Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Could you summarize what you learned? What were the wins and what were the mistakes?

Kish Vasnani: On the wins side, we figured out product-market fit. It reached a critical mass of people. As soon as people saw the product and imaging, they resonated with it. That is thanks to Vanessa’s background. That part was great. It was our first time going deep into the manufacturing process. That’s where we did have some slip-ups. Our samples looked great, but when it came to mass production, we had bags that were defective.

From November 2019 until March 2019, it was a tough time because people were receiving their bags and it wasn’t performing as stated on our website. We later learned that our manufacturer took a shortcut on a percentage of the bags. The end result was that people would use the bag and the zippers would split wide open.

Sramana Mitra: How did you deal with the quality problem? 

Kish Vasnani: In the thick of it, we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes first. We refunded a lot of people. We offered other people replacements. On the factory side, we had a conversation with them. We tried to reason with them but still didn’t feel confident. From the factory perspective, they’re saying sorry. By then, we weren’t able to trust our manufacturers any more. It’s not like you buy inventory with credit cards and have protection on it.

The way our colleagues think in Asia is how we think in the US. We were talking about this problem with our peers. We were introduced to a third-party quality control firm in March 2019. They’re the ones who helped us get to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of revenue was problematic?

Kish Vasnani: I would say around 7% to 10%.

Sramana Mitra: But you did have margin to absorb these problems.

Kish Vasnani: We did.

Sramana Mitra: This sounds like it aligns with the timeline when you were getting ready to jump full-time. 

Kish Vasnani: During the campaign, we had our jobs. Once we delivered all the orders, we saw a path to being able to fix the issues. That’s when we decided to go full-time. 

Sramana Mitra: By this time, you had validation and cash. You have experience. The one thing that you don’t have yet is the customer acquisition strategy other than the Indiegogo campaign. What was your hypothesis on customer acquisition, and did that work out?

Vanessa Jeswani: We knew we could rely on email marketing to some extent, but we didn’t have much experience in terms of bringing in a new audience. We wanted to test out paid ads and influencers.

Sramana Mitra: You tried the influencer strategy?

Vanessa Jeswani: Yes. 

Kish Vasnani: We had sold through all of the initial units that we had purchased. We found a QC firm. We were actually sold out in the six months from March 2019 and September 2019.

Vanessa Jeswani: We spent that time working on our supply chain and manufacturing and figuring out how to bring this to life on our own website. We spent two months in Asia visiting and vetting several factories. At the same time, we worked on developing a new website. 

Sramana Mitra: Once you got to your own website, what was the ramp? 2019 is when you were starting to sell on your own e-commerce website.

Kish Vasnani: That’s correct. We clearly communicated to everyone what the improvements were. We had the email list from before. The launch was around the end of September, but we actually started taking pre-orders about a month before just because we had gone so long without having any revenue. We wanted to keep ourselves going. During the pre-order phase, we had reached around $250,000 in sales. That was very encouraging for us.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an E-Commerce Business Using a Paycheck and Crowdfunding: Nomad Lane Co-Founders Kish Vasnani and Vanessa Jeswani
1 2 3 4 5 6 7