+1

FWIW i also agree with the bonus gift instead of $1 think thats a great touch but in no way should it be a gift that isnt something you can buy from you as others have suggested, id actually gift it by saying something like here is a bonus cany we think you might enjoy given your previous orders.

anyways gd bussiness gl, wd

OP, if you can find me Mentos Tropical (the candy version, not the gum) I will suck both your dicks and become a lifelong customer.

If that's true, then they were just horrible. They should not have lasted 7 weeks. But, you can't make blanket statements about engineers because you hired bad ones. You need a better screening process. It's not easy for people to hire good techies if you don't know much about the tech. Sometimes it's hard to hire good people when you do know about it. Of the people I have hired, only 25% turn out to be really good. The rest handle minor stuff. I don't have any real good advice to give you on the screening process though. It takes A LOT of time and effort.

This is a great thread. Thanks OP and those who have contributed thus far. I just ordered a 12 pack and it was quick and easy.

Comments:

-The "designs by DryIcons.com" at the bottom is *slightly* offputting to me. It would make me think a little less of the site if I didn't already read the thread and have a pretty good impression of you. Not a huge deal, I assume you worked out a deal with that site.
-MORE CANDY. Unless I'm missing something, there isn't that much candy here. You should add about 3x (minimum) as much candy here.
-I'd put an "About" section on the site. Add a personal touch or funny anecdote about how this site came to be.

Good luck! Plugging you and this thread on Twitter right now, thanks again.

-1 to accepting bitcoins as a payment.

I have to think that the amount of people who would be sketched out by a "We accept bitcoins!" graphic would far exceed the amount of people who aren't purchasing products from you because you don't have that payment option.

This for sure. Otherwise I dig it. Great idea!

+1 to more candy, but I don't think it should be too much more. Maybe like 2-5 more countries. The simplicity of the site is one of the main appeals. I would be wary of adding too much more.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/colle...n-less-is-more

I read another article on that jam experiment where the main point is something like: When you have more choices it's more likely to have close substitutes, so the customer experiences a sense of decision fatigue in sheer # of choices and not being able to identify a clear "best" choice, so they give up; where as they can be more confident in their decision when they are only presented with a smaller # of distinct choices.

I think that principle is more applicable to shopping decisions where you have no previous experience with the product(s), which a large portion of your traffic will fall under.

have you looked into wafer-type candy and/or chocolates and did you nix those for shipping purposes or something? when i think of foreign candy that is definitely the first thing i thought of, but i see that the stuff you offer is all sugary gummy type stuff, cheapest to ship probably and you dont' have to worry about breakage.

Can you give us your thought process on your Twitter strategy? Looks like you've paid for followers or are doing something a little bizarre -- you are following a ton of people who appear to be from Asia.

with ppp i noticed that if you follow people in a similar industry you probably get an add from them ~25% of the time or something, there is a huge % of overlay in the people they're following vs the people who follow them. i tend to think ultimately mass-adding people looks kind've "cheap" or something, it's not like anyone can reasonably follow 1,000+ people or whatever, but im sure a bunch of people do it in the beginning to get added.

I outsourced twice for two different projects, and unfortunately both of them were very bad experiences. I gave very specific details and instructions on how I wanted things built, but in the end, their code was sloppy and their design was poor. I spent countless hours going back and forth trying to send my edits, but in the end, the difficulties were too big to overcome (I picked these guys up from eLance, oDesk).

Usually the most tempting thing about outsourcing is the price. Most people like to pay a flat-fee because it sounds like a great deal, but in reality this actually has the opposite effect on the outsourced engineers in terms of quality. They usually don't feel the need to spend all the time coding things properly (because they generally deal with people who can't assess their quality), and in the end the project is pretty sloppy. There are obviously some great coders out there, but my experience (and many of my friends) were very poor. In general, I would highly recommend avoiding outsourcing unless you are very strong at assessing the code quality. Another big thing to mention is that the design styles of outsourcers is very different form our own. For example, designers in China have a very different idea of what looks good compared to what Americans think looks good.

Lastly, we were not very concerned about someone stealing our idea. Your success will depend on your execution, not your idea, so I wouldn't be worried too much about someone stealing it. Also, there is almost no idea that is 100% brand new, so I really wouldn't think too much about it.

We have not done Adwords just yet. I still want to keep things scrappy to test how well we can do without significantly paying for marketing. I set a goal for us to get to X amount of sales before we pay for Adwords. I'm trying to take things slowly and not pay for heavy marketing until we have a bit more candy and a better idea of what candy works/what doesn't. Basically, it's still very early for us, and by getting into the mentality of paying for bigger features, you run the risk of prematurely scaling. Before we start spending decent money on marketing, we need to figure out the ins and outs of our product/service.

Not sure what the original question was. What was the purple button being referred from?

Bitcoins is not as established yet, and most people still do not recognize them as a credible resource. The last thing we want to do right now is to instill any shadow of a doubt about our credibility. Maybe in the future.

I'm not great at social media marketing, which is why I wasn't the one dealing with our FB/Twitter page, but I think about 50% were purchased and 50% are real. We were following the mantra of "fake it till you make it," and it definitely helped us in terms of social proof. We started off with all of our friends liking it, and then people see other people liking things and naturally tend to gravitate to the page.

