ColorBliss | Month One Update

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In the early hours of September 13, about 1 month ago, I purchased the domain for ColorBliss.art. Today is time for the month one update.

colorbliss receipt

What I accomplished in a month

I'm pretty excited to share that I was able to launch a product so quickly.

The timeline was roughly:

  • September 13 - do some keyword research and purchase a domain
  • Week of September 18 - figure out how to generate coloring pages, set up a content management system and start creating collections
  • Week of September 25 - Create the initial "generate your own coloring sheet" functionality and start driving traffic to the site via sharing on social
  • Week of October 2 - Launch on Product Hunt (ended at #14 for the day), run some facebook ads - get first two sales!
  • Week of October 9 - Experiment with pricing and conversion optimization, testing pinterest ads, and two more sales!

The feeling of that first sale was so thrilling, and all of them have been exciting because they are all strangers to me. Though my friends and family did initial testing for me and helped promote it on social, the initial purchases coming from people I don't have any connection to for this random idea I made is really really excited.

What I've Learned

If no one is using it, it's hard to know what to do

When I first released ColorBliss, I was so anxious to get it into people's hands. Until I did, I had no idea what to work on.

Once it got out on Facebook and Product Hunt I started getting a lot of feedback from folks on how I could improve it.

I also started getting a lot of data on how people were using it, which is helping me run experiments day to day with pricing, limits, and functionality to see how I can get people to convert.

For instance, one week I noticed that very few people were using the Share to Earn feature (when you run out of credits, I'll give you 5 for free if you share via social media) and very few people were clicking on the purchase links.

Based on this, I tested out lowering the limit of 3 free images to 1 free image to see what would happen, and right away the conversion rates for Share and Earn as well as free to paid went up! That was exciting.

Advertising isn't as hard as I thought

I've gone quickly through a few different ad creatives over the past couple weeks.

The first one was text based using Typeframes - and did all right: https://twitter.com/benrobertsonio/status/1708934923544052006

But I noticed people that clicked through weren't actually creating images.

When I created an ad that showed me using and explaining the product (a simple loom video), conversion rates for creating images went way up! Example ad: https://www.loom.com/share/92a8b3a639ef4986b7219e750e0a1830

I also learned that Facebook ads are relatively expensive, and I'm paying much less for much more traffic on Pinterest (an audience which makes a lot of sense for the product.) Currently paying about $1.95 CPM on Pinterest (compared to $10+ on Facebook) and the Pinterest traffic converts so much better.

Pricing is hard

I've been tweaking pricing almost every single day to see what will get people to convert.

At first, I wasn't even getting people down in the funnel to the pricing / purchase step. Now that I figured out a few levers for getting more people to that step, I'm focusing on getting more purchases.

I've had people buy in at $15, $7.50, $5, and $60! Here's the current pricing block:

pricing oct If the conversion rate is low here, but I can close at a higher price point, I think it's still worth it. But I'll probably tweak the "pack of 20 credits" pricing a bunch over the next month to see what I can do there.

Income Report

And now, let's do the numbers.

Income: $92.50

I've sold coloring sheets at 5 different price points over the past month. One of these is at $60 for a year of unlimited credits - I hope to sell more of those going forward.

To be honest, this is more than I expected to have to show in the first month!

Expenses: $179.55

My main expense over the first month has been advertising. Pinterest has had a great ROI for me, but while I got traffic from Facebook, very low conversion rate and no paid users that I'm aware of.

  • Pinterest Ads: $36.14
  • Facebook Ads: $101
  • Domain: $3.46
  • Image Generation: $38.95

Net Income: $-87.05

Honestly, I'm happy with this for my first month. I think month 2 has potential to be profitable now that I've dialed in my advertising a bit. I'll continue to run Pinterest ads focused on conversion to drive more sales. I can also see that organic traffic is starting to trickle in, and will find ways to convert that to paid.

What's Next

For the next month, I want to accomplish a few things:

  • Build out a full sign up flow (this is pretty hacky right now)
  • Build a marketing funnel for free user to paid user
  • Conversion optimization / figure out how to make sales more repeatable

This project has been really fun so far. I like that it's b2c so it's pretty low stakes. No one's business is in jeopardy if I ship a bug or there is an outage. It's creative - I like using the product. And it's nice that real people are using it and willing to pay for it! I feel like I'm getting the opportunity to flex my product builder muscles but without the higher pressure of a b2b dynamic. This probably won't be a business that retires me, but it's fun to work on it and could get pretty passive soon.