Answers to your questions below. Just a random thought: for the people that have bought your product, or who will buy your product, can you provide some crazy incentive -- even at a loss -- for them to tell someone else about it? Like, "Get a free pair when you tell a friend!" by providing an affiliate link. Who cares if they abuse it for their own family, it lets you sell more socks.
But you ask good questions. I don't know the answer to all of them, figuring things out myself!
What changes did you implement?
- Started to leverage the people on the team to tell their friends more. It seems fairly slow at first, but inevitably someone in one of those distant 2nd-degree circles will have more interest, and evangelize for you. You just don't know who that will be!
- Use Discord, Amazon reviews, or some network where users can gather and find each other. Like sharing passion. Not sure where this is for your socks, but maybe Twitter lists. I don't know enough to take this further.
What did you find you were doing wrong?
- Blasting out advertising to everybody, even those not interested. Most fell on deaf ears. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X advertising did nothing but each money. Probably should have been more targeted with keywords on Amazon or app search, in the domain where my most likely users frequent, rather than broad and general places like Twitter/Google/Facebook.
- Spending too much money on paid advertising, domain purchasing, legal fees for things like registering trademarks. Better to spend on keywords in the arena where you are most visible, or where most of your customers congregate/frequent.
What did you find you weren't doing at all?
- Not doing that I should be doing? Or not doing that ended up making no difference, so good thing I wasn't doing it?
- Not doing (for good reason): Paid advertising on Facebook
- Not doing (but should have): Approaching kids and getting them to try and give honest reactions.
What did you try that completely wasted your time?
- Influencers. Too many ask for money. They're really not in it to help you. Even some of my influencer friends did their diligence of a post/shoutout/link-in-the-description-below, then stopped. You have to find people with ownership or true belief, easier said than done. You often don't know until they've been paid, but if I had more time or a better system, I'd try to project in advance whether or not someone will take ownership before shelling out cash.
- Paid advertising.