Where Have I Been? Spacegoods 2023 £££ Numbers in Review and lessons learned - Doc the Journey Ep 56

Yo. Back with episode 56 of Documenting the journey. And many of you probably thought, given it's been nearly three months since I've made an episode and it's actually December 31st, end of the year, that I was never gonna make another episode again. And maybe the pod was completely gone and maybe that was a good thing or a bad thing or somewhere in between. And I was pretty nervous to make this next video because I know for a particular reason, but just because I was so out of the loop with things haven't recorded in, yeah, nearly three months. Kind of lost the flow of putting myself on the Internet in general. And I'll get into maybe slightly reasons why in a second on Instagram, Twitter, but people messaging me literally saying, are you alive? Which is very kind and caring. But yeah, I'm alive, everything's fine. I just took a step back from being in. I guess I built this personal brand kind of unintentionally and never with any plan or reason behind it other than just documenting shit. And that kind of drew people in originally with the pod. Then I started the doc series, which actually think is way more enjoyable and interesting and ultimately will be more interesting to look back on in years to come. And then, yeah, like the nature of the doctor journey is there's no point doing it unless I document the ups and downs and everything in between. And I'm completely transparent and honest because I made. I started the series and want to make the series and still do because I want to look back at it in 5, 10, maybe even 20 years time or 50 years time. How mad would that actually be? Well, at the first generation will be able to do that through Instagram, YouTube, etc. And I often wish I'd documented more in like the past five years. So even just looking back a year ago is really interesting now because yeah, everything changes and when you document it on video it's cool. But yeah, the nature of doing it means I have to be honest about shit and then have to document everything that's going on. And there's been a few big developments which I'm not going to share in this video. Positive ones in the business that I'm not sure I'm actually allowed to speak about them just yet. Or maybe I am, I probably am, but there'll be like a release about it or whatever and yeah, I'll speak about then. I was going through. I was basically just deep in the fucking trenches running the business in general, but working on a few key things and milestones which I'll Speak about in later episodes not to leave on a cliffhanger, but I just can't write it. And I felt like A, I probably wasn't allowed to speak about all the details, what was going on while it was going on, and B, if it hadn't ended up positively like it did, I might have regretted talking about it, saying it was gonna happen, for it then to not happen. So I decided with, you know, with all that in mind, it was just best to not post anything for a while. Not share too much on Twitter. I share quite a lot about the business on Twitter as well, which again, never any plan to it. It was just sharing stuff the brand's doing, sharing updates, milestones, which I think is cool. Cause like the whole. Not so much money to it. I think that's a bit of a meme. But like, there's a lot of founders on there, consumer brand founders, agency owners. I think it's just cool to share shit that you're working on, especially if it comes from a place of authenticity and just being honest about shit rather than just trying to sell something like a lot of people do. So, yeah, that's kind of why I haven't documented a lot of stuff recently. Because there was no point doing it if I didn't speak about stuff that I wanted to speak about that was going on. But by speaking about it before it was done, it felt kind of the wrong way around. And I'm still not speaking about it yet. I'll share a few further updates in the coming weeks. Just. I think it's better to let. Let that be announced properly rather than me speak about it on YouTube beforehand. So, yeah, that's kind of why I disappeared for a while. And I was just super fucking busy. And I mean, life's always busy, isn't it? It's never an excuse. I said I'd do this every week. I haven't done it every week. I've done it pretty much every week. I still feel like I'm documenting most of the key chapters, but for anyone that enjoys watching the POD or the Doc Doc series, which amazingly, there's quite a lot of you. Yeah, sorry. I've been away for like nearly three months, so. Yeah, that's why I've not been on. I've decided. I also kind of. Sometimes you need to step back from putting yourself out there to think like, do I want to do this in the next chapter? And I feel like I'm. I am kind of in the next chapter of this business for a few reasons. But also As a result, the next chapter, like what I want to do with my YouTube, I mean, obviously I'm not. I haven't got a massive following, what, eight and a half thousand subscribers. It's not like I'm a fucking YouTuber that's making millions. And I don't know if that's the goal at all. I don't know if even having a personal brand to any extent is the goal. But like most things in life, I decided it's definitely net beneficial for me to keep putting this stuff out because I think it helps people. Well, it starts with, I genuinely think in 10 years time, I wish I did it than not just to look back on, you know, know whether it's ups and downs. I think it helps people because I like to think my content is very honest and the nature of it being documenting rather than, you know, creating polished stuff means it's honest and I think it's in a, in an interesting space. You know, with the experience I've got in previous brands, the kind of stage I'm at now, I'm never claiming to have made it. I'm not like a lot of YouTubers. I think, you know, they kind of come from this position of I've made it. Follow me, here's advice. Buy my shit, which is fine. