See how Implementation of a new strategy including pivot to e-commerce and monetisation of existing content and communities led Pomelody to rapid growth from zero to 100,000 USD in monthly revenue.
Case study in a nutshell
Problem:
- Pomelody being on the edge of bankruptcy despite outstanding products and community.
Solutions:
- Together we turned the fan community into paying customers.
- We immediately launched an online store with Pomelody products.
- We provided performance marketing support for the crowdfunding campaign.
- We drove quick and cheap experiments in order to explore other business ideas.
Result:
- In 3 months Pomelody grew from 0 to $16,000 monthly revenue, in 15 months - it reached $100,000.
- Pomelody found a business model generating steadily growing revenue and profits.
About Pomelody
Pomelody creates quality entertainment for children. Their offer includes music albums, kids' audiobooks, animations, books and educational materials. Products are available in physical and digital form and via a mobile application. The founders of Pomeloda - Ania and Adam Weber - are professional musicians and parents, promoting education through art and conscious selection of content to the child's development level.
The Challenge
In 2017, Pomelody obtained funds from a private investor to build an app with their proprietary content aimed at foreign markets. The application was launched but attempts to attract users were unsuccessful. They were getting short on money.
In mid-2018, when we established cooperation, another punch came. A potential investor who was to invest over $700,000 in the company suddenly withdrew for formal reasons.
Pomelody was on the edge of bankruptcy - with an average monthly income of several hundred USD compared to $25,000 costs. Some of it has been cut, but not everything. Thanks to the loans, the startup was able to survive for a few more months.
Our short-term goal was:
- To lead Pomelody to at least $12,000 in revenue per month within 3 months and build foundations for future growth.
Strategy and Pivot
After talking it out with the founders and a detailed audit of the business, we proposed a new strategy. Here're its most important assumptions:
- We need to make the most of Pomelody's existing ecosystem and resources, namely: Ania Weber's blog, fan community on FB and Instagram, Mama Lama YouTube channel (co-created by Ania), Pomelody's extremely creative team, customer base, app and finally existing products (at that time there were three songbooks in English).
- Within a few weeks, we are launching an online store with Pomelody products. We direct traffic from the ecosystem to e-commerce, boosting it up with paid activities. The store has two language versions - Polish and English, but we put the greatest faith in the Polish market because most of the fans and customers come from here.
- We suspend work on the app development, limiting it only to minor product changes aimed at improving the conversion to the paid version. We test the traffic acquisition to the application using PPC channels on a small scale.
- We explore other business ideas - foreign markets, Amazon platforms, bookstores - in the form of quick and cheap experiments.
E-commerce
The first version of the online store was ready in two weeks. The costs of software and hosting were around $125. E-commerce has been warmly welcomed by the community in the first days of October. During the first month, it generated over $6000 in gross sales compared to $1000 spent on paid channels.
In the following months, new products appeared in the store, while we were refining the methods of its promotion. We optimized Facebook paid campaigns as well as in-store price promotions (as it turned out, nothing worked as well for conversion as a 30% discount on the entire stock). We developed the store with new functionalities. We managed to close December 2018 at almost $16,000 gross.
We continued on PPC campaigns improvements, expanding marketing automation, launching a referral program and much more during the next few months. The assortment was constantly expanding with new products. In December 2019, revenue grew to nearly $100,000.
Thanks to Skalski Growth, our business has survived. They took us from zero income to $100,000 a month. They’re perfect for startups.
Adam Weber | CEO & Co-Founder | Pomelody
New sources of income
In October 2018, after the store was warmly welcomed by the Polish community, the Pomelody team decided to release the Polish Songbook as a crowdfunding campaign. We provided marketing support for this project. We recommend the platform (we used Wspieram.to), took over the mailings (with over 25 unique emails per month - to different groups of recipients), paid channels, landing pages and analytics, as well as gave advice on rewards and "stretch goals". The fund-raiser ended up with a great result of $16,500, which was almost twice the goal and a record in the Music category.
In the first quarter of 2019, we configured and launched an online course dedicated to tutors and parents who would like to expand their music training competencies. For that purpose, we used instructional videos created for the application. We used WordPress again to save costs and time. The course became a constant source of Pomelody's additional income, although it is far from the store's results.
Well functioning Marketing System
We finalized our cooperation in March 2020. The care of the store, courses and paid channels was delegated to a fully competent person who was preparing for takeover for one year. Thanks to the steadily growing revenues from e-commerce and the course, it was possible to continue working on the app development, which already reached the MRR of $5,000 per month.
Pomelody received a working and metered business model that was able to provide them with stability and almost unlimited development opportunities. They managed to close 2020 with a revenue of nearly $750,000 and an increase of 60% year on year. In 2021, Adam informed us about investments from X-Kom with over $1,200,000 mln obtained for innovative solutions.
We can't wait to see what's next!
Cooperation scope
Growth Leadership
Audit and marketing strategy, company management support, product development and marketing team recruitment.
Performance Marketing
PPC channel management (Google Ads, Facebook / Instagram Ads, Apple Search Ads), email marketing campaigns, CRO.
Actionable Analytics
Marketing and product analytics configuration, preparation of investor reporting, A / B testing and business analysis
MarTech
Web and landing pages design and development using WordPress and Unbounce, marketing automation configuration and development.
MarTech Stack
Some of the marketing and sales tools that we used in the project:
- WooCommerce
- WordPress
- Get Site Control
- Mailchimp
- Facebook (Ads & Organic)
- Unbounce
- GA Enhanced Ecommerce
- Snappa
The results
Team
