Aha-moment roadmap

BookSell's revenue model is 90% driven by revenue sharing from retailers.

Generating the first consistent sales is retailers' aha-moment to stay on a membership.

Retailers showed urgency to install the app yet struggled to generate their first sales.

The task

My goal was to get retailers to their "aha moment" quickly while improving overall revenue and retention metrics.

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Key Results:
- Median time to first product listing ≤ 30 minutes and time to first sale ≤ 20 days, with 10% of new stores reaching 5 sales within 30 days.
- Improved MAU/total ratio (books synced or sold) to keep churn ≤ 5%.
- 20 average items sold per active store.

Customer discovery:

Mapped JTBD and blockers by segment.
- Most indie booksellers in early stages and didn't know how to build an acquisition engine.
- Some of the early performers were not booksellers but added books as upsells.
Mapped the path to aha and created retargeting events for each step.

Hypotheses: There were 2 simple routes to explore.

We could help the indie booksellers by setting up their stores and building their growth engines.
We could focus on websites with high-traffic, but these didn't use Shopify.

Experimentation:

We tested our first hypothesis by offering potential services to assess interest.
First email campaign announcing new services had a 5% CVR from email to payment.
First marketing services were executed manually, helping us understand friction and retailers' expectations.

Proposed solutions:

Removed the free tier and tripled retailers' margins (30%), allowing them to invest in paid acquisition.
Accelerated store setup:
- Guided onboarding: connect store, and publish the first 3 books (added bulk-import feature).
- Product tour with quick details about the basic navigation tabs.
- Email retargeting based on key drop-off moments (store, publish, process)
- Documentation and video tutorials.

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Mid-term MVP: