Broke Tiktok records (again), team updates and organic growth myth

👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. This is Shan and I write every Sunday on business and marketing. Last two weekends have been eventful - first weekend was a wedding ceremony in Jeju and second weekend was 11.11 mega livestreams. I am exhausted from the streams and the aftermath of it.

We have two events coming up on next two weekends and it overlaps with Black Friday - another major sale event of the year. Unfortunately, these are non-negotiable and will give us boost for at least the next one year.

Today, I hoped to write on hiring and managing a team in Singapore. However, I read my last post on "building lean marketing team” and it is quite a well researched and covers most of the things I wanted to write. So instead, I will talk about three different things today. Let me know how it goes.

1. Updates on 12 hour Mega 11.11 TikTok Stream. How did we do?

2. 6 month update on hiring and team building

3. The myth of organic growth and why everyone believes it?

Let’s get started!

#1 Mega 11.11 TikTok stream performance

Here is the brief performance summary.

1. GMV - SGD 13K+ (the best one for us yet, 1.5x more than 9.11 stream)

2. Viewership - 7K people (+1200 viewers compared to Saturday, 9 Nov stream)

3. #Orders - 250+ (Received 100 more orders on 11.11 compared to 9.11)

4. #Customers - 80+ (20 more customers compared to 9.11)

5. Ad spends - 2.2x more than 9.11 stream (we spent significantly more

6. Ads RoAS - 5x (slightly lower than 9.11 stream)

Let’s review the initiatives planned for this stream one by one (mentioned in the last week’s email)

1. Longer Duration - (worked) Viewers came back in afternoon and night, kept encouraging and asking Lucas to eat. They appreciated the hard work. It was heart warming, the love showered by the viewers.

2. More in-person guests - (worked) We got the founder, production staff, team members, a customer, a doctor and health coach on the stream. It broke monotony, gave perspective and users got their queries answered. We also got blood report sent during the stream for the doctor to analyse. Again, heartwarming.

3. Refreshed live setup - (did not work) This did not work. I changed the background to pink and the viewers plummeted. So I brough back yellow, the viewers went back up again.

4. New live banner with trust Icons - (worked) We had the trust icons - GMP certified, Vegan, Halal-friendly, lifetime moneyback guarantee. This worked very well. The trust of the consumers was won with the banner itself. Lifetime guarantee made the biggest difference.

5. New deals - (mixed results) Deals generally never fail. We did not have to give out as many gifts since the guests were engrossing the audience

6. Higher advertising spends - This worked well. 2.2x higher spending while maintaining a healthy RoAS of 5x. Quite satisfied.

Moving forward, we need to replicate the sale volume of this stream consistently. Every 3-5 days or at least weekly. How do we do it?

#2 How is the lean team set up going on?

In March 2024, I wrote this detailed post on building a lean marketing team. I find it to be quite detailed (and open). If you haven’t read it, check if after you finish reading this.

DTC #109: Building a lean marketing team in Singapore

I discussed about

1. Lack of talent in online marketing (or unaffordable)

2. Work life balance expectations - not wrong, but doesn’t work for all companies and current market reality. Business survival is always the top priority (without it jobs and economy do not exist).

3. Lack of large scale operations and international exposure - hampering global expansion of home grown brands - of course this also has to do with business mentality of entrepreneurs and investors here.

Considering this, I took steps to improve the team set up. Some worked and some did not. Here is how it went -

1. Hire an experienced full-timer - Our cash flows improved July onwards. This allowed us to hire a full-time staff on higher cost. So we did. Expectation was experience will improve our efficiency and bring knowledge into the team. The person left in 10 days. Moving forward, I am not hiring experienced people directly. Most experienced staff don’t know any better than someone fresh trained for 8-12 months on the job. I am not repeating this mistake.

2. Hire interns for full-time staff conversion - This started off good, and we have a good hardworking and smart talent base. Quite positive and fresh attitude compared to experienced staff (who have been burnt by the corporate system). Out of 4 people, 2 people have converted their internship into employment. I have high hopes on this program. It allows me enough time to make sense of capabilities, attitude and culture fit without financial burden.

3. School Interns - These are students who are still studying. We currently have 3 such interns from ITE and each of them are fabulous. Absolutely great energy, keen to learn and open to feedback. We will have a few more coming in and this will become a standard program.

4. Work Study Diploma - I have not been able to start this. This would provide students as interns for 2 year period at an affordable salaries. I need to get behind this and get it started. I am in touch with a few schools now, but need to go through their process.

5. Hiring through Linkedin - Compared to hiring via careerssg, I have found better resumes and experience on Linkedin. Since it worked well, we now spend on advertising jobs to get more candidates on LinkedIn. Instead of going through individual school career portals, LinkedIn provides an easy way to reach students and aspirational candidates.

These efforts have helped me build a strong team for Xandro Lab. I will initiate team expansion again in Jan-Feb 2025.

I am also working on building individual marketing teams (content, performance marketing, ecommerce and customer service) for 3 other brands. Initially seemed to be simple, but it turning out to complicated everyday (how to balance attitude, output, finances, work, mentorship). I will update the progress next year (hahaha, yes it is almost the end of the year).

#3 The myth of organic growth

Large section of business owners and teams believe organic growth and marketing is a thing! They are in a for a rude shock. Here is my take on this - "There is nothing organic”. It takes investment in form of ads, effort, people, and time. Just “organic” efforts don’t work. You need to push and go out of the way to scale marketing and business.

Some examples are here -

1. Social media post got more than 50 likes - Our social media posts would usually get 5-7 likes. Then we started boosting these posts by sending to our creator community. Now we get 70+ likes and 3x the views of normal post. If we boost this with ads, this will spike further.

2. New product launch success - A celebrity launches a new brand and product and suddenly it becomes a sensation. Organic? Absolutely not. It needs months of planning and execution - product design, PR, several posts (and months of hard work), marketing money and cold & warm reach out to friends and acquaintances to make it really work. One individual cannot make a brand or product successful with one post. It takes a lot of background work and effort.

3. Organic PR - No, you don’t get free organic PR. It costs a lot of money to first build the brand, make an effort to create the story, reach out to the right people and then convincing them to write about you. If somebody reaches out without any effort, don’t forget the months and years of effort, sacrifices and money put into creating that story. Or, you can shorten the timeframe by paying for PR coverage.

So yes the final result may seem “unpaid, organic PR”, but in reality it’s not unpaid. Either you pay with money or sweat.

Finally, everything is always inorganic first, organic second. It’s like a flywheel - you put effort into starting it and once it moving fast, then it keeps moving and everything seems to be effortless.

Do you think organic marketing exists?

That’s it for today.

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It’s different form of write-up today. Three topics mixed into one. Write to me if you like or dislike it. I would be keen to hear.

Thanks for reading. Please like and share if you found this helpful! 😍😍

Do I think about other girls beyond Jisoo?

Jisoo knows the answer, hahaha.

I am looking forward to the next few weeks - it’s going to be eventful since we have events, sale, new launches all packed together. How things will work out? I don’t know, time will tell. For now, we can just execute.

Thanks, and have a great week ahead! Cheers 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