Hi there,
Welcome to the 3rd edition of "State of anew sleep".
Every month I share what I (and the team) at anew sleep are working on.
Here's what happened.
My Business Trip to China
I haven't traveled a lot outside of Europe. So going to China has been a great experience and opportunity.
My co-founder, Haris, and I took a short trip to Shanghai on the 12th of March and got back already on the 17th - leaving us 3,5 days in China when excluding the gruesome ~22 hour travel time.
We went to Shanghai, got picked up by one of our suppliers and headed straight to meet our supplier and then go out for dinner.
The coming days were spent on visiting factories, new product development and planning for the future.
We also had the opportunity to explore Shanghai city for about 24 hours, which was super cool!
After visiting China and our suppliers it left me with a clear thought:
It's so easy to go on different sourcing websites, find bestselling products and order them home and try the luck selling them online. Often and not you can create a one-product-store, get lucky and sell a ton. But taking it from a one-time-thing to an all-the-time-thing is something different.
You have to create that bestselling product first ... and to do that you have to:
- Understand the industry
- Understand the new opportunities
- See the newest technologies available and think creative
- Craft the prototype together with the factories
That's how you get ahead.
(Good luck doing that comfortable from your office)
And that's how we will 10x anew sleep in a few years. Creating and being the first to sell new innovative products before everybody else saturates the market.
One of my favorite books is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout.
The very first law is The Law of Leadership.
That states: It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
People always recognize the product that got there first as the leader in the market and the better product — and marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products and services.
Funding ... Continued
Honestly fundraising is fun.
Especially when doing it with two of your best friends (that's my co-founders by the way). And in this process we've learned a ton and gotten a lot more clear on what we want with anew sleep and why.
We've been met with hopeful belief for our case and the opposite.
We've had investors believing in the future of e-commerce is bright.
And the opposite: Investors believing we're about to be wiped out on the belief that rising ad costs and Temu will destroy everything for everyone.
With every meeting you learn something new. We adjust and account for different point of views. Everything only makes us more resilient, more wise and ready to take anew sleep on a hockey stick growth.
In the process we've also learned: We can raise money if we want to.
But we want the right people with us. If we don't find them, we will do it ourselves.
New Products More Work
One thing I've been looking very much forward to has been moving from having few products to many.
In March we introduced a series of high quality products that will serve us well.
They are not our new best-selling-cash-cows.
But if you find products that can drive 100, 200, $300,000 in annual revenue comfortably through Meta, Google ads, affiliate and SEO ... that's not bad at all.
This means we've been busy with creating collection pages, negotiating affiliate deals and scheduling content for Meta for these new products.
Saying Goodbye to a Friend
Before we started anew sleep I posted on LinkedIn offering a unique internship to a hungry and talented person interested in marketing.
The catch?
I didn't say anything about what the hiring company was about.
No one knew about anew sleep.
It was a secret.
You had to apply and if you got invited to an interview I'd tell you everything.
I had over 50 applicant hoping to join this secret startup.
Matthias was one of them. And he was the one we hired.
Matthias joined us in august of 2022 prior to the launch of anew sleep. He has been with us since the very beginning, he was there on day one when we started selling. He has been with us through two Black Fridays and know everything and anything about anew sleep at this point.
He started as an intern, turned part-time and then full-time.
Matthias is one of the most talented marketing profiles I've worked with in my 10 year long career so far.
But nothing lasts forever.
On the 27th of March we said goodbye to Matthias. He is going to start a new business as the Chief Marketing Officer on a truly inspiring mission.
If you're interested, perhaps he will share something on LinkedIn about it at one point - I won't be the one to spoil it.
Am I sad? Of course. But I am truly thankful for being able to work with talented people such as Matthias, see them flourish and move onto new exciting things.
Best of luck to you, my friend, Matthias. I know you will do great things.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading so far. I will be doing this every month. If there's something specific you want to hear about in these updates: Shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
See you in a month.