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but it does sometimes to me come across pretty disingenuous and fake. And I think a lot of it has motives that aren't necessarily aligned with, you know, actually helping the audience or even just being sincere and authentic. And I think my content, I would like to think is certainly where it comes from in my head is I'm just being super fucking honest. I've never been. I never claimed to know everything. I've never claimed to have the biggest business at all. I definitely don't. I'm just doing something which is fairly unique, which is documenting the process from literally day one of building a new brand. And for people that are into brand building and the agency space and E commerce in general, which is a lot of people, probably more even now then that's interesting. If you're not interested, don't watch it, that's fine. There's plenty of way more successful, way wealthier, way better looking, way more interesting YouTubers to go and watch. But I'm just documenting shit and hopefully it's obvious that it comes from a place of sincerity and, you know, genuine. Being genuine myself and just being who I am because that's what the channel's Always been about. So, yeah, I also realized, to be honest, pretty largely stopped putting out some content for a while. I mean, maybe tweeting and putting stuff on Instagram, because I think I just started to care way too much what people thought. Like, can't lie, you know, everyone does. But I've had a handful of comments DMs over the past few months that made me think, why am I putting this stuff out? Like, everyone thinks the content shit when they definitely don't. You know, 0.1% of people or 1% of people think the content shit, that's fine. They're very sad people that. Projecting that on other people by hating. I never understand that. Anyone that hates online needs to have a look in the mirror, I think. But yeah, I just realized I cared too much what other people think. Probably even my own mates, like, do I want to be sharing numbers, progress, all that stuff when there's people around me doing better. And then I thought, well, fuck it. I mean, I need to get over that. I think the world and life is better when you stop giving a fuck what most people think. And, yeah, I've always wanted to be a bit of a YouTuber deep down. Like, as a side thing, you know, I used to make travel videos, music videos, before that, travel videos. The podcast. Obviously, never really found my feet with making content until I started documenting the journey because it just felt, this is what I'm doing, so I may as well just fucking film it rather than trying to come up with video ideas and stuff. Um, so, yeah, that's kind of why I was off and I thought it was the first video, you know, I guess. What's the next chapter? I'm releasing it on New Year's Eve. I'm filming it on New Year's Eve. So this will be online in the next hour or two. After I film this, I thought, I've done a few, like, review of the year videos. Not a calendar year, because I haven't had a full calendar year in the business yet. And yeah, I feel like I could. The risk with sharing the progress of a startup online is almost everyone's going to say my business is bigger or better or whatever. And I'm sure there's, you know, everyone on Twitter. You'd be led to believe he's running a hundred million pound brand. I'm not yet. But there's no point in documenting this unless I'm honest. There's absolutely no point. And I can inflate numbers, pretend everything's perfect, you know, there's plenty of people that do that, I know for a fact. And there's many, many people doing way better than me, many of which, glad to say, my friends and investors and mentors, but they're not putting out content. That's fine. So there's no point me doing it if I'm gonna try and keep up with other people by bullshitting around progress. So yeah, like, you know, ecom's fucking hard. I'm committed to documenting the journey an authentic way. And that means sometimes sharing like results and shit that I'm not particularly happy with, but definitely progress. So yeah, anyway, with that said, I think it's pretty valuable to be honest, the shit I'm learning doing this and fuck it, yeah, I hope you can see my screen because basically this is a bit cringe in it, but I just thought, I mean, in the spirit of reflecting. I'm nine minutes into a video without saying anything yet, which is typical, especially when I'm rusty. Top 10 things I learned in 2023. Given it's the full first calendar year running Space Goods and again, these numbers are real. I've decided sharing the numbers, fuck it. Because if I don't share the numbers then, then I don't really the full picture is it. I'm gonna share five things that were positive learnings, learnings I've made from things that were going well and also probably more importantly, five things that I learned in the past year and a bit of anecdote to each of them. You know, things I learned from things I got wrong and mistakes. So here we go. I might regret putting this on the Internet, but fuck it. Yeah, not the biggest numbers, not the smallest numbers, but they're the real numbers. 