On this episode with 2X e-commerce podcast show I speak with the Founder and Digital Marketing Lead of a publishing company that sold over 600,000 copies of a personalized children’s storybook in just two years. And they’ve got sales now totaling about $15 million dollars. They also had the highest valuation on Dragon’s Den, the UK equivalent of Shark Tank. Do stay tuned!
[Intro clip] Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast show where we interview founders of fast growing seven and eight figure eCommerce businesses and eCommerce experts. They’ll tell their stories, share how they 2X’d their businesses and inspire you to take action in your own online retail business today. And now, here he is, the man in the mix, Kunle Campbell.
Kunle: On today’s show I had with me Asi Sherabi and Depesh Mandalia of Lost My Name. I’m so looking forward to this conversation, it’s been in the pipelines for months for good reason, you’ll find out. I’ll tell you a little bit about Lost My Name and then I’ll introduce Asi and Depesh and they’ll introduce themselves. Lost My Name is a London-based digital publishing an e-commerce startup that has sold close to 600,000 copies of a single personalized book titled The Little Boy or The Little Girl Who Lost His or Her Name, to 136 countries in just three years. They had the highest ever evaluation on Dragon’s Den. For our US listeners, Dragon’s Den is the UK equivalent of Shark Tank. And they’ve grown by a staggering 1500% in a single year. They refer to their business as a ‘full-stack business’, which is quite interesting. Which means they’re vertically integrated, so they control the books themselves. They’re creative with the books themselves, they published the books themselves, they manufacture market and distribute the books direct to consumer, they’re a D2C. They’re a zero inventory company, meaning that every single book is uniquely printed on demand. And they recently completed a series, a round of funding with I think Google Venture and a couple of other investors. They raised about $9 million dollars as a result. Now I’ll talk about Asi. Asi is the Cofounder and CEO of Lost My Name. He is the father of three children. He has a PhD and has worked in London School of Economics. He then moved to marketing, took on the role as Managing Director of Sidekick Studios, an agency that helps enterprise-level organizations innovate like startups and solve problems that matter. And then he moved on to startup Lost My Name. Depesh is a father of four. He leads performance marketing at Lost My Name. He is responsible for digital and traditional media channels and he’s helped grow book sales from 200 books a day to 7,500 books with a strong ROI. So yeah, I would like to welcome you both to the show, it’s a pleasure to have you on the 2X eCommerce podcast show. Hi guys.
Asi: Hello.
Depesh: Hello.
Kunle: Hi. Could you take a minute or two to tell our listeners a bit about yourselves. I’ll start out with Depesh
Depesh: Hi, so yeah I joined Lost My Name last year. We were quite early on in our growth. My background is actually in technical development, moved into marketing just around 10 years ago and you know I think this is now ‘my full startup for my sins’ and thoroughly enjoying the journey so far.
Kunle: Great stuff. Good to have you on the show Depesh. And Asi, please could you take a minute to tell our listeners about yourself?
Asi: Thank you Kunle. Yeah, my name is Asi, I am one of the early guys at Lost My Name. Together with three friends we founded this business just about three years ago. It was never really meant to be business, it started just as a creative side-project for us between our day jobs and kids and what have you. And yes, we’ve been quite surprised, we’re still pinching ourselves every day we get into the office when we see what had happened to this little project of ours.
Kunle: It’s fascinating because you know growth, fast growth, what eCommerce businesses or digital businesses are doing in the space of three years… Yeah, what you guys have done in three years and a couple of other companies I’ve spoken with, it’s just fascinating in terms of how it works, the growth mechanism. And I’m hoping we would dig deeper to find out exactly how you guys have managed to have grow this fast and this well. Okay, could you tell us a little bit about the genesis of Lost My Name.
Asi: Yes, so Lost My Name started really as side-project between friends. It started when I received for my daughter, who is nearly 7 now, one of these personalized books that apparently been in the market for over 40 years. We saw the product, it was quite underwhelming apart from that kind of warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing my daughter’s name in a book. There was very little value beyond that. And as I said, we learned that the idea of personalized books have been in the market for over 40 years, but they were never really taken seriously as the creative canvas or definitely not with the technology playground that we looking at it. So we just took a pound, we said, ‘Hey, this is something interesting. Can we do something better than that?’ We started it with Tal Oron, my good friend back from the days in Tel Aviv and a creative technologist and a production guide, and David Cadji-Newby who is the author of the books and a cofounder and partner of the business. We quickly found Pedro Serapicos, the visual artist and a partner in the business. And we started this journey of trying to make a, simply a better product to the market.
Kunle: Right, so you’re four Cofounders, if I got that right?
Asi: Aha.
Kunle: And is everybody still on board with the company?
Asi: Yup, absolutely.
Kunle: Fantastic. Okay, good stuff. Okay, let’s talk about where you are now and what you’re most excited about. So you started in 2012 in private author and today in 2015 you sold close to 600,000 books. Could you chart the journey on a year-by-year basis? What did 2012 look like, what did 2013 look like, what did 2014 look like, and what is 2015 panning out to be?
