March 2016 Report
March was pleasantly surprising. We got 14 new customers, 13 of which came directly from our Instagram ad campaign. The other one was a referral from a customer that loved our service. Not bad for our first month of operations.
Advertising
Going into April my plan is to expand out ad campaign back into Facebook. I abandoned Facebook early on because Instagram was producing much better results. But now I’m starting to fear reaching audience capacity. My ad has already been served to each person an average of 3 times. Facebook opens up a whole new audience to serve.
Another concern is the current ad set will get stale so I need to create a new ad set for Instagram. I’m going to do that soon and deploy it.
Sales
I did make a mistake on one of my orders in March, which is why the amount of refunds is so high. The discounts in March were very high as well but that was on purpose and will continue. All new customers receive at least 10% off their first order and all repeat customers also receive 10% off.
Budget
Overall the company lost about $1,700 in March. I expect both operations and advertising expenses to go down in April. So much of the expenditures for the first 3 months have been to stock up on supplies and print material. Now that we are stocked up, both these expenses should drop.
Also, I only paid myself a few hundred in March. My goal is to get the business to the point where it can pay me a living wage, also referred to as Ramen Profitable. But I am too far away from that. The reason I’m paying myself anything at all is to get into the habit of running payroll.
Quarterly Expense Report
Since this is the end of the fiscal quarter, I’m including my expense report in this post.
Discounts & Refunds — $330.78
Operations — $2,661.67
Online Ads — $726.72
Print Ads — $776.84
Taxes & Licenses — $388.06
Labor — $832.13
I’ve split up online advertising and print advertising because although I have paid for the print material, only a small fraction or less than 10% has been distributed thus far. In fact all of the revenue is the result of online ads.
Profit & Loss
This is the year to date (Q1) P&L statement.
Although I’m happy with the results from March, I’m terrified that April will not be as good. It is imperative to me to show growth each month. I feel like if it’s not growing month to month, I’m not doing my job.
I’m glad that I did not outsource the work during this month because it has given me a better perspective on the process that I need to build. I made the mistake of outsourcing my core competency before, I don’t want to make that mistake again.
To Do List Update
- Build a new Instagram ad campaign.
- Find local bulletin boards to attach flyers / business cards.
- Create a pitch deck for b2b sales.
- Begin designing Snapchat Geofilter.
- Write down the back-end process.
This story is part of a series documenting the journey of a 2016 Dallas startup called Feather. For your reference here is the Table of Contents for the series.
Previous Story: Feather’s Advertising Results and Conversion Metrics
Next Story: Oops. My Prices Were Too Low
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