It has been 5 months since Ariana launched her product, Vino Cards, on Amazon. There has been some big successes and some failures too. For this video, we will share with you how she started her business, why the sales went down since the 1st month she launched, and what we will be doing to fix it.

Ariana created the product last year. We came up with the idea of wine flashcards which we thought would be something useful for us and for everybody else. The second step was coming up with a prototype of the product and shared it with a Facebook Launch Group that Ariana created. She used Instagram to get people into the group. The benefit of the group is to get feedback and crowdsource ideas on how to improve the product. This is also a way to validate your product.

Here are different ways to validate your product:
1. Emails – Did people gave their emails?
2. Launch Group – Did people join the launch group?
3. Interaction – Are they interacting with you?
4. Crowdfund – Did people give you the money when you launched on Kickstarter?

One of the mistakes we realized was having the product airship with the boxes being too thin. It resulted to having dents and damages on the boxes. Another mistake was ordering too much.

For the first month, Ariana sold 150 units and made about $1,000 in profit. Since then, she was only able to sell 60 units per month. Ariana admits that she hasn’t put in much time and effort into it, but I still would give her a lot of props. It’s tough to balance having a full-time job and growing a business on the side. Aside from these, she also takes care of me and puts the house in order.

From the updates that we’ve done, we’ve realized that there are things that we need to do to improve the performance of the product. One of the things that we will start doing again will be weekly meetings. The purpose of that is to note exactly what we want to do for the next week and what can we improve from the week before. We could talk about the Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Some of the things I would ask her would be the number of reviews and the number of messages sent out.

Another thing that we plan on doing is hiring a virtual assistant. Ariana has seen how beneficial that is having someone to help her out consistently throughout the week. One more thing that Ariana will do is to expand on Instagram Marketing. On my end, I plan to spend a few days at least to work on Vino Cards. I could help her train her new VA and also get on with Amazon PPC.