“There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.”
—Amazon.com homepage today.
September 2011
18 posts
“MOST IMPORTANT STEP FOR BUILD PRODUCT IS BUILD PRODUCT. SECOND MOST IMPORTANT IS BUILD PERSONALITY FOR PRODUCT. NO HAVE PERSONALITY? PRODUCT BORING, NO ONE WANT.”
—A VC
105 Days, 650,000 Members, 100,000 Orders, 200,000 units, and a lot of work ahead of us
We passed three pretty cool milestones on Fab.com today, 105 days since we first launched:
- We processed our 100,000th order.
- The average order (shopping cart) contains two items, and as such we’ve now also seen our 200,000th item purchased.
- We saw our membership grow to 650,000 members.
Growth has been fantastic.
Our team is hunkered down now, working on building a world-class operation to match the enthusiasm for our products. We never in our wildest dreams expected to grow this fast. Thanks everyone for your support (and patience) as we do our best to live up to to it all.
We’re now adding more than 30,000 new members per week, half of whom are coming virally via share links from our members via Twitter, Facebook, and Email. We added 155,000 new members the past 30 days.
Here’s what our team is currently working on:
- Improving our operations. Faster ship times. Faster customer service.
- Even more variation in our offerings. New types of products. New designers.
- Mobile. We’re just about ready to launch Fab.com on iPhone, iPad, and Android.
- Social. Social is at our core. It’s in our DNA. Expect Fab.com to launch new innovations in the area of social commerce like never seen before on any website/service.
Again, thanks for all your support in our early days. This is fun.
Smile, you’re designed to.
“We’re a culture of builders, now let’s go make something awesome.”
—At F8, Chris Cox, VP, Product Management - Facebook.
5 Lessons @Betashop Learned Starting Tech Companies (MSNBC Video) →
openforum.com
- Know Your One Thing.
- Measure Everything.
- Shine a Spotlight on Problems.
- Hire for Scale.
- Incent, Reward, and Thank Your Team.
(Watch video on MSNBC’s Small Biz website by following the link)
Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done →
blog.eladgil.com
I could not agree with this more.
Press & The Twitter Effect
On a typical day, Twitter links (t.co referrals) are responsible for about 2% of our overall traffic on Fab.com.
Last 30 days visits to Fab.com:
Yesterday was not a typical day here at Fab.com.
Yesterday was a press explosion about Fab:
CBS News
Flash-sale site Fab.com opens virtual pop-up shop with Fast Company
By Ysolt Usigan
Forbes
Video: Fab.com Founders Jason Goldberg & Bradford Shellhammer
By Nicole Perlroth
Racked
Fab.com and Fast Company Present U.S. Design Pop-Up Shop
By Jared Hatch
Xconomy
Fab.com’s Daily Deals Brings Designer Wares Picked by Fast Company to the Masses
By JP Ruth
Adweek
Fab.com Moves Beyond Flash Sales Startup partners with Fast Company for online pop-up shop
By Anthony Ha
USA Market News
Fab.com, Ahead of Spark Sales and Laid down a Virtual Pop up Shop, with 600 K Members
By Anza Noor
All Things D
Fast Company Pops Onto the Flash Sales Scene for Designer Edition
By Tricia Duryee
Fast Company
Fab.com Presents The Fast Company U.S. Design Pop-Up Shop
By Noah Robischon
New York Times Bits
A Flash Sale Site for Modern Design
By Claire Cain Miller
Portfolio.com
Fab.com Pops into New Format
By Teresa Novellino
Business Insider
3-Month-Old Fab Is On Track To Generate $10 million+ Revenue This Year
By Alyson Shontell
The Next Web
Fab launches online pop-up shops starting with Fast Company
By Courtney Boyd Myers
Forbes
Fab.com Is To Facebook What Groupon Is To MySpace
By Nicole Perlroth
VentureBeat
Design site Fab.com launches pop-up shops
By Jolie Odell
GigaOm
Fab.com tries online pop-up stores
By Ryan Kim
TechCrunchTV
With 600K Members, Fab.com Goes Beyond Flash Sales And Sets Up A Virtual Pop Up Shop
By Alexia Tsotsis
Wall Street Journal
With 600K Members, Fab.com Goes Beyond Flash Sales And Sets Up A Virtual Pop Up Shop
syndication
Washington Post
With 600K Members, Fab.com Goes Beyond Flash Sales And Sets Up A Virtual Pop Up Shop
syndication
Whoa. Holy scheisse!
