The Idea

The idea came about on a Wednesday afternoon as I was wasting time on the internet. I was reading about PotatoParcel, whose 24 year old founder is apparently making over $10000 a month anonymously shipping potatoes with handwritten messages on them. I had also recently been reading about Mathew Carpenter and Ship Your Enemies Glitter, which he sold for $88000 on Flippa. Not bad for a couple of week’s work.

The principle of both sites seemed pretty similar: let users conveniently and anonymously ship a low-value item with quirky appeal to their friends/enemies. Could I think of an item that didn’t cost a lot of money but was hard to come by/a pain in the ass to deal with, that people might want to send to their friends? Well, it was the Christmas season, and I happened to be a citizen of one of the biggest coal exporting countries on earth.

I floated the idea past my Dad almost immediately. “I don’t know, Reegs. It seems a bit mean-spirited,” he replied.

“I think it could catch on,” I protested.

“I don’t know,” he sighed, “Prove me wrong.”

I sent a text immediately to one of my best mates, Luke. Luke and I were already working on Compleat, focusing on delivering the benefits of a Soylent-like product to the vast majority of people who weren’t keen on committing to a mainly liquid diet. I’m good at writing the words, and he’s great at making the images. The rest we figure out as we come to it. You can read more about our philosophy on our website.

“How’s this for an idea?” I wrote, “We gift wrap coal and send it anonymously to people for Christmas. Wouldn’t require many inputs, plus we already know how to do the ecommerce thing.”

He called me back an hour later. “Yes, great idea, 100% in,” were the first words out of his mouth.

“Good,” I replied, “Because I’ve already claimed a URL and opened a new account with Shopify.”

And so, SendCoal.com.au was born at 5pm on Wednesday, December 2, 2015.

To be honest, I had a great feeling about this idea from the start, but I never imagined that it would get the traction it ended up with. Sure, the longevity wasn’t there, but it was operating on similar principles as Potato Parcel and Ship Your Enemies Glitter.

I quickly found out that it wasn’t an original idea either; there was at least one similar website already operating, and less than a week from Christmas National Geographic actually did a whole wrap up of coal sending websites that we were lucky enough to be mentioned in. No one was doing it in Australia though, and I knew that we could definitely execute the idea better.

Before anything could happen though, we needed to make sure we could actually get our hands on some coal. Alibaba could hook me up with coal if I was willing to buy at least 200 tons, but only Sydney Coal and Coke Supplies, whom I found on Gumtree, was willing to sell in more manageable 20 kilogram bags.

Consumer-level sales of coal are apparently quite uncommon, and I ended up having to meet the guy in a carpark in North Eastern Sydney (for insurance purposes I wasn’t allowed to enter their holding yard). Regardless, the product was close enough to exactly what we wanted — nice, golf ball sized chunks of Australian black coal.

We knocked together a quick website in about 48 hours using a basic Shopify theme and a hastily edited picture of the “amazing little black rock” from the infamous Australian Minerals Council advertisement. It was a bit shit, but I guess we weren’t really expecting it to go far beyond our family and friends.

We never really costed anything out properly, but I had the figure of $19.95 in my head from the start, including shipping. Roughly I broke this down to ~$2 in product and packaging, $0.50 in transaction fees and $7.50 shipping. Add 100% for a decent margin, and you’re making about $10 a unit.

If you’re selling something online with value you’ve added yourself, free shipping is an absolute no-brainer. Even if it’s someone else’s product through online retail, you should look to “eat” your shipping costs. People shop online for convenience and expect to pay the price they see on the product page, and adding a barrier to purchase of even a few extra dollars for shipping will be losing you sales. It also makes your customer feel like they’re getting something for nothing, even though most consumers will realise that you’ve just factored it in to the product cost. Sounds basic, but I’m still getting charged shipping too often.

We launched the site in a very low key manner on Sunday the 6th of December, four days after we agreed to give it a crack. I posted a link to my Facebook. We had 8 unique visitors.

All aboard the Hype Train

The next day, I wrote a shitty press release and fired it off to a few emails I collected from Australian pop culture sites — Junkee, The Vine, and Pedestrian TV. I had to amend it almost immediately, as Luke embarrassingly pointed out I was talking more about the business opportunity than the benefits any customers would get from purchasing coal.

We thought this was the easiest way to try kick off some buzz, but didn’t expect much. I was kind of shocked when The Vine emailed back just a couple of hours later.

