Here I Am Again

On the exhilaration of launching, the particular terror of spending your own money – and what happens when the inspiration doesn't strike the second time

A Forbes article that got 3 million views. A product page built over a weekend that tripled a business. And why, six months into Sans Savon, I found myself staring out a different window waiting for a different kind of inspiration. Diary post five is live.

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It was the Friday of Columbus Day weekend in 2016, and we were driving to Maine for one last barefoot wander through the tidal flats and to shutter Erica’s sister’s house for the winter. We’d grabbed the kids straight after school and were making great progress when my phone started buzzing repeatedly.

“Did you see the Forbes article? It’s really great! What’s happening to sales?”

It was just under a year since we’d launched Hairstory, but it already felt like five. Sales were moving in the right direction but remained far too low to cover our overheads. Cash was draining at an alarming rate.

“Not a blip,” I responded. “I’ll check again when I get to the house.”

My sister-in-law’s house is perched on a granite cliff at the end of a long finger that extends out into the Gulf of Maine. It looks across a narrow tidal bay at the craggy trees and rocks on the next finger, preserved for eternity by the progeny of the Colgate-Palmolive family estate. Flushed twice daily by the tides, the small bay empties entirely at low tide, opening up miles of entertainment for small kids and big dogs. At high tide it is 10 feet deep and a haven for sailing, standup paddle or the occasional option to surf the incoming surge if you’re lucky enough to be there when a storm hits. Six-foot-long sturgeon breach unexpectedly at a regular cadence, a prehistoric exclamation that natural beauty like this is what endures and we are as transient as the tide.

It was the perfect place to contemplate why your new business is failing and to receive inspiration from the universe that changes everything, all at once.

It was the next morning and still sales hadn’t budged, which was particularly frustrating because the title, Bumble & bumble’s Founder Wants You to Never Use Shampoo Again, was amazing and the content was very compelling. As I sipped my morning coffee, looking out the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows at the rocks and sloshing seaweed, a thought entered my mind: what if I boosted the article? We had already posted a link to it on Hairstory’s Instagram and Facebook pages. I could put a little money behind it to drive traffic. In creating that first ad, I targeted people who like several beauty brands I think are cool and then also people who are interested in yoga and gluten-free food. My thinking was that someone who is open to the idea that there could be a different / better way of exercising or eating may also be open to changing the way they clean their hair.

Almost immediately, the sales started to surge and within six months we achieved cash flow breakeven. In the end, that article got over 3 million views.

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Fast forward three years. Our one-hit-wonder digital marketing strategy had run its course and sales were stagnating right around $10mm. I had been very wary of hiring an agency – they were too expensive and none of them seemed to be willing to think differently – but I had recently met a woman who made me reconsider continuing to run our ad account personally. Her name is Emily Hickey, co-founder and CEO of an agency called Chief Detective, and she has since become one of a handful of digital marketing leaders who manage over $500 million of client spend on Meta. But when I met her at a coffee shop in Telluride in 2019, she only had four clients and was willing to take Hairstory on as #5.

The first few months with Chief Detective were fine, but relatively uneventful. They had spent particular time and energy running test campaigns that were not designed to sell, working instead to decipher which value propositions and what kinds of images resonated most with consumers. One day Emily called me up.

“Hey Eli. I took the liberty of mocking up a new product page for you over the weekend. It includes all our best learnings and I have a hunch it could help with conversion if we align the PDP messaging with the ads. Can you get it live and we’ll give it a test?”

That’s all it took – seriously. Within the next three years the business tripled. And I will be forever grateful to Emily Hickey (and her team).

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It shouldn’t be any surprise that, when it came time to launch Sans Savon, Erica and I turned to Emily Hickey again. I pitched the idea, sent her samples and asked her: “I know we’re much smaller than your usual clients – and we can’t afford to pay as much – but would you consider taking us on?” She agreed.

Every time you bring a new business to life it is both exhilarating and terrifying. Each new order generates a boost of dopamine while the time between orders feels like an eternity. For the first week or two, most of our orders came from familiar names. Both Erica and I sent emails to our friends asking them to check out the website and follow us on social media. Graciously, many purchased products as well.

In those first few weeks after launching the website, Emily’s team was following the same testing process that had been so powerful for Hairstory. And early signs were quite positive. We started stepping up the spend from a few hundred dollars per day to about $1,000. Now, $1,000 per day of digital marketing spend is pitifully low by most standards. But when it is your own personal money, it really feels different. Our stress levels skyrocketed, as did our anticipation.

Six months later, we faced a moment of reckoning. By almost every metric, the ads we’d created for Sans Savon were working beautifully — which made the two that weren’t all the more maddening. The watch times were double what we would normally consider good. The click-thru rates were in line and people were spending plenty of time on the site. But two KPIs were killing us: our conversion rate was horrible – half of what it should be – and as a result Meta was charging us a fortune to put our ads in front of relevant prospects. The resulting marketing efficiency metric, ROAS, was completely upside down, and Erica and I had already burned the entire amount we’d set aside for investing in the business. Something needed to change. Another old Tevya adage came to mind: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

We turned off the spend spigot and apologized to Emily Hickey and her team — she had taken us on as a favor and we had little to show for it. It was time to step back, re-evaluate what was working and what was not and figure out the “why” in both cases.

As I sat at my desk on the top floor of our renardier in Charlevoix, gazing out at the broad St. Lawrence with the mountains beyond, I felt a familiar pit in my stomach. Here I am again. It was like I was back at the window in Maine, waiting to catch a sturgeon leaping from the high tide, only this time… the inspiration didn’t strike.

I couldn’t believe I’d put myself back in this position – betting my family’s future on a dream. I felt like a fool. But I’d been here before and knew the path forward: Figure out the next best move. One foot in front of the other.

I pulled up a fresh page and started typing out a new plan: Sans Savon, phase 2.

Chilly swim in Maine