2023 is the first full calendar year, so I've obviously rounded these slightly just to make them look pretty. Revenue £3.8 million. I guess I've made an assumption for the next four hours of fucking Today before this goes live. But yeah, it's the end of the year. So £3.8 million in 2022, which is eight months. We did about 1.2 million which was an eight month year. So you know, over 3x year on year growth, which is good around 81,000 orders. I think it might be like 81, 177 I calculated earlier. But yeah, 81,000 orders, which is across Amazon. That doesn' to be fair. But you know, there's about 15 of them because they're all big orders. We're about 9,150 active subscribers as of recording this, which I guess a lot of people really want to see these numbers. So, yeah, there you go. Units sold. I know it's over 100k. This is a rainbow dust alone, by the way, which is obviously the hero product. It might be more like 120k at this point, to be fair, Factoring in Amazon, where it's slightly cheaper, and then also retail. Well, we've been selling quite a lot, to be fair. That's picked up dramatically, I mean, for a breakdown of channels. So website this year is about 3.3 million, Amazon's about 400k. Retail is about 100k, which doesn't sound like much, but it's grown a lot in Holland and Borough, which is good to see. Mrr as of today. So recurring revenue from subscriptions, about 350k. Over 70% of revenue now on a monthly basis is from subscribers. So whether that's new or existing subscription revenue, Obviously the other 30% is from one time, who we hope will subscribe at one point. LTR to NCPA is a massive metric. I look at a lot and I'll dive into a bit of this later on as well. We're over three now on a subscription basis and then gross margin, about 68%. Product margin isolated is about 88%, but gross margin, factoring in fulfillment, where we spend more than cogs and transaction fees, about 68%. So it's a very solid gross margin. Yeah. Fuck. These probably get screenshotted and I'm sure there'll be a Twitter thread from some guy trying to shill his agency quoting these numbers, saying they're terrible or something. But there are real numbers. I'm pretty happy with them in a difficult market, from a standing start, in a new market with an innovative product. And I'm not drop shipping, I'm not white labeling, I'm not ripping someone else's brand. Space was entirely unique. I think there's a lot of brands that ripped us off and that's kind of a huge compliment. And I'm pretty happy with these from where I was this time last year. So the good things I learned. Some of this might feel cliche, but cliche is often that way because it's fucking true. But simplicity wins and scales. I think one thing I've got right since the start of the brand and this year as well, is keeping as much as possible simple. And the headline of that is basically we're still 97% rainbow dust in terms of revenue, maybe 95%, but basically all our revenue is still one product, different offers and you know, bundles around that. But ultimately it's Rainbow Dust revenue and we're pretty much one channel sales channel, you know, largely online, split between Shopify obviously and Amazon, but largely Shopify website and pretty much one channel, you know, Instagram. So I think we've done that very well. And I think that any brands of sub 10 million or even sub 30 million, you hear some people like Moise Ali say, and I agree with that in principle having not done it yet, got to that level yet, just keep things simple. It's very tempting to bring in fluff, but you don't need it to offer is everything. And I didn't really think about offer until this year to be honest. Maybe even halfway through the year, which is kind of embarrassing given I'm meant to be relatively seasoned in the ecommerce startup space. At least kind of zero to a few million. By that I mean Rainbow Dust is the product great. But what's the killer offer that's going to get people to subscribe? Because that's been our key focus is acquiring subscribers and for us it's been the starter kit and it was originally the starter kit with just a moment and it became a starter kit with a mug, a pot of spoon, a frother. So basically it's increasing value. Granted you lose a bit of margin on the first order but we found that that got a lot more people over the line to subscribe on first order. So yeah, offer is everything I think especially when you got limited SKUs. Think about how you can reposition that SKU to be more valuable to acquire high quality customers as well, which is super important. You know, trying to avoid discounts. We haven't really done any discounts, we've just increased value on first order instead. So all that stuff, it's kind of what I said before but folks find one thing and I guess by this I mean kind of sales channel, marketing channel largely for us until at least 10mil revenue. And this is the advice I've had from you know, people that are way, way smarter than me and with way bigger businesses, guys that, guys that build and sold brands, guys that building brands few steps ahead of me as well that have kind of, I've had some consulting with in the past year as well and this just rings true with all of them. You know, find one thing until at least 10 million. There's an argument that's maybe even 30 million. And I spoke about this before on the pod, you know, we're trying fucking direct mail. Think about doing out of home. It's all bollocks until at least 10 million. Like ultimately we're an Instagram ads brand right now Google's starting to scale up for