Asi: So in 2012, we had just effectively created pretty manually about 120 books in products, alpha setup. It was purely to test an idea and whether there’s any demand, whether people will be receptive to the idea of what we were trying to do. That went very, very well. We got fantastic feedback from the people that got the books. And then we just went heads down and started to create more and more assets so we could fulfill more books.
Kunle: How did you test? How did you find these people?
Asi: We simply put just a word out there on Twitter. We said like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this idea.’ You know we used one of these simple, I think it was KickoffLabs, which allowed you to create these custom landing pages, very simple page with some analytics behind it. We just effectively told people what we’re doing, we had this idea, here is the storyline, here’s how we want to go about it, if you’re interested just leave us your name and we’ll get back in touch. And we had about 400 sign-ups,
Kunle: Wow.
Asi: out of which we could only fulfill about 30% of the names because back then we only created probably about a dozen of story letters. But that was enough for us to go about and as I said in a very kind of manual way, to go and make these books for the first hundred people.
Kunle: Okay.
Asi: That gave us a very positive signal that we’re onto something. And there was enough evidence for us or enough validation for us to say, ‘Okay, let’s keep going.’ And as I said we’re going heads down. By that point by the way, we didn’t write a single line of code.
Kunle: Okay. [laughs]
Asi: It was all very, very manual. It was purely some story, there wasn’t any front-end there wasn’t any back-end. But after the validation of the first hundred books we said like, ‘Right, let’s invest.’ That basically unlocked more resources. We were still in a, you know it didn’t really cross our minds to leave our jobs at this point in time. It was still very much just a creative side project, but moved on to build the very first situation of the website and a very crude kind of back-end. And we launched, as I said, publicly in April, 2013. Nothing really happened until about October this year. As soon as we were live, we sold about I don’t know, a couple hundred books every month, nothing to write home about. Still exciting, because you know there was demand.
Kunle: Had you left your job at the time?
Asi: No.
Kunle: Okay. It was a side-project, okay.
Asi: Yes. No, it was only a year later that we left our jobs. And back then as soon as we launched, the main I guess marketing activity was myself talking, at 5 AM in the morning before the kids wake up, to many bloggers all over the world,
Kunle: [laughs]
Asi: trying to get their attention. And we actually got featured in some very influential blogs from the USA. And then came Christmas, and that took us by surprise. We partnered with notonthehighstreet.com around October 2013 and I remember around towards the end of October they called us to say, ‘Hey, we were thinking of putting your books on our weekly newsletter.’ And as I said, back then we were at a rate of about 200 books a month.
Kunle: Okay, I’m just going to explain to our US listeners Not On The High Street. Not On The High Street is a UK marketplace for really unique items. It eCommerce, so it’s kind of like an eBay but for really unique items in the UK. Sorry, just go ahead.
Asi: Thank you. So we started on a, you know we got our product page there and they gave us a heads up that they’re going to put us on their weekly newsletter and we sold 15 hundred books in one weekend.
Kunle: Wow.
Asi: And that took us by surprise, frankly. In one weekend we’ve done what we’ve done in the previous four months since we launched. And then in November, we ended up selling about 15 thousand books
Kunle: Okay.
Asi: So it just picked up. It was the right time, holiday season and we started sell a lot, both on notonthehighstreet.com as well as direct with us. And we ended up the year with about 22 – 23 thousand books in sales.
Kunle: Okay.
Asi: That gave us again you know another very strong evidence that there is a product market fit here. And early last year, early 2014, we started to look for some seed capital and we raised 500K from the likes of Forward Partners, a few brilliant angels, and as you mentioned from Piers Linney on the Dragon’s Den show. And it was only in about April, 2014, that, as soon as we raised the 500K seed capital, we left our jobs and we started to run this business full-time. Interestingly enough, we targeted about 100,000 books on our second year, we were hoping for around 4 or 5X growth and we ended up selling about 325,000 books in 2014.
Kunle: Phenomenal. Okay.
Asi: And again, kind of pretty similar, we had a brilliant Q4, we sold a lot of books. That again gave us more confidence this can really go global. And we started early this year the conversation around the proper Serious A rounds, with the ambition to continue to scale up the business globally and to have enough capital to build a proper R&D operation that would help us to launch more products in the future and to expand our global rollout. Effectively the aim of the round was to help us to grow faster, bigger.
Kunle: Okay, because I was, you know you’re essentially a one product business at the moment. I know there are things in the pipeline, there are projects in the pipeline, so, are we expecting something new this Christmas? Because obviously we can sense a trend where Christmas is a good time for sales, especially for gifts, so should we expect anything new, should we expect more lines of products? Or are you just going to take it one product at the time?
Asi: I think that you know we’re hoping to be able to commit ourselves to a new product once a year. We don’t have any ambition to have you know dozens and dozens of products. I think if you look at existing kind of publishers of personalized books, they operate on a very different way than us. They have at least three dozens of books, again quite lightweight in terms of the execution, in terms of the action, storytelling, the illustration. We’re really keen to… I think it’s about creating a market. Creating a new market. We’ve validated that there is demand for beautifully executed, personalized entertainment for children and there’s quite a few surprises in the pipeline, as you said.
