bumblejumper

I mean, it feels to me like this whole post just reinforces the idea that ideas are worthless.

Without the development, meetings, patents, copyrights, lawyers, etc, nothing happens here. The only reason you were successful in the end is because you didn't have an idea, you had an idea, that turned into research, that turned into a prototype, that turned into a product, that was then able to be protected through patents and copyrights.

The idea itself was worthless, the execution on the idea, and the protection of the work are what mattered. In other words, the execution all us "ideas are worthless" guys always talk about was really what saved you - it wasn't the idea - it WAS the execution.

I'd put up a specific landing page, where you offer to demo, and on-board potential new clients.

I'm not sure what your stick rate, or your ascension rates are, but if you're at $50 a month, and you're keeping a client for a year, you can easily spend $500 to acquire a customer and still be profitable.

That's how you have to look at this. The cost is going to be high up front, but maybe you can acquire customers that work for you over the long term.

You're not going to pay $10 to acquire a $25 a month client, that's just not realistic... especially with such a specialized service.

My best advice is, DO NOT TOUCH THEM AT ALL FOR 7 DAYS!

Just let them run their course. I know it's tempting to play with things, adjust, etc, but each time you do, you're basically telling FB to start over and ignore what it has learned so far.

Just leave things alone, let the system do what it should, and come back after a full 7 days.

A spend of $4.58 is not statistically significant, and FB is trying to give your ads enough spend that it doesn't make a mistake.

Let's say you have an ad set that has 5 separate ads, that get shown a total of 10 times each, this is 50 impressions in total.

If one ad gets 2 sales, and the other ads get 0 sales, you're going to assume that the ad that got 2 sales is the winner, and the other 4 are the losers - the problem with this is that you don't have enough data yet.

If you ran those same ads to 1,000 impressions, it's entirely possible that the one ad that got 2 sales, ends up generating 0 more sales. The other 4 ads may end up generating, more, or less, than 0 sales - but you can't know for sure until you've reached a statistically significant number of impressions to a wide enough audience.

Over time, the ads will continue to adjust themselves in an attempt to slowly favor the better performers, while slowly eliminating the ones that perform worse. That said, you should also prune your ads based on your own knowledge of the size of your audience.

If you're selling a very niche product, you should give your ads less leeway, if you're selling a product that appeals to a much larger audience, you should give the system more time as it's going to take longer to reach a portion of your audience that's going to be statistically significant.

I personally won't adjust an ad until I've seen at least 5,000 impressions, per variation. Yes, this can get expensive, but it has also shown me that what you think you know on day one, may be totally different than what you actually know by the time you reach day 7.

Are there any incentives to show up? Do you get free food? A free beer? Something else?

What type of event is it?

It may not be too late to salvage, but I'd need more details.

I can put you in touch with a sourcing agent who can get product to you in as little as 3 days - even if it's currently in China.

Let me know if you'd like to talk - he started the sourcing business because he ran into this problem himself. Was selling through shopify, blew threw inventory, and had to re-stock quickly. Over the years he learned how to make it happen.

Don't do pre-orders! Not only are they against the terms of some credit card processors, if your stock doesn't arrive in a timely manner you're going to get HAMMERED with chargebacks. This will cause you to lose the ability to process, and you'll also lose your advertising accounts.

Pre-orders without inventory in hand around this time of year is a VERY bad idea.

You didn't give us nearly enough information to give you any type of actually useful answer.

How much traffic are you generating? What is the conversion rate? 25-40 means almost nothing without knowing if they're male or female, without knowing their income level, household size, demographic makeup, etc.

25-40 might be great, it also might be trash. Age range means almost nothing.

Are you doing follow-up advertising of some kind? Retargeting? Email followups? SMS?

You have a very niche product, you're probably going to have to go after a very niche audience - that's likely going to require very targeted advertising if you want to see higher conversion rates.

If these are also truly handcrafted items, why aren't you highlighting the makers more prominently? I know nothing about where the items came from, who I'm supporting, why they're better than something I could get from Etsy, or even Temu, or why the pricing is what it is.

For example, your confetti cutting board. Is the product made by hand? Does it use recycled materials? Are there any reasons it's worth spending $42 on a piece of plastic that I could get for probably $5 elsewhere? Is the product being handcrafted, using recycled materials, sourced through a specific community? Are kids bringing in plastic bottles to a teacher, who is then using the bottle tops to create cutting boards to raise funds to help their kids in some way or another?

Also, some of your descriptions are... worrysome.

Coasters that can't be soaked in water? What the hell is the point of having a coaster that you can't have soaked in water? That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Maybe you mean it shouldn't be left completely submerged for more than X amount of time, but as someone who lives in an area with very high humidity - the only reason I use a coaster is to catch all the water from the condensation on the outside of my glasses.

Basically - you're not justifying your prices with the reason why. Build the story behind each product, why the supplier was chosen, why the product is worth the money, etc.

Finally - one picture of each product? Are you kidding me?

Where are the pictures of the products in their natural setting? There's a reason that companies like Ikea show compete, staged rooms in their magazines - you need to show people what the product will look like in use, in their homes. It needs to aspirational, so that people will buy hoping to achieve that same look.

You should talk to a sourcing company to handle this for you. Typically they're US based, but they have contacts in China that do the actual manufacturing.

The benefit of working with the better ones is that you'll pay the sourcing company in the US directly, and they handle everything from there. You're not going to get screwed in terms of losing money, because it's all US based transactions.

PM me if you want a recommendation. I've worked with a lot of people looking for the same, and found a couple of good companies that do millions in volume every month for their clients.