Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
Website: https://www.tuftandneedle.com/ Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/top-rated/home-garden/3732961/
Problem: Painful shopping experience and extremely high margins in the mattress industry.
Solution: We make a good bed without any gimmicks. It is comfortable, safe and attractive without falsely advertised features or fraudulent discounts.
Business: We launched with a MVP and a simple landing page to test our ideas. Then about 4 months ago, we listed on Amazon and it's caught up to be a significant sales channel on its own. In the last quarter we've had 100% month-over-month growth. We don't spend on advertising, and more than half our sales are from word-of-mouth referrals and social media.
Technical: We take a pragmatic approach with everything including the storefront, sales tools, inventory tracking and fulfillment processes. We use 3rd-party services for payments (Stripe), bitcoin (Coinbase), shipping labels (EasyPost), CRM (Intercom), etc. Stack: Rails+AngularJS+Heroku.
Lesson Learned: Our primary success factor was starting with a rough draft. We didn't like our v1 much—an all cotton tufted mattress—but that didn't keep us from launching with it. This gave us a chance to experiment with problem/solution and to start collecting feedback right away. We had to do quite a few returns at first but we iterated constantly until our customer satisfaction was high enough for us to start getting referrals.
We would really value the community's opinion. We want to get as much feedback as possible to make sure we're going in the right direction.
JT & Daehee at T&N
276 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadAll the best for your future.
One question - did you guys come from a pure technical background? or did you also have significant experience with the mattress industry before?
well done!
Would LOVE to see a blog post detailing your experience here with what you learned (you know, in the time you have in between building mattresses, heh). The experience of being rejected multiple times is applicable across so many entrepreneurs journeys.
The line of trying it in real life is getting spread pretty thin and soon will diminish against the power of social media and online customer reviews. Why would I need to try it myself when I can read tons of reviews online of people who bought the product? Surely a review will actually be more helpful than trying it myself since it could delineate facts that I may not of considered.
Salesmen, absolutely no reason.
It started from there.
Question: why there are only renders on the website instead of real pictures of the product ?
Congratulations with the success on Amazon, and thanks for sharing and not posting blog spam!
Comparing to Ikea, our prices are only comparable because we cut our margins almost all the way down but the quality of material is very different. In other words, our bed won't sag after just 12 months.
Thank you for the kind words.
Amazon is really limiting when it comes to communication with our customers. This is a major pain point for us for that channel.
Also, what frame do you show the bed with? It looks good together.
But.
A mattress isn't a trivial purchase (not just in cost, which is what you're disrupting, but in what it does for you). You use a mattress for a large period of your life and it has a great effect on your health (either good or bad).
Being able to physically lie on a mattress in a store provides some value in regards to feeling how hard the mattress is, how it responds to your moving around, etc.
I'm not sure I could buy a mattress online sight unseen and just "hope" it was the one for me (and my wife), hoping I didn't have to deal with returns, etc. (How the hell would I return a mattress via UPS/FedEx?)
Maybe I'm overthinking it?
We setup some really good policies to make it super easy to return without much risk. We'll have it picked up by a 3rd party before having you ship it back to us as an example.
We see ourselves moving offline in the future for sure but to bootstrap, it wasn't really feasible to do anything other than launch online.
Site looks great, photos are excellent, product looks great based on all that. Having bought 2 new mattresses in the past 2 years, I know how shitty the mattress buying experience is.
Good luck to you, definitely rooting for ya!
The line of trying it in real life is getting spread pretty thin and soon will diminish against the power of social media and online customer reviews. Why would I need to try it myself when I can read tons of reviews online of people who bought the product? Surely a review will actually be more helpful than trying it myself since it could delineate facts that I may not of considered.
Part of the conditions of the satisfaction guarantee is that you have to have certification that you lay on the appropriate demonstration mattress for at least 30 minutes.
I don't see that listed here but it's in our hard-copy, and the retailer emphasised it before purchase:
http://www.vispring.com/our-promises/guaranteed
The frame that we have in our photos is of our design but we're not really able to move into hard goods yet. Maybe once we grow a bit more.
West Elm has some nice simple designs that we like.
-V.
Thank you for the kind words.
Their twin is $199, and less than half the height of a normal mattress. For $139 you can get a 5-star-rated 8" foam mattress with 4" of dense foam, 2" of soft foam and 2" of memory foam, delivered tomorrow with the same certifications and 5-year warranty. [1] For $229, you can get a 12" foam mattress, which is more like a traditional full height mattress. [2]
1: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006L9QN4G/ref=oh_details_o...
2: http://www.amazon.com/Signature-Sleep-12-Inch-Memory-Mattres...
Did you start this as a side project?
Also curious how you built the bed as well…definitely a great price and a very elegant site. Aligns well with your product.
I don’t know if we have any New Yorkers here, but Bob’s furniture (official sponsor of just about every NYC sports team) sells lower cost furniture, and you’d never know it based on their cheesy late night commercials, but they’re actually an extremely fast growing private company, and did a ton of growth in the furniture industry during the “great recession”
Kudos to you. You should setup a blog and track progress and tell the story. I’d definitely be a reader!
So we launched with a very simple v1 product — an all cotton mattress — and then iterated from there based on customer feedback and surveys.
Thanks for your feedback!
Worth it just so you can avoid a freaking furniture store!
Next mattress will be from you guys --- any king-sized mattresses in your future (or is that what the twin XL)
Again -- thank you for disrupting this corrupt business
I'd be really interested to read a follow up post detailing a little more about your story, how you guys got started, challenges you faced, what you'd differently, etc...at least the details you're comfortable sharing.
Would love to have a recommendation for an affordable(!) good looking bed frame on the site while you guys build the replacement.
Our current frame is just a prototype but is something we'd like to make in the future.
b.) people naturally sweat and have oils in their skin that get transferred through sheets. it's normal to have discoloration where you sleep. that's another reason a mattress protector helps (easier to replace a $50 cover than a $$$ mattress).
We definitely wouldn't sell something that we wouldn't want to sleep on ourselves but I can understand your concern with sleeping on something that isn't 100% natural.
If you're concerned about sleeping on foam then you might want to take a look at a more alternative option. Look for 95% natural latex foam (there is no such thing as 100% because they use glues) or for all organic cotton/wool tufted cores.
I thought I understood consumers, but now you have me doubting myself. Human behavior is fascinating.