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Hey HN: Check out my first Muse

8 points by Artifex ↗ HN
Hey HN, I finally got around to figuring out how to implement Tim Ferris's muse concept for myself. I'd like to get your feedback on how to make it better.

Address is http://miraclefruitstand.net/

Let me make this clear: I'll be grateful if you just throw some advice my way on how to take this to the next level. Don't feel obliged to purchase anything; my desire is not to spam (but I will say I enjoy the products myself).

For the curious lurker, here's what I did:

>Contacted the warehouse rep.

>Arranged to be a distributor for the product (which isn't hard - basically just reviewing their policies and getting familiar with how they operate).

>Found out their dropshipping rates; calculated the margins for myself.

>Registered the domain with NearlyFreeSpeech.net - saved a bunch - 11 or 12 bucks.

>Built the site with wordpress and customized it in a day. Theme, plugins, etc...

>Plugged it in to paypal.

>Tested out the payment system.

>Set up an Adwords campaign which began this morning, using a 100 dollar promo coupon from Google + 10 dollar activation fee. Spending 3.33 a day on advertising, testing the system out using google's cash instead of my own. From that I garnered 3 clicks, 1985 impressions, for a %.15 Click through rate. (Here's a question: is that good or bad? The campaign literally started at midnight.)

Basically if the site fails, I'll have lost around 20 bucks. I also have the option of repping wholesale to retailers in the area, so I'm not entirely dependent on the site, thought I would like for it to be an automated source of income.

Haven't had any "real" sales yet. Processed two orders, one from family, one from a friend, and the company later informed me they'd just send it to my family for free - essentially I've earned back my 20-something dollar investment back already.

So - What do you think HN? How can I make this better and improve sales quickly? Anything I should be aware of from your own muse-creation experiences?

Thanks much!

15 comments

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ryduh
I'd say up your Google adwords spending a little bit, maybe up to $5 or $10 a day, and see how it fares with more traffic.
Artifex
Yeah I'd probably want to double what I'm doing now at least, once things got serious. I figured I'd just burn through google's cash before I burned through mine.
jarsj
First your website looks nothing like a shop to me. Spend some time looking at www.amazon.com and convince yourself that my chances to buy anything are much higher if your site looked like it.
gprisament
Good luck to you! It's inspiring to hear about starting a company on pocket change!

I'm wondering if you're allowed to use those "New York Times", CNN, etc logos... sometimes companies can be protective of their branding.

Do you plan to form an LLC or sole proprietorship?

Artifex
Not sure yet. I'd imagine LLC down the road for it's tax advantages, but I'd have to look in to it more later. In other words... I'm not incorporating until I have to.

Also for the images - they're links to particular articles. Do you really think they'll have a problem for linking like that?

briancary
Definitely agree that it doesn't look like a shop. Checkout my friends dropshipped-powered site http://seriouslyscuba.com - also inspired by Tim Ferriss' muse concept. If I were you I would quickly move away from wp-commerce into a real e-commerce solution (seriouslyscuba is on shopify by the way, so I guess you'd have to justify spending money on their high fees to go that route). The design looks good overall, I guess to me, its just that wordpress doesn't make for a good e-commerce solution. I'd hide the Categories block, RSS links, 'Comments are closed' text, i.e. anything that makes it looks like a blog-converted-to-store. Good luck nonetheless.
Artifex
Okay, good advice. I am really just bootstrapping here, trying to get up and running and working as soon as possible, for as little as possible... Perhaps I'll switch over to a more serious e-commerce solution once I build up the business a little, with the intention of looking for a better "store-like" theme in the mean time.
briancary
Cool. Definitely promote your top-product on the front page so people can add to cart with one click instead of having to navigate over to the store page. If you do want to use a content management system for a storefront, perhaps check out Ubertcart and the fusion theme (is what I think I used). You can see a test site I created at http://c2c.infusedindustries.com - but if you haven't used Drupal before, it can be a timesink to learn.
Watts
Where does your friend get all his products? Are they from the same supplier? Is drop-shipping something suppliers normally engage in?
weaksauce
It depends on the industry but there are a lot of suppliers that will drop ship for you. Blind drop shipping is a whole different beast since you might not want to have the supplier advertise his wares or include an invoice for what you paid so be careful.
briancary
Same supplier. Just found a business they could work with and pursued the relationship.
python123
Can you (or someone) explain what Tim Ferris' muse concept is?
briancary
its where you build something that can make you money after setting it up, with little or no extra work involved. if more work is involved, it can be done by hiring someone cheaply (in another country more-than-likely) so you can focus your time on things you would rather do, while having the muse continue to work for you.
weaksauce
One thing I would do is make the Visit our shop button a different color entirely than the background is. Dark blue on light blue is not screaming "click me to shop for the awesome product that I am selling you!"
anthonyb
I second this - the 'call to action' does need to be stronger. On the other hand 'not looking like a shop' makes it less likely that your window will be immediately closed and that people might have a click around.