The net of this was that we’ve had an amazing 24 hours, adding another 10,000 members.
And, the big winner? TWITTER.
Twitter traffic to Fab.com jumped from 2% of total on a normal day to 10.4%.
It’s clear that Twitter has become the major news distribution medium on the planet, period.
Interesting what that means for journalism. News organizations write the news, but Twitter distributes it.
Play
Play
New! Announcing Fab.com Online Pop-Up Shops, Partnership with Fast Company Magazine for U.S. Design
Our vision with Fab.com is to be the most valuable provider of design inspiration.
Since launching just 12 weeks ago on June 9, 2011, our membership has quickly grown to more than 600,000 membes who have placed more than 80,000 orders of more than 160,000 products from more than 500 design partners who have teamed up with us to rapidly make Fab.com the single-largest online marketplace for design. Site visits grew from 1.8 million in July to 2.5 million in August, and September is tracking to be even bigger.
The whole experience has been so rewarding and humbling for our team. We believe that the secret to our initial traction is that we’ve introduced a whole lot of color to e-commerce with our daily flash sales featuring an eclectic and fun mix of design objects at all price points across a wide range of categories.
Today, we’re excited to announce a new innovation that furthers our progress towards our vision.
Introducing Fab.com Online Pop-Up Shops.
In the physical retail world, pop-up shops are stores that pop-up for a limited period of time, typically around a specific theme. Often these are holiday shops or seasonal shops that move into an empty retail space to instantly create a temporary retail experience.
Today, Fab.com is bringing the pop-up shop concept online with the world’s first online Pop-Up shop:
Fab.com & Fast Company Magazine Present U.S. Design.
The Fab.com & Fast Company Magazine Presents U.S. Design Pop-Up Shop features American-made products from some of our country’s greatest designers, as selected by Fast Company Magazine. Fast Company magazine identified 76 U.S. made-in-America designs to recognize in their current issue on U.S. Design. Many of those designers teamed with Fab.com to offer their products for sale on Fab.com for the next 30 days in our first-of-its-kind online pop-up shop. Read about the chosen designers in the current issue of Fast Company Magazine. Download the Fast Company U.S. Design iPad App to browse the designs. Then, head on over to Fab.com to buy them!
To top it off, Fast Company magazine is also throwing in a free subscription to Fast Company magazine with every purchase from the Pop-Up Shop, a $49.99 newstand value!
This is just the first of several Pop-Up shops we’ll be running on Fab.com to augment our daily flash sales. The Pop-Up shops will each be around a specific theme and will typically run for around 30 days.
Expect us to continue rapidly innovating here at Fab.com this fall. In addition to unveiling more Pop-Up shops, we’ll also be launching our mobile apps soon as well as introducing new social commerce innovations unlike anything ever seen before.
Finally, we just want to say thank you to everyone who has partnered with us, purchased from us, and browsed the Fab.com website. We could not be doing this without your support and interest. Our success is your success. We’re also doubling down on our commitment to providing the best customer service experience in the world, including working on faster shipping and delivery times.
Much, much more to come.
Revenue Schmevenue, We're In The Inspiration Business
Today I’ve decided to let the world in on a little secret.
Here at Fab.com: we don’t care much about revenue.
That’s saying a lot for a company that’s grown from 0 to 600,000 members and that is doing millions of dollars of revenue per month in just our 13th week.
Revenue is for keeping score and paying commissions. Ok, and for fueling the biz, but that’s secondary right now.
