How Brex inspired us to create a product that sells a product
An experiment in offline marketing
Yesterday I found myself sitting in my office in the middle of the day, trying to think about the last time I celebrated a small win. About that time, I received an email notification of a new subscriber at eatlettuce.com. That’s our 10th new subscriber this month. I’m proud of that milestone. When looking at our newest 3 subscribers, I realized they’re from back-to-back-to-back neighborhoods where Danen has been placing door hangers.
Door hangers!? Yup. Door hangers. How did we arrive at door hangers? It all started with Brex.
The first time I heard about Brex, I was coming through the San Francisco Airport. The word “startup” caught my eye. The sign read: “The first corporate card for startups. Brex.com.”
Simple and clear messaging. Nice and easy-to-remember domain name.
We had the opportunity to hear from and meet the founders of Brex at a Y Combinator batch dinner last year. We then had the opportunity to go to one of the founder’s houses, as he invited the entire batch over for dinner. A gesture like that goes a long way for an Iowa founder like me, who knew only a handful of people in all of California—let alone San Francisco. It was also a great move for Brex, as Y Combinator companies are ideal customers.
Throughout both of those dinners, I took mental notes of a few ideas without being sure if we could ever implement them here at Nebullam.
1. Brex’s aggressive marketing style causes some people to shy away and others to sign up, so it must be working at a good enough conversion %, right?
a. We’re cold emailed by a Brex team member at least once a quarter, but I appreciate their hustle
2. In deciding how to get in front of potential customers, they took to offline marketing. Not just those advertisements at the airport, but to billboards and bus stops as well. Afterall, San Francisco is a hotbed of their potential customers.
So how can we take ideas from a B2B fintech company and apply them to a D2C food company who currently only serves Ames and Des Moines areas?
For us, we liked the idea of billboards the most, but the costs were too much for us. Next best offline marketing experiment? What about a mini billboard, AKA a door hanger? The following is a chain of events that kicked off on July 1.
For help with graphics, we turned to Andrew Zalasky, founder of Hazel Creative. He’s awesome and no design request is outside of his wheelhouse.
One day turnaround time…
Once the final touches were made, he sent us over step-by-step instructions to order through GotPrint. Voila! Door hangers ready to send to print.
For the front, we wanted our bold, red+green colors. We wanted you to know we’re now delivering fresh greens to your neighborhood. We wanted to mention the options and how you can order online at nebullam.com.
For the back, we needed to highlight that you could securely order online, and why you should support Nebullam. If you’ve ever ordered a pair of glasses from Warby Parker, you’ve received a lens cleaner which tells the Warby Parker story in 100 words. We decided to borrow that idea for Nebullam. Thank you, Warby Parker!
In August, we set out to blanket local neighborhoods nearby our farm, with our first batch of 250 door hangers. We were surprised to have 5 houses sign up! That 2% conversion with our first iteration was good enough to order more.
Observations and iterations
When we first started this experiment, the perfect person for the job was our team member Ryan, who handles all of our deliveries. Ryan also lives in and knows Des Moines well, and he recently jumped into real estate, after searching in multiple neighborhoods for a house. It was Ryan’s idea to add door hangers all around existing customers’ neighborhoods, or around any new customers who didn’t come to us via door hangers.
After our first couple hundred door hangers made their way out into the world, we thought about how to improve the product that helps us sell our product, and how we could possibly improve conversion rates from 2% to X. Enter Danen, our co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
While talking with Ryan about the door hangers, Danen became excited to try his hand at getting a higher conversion rate. Danen started by going to Zillow and looking at the highest valued houses throughout the Ames area. He then mapped out the neighborhoods which offered adjacent, similarly sized houses down most of the surrounding streets.
We had now somehow gamified door hanging, with creating a tally on a dry erase board to track conversions between Ryan and Danen. The race was (and still is) on.
Danen’s Zillow approach started to pay off, with his current conversion rate sitting at over 2.5%.
But as an engineer’s mind is never done iterating, Danen dove even deeper into thinking about door hangers and how to improve conversion rates.
Danen searched for marketers on YouTube who had previously had success with door-to-door advertising. One YouTuber mentioned how a door hanger feels more like junk mail or a solicitation. Whereas a door sticker feels more like a missed delivery or opportunity. A door sticker also stays in place better than a door hanger during windy weather days here in Iowa.
While we’re in the midst of having Hazel Creative spin up door stickers that we’ll be rolling out to neighborhoods between Ames and Des Moines starting in January, Danen wanted to test the door sticker theory ASAP.
While we’re still at a small sample size of getting out door-hanger-turned-door-stickers, this conversion rate is almost at 3%. A 50% higher conversion rate from our original approach.
At the time of writing this, it costs us a little over $100 to gain a subscriber from Facebook Ads. For door hangers, it’s about $25.
Genius Marketing! Love the idea.
Thanks for sharing this story, Clayton. It has been awesome to work with a company pushing the bounds in regard to marketing. Looking very much forward to getting the next gen "billboard" posted on doors throughout central Iowa.