Video Intro & Approach to Launch Email...

We share some of our early observations launching a product last week in 5-minute video clips. It is our first attempt at video, we apologize up front. 

Here is a mostly accurate transcript of the video.

Hi I am Eric, founder & CEO of Amari, a new supplement company that provides active lifestyle consumers with convenient effective products that help them to play longer and recover faster.

We have started posting to LinkedIn about our experience launching a company and a product in the times of COVID. Our goal is to share what learn in the hope that you will find it helpful.

If you are like us, in times like these you go into sponge mode where you seek out talented individuals and absorb what they write and the video content they release. We run that information through our filters, digest it and apply it to our unique situation. We hope you can find some of the content we post useful, apply it to your own unique situation and helps you navigate your way in these unprecedented times. 

Our first 2 posts on LinkedIn were about the decisions leading up to the launch of the product.  Based on a suggestion, we are trying video. It is our first time creating a video for LinkedIn or YouTube. If you have suggestions, my contact info is at the bottom of the page. We value your time and will keep future posts to 5 minutes or less.

Approach to the launch Email and the Response
Amari launched its first product on the 2nd of April. It is a blend of adaptogenic herbs and CBD formulated to decrease inflammation from exercise and improve joint comfort. You just mix it with water and enjoy.

We’re 2+ weeks into our sales. We’ve committed to sharing what we learned and while it is too early to draw concrete conclusions, we wanted to share some early observations and course corrections we are making.

As a startup you want your sales to be trending up and to the right. Amari’s sales are headed in that direction. We started presales in February.  March sales were double February’s and we’ve beat March’s sales the 1st week into April. All awesome and we appreciate every customer. Best news is that people seem to really enjoy the product and find that it is helping them. All fantastic! But, we are a start-up, we are starting from $0, the dollar amounts are low and you certainly hope you see these types of sales trends continue. 

Now that we have product in market, Amari is officially in the phase of validating our customer assumptions and refining our customer understanding. In other words, deepening our understanding of who is buying our products, intimately understanding the why behind that purchase decision and what is the content and communication channel that resonates with our core consumers.    

So what happened with the launch…?
Initial impression is that there are customers are out there. 
We started with a rolodex of 1,700 people that we reached out to. Our first emails were back in February, which seems like 3 lifetimes ago, announced the launch of the company and the product coming soon. We used those early emails as a way to scrub our email list. 1st week of April we sent out the product is now available emails. We did our best to walk the line of being very sensitive to the current environment while moving forward with launching a product. We acknowledged the seriousness of what is going on and that all of us going to be impacted by COVID either directly or through someone we know. We also framed our reasons for moving forward with the launch when some rightfully assume we need our heads examined. We shared how we were trying to provide a bright spot and hope that better days are ahead. 

The next video has observations so far.  We hope you found this video useful and welcome your feedback. 

My Background
Prior to Amari, I spent 10+ years working with early stage CPG companies and commercializing technology from a University setting. We leveraged a community-based model that put the best domain experts in the room with our client companies. I was fortunate enough to learn from those experiences and now apply those lessons as an operator. Please reach out to continue the conversation or provide feedback, Eric at AmariBotancials.com