Kunle: Okay, we’ll stay tuned, we’ll keep an eye, we’re fans. Depesh, just bringing you in. When did you start working in Lost My Name?
Depesh: So, I started initially just kind of helping out around I think it was early April last year. And it was kind of really just to review marketing channels, analytics, and conversion rate on the site and just to give some insights and help the team to better understand what was working and you know how to try and find growth levers. So there wasn’t really too much of an expectation beyond just kind of giving some advice and input.
Kunle: Okay. And how has it evolved over that last year and just over the last 15 months?
Depesh: Yeah, it’s evolved back massively. I mean I actually was only around for a few months, I left to join another company and then I rejoined permanently in November. And you know between that time we had managed to find a growth lever and you know the guys at Lost My Name really pushed that quite hard. And by the time we hit Q4 you know things were really rolling along. And you know Asi’s mentioned two years worth of research and product marketing fee that kind of went in to the product before then, and it’s quite easy to forget that background work was already in place, plus for us to really push on last year in terms of sales.
Kunle: Okay, we’re going to talk about growth levers shortly very soon. Because I’m quite curious to figure out if the growth levers come from the product itself, which is from personal experience, or from marketing, social or perhaps even both. Okay. Let’s touch base and go back to raising funds, Asi. So you crunch base, you just alluded alluded to the fact that you raised 500,000 pounds from Forward Partners. What was your journey towards actually convincing Forward Partners to raise you know that much money, at least publicly it says 250,000 from my end, but what’s the drive? How did you sort of say, ‘Okay, right now we need funding and we’re going to approach Forward Partners’, and what were your steps towards actually raising capital for the business?
Asi: It’s an interesting question. I think, I haven’t seen it for you know over a year but it but I’m sure that if I look at my very first pitch, that I would actually cringe. It was you know my very, very first experience of raising capital.
Kunle: And a good one too. [laughs]
Asi: [laughs] Yeah. And I guess that when we started to talking to Forward Partners, as I said, it was after selling about 22 – 23,000 books. If you do the maths that’s around just over 400,000 pounds in revenue.
Kunle: Wow, okay.
Asi: And you know to be honest I think this is what opens doors. Whatever it is you’re doing, if you’re coming to a capital-raising conversation with a Product/Market Fit or with enough evidence that you’re onto something, it makes things so much easier than to try and convince people about an idea. And I think that’s, and perhaps this is something which we should’ve mentioned, while it was you know predominantly a just a creative side-project, for both myself and Tal my cofounder, it was very much an experiment in lean stock. It was very much an experiment of, ‘Can we do something good and try to ship it on the Internet, and see how it moves?’
Kunle: Does this connect to your days at Sidekick Studios, were you taking the methodologies, the lean methodologies at Sidekick Studio and applying it to your side-project?
Asi: Exactly. Exactly. Back then at Sidekick we were hugely influenced by everything in startup and Eric Ries’s book which just started to to do the rounds here in London after getting global traction in the Valley. And at Sidekick we felt that we’re part of this new movement. So it was quite natural for us to think along the lines of these kinds of principles, and it was an interesting exercise in applying these lean methodologies and principles for a product that’s lives on the intersection of digital and physical.
Kunle: Okay.
Asi: And we are quite keen to you know explore, you know what does it mean, what is an MVP a Minimum Viable Product in the context of a physical product? How do you validate the demand? How do you work up from a Problem/Solution Fit to a Product/Markets fit? And pretty much since then, you know these principles remain at the core of everything that we do.
Kunle: Given the fact that those Product/Market Fits and you were very much in the lean methodology mindset, was Forward Partners or were the people at Forward Partners also of lean methodology mindset and did you speak the same language?
Asi: Absolutely. That was exactly the case. I think that what appealed to them is that you know, we came with this lovely creative project and product for children, but behind it was a very rigorous progress that kind of adheres to this lean startup methodology, so we were completely on the same page. And I think that they were quite fascinated by the way that we went about and moved from I guess you can say, from a Problem/Solution Fit to a Product/Market Fit. And you know, coming with an evidence of 22,000 paying customers and over 400,000 pounds of revenue, it was a pretty smooth [inaudible 00:22:03] .
Kunle: Okay so your journey before that. How much did you put into the business?
Asi: We put about 35K into in total of our own money before we started to see any return.
Kunle: Generating that much sales, because you’re about 22,000 pounds worth sales over that period for 35K in, was not bad at all.
Asi: Not at all
Kunle: Not bad at all. Okay, and then you moved on to Dragons Den, and guys in the US it’s ‘Shark Tank in the UK’, so you moved in to Dragon’s Den, what was your transition into Dragon’s den and why did you… was it strategic, was it for publicity, or did you genuinely really want their money?
