Apr 28, 2024

7:00 - slow morning wake up

8:00 - cleaned house

9:00 - email Check

10:00 - Home Depot Run

On the way I reached out to Jacob. 

I met Jacob in 2019 ish. He was working for 18Birdies and we were working together to develop the plans for ai coach on the app. We spent a lot of time chatting about different things to zone in on and how to make them work with the ai swing analyzer (a pretty cool visualization of the swing that uses 3d ai to help golfers see their swings). 

At some point Jacob and I started talking about MNML GOLF and he was very curious about what we were launching, how we were planning to go to market, and what our ecommerce store would look like. 

I gave him the basics… Going live in 2020 on shopify. Used kickstarter campaign to raise some money to hold us over until we had product to sell. Would be focused on organic growth primarily. 

Jacob is a bit of an ecommerce and conversion specialist. Actually, I’ll go a step farther. He’s an absolute boss at understanding customer flow whether in an app or on a website.

He took a look at our page, made some suggestions, and within a week got our conversion rate over 1.5%. That was about 100% growth in conversion (sales).

If you know conversion rates and what that means, skip the italicized part.

Conversion rate means what it says; the rate at which something is converted. 

In ecommerce, it refers to the percentage of people who buy vs the number who go to checkout. SO, if 100 people go to checkout, a 1% conversion rate means one person bought. 

Know what a good conversion rate is? In the golf bag market, the best average we’ve seen is 2.2%. The best we’ve been is about 1%. Our lowest? .38. 

So I called Jacob to see if he could have a quick look at our site because we’ve been converting at about half our usual rate since July of 2023. Uh, that was way too easy to say. 

Just to put this into perspective.. We need to sell 8 bags a day to break even - pay the rent, staff, cost of goods sold. To sell 8 bags every day, we need to see 800 people on the site converting at a 1% rate. Every day. That’s an average weekly traffic of 5,600. From July of 2023 to now, we’ve seen almost exactly 5600 unique visitors, on average, per week. So that’s ok. The issue is that we’ve been converting at .5%. So we’ve sold an average of 4 bags per day. So we are getting crushed. Barely making rent and payroll, getting behind on factory payments, oh and I’m not able to draw a salary. Campbell’s payments have been on hold since January. Scratchy is also on hold. More on how all that works in another post. 

For now, just know that if we don’t improve conversion to 1%, we won’t be able to survive on website sales alone. And that would be a serious disruption to what we are trying to do with this business. 

Anyway, Jacob said our checkout process sucked because shop pay was adding a step in the checkout process. This was crushing conversion. Since July of 2023, we’d been experimenting with different sites and we apparently lost a key contributor to a fast checkout. Apple Pay. 

So Nicolle immediately added apple pay back in and took shop pay out. 

Since the change, we are at .9% average. Oh and Anze Kopitar bought a bag last night.. So that’s cool. 

3:00 - met with Javier for Pinchos

5:00 - tried to film at BQN but course was closed

6:00 - read, youtube car stuff

8:30 - bed