Hi there,

Welcome to the 2nd edition of "State of anew sleep".

Every month I share what I (and the team) at anew sleep are working on.

It's been a busy month and here's what made it so.

Speaking at E-handelsdagen

And it was honestly an amazing experience.

Not because I love public speaking (quite frankly I find it difficult being the introvert I am), but because of the 650+ people attending the conference.

Everyone attending the conference had a love for e-commerce and that came to show in both the questions during my presentation, but also during the networking sessions we attended.

Over 100 people came to hear me talk about how to run succesful ads on Meta in 2024 and the feedback was great. If you want to hear my talk - check this video out. Note: It's in Danish. 🇩🇰

First time speaking in a cinema, but it was cool!

Other than that I had the chance to talk to a ton of skilled e-commerce professionals. Haris and I had a lot to talk about on the way back to Copenhagen (it's a long drive from Skive to Copenhagen. About 4 hours. But in my Tesla having to charge with both snow and wind it ended up being 6 hours. 😆).

We got some crucial insights that changes our priorities going forward. Even more focus on product development.

Funding

We're seeing a great potential in anew sleep. We have the opportunity to scale the e-commerce if we can fund a few, but important initiatives.

That's why we're going to actively seek funding for anew sleep. It'll most likely be through multiple angel investors to secure our first and only round.

Currently we're validating our business case by meeting with our close network. So far we've talked with 5 angel investors. They've all given us great insights in what to expect in the current market situation and have validated our valuation - which we thought to be lower than they did. This is something I feel you can only hope for and not expect (especially after having watched a lot of Shark Tank & Løvens Hule on television). 😅

Molly

I think any e-commerce store in Denmark working with discount codes has stumbled upon them at one point.

Molly is a community-style app, where people with the app automatically can add their discount codes to the Molly discount code library.

And that enables everybody to use the discount code for themselves.

For me that is actually okay, but it starts getting really annoying, when you want to use discount codes to track commission (with influencers and affiliate partners).

Molly and apps alike do make it almost impossible to operate with commission based on discount code usage. A lot of affiliate network and influencer platforms push discount codes as it tracks better cross device. Molly manages to destroy this business model. Sure you can cancel commissions, but this discourages influencers and affiliate partners to work with you if they experience a lot of cancellations.

It's gotten to a point where I've completely given up on tracking commission through discount codes.

And perhaps soon we'll ditch discount codes all together - more on that.

Example of Molly on our website.

Taking meetings with strangers

E-commerces running Shopify tend to get a lot of calls, e-mails and LinkedIn messages with people promising more revenue if you sign with them.

My own digital marketing agency background learned me a few things over the past 10 years:

  1. Not all are crooks.
  2. If you don't care - you won't learn new things.

So I try to read and reply to every email. Even with a simple "no thanks, appreciate the reach out though" knowing very well I've been e-mail blasted.

And sometimes you strike gold and meet with someone offering unique insight on your industry.

I did recently take a meeting with someone who worked with one of the biggest sleep brands in the US. Here's what I learned:

  1. He gave me straight up product recommendations on what this brand spending $50K daily on ads were getting good results with.
  2. I got insights on industry budget splits between Google and Facebook.
  3. He shared top creatives they ran.
  4. I learned how their business model service DTC stores. Something I found interesting as it was totally different from any agency in northern Europe. I took some of the principles and learnings to PL & Partners straight away.

So next time you see this in your inbox - take a moment to read the mails. Perhaps someone is working with someone 10, 50, 100 times bigger than you in the US in the exact same industry as you.

Conclusion

2024 is going to be a great year and I can't wait to share all the great things we'll be working on and improving upon in anew sleep.

Every month I'll be sharing a brief update on my business and what we've been working on.

See you in a month.

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