Asi: Well, kind of all of the above. It was interesting because when the guys at the Dragon’s Den, the BBC called us, we were literally towards the end of the Round, we were oversubscribed. And I was quite surprised that they allowed us or invite us to the show when I told them, ‘Look, our equity is absolutely fixed. We cannot really come to the show and negotiate anything.’ And they said, ‘Hey, you know we like the products and our number one rule for the show is that it’s your business, you can do whatever you want. You can ask for however much money you want, you can put any valuation that you want, it’s your game. So you’re completely eligible to come on the show.’ And obviously because of that, and we said like you know, ‘What what’s the worst that could happen?’ You very rarely get to have about seven or 10 minutes of prime time TV with your product, so it’s not something that you can say no to. We came with absolutely zero expectations. You know normally people are coming to the show asking for say 50K for about 20% of the business and if they’re lucky they end up getting the money but parting from about 30% of the business. In our case we came to the show and asked for 100K for 4% of the business, which was completely unheard of in the contexts of the Den, and we ended up taking it. I guess that Piers Linney, I guess unsurprisingly because he’s the only kind of proper techie in that group, he saw the potential, he liked the product, he liked us, and he just jumped on it.
Kunle: Is Piers still active in Lost My Name?
Asi: Yeah, as much as he can. We talk quite regularly. Still as operational I would say. But he always lends us good advice.
Kunle: Okay, okay. So what kind of role does he play?
Asi: I guess just as a kind of general advisor. I would call it this way.
Kunle: Okay, okay. Now let’s step back into the BBC dragons den. It was an inbound inquiry. You didn’t go out there hustling for an appearance on the show. But what had you done to more or less improve your exposure to attract the BBC to come in and you know invite you on the show despite your position on a fixed equity and given the fact that you’re oversubscribed.?
Asi: Well interestingly enough, it was some good few months before that that I was just in a dinner party, and you know just after this kind of closed bid. And somebody told me, ‘Hey, you guys should go on Dragon’s Den.’ And I was like, ‘Mmm. Okay, that sounds like a good idea.’ And literally at that point I took out my mobile, kind of went on to the Dragon’s Den site and made the application. And then completely, completely forgot about it until about three or four months later I’m getting a phone call from the producers. He’s like, ‘Hey, we want to get you on the show.’ We had to apply to the show, but it was a good surprise.
Kunle: Nice. Fantastic. And what has been the impact of TV on growth of Lost My Name?
Asi: I’ll let Depesh because he probably remembers the actual numbers, but I remember it wasn’t transformational for us. We were already on a quite solid growth trajectory. But I think that the long term effects from a [inaudible 00:26:37] and just awareness is something which we’re probably still enjoying.
Kunle: I mean we’re still talk about it in that context, in the same context. I remember when I spoke with Nick, PR person, just the mention of Dragon’s Den just was an anchor point for me. So okay, I know the brand, I remember you guys because I remember that evening . Depesh what was the impact, because I was hanging out on Twitter at the time and I think I actually made a comment and I was like you know, your website hadn’t actually crashed. Depesh, what was the impact in acquisition that day? Were there loads of sales that day? Was it more like a burst, or? And how long did the burst actually last for?
Depesh: Sure. I can remember the day quite vividly, it was quite surreal.
Kunle: [laughs]
Depesh: You know, we were invited into the office, it was a Sunday evening, it’s nice and sunshiney outside. And we’d kind of sat down, the tech team were all over the servers and you know we were expecting a spike and we had planned ahead, but you know we also knew that I think something like 95% of websites that had made it onto Dragon’s Den crashed just due to the traffic. So, we were hopeful we’d get a crash because that would obviously mean we got a lot of traffic. And actually what happened was we went from you know, we were looking at these numbers on Google analytics. We had I think maybe 20 people on the site at that moment in time just before the we got to the ad. And it rocketed, rocketed up to beyond 10,000 people on the website at that given time and it was just unbelievable. It was just climbing, climbing, climbing. And the servers held out and we’re one of few sites that actually survived it.
Yeah so in terms of direct sales, you know it didn’t drive a ton of sales and there was a quick tail off once the site show had finished. There wasn’t a sustained amount of traffic coming off the back of that. But you know the impact of that has been the kind of awareness and press and the industry and things like that. So although it wasn’t a direct traffic-driving growth thing about time, what it has driven off the back of that is you know like you mentioned, we still talking about it.
Kunle: Okay. Let’s go into customer acquisition Depesh. Book sales grew in 2014, this still is mind-boggling to me, 200 a day to 7,500 a day in 2014. I mean where do we start from here. How did this happen? And should we start out from the growth lever or should we kind of breakdown the transition from 200 to 7500 per day?
Depesh: Yeah, I think you know going back I think it was kind of late March and early April and at that time you know the guys were already running PR. There was already some Facebook ads marketing running. So there was a little bit of activity I think you know actually correct me if I’m wrong, I think there was about maybe 10 people in the team at the time, hugely overstretched trying to keep everything together in terms of all the different parts of the business. So to me it was just kind of looking at this stance, seeing what was coming in from the traffic point of view, what was working, what was not. And at that time it was spinning as many places as possible, whether it was around conversion or optimization, looking at the analytics data, the Facebook marketing, PR etc., looking at Twitter and paid search and just seeing you know what where could we actually accelerate their growth from. And you know at that time we were running Facebook ads, they were not profitable but they were still bringing some revenue in. And actually what kind of came out of that over April was actually refining the Facebook ads work that we were doing and targeting our audience better, improving the creative, the bidding etc. And that just slowly started to take off. And that was the kind of first sign for us that actually there could be something in there for us.
