Building Product Hunt for CPG Industry

Launching a CPG brand has become significantly easier with the rise of Social Media and Ecommerce, hence a rise in the number of DTC brands in the last decade. But two areas still remain outdated, early feedback from consumers and loss of actionable data to show retailers. This lack of data has led to slotting fees becoming an industry norm and widely accepted by retailers and brands alike. Social Nature already had an active community of 500K users wanting to try natural products via its Sampling business, and we had early indicators that they wanted more ways to engage within our platform. The problem though was how to get the supply? How do we convince the CPG brands to use the power of this data when the industry was still used to deals over drinks at trade shows.

We started visiting and talking to industry players at their home ground - the trade shows. Based upon data from in-person interviews, surveys, I organized my observations and categorized them using a customer journey map for every participant - customer, brand and retailer. This helped me expose the pain points and key drivers for each user segment. It also helped spark discussions to help close knowledge gaps and acted as a catalyst for idea sharing and generation between the team and stakeholders. Based on these insights, we built our MVP of Launchpad.‍

Then we needed a way to reach out to CPG brands. We started by mapping the entire space and realized that we're working in a niche community of a maximum of 50K natural CPG companies - thus, every piece of communication became key. We started with a variety of channels, but it didn't take us long to realize that email would be the one that's the most scalable. The second task was to learn how do we send the Best cold emails. Luckily, I had incredible copywriters like Mitchell Swanson on my team. Through various iterations of emails, we started getting signs that the most important thing that CPG brands cared about was the ability to connect with Retailers or Buyers. Then, we had to understand what mattered to these buyers and how they consumed information. Through the next phase of interviews with retailers, we realized that Product Guides were an industry norm that Buyers used to find the leading products. We took this insight and pivoted Launchpad into a product guide that would be distributed among all major Retailers.

We took this insight and pivoted Launchpad into a product guide that would be distributed among all major Retailers. - 2020 Consumer Insights & Trending Products Guide. The campaign onboarded 250+ CPG brands within 1 month.‍

We started getting more brand requests than we could onboard onto Launchpad and that's when we realized that we had found product-market fit on the brand side. We quickly changed our focus on other issues:

Increasing user engagement

Making onboarding & reporting easier

Increasing AOV per brand