Reclaiming Our Market Leadership As Competition Emerged [Update On Our $35K/Month Gift Service Business]
This is a follow up story for Thankbox. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Valentin Hinov and together with my co-founder, Tsvetelina Hinova, we run Thankbox, an online card and gift collection service for teams. I first wrote about my story bootstrapping Thankbox back in June 2022.
We are mainly used within businesses as an employee appreciation and occasion celebration platform. Sending a colleague a Thankbox for their birthday, retirement, or farewell are all common use cases. Personal occasions, like a remote group of friends celebrating someone’s birthday, are pretty common as well. We also make it simple to collect money from everyone as a gift for the recipient.
Our pricing is dead simple and hasn’t changed since we launched - $5.99 for a standard Thankbox and $9.99 for a premium one. Since launch Thankbox has been used to send over 100,000 cards and issue over $6 million in gifts. Our average monthly revenue is around $35k.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Thankbox was launched in May 2020 and grew rapidly in its first two years. We rode the wave of the remote work explosion. High market demand and low competition helped us get to $20k/month in just over two years after launch.
However, the market has matured in the last year and a half. More competitors have appeared and older players are catching up. Despite that, we still managed to grow by about 50%, which I am very proud of.
To reclaim our position as market leaders and disruptors we had to be more strategic and goal-oriented.
Quite recently, in June 2023 we had our first ever month where we had almost 6000 cards being created in a single month. The same month Thankbox was used to issue $400,000 worth of gift cards - this is all money that customers collect through our platform as gifts for recipients.
Upon reflection, I can attribute our growth to three main factors - funnel optimization, heavy focus on SEO, and better upselling.
Beginning with the funnel - how most users get started with Thankbox by clicking the “Create a Thankbox” button on our landing page. From there we take them through a form to create their first Thankbox and register.
The problem was it wasn’t converting very well. So at the start of 2023, we dedicated 6-8 weeks entirely to optimizing our sign-up experience. We ran about 10 A/B tests in the scope of two months and two of those pushed our sign-up rate from 15% to 30%!
The key learning there was cut & simplifying. We removed as many steps from the process as we could, replaced the text with imagery, and, mainly, showed users how the product looks right there on the page:
We tell users they can get started in under a minute and we mean it! You can see a video of how quick it is to make a Thankbox here:
Running tests on the signup form has proven so valuable that we now always try to have at least one active at any time - as gaining even 1% extra is very big for us.
In my first interview, I mentioned that I wanted the company to focus more on organic search and we’ve followed through on that. We hired an excellent SEO strategist who has helped us craft a long-term plan for how to improve our rankings.
Together with our blog content ramping up, we’ve managed to increase our traffic by 200% in just one year. We still haven’t deployed some of the biggest changes we’ve got planned, which I’m feeling pretty confident will catapult us even higher.
The third big area of focus was better upselling of our pack plans. For regular customers, we offer bundles of prepaid thank-boxes that are better value than buying individual cards. They are super useful and customers loved them but we weren’t selling a ton of them. The problem, we discovered, was that we just had a small paragraph on our payment page that linked to the pricing page where the user had to pick a plan themselves. That’s a lot of steps!
So instead, we put a nice, big upsell directly on the payment form and let the user buy a pack right there and then:
The results were pretty immediate. Our pack sales jumped 180% over just a month. The best part is that when users buy a pack they are incentivized to use Thankbox more so this move helped a ton with retention, too!
We haven’t stopped there. One of the biggest additions we’ve delivered this year is partnering with Bloom & Wild, a UK flower delivery service, to offer our customers the option to buy a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to their recipient. It’s an amazing additional personal touch to receiving their card.