We were also lucky to have a mate who was able to give us an outrageous article on Pages Digital to help kick things off, shoutout to the ignorant don, Christopher Kevin Au.

The next day things started getting even realer.

National breakfast TV show, Today, wanted us on their show. I’m not sure if an email has ever made me more excited/filled with trepidation in recent memory. It actually felt like the idea was being validated, that it was gaining traction, and all this before we’d even shipped a single unit. In fact, we had only one recorded sale when we received the above email.

We also had a slight problem.

“We don’t know what this product even looks like,” Luke told me. Luke is often good at pulling me up on minor details like this.

At first, I was a bit incredulous — it was just plain old coal, after all, and there was plenty more available from our supplier. Luke was right though: while I had an idea of what it would look like in my head, there were plenty more aspects to the product to consider and resolve. We were starting to receive all this media coverage and didn’t really have any idea what people were going to be unwrapping on Christmas morning.

This was where some real hustle had to start.

Making It Work

We decided on using a clear cupcake/bonbonnierre style box to package up a few nice lumps of coal. Originally I guess I had it in my head that we’d just send a nice big lump of it with some gift wrapping, but this was quickly proving to be unrealistic. We couldn’t wait for shipping either as we feared falling too far behind on orders. We had a stressful time one afternoon on eBay trying to find a supplier we could pick up from, and were finally able to settle on 9 x 9 x 9cm boxes for about 50c each.

The Christmas season was in full swing at the local shopping centre, so we bought the best looking/most cheapest wrapping paper and adhesive bows we could find. I picked up another 240kg of coal from the same carpark in Sydney and we were basically ready to go.

We washed the coal to remove some of the residual dust, blocking the laundry sink in the process. Coal washing might be a regulated industrial process (we didn’t check that out), but we figured a scrubbing brush, soapy water and a drying tarp in the front yard would do the job.

At this point, we also realised we might want to put together a better looking website, so we invested $220 in a pre-built Shopify theme with a single page, parallax scrolling design like all the cool startups had. Luke took some nice photos in a well lit corner of my house, and things started to look a bit more professional. We were able to redo our entire website in about 4 hours.

We settled on an initial run of 1000 units, which was part arbitrary number and part guesstimation. We did some timing of various parts of the washing, boxing, wrapping, and shipping process, and figured this was the maximum we could reasonably produce ourselves in the time we had left before Christmas.

Meanwhile, the hype train was still going full steam ahead. Within about 72 hours of launch we’d been covered locally and internationally by Junkee, Pages Digital, Life Without Andy, Mashable, Design Taxi, The Huffington Post UK and The Daily Mail. We also did some radio interviews, which were actually a lot more weird and awkward; “just-laugh-and-say-yeah” became our modus operandi.

We started getting inquries about shipping to the United States. “Why not?” we said, and started offering shipping to the US for an extra $15. People started to pay AU$34.95 to ship coal from Australia to New York. Fossil fuels aren’t dead, apparently, but it turns out they are hard to ship. In fact, the US Postal Service won’t allow you to post coal internationally, as even though coal is a bitch to actually get burning it’s still classified as a mineral fuel. We had to issue some embarrassing refunds. We did however get to ship one order to Norfolk Island, a remote Australian island, which was cool (and it’s covered by the same flat rate as other 500gram Australia Post satchels).

I guess the thing we were most nervous about was the on-air interview with the Today show, one of the highest rating breakfast tv shows in Australia. Neither of us were too concerned personally with being able to gloat “Hey I was on TV!”, but this was our biggest opportunity to directly push sales.

Would we know what to say? What if we said something dumb live on air? Briefly we considered doing something dumb on purpose to gain more notoriety, like seeing how many Drake lyrics we could subtly drop into our conversation. People were calling us entrepreneurs after all, and you know it’s real when you are who you think you are.

Don’t Believe The Hype

On Monday, December 14th, eight days after we launched, we got up real early to head to the Channel 9 studios in Willoughby for our 7:55am slot. The Today Show set was surprisingly quite bare — just a couple of desks, green screens, and a small crew, with two people sitting on laptops in the corner dedicated entirely to social media. We were disappointed to learn that we wouldn’t actually get to hang out with infamous host Karl Stefanovic, and would have to make do with his brother, Peter. The producer sat us at the desk with Lisa and Peter, we introduced ourselves and shook their hands and that was about it. We didn’t know what we were going to be asked, or even which camera to look at. You can watch the video here.

