How I got away with murder

I almost killed my startup in our initial years.

Because of a rookie mistake that many new founders tend to make.

You’re in the same boat if you’re:
→ Competing on price
→ Giving discounts and doing sales every few months

There are 2 main problems when you compete on price.
1. Anybody can out-price you if they have better sourcing or manufacturing.
2. Your customers are choosing you because you’re cheap. not because they like you.

The last part is especially dangerous because you think you’re doing well because you have all these customers but its just a false sense of achievement and it will all blow up in your face sooner or later.

My wake-up call was our 2021-2022 balance sheet which was deep red. We had not factored in taxes while setting our initial pricing strategy and I had no option but to increase prices at that time. Our repeat % fell from 25% to less than 5% for all customers acquired before 2022. Almost 2 years of hard-work and customers, all gone.

It took us a while to learn how to sell without using discounts as a crutch and it has been one of the most rewarding learnings of my D2C journey so far. The process taught us skills we were too lazy to learn more about - storytelling, design, better product research, building a community and so much more.

Two very key resources which helped us in this process were:
a) a great copywriter
b) a solid UI/IX designer
Both of these allowed us to communicate our product value and story the way we wanted to, and gave us the confidence to charge what our products were worth.

P.S. I couldn’t write for a while because I was traveling. That’s just a lame excuse though. I promise to be more consistent.

If you learned anything new at all, do share with your friends!