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I actually did one of these (oyatsubox) for about a year, and if you want my unsolicited feedback it'd be that it got old after a year. The DIY candy was fun (a

by pbnjay 10y ago

I actually did one of these (oyatsubox) for about a year, and if you want my unsolicited feedback it'd be that it got old after a year. The DIY candy was fun (although deciphering the directions was a challenge in itself) but it all tastes the same. The Hi-chews and pocky and odd gummi things are good but I can get similar things here for cheaper if I wanted to do that regularly. I really did like the random flavored savory chips and things though, but I imagine these are not so cost effective to ship. I don't know if it was an issue of scale and/or other folks' tastes (e.g. could they only buy "safe" flavors at scale?), but after a while I felt like I had "tried it all" and it was increasing hard to justify spending that much every month. So if you're not planning on cutting a profit until you hit scale in a competitive market, I just wanted to provide the data point that LTV may not be as high as you hope and you might want to plan accordingly. I'm sure you've thought a lot about these issues, but since I can provide feedback from the customer perspective I thought I'd share as an N-of-1 sample. Good luck!

gotrecruit 10y ago
thank you so much, i sincerely appreciate these useful and constructive feedback from paying customers, even if it's not me they're paying! one of the things we also plan to do is, because our order fulfillment center is in Singapore, we have access to a wide variety of limited edition or seasonal flavors of particular products. e.g green tea sakura kit kat, peach and sakura hi-chew, etc. these are often not available in western markets. we also try our very best to rotate the types of flavors and textures of products we ship out so as not to fatigue our customers' tastebuds. without giving away too much of what makes our business model novel, our intention is to achieve a minimum scale where we become interesting as a distribution channel to other products, ideally complementary ones. this means even when at scale we are able to achieve profitability with candy sales alone, we may choose to forego the profit and continue increasing the value we ship to our customers. we believe there is plenty of profit to be made outside of the candy itself, which is why the value of our boxes will only keep going up as our costs goes down.

by pbnjay 10y ago

gotrecruit 10y ago

thank you so much, i sincerely appreciate these useful and constructive feedback from paying customers, even if it's not me they're paying! one of the things we also plan to do is, because our order fulfillment center is in Singapore, we have access to a wide variety of limited edition or seasonal flavors of particular products. e.g green tea sakura kit kat, peach and sakura hi-chew, etc. these are often not available in western markets. we also try our very best to rotate the types of flavors and textures of products we ship out so as not to fatigue our customers' tastebuds. without giving away too much of what makes our business model novel, our intention is to achieve a minimum scale where we become interesting as a distribution channel to other products, ideally complementary ones. this means even when at scale we are able to achieve profitability with candy sales alone, we may choose to forego the profit and continue increasing the value we ship to our customers. we believe there is plenty of profit to be made outside of the candy itself, which is why the value of our boxes will only keep going up as our costs goes down.