Making this work was not easy as it required a ton of behind-the-scenes work integrating with supplier systems, keeping order information up to date, etc… We essentially had to build a mini-e-commerce experience within Thankbox! Currently, this feature is only available to UK customers, who are our biggest market, but we are already thinking about introducing it to other territories, like the US, as well.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
We’ve been trying hard to find more marketing channels for Thankbox. While SEO, Paid Search & word of mouth all work pretty well, we’re always on the lookout to add a fourth performer to diversify our customer acquisition even more. This has been hard!
Our most recent ongoing experiment is being more active on TikTok. We’ve had a few videos that have performed well but overall it’s not working like we’d like. It just seems like a tough nut to crack for us. We’ll keep at it, though, as numerous other brands do very well there - we just have to find the right recipe.
Another big challenge for us has been keeping our paid search working effectively. Click costs have only increased in the last few years and we’ve had to revise our approach a few times to make sure we stay competitive. It’s very hard when you have an inexpensive product that relies on volume - it means you need to get lots of clicks on the cheap and it’s just not always possible. I’ve also been very annoyed seeing other brands starting to bid on our name forcing us to pay Google for what should essentially be free traffic for us.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
We spent a few months towards the end of 2022 fumbling in the dark. Our growth had stalled, competitors had caught up and we had no idea where to go next. It certainly didn’t help that I got Covid around that time, which resulted in a brain fog that lasted for a good month and prevented me from making any sort of good decision making.
Luckily, at that time my partner and co-founder, Tsvetelina, was able to step in. Together we spent some time thinking about what we were doing wrong and devising a strategy for proceeding next. That didn’t just mean deciding “what feature we’re building next”. It meant asking “Where do we want to take this business long-term and what are the steps to get us there?”.
Up until that point we had been very opportunistic and short-term oriented with the business. The lesson I learned is while that works when starting out, you cannot run a company long-term that way. To reclaim our position as market leaders and disruptors we had to be more strategic and goal-oriented.
We changed up our team, hired people who aligned with that way of thinking, and went back to work. Slowly we dug ourselves out and by the end of the first quarter of 2023, we were growing steadily again.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Currently, we have a plan that extends about 6-9 months in the future. Having recently expanded our team, it’s exciting that we’re able to work on a few things in parallel. Our main aim is to expand the pool of possible use cases for Thankbox and continue establishing it as the go-to occasion celebration platform within organizations.
One of the areas we want to develop more is offering more physical gifts that our customers can order alongside their Thankbox. Introducing flowers was the first step of that but we want to add more options soon - it’ll all depend on how our current offering is accepted by our customers.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
The best thing I read was “Atlas of the Heart” by Brené Brown. It was a gift from my coach and I loved it.
A lot of us struggle with our emotions mainly because we can’t identify or name them. In the book Brené, who’s developed the famous Dare to Lead course, goes over the main different emotions that you can feel and how and why they come up.
Most of us are just able to say that we’re happy, sad, or angry but digging a bit reveals that we’re curious, disappointed, confused, or feeling shame. Just knowing that can make a big difference in dealing with negative emotions as recognizing them is the first step.
The knowledge from this book has been immensely useful in my day-to-day life - both business and personal. It helps me be a bit more balanced and a bit more curious about my thoughts and reactions to events. I can highly recommend it.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Now that I’m 3.5 years into my journey I think that just surviving and pushing through is a competitive advantage all on its own. I’ve struggled with the loss of direction, stagnant growth, others cloning our product and copying my ideas, and, honestly, just feeling like I wanted to call it a day.
But I pushed through - I took some time for myself when needed and I just continued working away. And slowly things started working out - the path became clearer and competitors seemed less scary.
My advice is to constantly come back to your why - why did you start your business? For me, it was because I’ve always needed to make something that brings others joy and I’ve always wanted the freedom of an online business that allows me to be in control of my time.
What’s your ‘why’?
Where can we go to learn more?
- You can find Thankbox at our website - try it the next time you send a card to someone and let me know what you think!
- You can find our company socials on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok
- You can catch me personally on my LinkedIn, X / Twitter and blog
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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