Kunle: Okay, in Facebook.
Depesh: That’s right.
Kunle: So over that period, 200 to 7,500 reaching 2014, what was your number one custom acquisition channel?
Depesh: It was Facebook during that time.
Currently: Wow. And is it still Facebook?
Depesh: Yeah, I mean we rely on it less so than we did back then. You know, other channels have picked up, organic, price, referrals etc. etc. But it’s still kind of our major paid channel.
Kunle: You’ve got 314,000 fans on your Facebook Page. Did it significantly… was there kind of a correlation between the growth of Facebook fans and sales from Facebook?
Depesh: The actual correlation is our spend on Facebook. So you know we haven’t gone out and searched for fans, we haven’t created any kind of organic strategy to push our fan growth up. But you know as we started to market the product more, what we were finding was that not only did it drive clicks in to the website from those ads that we were pushing, we also generated a lot more Likes. You know people are not just looking at the product buy it, they actually bought into something else that was behind the ad which was you know, the creative experience. And we’ve just generated Likes through that.
Kunle: Okay. What about the format of the Facebook ads. Are they images or are they videos that summarize what Lost My Name is about? Because yeah, it takes a bit of explaining or actual seeing to understand the concept of Lost My Name.
Depesh: Yeah, so interestingly enough for a long time our best performing ad was really long copy piece of ad. You know coming into it from a marketing point of view, we tried to trim it, optimize it, focus it on key messages. But you know that long copy form actually worked better for us to to explain what the book was about.
Kunle: Okay.
Depesh: We’ve since refined it to get the message out a lot better, but yeah you know, explaining that this isn’t just another personalized book, that’s one of the key things for us.
Kunle: Okay. I noticed on the website that there’s push on referral marketing. I personally about a couple months ago, bought a copy for our son. And my wife just absolutely loved it. And all the birthday parties he’s been to, at least the two birthday parties he’s been to so far this summer, we’ve brought them as presents for his friends. And we will probably buy more copies as he attends more birthdays.
Asi: Thank you.
Kunle: Cheers. So is there a social word-of-mouth thing going on too? Because you’re very heavy on referral marketing. Is Facebook helping sort of spread the word about Lost My Name? And are you leveraging that in advertising, in Facebook advertising, are you leveraging the word-of-mouth there in Facebook?
Depesh: So, I think going back to answering on kind of how important word-of-mouth is, even pre-paid advertising and you know in the early days, the work the founding team were doing, word-of-mouth was always that. It’s always been a product that people look at and think wow, you know this is different, this is great, it’s unique, it’s a keepsake. And that’s kind of built over time so, we had been putting discount codes within each purchase, so you get three discount cards to share with friends. You know, there’s a good traction rate there. We know through feedback, either through customer services or by Facebook that people are telling us that you know, this has become there go-to gift. You know, you’re one of many people that give us that great feedback. And actually a kind of interesting anecdote from running our TV ad last year, we’ve had one or two customers actually quite upset that we were publicizing their go-to gift.
Kunle: [laughs] It’s a secret!
Depesh: Absolutely, absolutely and this is what kind of became. It was almost like a big secret for someone to tap into when a gifting occasion came about, so word-of-mouth online/offline, we know it’s there. Certainly the offline side is far harder to track, but even with online we know there are lots of conversations going on whether it’s on Facebook or blogs and different sites and you know that’s testament to having a great product.
Kunle: Okay, okay. So what are your core, what are you most important customer acquisition channels now in Lost My Name?
Depesh: I think you know the main ones we focus on right now are Facebook ads and paid search. And you know it’s a case for us of, we don’t go after any particular channel, we’re constantly testing and learning which ones are working. And it’s kind of, we want to be where our customers are, so if that’s paid search and that’s Facebook ads or anywhere else. We know we have a great product and we know that when we get in front of the right customer, they will buy. And you know as with any business, that’s our aim.
Kunle: I like the fact that you test channels and it’s not just you know relying on any one channel. Okay. With regards to, I was looking at your Periscope and I was looking at the spread of orders by country. How important is international eCommerce or cross-border eCommerce to Lost My Name?
Asi: It’s huge for us. Even in a complete site/product mindset, when we didn’t really know where this is going, and that probably was our very first business proposition or growth hack if you will. As I always said, ‘This book is going to be available for anyone in the world wherever they are, and shipping is going to be free.’ And I think this is still a very strong growth driver for us. We have the evidence for that. And even you know, we’ve made it available even before we had any idea if we can make the economics work for it. Because obviously we started printing with you know, a single print service provider in the UK. And shipping to different places in the world have a different, obviously, cost structure. But I think that on the very first year of these 22,000 books that we sold in the first holiday season, we were already sold in about 60 was 70 countries. And then in 2014 we’ve continued that, we made the economics work, we branched out to more local print providers, we now have about six or seven of them around the world. And you know, I think that the Internet’s democratized distribution. That’s what everyone says. I think it also means that the web should democratize global ambitions. And I always find quite surprising that I see a lot of eCommerce businesses that are still very local, in a sense. And for us, I guess it gets easier when you’re a print on demand business with zero inventory, it helps to make the decision to go global from day one, a fairly easy one.
