Elevator pitch: We help parents remember the size of their baby at birth by creating a timeless illustration of a custom-made baby poster that adapts to the baby's true size at birth.
Main difficulties: Online Marketing, online marketing, online marketing.
After 3-4 months of development next to my studies (I am studying industrial engineering and I am in the final semester of my master's program), I have finally launched my shop YourBabyPoster.com. The shop is based on the Shopify platform and I've coded most of the customizations myself, with a little help from overseas. My main focus right now is to grow the sales by testing and implementing growth hacking strategies (mostly free or little budget involved), I have found a post with many bullet points about this, that I can share if anyone is interested.
Don’t market to new parents. I have a 2 month old and I’m definitely not shopping around for stuff like this right now. Market to friends and family members who will preorder it for them as a baby shower gift. So you’ll need to provide something to be presented to the parents-to-be in lieu of the gift— just a flyer or gift certificate sort of thing that explains the product, maybe has instructions on it for how to redeem and submit the photo or whatever you need.
@golf_tee Thank you for the feedback! To be honest, since our tagline includes info like the size at birth (for the 1:1 scale illustration), weight it might be hard for friends/family to buy this as a present. Might be even hard for some friends to know the exact birth date of the baby. I will definitely have to find a workaround for this issue. Looking forward to see if more new parents agree with you on this point!
@whiskipops All new parents I know post this info (and seemingly everything else) on Facebook, shouldn’t be too hard to find most of the time. It s definitely an option!
@whiskipops I haven't checked out the product yet but you could add a prebook option where friends of the family can buy the package and you can mail them some sort of credentials maybe login credentials if users normally log into their accounts. After birth the parents can use those credentials to get their baby posters.
@whiskipops I would definitely remove the word "poster". Posters are cheap and generally mass market low quality.
I assume OP is using some print on demand service. I'd see if you can also sell frames. It's not much extra work for you, makes the product more polished, and can make extra money.
@hricard1964 Thank you, haven't thought about the psychology behind the word poster. Reading this I feel like I should also highlight the product quality more on the website!
@whiskipops As a father of two I was intrigued. But then I realized that I’m buying a generic poster. I thought I would upload a picture and someone would illustrate my son. Why would I want a poster of some generic baby? That doesn’t make much sense.
@nerrawg This is exactly what I thought. I was looking for the part where I would upload a baby photo. I have no idea why I would pay $59 for a generic photo of a random baby.
@whiskipops Suggestion: try to find a better name for the site. yourbabyposter is not something you hear and get kinda excited about if you understand what I mean. Cool idea though.
@ilove Thank you for the suggestion! Love to hear feedback and different opinions, because I personally was happy with finally having a domain name that perfectly describes the whole product behind it.
@whiskipops Maybe you could reach out to some popular instagramers who had recently had children? You could send them a free poster and then they can post to their followers. Seeing it in someone's home can help potential customers imagine it in theirs and reinforce that it's a real product...