us. TikTok just hasn't worked. We just, it kind of ignored it and just focus on Instagram and I would recommend doing that. Keeps everything more simple, better for your mental health as well and probably better for performance as well. So that's worked really well for us. Keep things lean within reason. I spoke to a lot of potential investors over the past year and I think this is the thing that money, Twitter and the guys on Twitter and this generation maybe don't appreciate in themselves or in ourselves enough is that a lot of us are running relatively pretty big businesses with very limited overhead. And you compare that to a lot of older businesses. I've come across brands that have got 50 employees and they're doing 10 million in revenue and I'm like, hold on a second, that's what, 200 grand a year per employee? Like in my mind, a brand should comfortably be able to do a million per year per team member at least. Core team member. That's kind of a good. That's sort of what where we're at right now in terms of core team at least in terms of run rate. And yeah, I think just keep things lean. I don't have an office. I would like to at some point soon I'll speak about that, probably a later video, but plans there. Keep things lean, focus on what works. But you know, I say within reason because I think there is. It's detrimental to have a team that's too lean and because you ultimately have to work out where there is value as well as cost. Obviously, like not all cost is bad. I'm saying not. I'm not even saying an office is bad, but certain things like that I've kept super lean, at least for the first 19 months now the business at the end of the first full year as well. So yeah, that will change over time. But it's about knowing what's worth cost. I think things that are definitely worth cost for an early stage brand you're investing in obviously good media buyers, good agency, good product quality, obviously good product imagery, shit like that, which isn't necessarily cheap. Things that I think are less worthwhile at this sort of stage is, you know, fucking employee benefits, massive pay packages when you could just have freelancers for the first year or so office. I think it's a huge one, especially if you live in a decent spot. So yeah, that's one thing. 5 omnichannel but still 90% online. I think I've read a lot about this recently. Maybe you have as well, if you're interested in the space. I think brands are going omni channels sooner. By that I mean we are on obviously our website Shopify, which I said is like 3.3 million this year. So vast majority of revenue about 400k on Amazon, which is the second biggest channel. But we've also gone into retail. Never really thought about that at the start of the year, but then Hollander Barrett came to me and actually that listing's doing really well, especially given it's nearly twice the price of anything else in the shop and looks completely different to anything else, which might be why it's doing well. But yeah, next year we're targeting about a million in retail and again, I'll speak about that on sort of 2024 goals and maybe some more detailed stuff on that in a later video. But yeah, Holland and Barrett, Boots, Selfridges, Whole Foods, I think one more as well. Plant organic, I think is the plan for next year. And a bit of European Holland and Barrett as well. Probably more importantly, the bad stuff. What I got very wrong. And these aren't the only things. These are just things that stand out and hopefully you can learn from. Don't rush new products. You may remember Dream Dust this time last year and I made that ridiculous 80s movie, which was really fun, but in hindsight not worth doing, to be honest. Financially, I rushed that product. I wanted to get a new product out, got the flavor profile all wrong, basically realized in the first few weeks that it wasn't going to be a winner, wasn't going to be something we scaled. We had 10,000 units of stock, which wasn't that much, but not ideal, and no one likes the flavor. I mean, yeah, we never ran ads to it. We sold it entirely organically to our email list, to our existing subscribers and basically parked it. We've relaunched it as Astrodust. There was a name problem as well in a much better flavor profile based on actual feedback. And I wish I'd done that right at the start because we would have scaled a new SKU way, way quicker. So, yeah, you know, point I might make on this, it might, might have even made more sense not to do that product at all. Even now it's a tiny percentage of revenue. I think there's incremental gain to be had. But don't rush new products. This is probably a big one. I'm not going to name names, et cetera, because they might Be watching. And it's an obvious one as well, but it's never obvious until you do it. I think highest low, fire fast. I think basically I probably hired a few people too quickly without properly. Honestly, my fault. I would say I'm not the best at hiring. I'm not particularly experienced even now. So now I'm hiring for two roles and we're using a recruiter that was recommended to me by one of our investors. I think that's a way better way to do it because they know how to find the best people. They've been there, done that experience in the industry at least these guys are um. So yeah, I kind of. I think I hired people too quick that we A didn't necessarily need at the time, so increased costs too quick and then I was kind of panicking about around shall we have them, shall we not? But B didn't run a proper hiring process, particularly for an expensive job that I hired for