Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf (Part 2)

Sam Wolf: I started working three months after I graduated and launched it the in following June. I hired a couple of developers. We worked on putting it together. We launched with 7,000 items mainly vitamins and supplements that I knew were selling well and were good items from my experience in the health food business. Two to three weeks went by and I didn’t get any orders. I said, “Good thing I have law school coming up.” I wasn’t ready to give up either.

Sramana Mitra: Why weren’t you getting orders? What was your analysis on why you weren’t getting orders?

Sam Wolf: I put up a website and said, “Let’s see what happens.” I was naive going into this. I knew how to design a site and get it developed but I didn’t really have a lot of marketing experience to drive traffic to the site. I started to learn. I read everything I could about ways to drive traffic—SEO, SEM, and affiliate marketing.

That was over years of figuring things out, but in the first couple of weeks, I just found a few things and started to try them. Before you know it, I had a few orders a day. The following week, it was ten a day. A month or two later, we were getting a hundred orders a day. I always had the knack for the technology and the marketing side of the business and I’m still very involved with it today.

Sramana Mitra: What turned out to be the big customer generator? Was it Google AdWords? Was it search engine optimization? Where were the revenues coming from?

Sam Wolf: Back in 2004, which was a much different time in the world of Internet marketing and e-commerce, you could buy clicks in Google AdWords for pennies. That helped a lot. But what ultimately led to its success was the fact that it was a well-built site. There was a lot of information and content. We were also very price competitive. That is still one of our key selling points.

We knew that these products we were selling were expensive. We sold them in brick-and-mortar stores. We knew what they cost. I had this knowledge that if we could sell it in volume, we could actually be pretty effective and grow the business. That was part of the strategy. We focused on being very competitive with pricing out of the gate. For the first couple of years, we definitely didn’t make any money but we started to drive customers to the site.

They were discovering us and they were discovering these products that they had been spending significantly more money on at a great value. We were able to do some of the Internet marketing things in a savvy way. They were also fairly low risk and affordable at that time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Scaling a Family E-Commerce Business: Lucky Vitamin CEO Sam Wolf
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