Rjain Group LLC is the name of my LLC, and is the legal umbrella of what SwagCandy is under. I use this LLC for all of my sideprojects, and if you're interested in ever creating your own site to sell things.... you should too. Our payment processor (Braintree) required us to be an entity in order to be able to process through them.

The "designs by DryIcons.com" is a legal issue . Although I totally agree that it can be slightly off-putting, we have to give credit where it's due.

A lot of people have been asking about more candy, and while I think we do need to add more candy, right now we are in kind of a test-phase with our choices. We are probably going to add a few more next month and possibly even take out a few that aren't selling as well.

Here was our logic when we originally came out with our product line:

Least Viable Product - When we originally created this site, we had no idea whether this candy was going to sell at all. As mentioned before, we didn't even have any inventory when it was released. So instead of adding a bunch of different candy and having to purchase a lot of different items on the first order, we just inputted a good enough amount to test whether this website was even going to work.

Competitive Advantage - You always have to ask yourself, "What value are you bringing to your customers?" Anyone can go to the store and buy a bunch of bags of Skittles, Starbursts, or whatever. We absolutely hated those candies. We only wanted to deliver the rarest and most delicious candy from all over the world. This means that we have to be extremely selective of what candy we are going to put up on our site, and that the process of what we sell is inherently going to be limited to only the finest. I'm sure we will implement more in the future, but it will be a slow process of testing out what tastes awesome + fits our price range.

Simplicity - Another piece of value to our site is the simplicity of it. By adding a lot more items, we jeopardize ruining one of the features that made our site in the first place. Adding too many items can not not only cause a lot of clutter on the page, but it can also intimidate users (think about when you go to a restaurant and you see 25-30 different items.. it becomes a bit trickier to decide).

I have different ideas of what other candy we want to implement, but I think we will eventually end up with 5-6 countries with 3-4 candy in each. I want to be very careful and picky about what we add, and to do this I'm getting feedback from our users on what they like the best. Naturally this will be a bit slower process.

Lastly, I love the idea of adding a humorous "About" section. Gonna put that on the checklist of things to add.

Thank you for your order Green Plastic! I truly appreciate your support and feedback - it means a lot. Let me know if there's any other thing we can do to improve the process (Oh and let me know how you like the candy!

You definitely have to accept PayPal. I went through your cart but didnt have my card handy so I stopped. With PayPal, I just add my account and that is it....no address, no account, no password....speed

Good point. We didn't put Paypal originally because we thought people were starting to hate Paypal + it might make our site look less legit, but that's definitely a great point you make. It's probably a good idea to give users multiple options for purchasing.

And thank you for wanting to support us! All of this feedback/support means a lot to us. Truly appreciate it

Your thinking on this is right on. Don't add a tonne of other candy.

Hey Dagger great thread and good luck with your venture. I'm glad I follow Taylor Caby on Twitter as I saw this link. Its given me more hunger to yet again try and do something similar. Although for the most part a few start ups I have tried have failed for various reasons, there is good advice itt and even something as simple as your candy concept shows simple ideas work.

Forgive me if this has already been covered, I am reading on my iphone, out of interest how did you come up with the idea to sell candy? This is the hardest part for me, I know I am capable of running something similar its just finding the product to source - did you have direct access to the candy industry or if not how did you figure out that you 'wanted' to make an online candy store.

Wish you the best of luck.

Great thread and nice job Dagger, this is definitely how one of these threads should be done.

Here are a few nitpicky design things that might be worth considering:

1.) When you click on the candy, you get a thickbox pop-up that is the same size as the original image with no information other than the item's weight (not really something anyone cares about). I think it would look great if you had a bigger picture in the thickbox, a description of what the candy is like, and maybe a customer review or two.

2.) I would make the "Everyone gets FREE SHIPPING" stand out even more. Maybe center it, change the color, put it in a box, something to make it impossible to miss.

3.) I might make the trust icons at the bottom of the page a little more visible -- possibly putting the credit card ones under "Add SwagPack to Cart."

I know you're trying to keep it simple, but I'd be expanding the selection of candies too. Nothing crazy, but maybe to the point where you have at least one full row from Mexico and Germany, and add one more country.

Overall you've done great though and I am definitely ordering some today. I'll show the site to my girlfriend and get her opinion as well.

I would accept PayPal for sure, accepting BitCoins is a terrible idea.

When I first loaded your page I spent two minutes looking for the scroll bar or the "next page" icon. Simplicity is very important but it needs to be clearer that you are specialising in just 12 types of candy and that what you see on the front page is the total of what you are selling.

How are you going about testing new candy? It seems quite a difficult thing to do unless you spend time in the relevant countries.

Bitcoin will be dead soon anyway. Or at least, Tyler Cowen says so and that's enough for me.

I wonder if there's a tension between wanting people to buy an unfamiliar candy and people wanting to know something about what they want to buy. i.e, if there's such a thing as too much or too little description. I agree with your general point but it could be difficult to get exactly right.

Were you guys launched before Stripe was? Curious to know if you compared braintree and stripe, and what your thoughts are

guids, are there any advantages to those processors over Authorize.net?