Kunle: It’s a perfect product for international e-commerce. I can’t imagine if you’re selling beds online to actually pull that from day one.
Asi: Exactly. Exactly.
Kunle: What about the future? What about the future in the sense of the US? Do you want more penetration in the US? It appears to be the second most popular country from your periscope.
Asi: That’s interesting because as far as I know, since the beginning of this year USA is our biggest market, Depesh correct me if I’m wrong. And that was our ambition, one of the many reasons why we raised our capital with USA partners was to get more access and get closer to the networks that will help us to scale in the USA. I believe that in the USA alone we should be able to sell a million books a year. And I guess you know, going back to the international or kind of global ambition, I forgot to mention that the book is now available in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian. English is both UK and American, and in the next 3 to 6 months we’re going to roll it out for another five or six languages.
Kunle: Wow.
Asi: And USA is and should be our biggest market and that’s before we started to look at you know the likes of Korea, China, Japan which will happen next year sometime.
Kunle: Okay, so when did you go more multilingual with? When did you rollout so many languages?
Asi: We wrote the first three adaptations to Deutsch, France and Spain in November last year.
Kunle: And what’s been the impact given the fact? How has it grown the business? Do you have any hard figures on the impact of offering it in multiple languages?
Asi: Absolutely. Depesh, I think you can offer more of an overview of the numbers.
Depesh: Yeah, so I’m just going back to the US so, this year US is our biggest market overall. I think the data you’ve seen US is second, just because of the kind of growth in the UK over the last two years. Going into the other languages we operate in so, to get an example of the sales numbers, Germany and Spain are the two biggest countries behind the States and the UK in terms of top sellers this year. And you know France isn’t far behind. So they’re definitely taking off. Germany in particular took us by surprise. The amount of traction we picked up you know considering that there are certain eCommerce challenges in Germany around things like payment options, which we are still looking to implement and improve upon so even given that, we’ve had a lot of success in Germany. And you know we’ve recently launched into a few other languages and they’ve also gone really well. And I think something which I reflected on as we launched into each country is, this is a brand-new concept for a lot of these people. You know myself, I know Lost My Name over the last 12 to 14 months but every time we launch into a new country, it’s starting afresh, it’s communicating the core product, the emotion, the keepsake, they giftness of it. And you know customers are really loving it. And I think there’s just so much more we can do with this, just with the existing products.
Kunle: And your product is brilliant, I have to just say. The two people we gifted for their birthdays you know, sent us special messages saying, ‘Thank you. That was very, very thoughtful.’ It’s just to the heart, if I make any sense. Right, let’s go back to, yeah I found some interesting figures here on retention. Well, 74% at least from the data I have here, of your orders are for single books and then another 18% are for two books and then 5% for three books, is single orders. How do you go about increasing average order value?
Depesh: That’s actually an interesting one because we’ve been looking at it over the last you know 6 to 12 months and it does seem to be a difference by a kind of month by month and also by country. So I think naturally there’s something we’re still trying to understand. We know in Q4 for example the books per order does pick up, obviously there’s a lot more interesting going on. So you know the work we do to try and increase that average order value, for example we have a promotion on the site so that if buy more than one book in a given order you get a multiple book discount, just because of the economics around shipping. And you know we’re trying to surface that a lot more throughout the customer journey at the moment. Conversion rate optimization is of growing importance for us. We have a team now actively completely owning that and looking after that and really trying to push both conversion rate and order value as well.
Kunle: I was also going to ask your CRO test and how you identify customer areas, but I guess it’d be someone else in there. Okay. So let’s go back to your team. I was just having a look through the team page and as far as I could count, there were over 80 people and it looks like a pretty fun place to work. How’s been the evolution of the team size? Depesh you mentioned you were in when there were 10 last year April, so how has it sort of scaled out to 80 or more? Yeah, I’ll be interested to know the trajectory on resources, on people really, in Lost My Name.
Depesh: So now there’s about 50 people here in the London HQ and about let’s say 25 more kind of distributed team members, mostly around our customer support which is built around many network of agents around the world agents around the world as we call them. Which are normally stay-at-home moms who can really have the flexibility of you know logging into the customer support dashboard and kind of dip in and out and help us in different markets. The growth has been an interesting one, obviously. I think that since the end of last year we focused heavily on growing the product team and the engineering team. I think that because we are a full-stack business and because pretty much every aspect of the business runs on software which we designed, developed and integrate, there is I a heavy bias towards technologies in the business. There’s about nearly 20 of them across the full-stack and it can be from like heavyweight DevOps and PrintOps, to people who are doing computational art for our new products and everything in between.
Kunle: You said there are about 20 technologists. Are significant portion of your team also into design? The reason I’m asking is, it’s a pleasure actually browsing through the site. It flows whether it’s mobile or on desktop, the buttons work, there’s a flow. You’ve certainly invested in design not only in the book but also on the website. So I was just curious to know what portion of the team I actually into design?