Notice how we didn’t do any of the basics like, I don’t know, MENTION THE ACTUAL URL? It was amateur hour out there. We tried to be funny by giving the presenters their own boxes of coal with handwritten cards like “Peter, we know what you did,” but I think Peter ended up thinking we were trying to blackmail him or something.

We were relieved to have the TV segment over and done with, but it was mixed with a definite feeling of disappointment that we could have done much better. From that point on, I guess it kind of changed our whole outlook on the project as well. We can’t say for sure that we could have sold more if our PR game was more on-point, and while it was a great experience to have, we both chalked it up as a bit of a missed opportunity.

We don’t really know how much free media we got out this. Neither of us have worked much in that area, but one of Luke’s colleagues estimated maybe half a million dollars. The Today Show was probably our biggest piece.

So how many sales did it end up converting to?

Get ready, it’s kind of embarassing.

One hundred and twenty four.

If we didn’t have to refund American orders we would’ve broken the magic 130, but it fell well short of what we expected. Remember, we had stock on hand for an initial run of 1000. Why?

I think this was an idea that had legs. It obviously resonated with people. I remember being at a cafe with Luke in December and meeting a friend-of-a-friend who made us feel like local celebrities, “NO WAY! That was you guys? Everyone’s buying that!” he said. Except they weren’t.

We relished the challenge of starting a business three weeks out from Christmas, but I think the required pace of everything ended up being part of our undoing. There were plenty of little things that bugged me the whole way that I simply couldn’t find the time to fix properly, like defining the OpenGraph tags for when people shared our site on Facebook. Fuck you, canonical url.

There were bigger things as well, like how we launched the site. Our launch strategy was literally just a one page press release sent to three publications, one of which never ran it. I’ve never written a press release — I basically just copied this HubSpot guide. Compare it to our actual one here. It was like a snowball effect from there, as publications bigger and bigger kept featuring us.

If we had more time, we could’ve been more organised. We could have launched earlier, and in a more considered fashion. We had no real, “organic” virality, and I think a good portion of the hype can be attributed to these media outlets looking to beat people to the punch, breaking the “next cool thing”. For example, the producers from Today made us promise that we would do our first TV interview with them (turned out to be our only one, but whatever). We had only sold one product when they booked us, but to the producers of the show, it probably didn’t matter.

Even with a week or two more, we could have put more work into reaching out to influencers, aggregation sites, or contacting niche blogs. We never even put a link on Reddit. Sure, mass internet media worked well for mass reach, but it wasn’t necessarily to a whole bunch of qualified leads or people who would buy our product. To the thousands and thousands who read about it, it was just a funny story.

Mathew Carpenter, creator of ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com, did a really interesting interview with Observer where he gets into the nitty gritty of the media hype his infamous website enjoyed. I recommend you read it here. There’s a few key differences between what we did with Send Coal and what Mathew did with SYEG (e.g. we haven’t sold our site for $88k…yet), but there’s also some great parallels.

Mathew says he knew that if SYEG would succeed if it blew up on aggregation sites like ProductHunt and Reddit. Send Coal skipped that step entirely and went directly to the media, and we only had to reach out to three niche Australian sites before the story made its way to massive news sites like The Huffington Post and The Daily Mail. I guess our experience throws interviewer Ryan Holiday’s summation of SYEG into even sharper relief:

“(SYEG showed) how great the demand for weird, funny startups actually is and how desperate and derivative the online media is these days.”

In our case, I might amend that quote to read “how great the demand (for stories) about weird, funny startups actually is”. We got far more social shares than sales, and we never even needed to “trade up” our media and reach out to bigger outlets. Some media we were featured in didn’t even link to our site, such as all the stories in the regional Fairfax network. Most, with the notable exceptions of Mashable and StartUp Smart, didn’t even interview us.

Don’t read me wrong, I’m not blaming the media for our lack of success; it was our strategy from the start, and it didn’t come off as well as we hoped. I’m more trying to show the disconnect between the hype and the reality. We only had about 5000 unique visitors to the site over the three week period we were trading, but there would have been many more times this consuming the media written about us.

There was plenty more that we could, and should, have done. eCommerce is a numbers game, and something we didn’t even touch was retargeting and lookalike audiences, even though this is one of the most effective forms of online advertising.

The impression we were left with was that SendCoal.com.au became not much more than a piece of seasonal content. The idea outstripped the product. Only just over a hundred people actually wanted to send coal, but thousands more were just entertained with the idea that you could. It was a stunt, and in real value terms, the media and publishers probably got more out of distributing the idea than we got out of distributing the product.