Our focus is 100% on delivering daily design inspirations.
At our core we believe that if we inspire people, sales will happen and revenue will grow.
But the key for us is inspiration.
I’ve made clear to our team that not a single decision around what products we sell on Fab will be made based on revenue. Rather, I’ve instructed our team to just keep finding and selling stuff we love.
I firmly believe that if we love the products we are selling, our users will too. And, if we inspire our members with a daily dose of design inspiration, that will lead to plenty of sales and revenue over time. That’s why our website is an eclectic mix of colorful design object at all price points across hundreds of product categories. The common theme: useful, practical, fun, stuff we love.
So, we’re building a different kind of company here at Fab.com, one where the primary goal is to delight our customers, not just take money from them.
Further, we believe that the most Fab service experience is key to all this. That’s something we’re now turning a lot of our attention to. In our early days demand has been more than 5 times anything we ever expected. To a certain extent we’re now playing catch up to that. But, we are committed to inspiring people with every aspect of Fab and every interaction with us.
Want to work for a different kind of company, one that is focused 100% on inspiration? We’re hiring. Email me at jason at fab dot com explaining why you want to work in the inspiration business.
A Fab Summer
As Bradford and I sit here on an airplane flying from NYC to SF for a series of meetings, we can’t help but reflect on the incredible Fab.com journey we’ve been on.
We started a company together in January 2010. While we’re still technically the same corporate entity, the business we’re running today bares no resemblance at all.
Just 6 months ago, Fab.com as we know it today was but an idea we were noodling over as we considered what to do with our languishing social network. Our decision then to throw away tens of thousands of lines of code and literally restart our business as a design website is looking pretty good right now. How good? That depends on our ability to keep delivering daily design inspirations that delight our users and keep them coming back for more.
What we do know is that it’s been A Fab Summer.
Since launching on June 9, 2011:
- Our membership has now grown to 600,000 members, up from 175,000 at launch.
- Traffic has grown to 2.5M visits in August, up from 1.86M in July.
- Orders have continued to climb weekly, with more than 70,000 total orders placed over the summer.
- Of more than 140,000 units.
- From more than 500 designers.
- Supported by a team that has now grown to 75 people worldwide, unified by a common mission: Fab.com is design.
And, just 80 days into all this, we’re really just getting started. We couldn’t have gotten this far without the support of a fantastic team of designers, colleagues, partners, and investors. Thank you. But, it’s really just the start.
We’ve got big plans for the fall, with new initiatives that build on our core design focus while providing new and innovative way to discover, share, and shop design inspirations.
The first such “new thing” pops-up on the Fab.com website September 14th.
Stay tuned!
Frustrated
Frustrated.
That was the one-word subject of an email millions of Obama supporters received last night.
And someone should be fired over it.
It shows an utter lack of understanding around leadership and communication.
What kind of message does it send for a leader to tell their people that they are frustrated by their own inability to get things done?
Imagine if the CEO of a company wrote her/his employees and shareholders an email telling them he/her were frustrated by the company’s ability to get stuff done. The employees would think to themselves, “Well, if you’re frustrated, you’ve only got yourself to blame. You’re the leader.” The board of directors would think to themselves, “Well, if you’re frustrated, maybe we should get someone different to step in and move things forward.”
The dictionary defines frustrated as:
foiled, stopped, disappointed
suffering from frustration; dissatisfied, agitated, and/or discontent because one is unable to perform an action or fulfill a desire.
That’s not exactly the sentiment people want to hear from their leaders.
Sure, Obama’s campaign was trying to rile up Democrats around frustration against the Republicans in Congress. But, imo that’s like the CEO saying I’m frustrated by this department of our company, or this executive, or this initiative. In the end, Obama’s still the guy at the top and he’s got to lead and find ways to channel his frustration towards positive outcomes.
I wonder if Obama truly is frustrated or if his campaign just lacks message discipline?
For the record, I’m an Obama supporter, frustrated by his leadership and his campaign.