Depesh: Probably about 10 now, I could say but I think your observation is right, we are design and UX fanatics from birth. And we take it in a quite holistic way so you know, we are obsessed with execution, with integration, and with just improving everything that we do. And I guess, you know going back to the more kind of lean approach, I think that generally even though we sell very physical products there’s a very strong software-develop mindset that runs across everything that we do in the business. And it’s this idea that everything can be better. There’s no point in time where we say like, ‘That’s it, the codes for the front-end or the codes for the back-end is finished, it’s ready, it’s good.’ We obsessively integrate every aspect of the business in every possible touch point with the customers. So, and that includes by the way the physical book as well as the website, so if you think about you know we launched the first duration of the site in April, 2013, I think that both the website and the actual physical books that we were selling are about version eight or nine today. And you know we have the advantage, because the books still live in a digital format or kind of based on digital assets until the very last point where somebody is making a purchase, and there’s a command to the server on the printer’s site to actually print the book. Because all the assets for the book are living in a digital format in our database, we can always improve, we can always integrate, we can always find ways to make every touch point better.
Kunle: Okay, okay. That makes a lot of sense. I’m just going to finally wrap up with regards to some observations I’ve made here. After I ordered on Lost My Name there was a pop-under survey. Depesh, do you mind answering how often people actually answer out the survey and what kind of insight it reveals? By the way the survey was, ‘Can you answer a quick question to help us improve future products? How did you hear about us?’ And there were loads of options: Facebook, friends and other websites, search engines, TV, newspaper, magazines.
Depesh: Sure, so I mean we set that specifically up for our PR team to kind of get gather data around press work. We often run these surveys to learn about our customers, you know pre and post purchase. Response rates actually varies, so prepurchase the response rate is lower but we’re talking at around 20% which is actually quite good. Post purchase we can get up to 40%. So you know, that survey give us an ongoing benchmark of you know, we can look at the analytics data and see where the traffic came through and where the purchase came through. But often people have heard about it through their friends or they’ve seen something on TV. And you know we had a situation a few months ago where the Dragon’s Den was re-run in Australia for example. And we were getting people coming into the site and buying in saying they’d heard about us through Dragon’s Den which you know, just came out of nowhere. So it’s a good way for us to tie in as many data points for us as possible to our marketing whether it’s online or offline.
Kunle: Interesting. Very, very interesting. And then for account creation, I was not asked to create an account. It was like a guest check out. Was it deliberate? Is this powered by data, or?
Depesh: No, I think it is powered by having too many things to do. It’s certainly something that we’re continuously looking at. You know it’s eCommerce best practices there to offer, especially if you’re a returning customer, to login and retrieve your details etc. etc. So they’re all things that we’re looking at, and you know this is part of the reason why we’re growing so aggressively in terms of team size. We just need resources to kind of help us bulk up and work on all these projects.
Kunle: Good stuff, good stuff. And then finally your referral marketing program. It’s amazing. I think it’s refer three people and then it gets a book completely free shipped to you. Is this working? Are you finding a lot of customers bringing in more customers? Existing customers bringing in new customers as a result of the fact that they get a completely different book with all the characters shipped to them for free?
Depesh: Yeah absolutely I mean, we know that the redemption rates of the cards that we gave out in the books that were purchased were being used. It was a case of how do we bring that online and enable us to track it a lot better, so you know of those people that are referred conversion rates are between 25 and 40%. So you know that word-of-mouth, we can now put a metric against it and say, ‘You know what, if we do get people to refer us that is going to convert into sale.’ And you know we getting a lot of outliers where customers are referring up to 70, 80, 90 people and it’s just mind blowing. But you know these people are completely bought into what we’re doing, they’re spreading it on their social networks, on their blog posts etc. etc. So you know, we knew that people love the product, like you’ve also said, but we can now also put some numbers behind it and say you know what this is actually some hard data behind behind that.
Kunle: Okay, so on average how many customers would an average customer refer… how many customers on average would an average existing customer refer Lost My Name to?
Depesh: Yeah, I think you know most of them will refer between one to five, it will kind of vary. And you know that’s something we’re still learning and developing. The program launched pretty much as everything else does within the business, as a minimum viable product to see how quickly we can get something out and then grow it from that. So there’s loads more we need to learn and develop off the back of that. But you know the work done so far has been a big success and it can only get better.
Kunle: One to five is a fantastic number and given the fact that there’s hardly any retention in the business just due to the fact that it’s just a single product, but the fact that there’s word-of-mouth and one person can get one to five to people to buy, it just speaks itself in terms of Product/Market Fit and the kind of products you guys have.
Depesh: Absolutely
Kunley: Okay so wrapping up on final words please. Asi, what advice can you give to listeners is keen on building fast growth e-commerce ventures?
