231: Selling Your Invention on Your Own Website Starting from Zero

With Hamdy Albana, Co-Founder of Push Analytics

Hosted by Kevin Mako, President of MAKO Design + Invent

Hamdy Albana is the founder of Push Analytics, a sustainable growth-centered marketing agency focused on leveraging data to propel brands from inception to millions in sales. Additionally, bolstered by a robust education in electrical engineering at NYU, he possesses a wealth of knowledge salient to hardware startup business owners. Today, Hamdy will share the benefits and nuances of selling products directly on one’s own website as opposed to through online marketplaces like Amazon with today’s inventors, startups, and small manufacturers. He will also highlight the two most critical aspects of launching a new social media marketing campaign to attract potential customers to your own website and divulge best practices for optimizing return on ad spend, enabling you to swiftly and successfully scale your new product business.

Here are the key takeaways from the episode:

• How to scale your brand from securing your first few sales to millions of dollars in revenue using your own website to sell directly to end customers.
• Squarespace, Shopify, and other popular website building and hosting platforms are great, simple options for building your D2C site.
• The biggest advantage of selling through your own website is that you own all of the customer contact and relationship info.
• Social media ads are great for getting new prospective customers to your custom website.
• Interest is the key part to identify when pinpointing your target audience. Meta can then help you figure out who your ideal audience is!
• The second most important part of your campaign is your content. It provides different types of messaging that explain your product’s value proposition.
• Video demonstration is a powerful tool for promoting and selling hardware products.
• Look for clear signs by analyzing the metrics on each type of ad to know if you’re moving in the right direction.
• Use your ad dollars in the early stages to learn what is working and not working to ensure you are continually improving.
• 50 orders is a notable learning point! You can feed the customer info into Meta’s system and the algorithm will start to understand exactly who your target audience is, finding the best customers for you.
• Scale, troubleshoot, repeat! This strategy will allow for continuous growth.
• Once you have reached the scale stage, having your own website becomes even more advantageous.
• You now have strong, proven methods you can use to retarget prospective or existing customers via both email and SMS, which are cheaper than platform remarketing.
• Start with $50 per day in ad spend. When you start having your first few orders come in, increase the spend amount so that you can warm up your target audiences for purchase.
• Focus on a large geography rather than a small region to let the algorithm find where the most efficient and aligned sales are for you.

Hamdy Albana Links:

LinkedIn | Push Analytics

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

www.ProductStartup.com

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MAKO Design + Invent Links:

www.makodesign.com

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Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to the above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.