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With Stricks we generated a revenue of Rs. 7.5 Lakhs.
But why did we stopped working on it then?
We started Stricks with a mindset that habit tracking can build habits but habit tracking is in itself a habit which people fail at.
The idea was that if we make the process of habit tracking fun and easy, people will be able to form long lasting habits.
We built an easy prototype, a NFC based reading habit tracker in the form of a bookmark.
Launched in Cubbon park at Cubbon read, shared free samples with everyone.
People just loved it. (obviously as it was free)
Some people offered us money, stating they would like to pay.
To evaluate further to understand playability of the product, we put stalls in Church Street.
Sold 20 bookmarks for Rs 100 each.
Time was to test the product on scale, launched it in a book fair.
Crowd was less in the fair, but we had a good conversion rate of 35%.
35% of the crowd who came to the fair purchased our product.
Market pull felt right, we launched the product as D2C product. With avg. price at 150Rs per bookmark.
Launched multiple UGC ad campaigns on meta, at one point were doing sales of Rs 1.5 Lakhs per month.
Our avg order value was Rs 550 and acquisition cost was around Rs 400, while being always on the edge of breakeven.
Aim was to bring this acquisition cost down.
Tried social media marketing, influencer marketing, marketing agency, rebranding the product, launching alternative product as water tracking bottle, enhancing the tracking system, launching on market place, forming whatsapp community, running open tracking challenges, revamping website, launched whatsapp based motivation coach.
But nothing helped, to get that acquisition cost below.
We even tried pricing experiments as well, but things went worse.
We still had few bets in mind:
1. Doing international launch, as NFC is more prevalent there.
2. Parallel product for renewals for D2C brands.
3. Pure NFC based trackers, at cheaper rates.
4. An app which works even without NFCs for tracking, and can be used to upsell the physical products.
5. New categories like gym bag, cheaper bottle etc.
6. Influencer based ad campaigns.
7. App enhancements with forest app like features.
But time was ticking and the aim with stricks.in was to just create side income.
We had already lost over 4-5 Lakhs, and we only had few months left for our strict deadline (got extended now though)
Both of us @skgupta996 and me have tech background and the stricks required very basic tech.
Hence, we planned to shift to our strengths and started exploring ideas.
During the process of building reading habits for people, we realised that reading non-fiction books are not stimulating enough for today's Instagram generation.
Which made us realise that why can't books be as addictive as reels.
This became the basis of thedeepshorts.com.
The idea of deepshorts evolved from their, and now we think of it as an better alternative to Instagram, where you can scroll through learning content of your own choice. Or even can create custom through AI.
We are launching soon. (Estimated 1st June)
What's going on with Stricks?
The product is stable and is live on stricks.in, people still buy then and their.
We don't put any effort in tech or marketing.
Just when the order comes we pack it and schedule the delivery.
Wrote this today as got a random order of a bottle and a set of bookmarks from one of our recurring customers.
Last question, do we consider Stricks as fail?
-Definitely not, we earned few users who are tracking their reading for over 400 days
-we still have few people who showered love to our product
-we learnt a lot in the process
-the product still have potential to be acquired from brands like crossword, or any other reading related startup
-it is the idea which let to the idea of deepshorts, which we believe can transform the whole education system one day.
That's about it. :)
(Below is the pick of my 2 friends, Kuldeep and Himanshu, who were their with me at the launch in Cubbon)
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