and then fire fast. It sounds brutal, but I think if you know something isn't right, don't wait five and a half months like I did to end it. You know, do it amicably, do it respectfully, do it properly. But I think usually your guts right on kind of team members and that sort of stuff. And yeah, that'd be a huge lesson from this year as well, which I'll definitely take into next year. Performance over brand. What I mean by this is kind of referring to the 80s movies and out of home and all this sort of stuff that we sort of try, which is why we haven't done it out of home. But we thought about it basically at this stage, you know, seed, sage business, 0 to 10 million, definitely sub 10 million revenue and even beyond potentially. But performance over brand. I think brand is thrown around like we're a visual identity. We're a beautiful product that has. We're a great product that sells online right now. I wouldn't consider us, you know, proper brand similar to likes, you know, Gymshark or an Apple. Obviously not like brand I think takes years to build. And I also think you shouldn't really be doing any brand marketing at this stage. It really needs to be performance. And by that I mean, you know, build a proper system around ugc, content creation, performance, creative, which we have massively. It's probably the best part of the business and just focus on acquiring quality customers with decent value cohorts, a decent cac. Everything else really marketing wise is secondary and I think should be kind of ignored at this stage. I'm not Necessarily right on that. But that's just my view. Number four, fog's 100% in one key country. We've been about 80% UK this year. I think would have been better if we'd been 95%. And the reason for that is we've spent a fair amount of ads and sort of European, fair amount money on ads in Europe, a bit of America, very small percentage America, but largely Europe. And at the start of the year it was a huge headache shipping into Europe. We then figured that out by shipping from Northern Ireland. We now recently got a warehouse in Benlo in the Netherlands, so we can ship locally in like one day in the whole of Europe, which has been a massive, massive game changer. But I'm not sure it's been worth the faff, to be honest. I think would have been better to focus on one country. I also think for long term, if you're thinking about raising for your brand or whatever. I think having a story where you say we dominated one market first, we haven't even touched that market, for example Europe or America probably in my case, this is what we could do rather than scattering out, scattering your efforts across multiple countries and sort of half assing them. So that's one thing I've learned as well. The last one, so I don't bore you, is re dive into your data. I think people think they know their numbers. Well, they might know their numbers, but do they know their data? And I think what I mean by that is so we started working with, don't know if I should name them, but a fucking really good, I guess, data consultancy about five months ago and it was a complete game changer in terms of understanding cohort quality, CAC payback, building our financial model, which we've always had, but we've built an even more in depth one for 2024 going forward. And yeah, I just think a lot of people are kind of child scaling and thinking they have to be profitable on first purchase, which by the way is really fucking hard to do right now. So if you're doing that, fair play. But I think a lot of people will be lying if they said they're doing that in a consumable brand in 2023, 24 while scaling quickly. But you don't necessarily have to be if you understand the quality of your customers and the ltv like the actual cohort value per customer. So yeah, I mean I could talk about this for hours. I'm not an expert but I've learned a fuckload on this stuff. And yeah, I think just dive into your data, whether that's just hiring a freelancer, doing it yourself. You know, you can use basic apps like Lifetimely Peel we used for a while. Ultimately I think getting an expert would be the best thing to do. But yeah, that's kind of the last thing I had on there. This is probably a 25 minute episode already. Yeah, that's pretty much where we're at. I'm excited to probably make a video shortly, maybe tomorrow, next few days, next week, announcing goals for 2024. I want to make these videos because I think they'll be interesting to look back on in years come. Hopefully they're valuable. I don't. I still personally haven't seen anyone else in the UK at least documenting the actual ups and downs of building a brand because I think it's massively glorified on the Internet, being an entrepreneur in general, but particularly building a consumer brand in arguably a recession. So yeah, it's fucking hard and you know, hopefully five, ten years time I can look back at these and just be really cool to watch, to be fair. So yeah, look, I'll wrap that episode there. You can probably sound quite rusty. More episodes come in. We're back on this. I took a while off for the reasons I said. I'll explain what those reasons are in a bit more detail in some recent episodes coming up soon. And yeah, subscribe to the pod. I'm gonna. What? Is it a pod or is it a YouTube channel now? Am I podcasts or a YouTuber somewhere in between. Yeah. Appreciate all the support. Hopefully this was interesting. Maybe too much information shared, but shoot me, I guess that's kind of the nature of this channel. Cheers for watching. Have a great new year. I'll speak to you soon. Peace.