Apex
It’s been such a slow few weeks with numerous delays from the manufacturer, but I’m delighted to say we’ve finally shipped the socks to our various fulfilment centres across the globe.
This means it’s time to ramp things up, as we’re probably looking to launch in ~2-3 weeks from now.
Today, I needed to sort out the launch email marketing that’s been thrown massively out of kilter from all the delays. We’ve been sending regular emails to the waitlist, but less so in the previous month (I just didn’t want to email and string people along without really knowing exactly when we were launching, taking the sting out of launch and all the momentum I’ve been trying to build).
So, today was mainly about fixing a launch date (or, I should say, the 72 hour launch window). Then I can build the entire email campaign around that launch date.
To be honest, it’s still a little tricky because things can go very wrong when shipping products to fulfilment centres, but I can’t delay things any longer.
So, I spent my day analysing our waitlist signups, historic shopify data, email data, and GA4 data to see when our audience was most actively engaged with our brand. I also had to normalise a lot of the data so it wasn’t skewed e.g. by days we were doing more email marketing or so the timezones were aligned, and things like that. I also looked into loads of other similar D2C brands to see when they launched to see if that would give me any particular insight.
I’m not going to go into too much detail about all of this (although an essay on when should brands do launches may be interesting), but the short conclusion is don’t launch on Fridays or Saturdays. And you’ll probably experience your strongest sales days Monday to Wednesday.
Having said that, I also have to take all of the data with a rather large pinch of salt. The analysis I did is trying to estimate an intrinsic day effect from historical behaviour, but launches are not normal days. With our launch we’re going to have concentrated hype, emails, social posts, creators, etc, which means our launch can overwhelm relatively small baseline weekday differences.
If our instinct is that launching one day feels better than another then that isn’t a bad data point.
So we’ll probably launch early access on a Sunday.
Three Things That Happened Today
- ADHD Medication: I’m not diagnosed with ADHD but I’ve had a strong suspicion that I’ve got ADHD, and have done for some time. Today, I took some ADHD medication and was astonished by how much it has helped me today. I’ve been able to focus, I’ve felt happy and less anxious, and just have an inherent drive that I’ve not felt for such a long time. Normally I’d have to have a perfect morning of running/eating/sleeping before getting an ounce of this feeling. I’m going to speak to a GP when I’m back in the UK. This is life-changing.
- Athlete Tools: This wasn’t today, but I’m still half building out my athlete tools site (name needs to change for sure), and creating profiles for all 90,000+ Hyrox athletes I have in my database. To begin with they’re just going to look quite nice with some decent analytics, but eventually they’ll be claimable and people will be able to personalise them too. Just having fun though, putting zero pressuree on this.
- Learning computer networks: I’ve been deep diving all about computer networks in the notes section of this website and really enjoying doing something intellectually stimulating. Going to make a habit out of it. Again, no pressure on me to actually do anything with that knowledge, but I suspect there’s a certain amount of luck and serendipity that comes from being curious.