How I made €2,187.50 revenue with sausage stickers
Welcome to the online butchery! Here you will find the best and freshest sausage stickers!
Are you sick of seeing the same hipster stickers everywhere? You attached countless stupid stickers of unknown bands? You finally want to demonstrate your love for salami and co to everyone around you? Then the sausage stickers are exactly what you need!
100% vegan, gluten-free and definitely zero calories!
How it started
The idea was born on my way home from the office. In Cologne, as in every major city, the streets are lined with nice and ugly stickers. After some very technical projects I was looking for something different which could build easily as MVP. So i got inspired by sticker art at the traffic lights. I don’t know anymore how I came up with the idea of sausage stickers but it immediately seemed very funny to me.
The same evening I bought the domains wurststicker.de and sausagesticker.com. On the next day I set up the site at Shopify, connected my account to the Stripe API and Paypal and uploaded some nice looking product mockups. I also wrote the product description in several minutes without too much hesitation and created some mockups of the very first products. The shop went live on Oct 02, 2015 after only two days from the initial idea.
Shopify is really nice if you need to set up a shop in a few hours and validate your product idea.
The first sales
The really difficult part was to market the site. The biggest issue, as with every project, is to get attention. If there was a chance that people really like the idea of some crazy stickers I need them to visit the site. Buying ads was no option because it was not foreseeable how well the idea will turn out. The only way for me was to get featured on some blogs or news sites with similar topics. So I wrote a short email with a personal touch describing the product in simple words.
Sausage Sticker for your Notebook
Hello XY,
my name ist Stefan and I’m an software developer. Many of my friends are nerds. They stick their notebooks with the very same startup or band stickers. That was too boring for me, I wanted something crazy for my macbook.
For this reason I invented the sausage sticker.
Currently there is the sticker in the versions salami, mortadella, bacon and steak. Other sausages are already in the works and will follow in the near future.
Maybe the topic is interesting for your site.
Best regards
Stefan
Unfortunately, I have not created a list of all the recipients I wrote to. But it must have been more than 200 emails. Most of them didn’t reply to me but some seemed to be really interested. One of the first Bloggers who published an article about my little project was Marc from testspiel.de. His site drove some traffic and brought the first sales. This was really impressing to me because I did not think that I could get the first sales in that short period of time and with that less effort.
Going Viral
What happened then was really amazing. Marc’s article began his journey to the www. Many different sites also started to write articles about the sausage stickers and people on Facebook shared my site and informed their friends about the project. This peaked on Oct 4, 2015 with nearly 4,000 page views and an revenue of €298.00.
After that weekend my girlfriend and I had a lot of work to do. Printing invoices, putting stamps on the envelopes, writing thank you post it’s and putting everything together.
The absolute traffic peak occured the day that germanys biggest satire magazine put a small link on their page. Although the traffic was really impressive it did not lead to an increase in sales. This might be because people who are coming from a satire magazine are neither in the correct mindset nor do they believe in the seriousness of such an project.
The Numbers
Until today the project made an revenue of €2,187.50. From this amount the fees and the printing have to be deducted. I shipped the sausages to Germany, France, Austria, US, Australia and Island. The best selling product is the “Salami Sticker” which sold 140 times. More than 75% of the payments were made through Paypal.
Conclusion
For me this project was an amazing journey and fun. I do not think that a sustainable business model can be developed from it without much effort. But it yielded some bucks and it motivated me to quickly develop and publish my ideas in the future.