Asi: Well, I honestly don’t feel in a position to give such advice but [laughs]
Kunle: You’re qualified.[laughs]
Asi: I’ll try. I think it’s not the eCommerce part that I feel like I can properly comment on but I think that our story and our growth prooves a couple of things. A) That execution is everything. And if you’re doing something that is better than anything else that is on the market, it will take off. And I think that’s you know the first advice that anyone who’s asking now, I’m telling you just focus on execution. Just do something that is absolutely brilliant. And if it’s not, it might take off but it will be much more difficult for you to push it forward, it’ll be much more costly for you to acquire customers. The other thing which I think is more important is that there are enough opportunities, you can really build a business, you can really validate something, really put up something without taking a huge risk of leaving a job, raising capital. I think that there are enough platforms. We are living in the generation of Kickstarter and Indiegogo and there’s so many routes to markets today that will allow you to quickly and cheaply validate any ideas. So if anyone is sitting on a half-baked idea, and think that you know what, that could be my dream business or that could be my, just go and do it. And don’t you know, don’t hurry up to just like pack everything and leave your job, take big risks you know, take big loans from the bank. You know there are so many steps that you can do before that to get some evidence, to get some traction, to get some signal that you are on a right track. And I can tell you from both Rounds now that when you are coming to conversations with investors, when you prove a Product/Market Fit, when you are already generating revenue, definitely if you’re profitable, it makes your life much, much easier.
Kunle: Okay, okay. So I’ll just summarize. Execute, validate, get that Product/Market Fit and then look for funding if you need it.
Asi: Mmm hmm.
Kunle: Fantastic good advice, great advice. Depesh, what advice can you give to our listeners looking to find a notch of growth levers?
Depesh: I think that you know, the key thing for me is really understand your differentiators. You know if I reflect, the few startups I’ve been at previously that didn’t quite find traction, you know we found marketing channels, we were bringing in customers, but when you struggle to find that differentiator between yourself and someone else, you know a lot of these other companies have bigger budgets than you, they’ve been doing this a lot longer and it’s really a case of finding your niche for that customer. Why should the customer care about you? And I think that was quite easy to find that Lost My Name, which really helped us to accelerate our growth. And you know without that, we’d have really struggled to cut through.
Kunle: All about differentiation. Okay. Alright let’s talk books. Ashy, what single book or resource would you recommend, it could be anything, to our listeners? I’m going to keep it wide, it doesn’t have to be business it could be anything, any book that sort of changed your life, a single book.
Asi: Ah, you’ve caught me off guard here, there’s so many, I don’t know which one to choose. Professionally? Spiritually? [laughs] Where do we…
Kunle: Let’s say professionally. Okay, business, in business.
Asi: My current Bible is Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, the Founder and CEO of Pixar. It is by far… You know, I wasn’t really in the market for leadership books until very recently and I’ve read quite a few and they were quite underwhelming but Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull is by far, I think, the best leadership and creativity book that is out there.
Kunle: Creativity Inc. And then Depesh, what single book would you, has changed your outlook?
Depesh: Actually, it’s a book I was introduced to by someone about five years ago maybe, four or five years ago. And it got me into taking an interest into behavioral psychology and behavioral science and it was a book by Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational.
Kunle: Yes.
Depesh: It’s just amazing to think how much you can influence and shape people’s thinking by your communications: physical, mental etc. etc. And that, it just opened up a whole new field for me of interest.
Kunle: Absolutely, absolutely. I, you know I just concur with you regards to psychology and marketing and just the impact, the power. It’s a superpower, really, to have.
Depesh: It is.
Kunle: Right. Okay. So what, actually just this final thing before we sign out. What are your five indispensable tools for managing Lost My Name? Marketing tools, productivity tools, any tools you know, software tools.
Depesh: We’re big fans of Slack, like many, many people
Kunle: Absolutely
Depesh: I find it brilliant. And I guess on all kinds of optimization, Depesh would be the best person to ask.
Kunle: Depesh?
Depesh: Yeah, so I mean I’d go one step further of Slack, that there are actually communities of kind of ‘Slackers’ out there so for example, there’s one called Tech London. And it’s a great way to network and tap into local knowledge. There’s other networks out there as well. But you know other tools like you know, we’re big users of Google Drive, so docs, sheets etc. Most of our work is done there, it just kind of helps to keep things collaborative and in sync. I think social feeds, keeping up with news updates you know, I use HootSuite, others used TweetDeck. It’s just so important to kind of sort out the noise out there to try and make some kind of sense of it. You know another tool is Trello, we use Trello a lot on the business to help run through projects and programs and things like that. And I guess you know Google analytics, Periscope which you’ve mentioned which plugs into our back-end database and visualizes our data, you know those kind of tools are just so important when you need to know and but you don’t have the time to really hack together excel sheets, to just tap into data quite quickly.
Kunle: Okay, okay. All sounds good, sounds good. I’m going to link to everyone of these resources in the share notes. Okay so finally, finally, finally. How could our audience or our listeners reach out to you, find you guys, and connect?
Asi: Twitter is always great. We always respond fairly quickly for anyone who’s reaching out to us on twitter.
Kunle: What’s your handle?
Asi: Mine is at Asi_Sharabi
Kunle: Okay, Depesh, what’s yours?
Depesh: Mine’s DepeshM
Kunle: Okay, DepeshM. Right, we’ll connect to you guys. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you both on the show Asi and Depesh. And thank you for sharing your insights on starting growing new skin in the business.
Asi: Thank you for having us. Cheers.
Depesh: Thanks for having us, cheers. Bye,

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