Under The Hood: Matt from Fussy

Welcome Matt! Fussy started with a kickstarter - so that’s where I’d like to begin. Was it a good idea? ‍

Yes - for us, it was key, and I would definitely recommend it to first time founders. It’s just such a great way to test the market. We ended up as the top grossing deodorant ever on Kickstarter worldwide. 

When you're approaching investors and all you have is a deck, no MVP or traction in terms of revenue - it’s gonna be borderline impossible to get funded. Unless you’ve been there and got the tshirt. But if you can come to the table with a funded kickstarter project, having proven demand for your business. That’s quite impactful. And the other thing it does is teach you how to do a product launch, which you’ll end up doing again once you’re up and running with your business in a post-kickstarter world. So you learn lots along the way. 

 I actually wrote an in-depth article about our approach (here it is).

What’s the one hack you could give to other operators thinking about kickstarter? ‍

It’s hard to know whether this is still relevant today, but you wanna try to get on the trending page. Those are the projects that drive most awareness and action. One way to do that is to play the algorithm.  Set your target lower than you actually need. And if you get lots of people to contribute within 24 hours and smash your target goal, the Kickstarter algorithm will pick up on it and list you on that page. And that’s when you’ll receive a huge amount of organic traction. Staying on that page though is tough and you need to hustle like mad! We literally phoned every person we’ve ever met and asked them to back us. It was far from glamorous. 

One of the things that stood out the most for me with Fussy was the product design. How important was that to your success? And where did that expertise come from on the team? ‍

It was vitally important. At Fussy, we see design as a key part of our DNA. We see it as a differentiator. I’m not comparing Fussy to Apple, but if you think about Apple - design is really the main differentiator. We want to achieve the same effect in the personal care space, and that’s why product and customers are the two most important things to us. 

In terms of where that came from. I come from an advertising background, studied product design as a kid and then went more into an engineering route. So have always had an eye for design, and that led us to working with a top London design agency to design the outer case of the deodorant. 

Was the product ready before the Kickstarter?

Kinda. We had the design, but were prototyping during the Kickstarter. And actually, right around the time we raised our $100,000 in presales on Kickstarter - we realized we had to change manufacturing methods to allow our refills to function properly. That meant our costs doubled. Which meant we didn’t have enough money to fulfil the Kickstarter so it was a mad scramble to find more money. But with the Kickstarter sales as proof of concept we were able to secure the funding from external investors quite quickly and start manufacturing. 

Let's talk about the launch of D2C. Did it go according to plan? 

Our Kickstarter ended in October 2019, and 9 months later we were able to launch our site (June 2021).  In those 9 months, we didn't hire agencies or freelancers or anyone actually - we got our hands dirty, and set up everything ourselves including Klaviyo flows, customer support systems, FAQs and all the rest. 

And then once we launched, we started selling well. We already had a good fanbase from the Kickstarter, but then we expanded beyond that to 20,000 customers and $1m in annualized revenue, in just 6 months. We’ve been up 40% Q-o-Q and if anything, we’ve grown a little too quickly and are now running into resourcing issues - but all good problems to have.  

How are you thinking about expansion for Fussy? Are you just focused on the UK? 

We'll be scaling via territories, new products, and then distribution channels which includes retail. Those are our three pillars for scale. In terms of geography, we'll be entering Europe this year with a low risk, high reward approach: We'll start running some ads, and fulfilling from the UK. And if the metrics look good, we can set up distribution locally and set up manufacturing locally. 

Let’s touch on retention: How do you solve for that? 

Well it starts with the product. One of the reasons we went into deodorants and not body wash for example, is that deodorants are stickier by nature. Once someone finds one they like, they tend to stick with it for a very long time. That’s very different from a body wash where you may inherently lack loyalty. 

And on top of that, our products are also inherently sticky because they’re a refillable product. So when a customer decides to buy Fussy, they’re already looking to make a commitment. The last obvious tricks are focusing on product and providing an amazing customer experience which is what I’m most passionate about. So our whole brand experience has retention built into it. 

Let’s talk about the stack: What’s under the hood? 

On the subscription front it's Recharge + Shopify. After that, we use Gorgias for customer support, then reviews.io or Trustpilot for reviews and Carthook for upsells. 

Beyond that, we use Littledata to clean our conversion, attribution, and Recharge data in GA4; Lifetimely and Triple Whale for analytics. Shogun for landing pages. Giftbox for vouchers. And conjured for Referral.
In terms of SMS, we use Blueprint. It’s a UK based company. It's an amazing tool that’s focused on driving 1-to-1 interactions. SMS is generally quite expensive as a whole, but it makes a difference for us on the retention front. 

One last question: What would attribute most of your success to?

It has to be a relentless focus on the product, and our customers or Fussers as we like to call them. For us those are the driving force behind our success. 

Thanks Matt! Appreciate your insights :) Keep inspiring us all.