said, focused on subscriptions, retention, all that sort of shit. And yeah, going into Christmas period, doing much of the same really. And then preparing for January, which again is a huge, huge period for us. We've got a few new flavors coming doing like a brand refresh thing in the background, which has been controversial the based on my LinkedIn and Twitter posts about it recently. But yeah, all in all the goal is to like double the business in 2025. Can't believe it's 2025 next year, which is kind of scary because we've got work to do to do that for sure. But maybe I'll cover more often 2025 goals like I did on 2024 goals the start of this year and review 2024 at the end of December with a pretty transparent update. But yeah, that's the Black Friday video done. Yeah, more vlogs to come. I'll see you in the next one. Subscribe to the pod. I am actually going to be consistent for once. They have this new little fucking gadget camera thing definitely helps. It's so easy to film with. And yeah, had a few comments of what people want to see day in the life would be quite an interesting one. I'll have to make it an interesting day. Or maybe just do a day in the very boring life which is more realistic. Let me know if there's anything else you want to see. I'll catch you the next one. Cheers for watching. Peace.