How We Got Over 600 Pageviews and 10 Orders of Kimchi in 24 Hours with $0 and a Reddit Post
We didn’t quite know how it all happened. One day we were sitting in front of our computers trying to get code to compile, and the next morning we were racing against the clock biking all over Toronto, delivering kimchi.
This is our story.
It was 2 AM on a Friday, when Ashton asked me the question, “As a Korean-Canadian, what is something you would like to have that is difficult to get today?”
I had to think about this question because nobody had ever asked me it before, but my mind quickly went to how difficult it was to get quality Korean food delivered. My whole family lives in Korea, so I don’t have the luxury of eating homemade Korean cooking regularly.
From this problem, we began to brainstorm the possibility of creating a service that delivered staple Korean foods, like kimchi, to people like myself who desired it so much. Even if it wasn’t homemade, the convenience of having it delivered to my door was compelling. Our team suddenly became excited by the opportunity to provide personalized experiences for people of different ethnicities and identities.
We had an idea, but we knew we needed to act quickly. Execution was everything. By 4 AM that day, we bought the iwantkimchi.com domain on impulse, whipped up a minimum viable product of our website and spun up some servers. We were live in 2 hours and started to make marketing content for another hour.
We launched first on Facebook and Reddit communities on Friday at 11 AM. Not a whole lot of upvotes in the first couple of hours, but it was enough to get us to the front page of the /r/UofT subreddit, which has on average 300 to 500 users online at any point in time. We expanded our reach to Twitter and Instagram by 2 PM that day.
By 6 PM we had received about 400 views on the Reddit post on /r/UofT, and yet we hadn’t closed a single sale of kimchi. People were coming to our site but weren’t ordering anything. It felt like the experiment wasn’t working.
Out of desperation, we wanted to see if we could find some Torontonians on other social platforms, so I decided to do a livestream on Periscope. The idea here was that because Periscope focuses on geolocation to help you find live video of what’s happening around you, Torontonians would be more likely to view my video.
By 7:30 PM, we were close to giving up. Everyone was exhausted from 8 hours of straight marketing. We tried to think of products that were hard to get that we could deliver to Torontonians. The team came up with sex toys and marijuana. You could tell very clearly we weren’t thinking straight.
By 8 PM, Alex had fallen asleep, Ashton was watching YouTube, and I was browsing through Periscope, when all of a sudden — I get a text message:
“Hey, you deliver kimchi?”
Everybody lost their shit. Ashton took off his shirt (?) and Alex and I were jumping around the house. Someone actually contacted us to order kimchi! That text was the start of a long night of delivering kimchi to people all over the city.
We ended up closing 5 units of kimchi on the first day mostly through the one /r/UofT post (we made sure we asked our first customers how they had found us). One of our orders took us 40 minutes out by bike at 1 AM, but #hustle, amirite?
It was a wild emotional roller coaster, but looking back on what remains a fresh memory, we think that the main success of our essentially free marketing campaign came from a couple of factors:
- The “meme-able” nature of our product choice. One of the Redditors who saw our campaign said this about our product:
2. Quickly creating legitimacy through word of mouth — one of our first customers had taken a leap of faith and had come back to comment on the post. A second comment which backed us up made people more willing to purchase from us.
3. We were documenting and sharing as many orders as possible through Instagram, so that our followers (of which we had 20 on the first day) could see that we were real, relatable people, delivering real kimchi. Some of our customers even came back to thank us!
4. We left personal notes on each jar of kimchi we sold, thanking them for their order. Each note was personalized, and handwriting each note was something that obviously wouldn’t scale at first. For our customers however, this would hopefully convey more meaning than a simple sticker.
5. We responded quickly to all Reddit comments. The longest time someone would have to wait until they got a response to their question or comment was five minutes.
We had started our kimchi delivery service on Friday morning, and by the end of Saturday night, we’d received 600 pageviews and 10 orders of various kinds of kimchi. Up until today, we’re continuing to take orders and are working to make ethnic foods more accessible for as many people as possible.
If you liked this post, be sure to recommend this article and share it with someone who might find it useful. If you would like help marketing and growing your business, send us an email at hello@iwantkimchi.com
