My First Big Failure
My first experiment launching a product.
When I was in high school I started a men's body care line selling paraben-free shampoo, body wash, and conditioner called Neptune for Men. Creating and launching Neptune was my first glimpse into entrepreneurship. Before that, I was reselling sneakers, doing retail consignment sales, and busboying at a restaurant that transformed into a nightclub.
It was my dream to actually build something compelling enough that strangers would purchase it. And I had a kick for sensory and luxury during Covid that could be compartmentalized into an actual brand.
So after months of building the website and brand system, navigating supply partners who lost their business during the pandemic, and actually incorporating this so-called ‘brand’, I was finally ready to push to my small audience and start posting on Instagram in hopes of drawing traffic to our store.
Well, I missed a crucial step in our P&L models: free shipping didn’t mean it was free for ME to ship the product.
Our already razor-thin margins were now crushed, leading us to increase prices by 30%.
Getting a product into a stranger's hand more than once, I learned, can be much more difficult than designing a good one.
So while I’m learning to drive, I’m also learning what an LTV to CAC ratio is, and discovered how unlikely a solid 3:1 ratio would be with our existing v1 product and distribution strategy.
Neptune generated roughly $5,000 in sales with a less than 5% repeat purchase rate. And nobody purchased it a third time. The remaining product split between me going door-to-door to Fort Lauderdale salons for consignment, donating to charity, or hiding in cupboards in my house.
I elected not to reformulate and run a second release based off of all that I learned. The good news was we didn’t have to buy any body wash for a good year and a half.
But in reality, I had been running an experiment more than a company, and the experiment succeeded.
Making something people want is so difficult, but rewarding if you find the right domain to serve. I have not lost my enthusiasm for making things people want, and I’ve made it an existential goal to hang onto such a spirit. There are unsolved problems every day, which means incessant channels for executing on good product sense.