

Ask HN: Review my Custom Rosary Startup - bryanh

This is definitely not the standard HN high-tech start-up (though we love those), it is very much old school e-commerce. We just launched to the world a few days ago and so far response has been good. We had a few sales already.<p>A little about us: the mother of a good friend of mine (friend is also an entrepreneur) makes absolutely gorgeous handmade rosaries. While I'm definitely not religious (I'd say I'm agnostic, but who knows? ;-), I couldn't debate her knack for creating these rosaries. Most sites selling rosaries are (not surprisingly) still in the stone age. A quick Google reveals the state of rosary websites after only a few results.<p>We're definitely aiming for a market segment who understands and is willing to pay for quality (and our prices reflect that). Made in the USA by independent artists, etc.<p>Marketing is initially PPC (Adwords), though Facebook is probably next. Once keywords are locked in, SEO will ramp up. Also, we plan on going church to church hanging up fliers.<p>What are your thoughts? We'd be forever indebted to you! If you PM, I'd be happy to send a fancy coupon. Obviously, the rosaries make awesome gifts for special events like weddings and baptisms.<p>http://beadifulrosaries.com/
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tptacek
This site is great. Two things to think about:

(1) I'm 99.9999% sure Patrick McKenzie will be here within the next 15 minutes
to tell you in detail how to pull this off, but you are selling something that
has a natural content SEO fit and you should chase that down.

What you want to think about are ways to break down your subject matter into
categories (again: it's natural here; the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful
Mysteries, etc). Look for other angles; when are people praying the rosary?
For what occassions? Think about kids, think about class projects, etc. Break
content into _atoms_.

For each atom of content, have a system that allows you to host it on its own
page with a meaningful URL, a meaningful title, a meaningful article summary
(meta description), the atom's worth of content, some contextual content
(general stuff about the rosary, how you got to that page, etc), and some
basic call-to-action to get people to pivot from reading information about the
rosary (which is how you got them to your site) to looking at easily buying a
rosary (extra bonus points if there are convenient ways to customize the
rosary based on the atom of content the user is looking at).

Note that this sounds suspiciously like programming and application
development. Who'd have thunk it; selling things online can be an engineering
process!

I have been continuously astonished by how quickly you can capture swaths of
Google search space by generating content that directly and succinctly answers
_one very specific question_ people ask Google. Remember: do not try to answer
every question on one master page. Anathema! Have a crawlable sanely-indexed
sanely-browsable system on which you can hang hundreds of pages.

You can start all these things very simple, and once you _start_ , if you
attract a baseline level of traffic, you can start A/B testing, which will get
you to a place where you can start assigning a dollar value to each thing you
do for the site.

(2) This system looks very well set up to address the case where I want to
carefully buy one customized rosary. Isn't it very common that people want to
buy _many_ rosaries, say for the 60 students in the 5th grade at St. Barnabus
elementary, or (if you are one of my aunts) every one of her 18,000 nieces and
nephews?

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patio11
The great part about having exactly one drum and banging it all the time is
that every time other people bang the same drum they give me credit!

Seriously though, that is exactly what I would do. (I would prioritize
occasions, people, and styles of rosaries way above what types of Mysteries
there are, simply because I think the average American Catholic is going to be
much more conversant with those topics than with the latter.)

One obvious choice for an atom of content in this context is a photo of a
finished rosary. Have a bunch of adjectives which you can apply to a photo.
Check them off like boxes: this is an [Asian style] rosary with [black beads]
made of [mahagony] that was given to [a boy] on the occasion of his [First
Communion]. With a few dozen madlibs templates like that you could fairly
easily turn every handmade rosary ever into a web page, without necessarily
duplicating anything.

Incidentally, you do rosaries with names on them, right? You know Catholics
have a quirky cultural tendency to name their children after saints, right?
And that the list of saints is very well enumerated, right? So if I were to
pick the most outlandishly obscure Catholic name I can think of to name my
daughter, you could already have an entire set of web pages for her baptismal,
First Communion, etc etc rosaries ready to go, right?

By the way, John Paul II was a really big fan of praying the rosary in
general. Find some of his writings on the matter. Put them on your website. I
mean, seriously, you'll be in the running for "most credible endorsement of
product category in the history of the world."

~~~
tptacek
And he was uncertain that he'd get much domain-specific feedback on HN! ;)

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Roridge
It looks good, nice to see real eCommerce exists (e.g. you pay something for a
product, I was beginning to feel like everything was a service of a service).

One thing that really really puts me off web sites is if I can't tell shipping
costs quickly and easily. Your site is good in that at least you don't have to
register to see the total cost, but you do have to add a product and go to the
cart to find out shipping. If your shipping is a flat $8.45, I'd suggest
having that under a FAQ type area.

Also gift wrap options are good.

I'd be interested to know who you are hosting with. Is it a 3dCart or Shopify
type or did you go solo?

~~~
bryanh
Wonderful suggestions on both accounts.

We went solo and built from scratch with Django, not because it was easier,
but because we want to do a lot of fancy stuff with content, tracking, A/B
testing and custom product generation later down the road.

~~~
Roridge
All good reasons for going solo, and exactly what I would expect HN user to
say :)

Good luck

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jamesbritt
"This is definitely not the standard HN high-tech start-up "

But it does look like a good example of finding an under-served niche and
doing a better job.

BTW, on FF35.9 the text in the boxes on the right gets a bit chopped at the
bottom. Otherwise the site looks quite good.

~~~
bryanh
Thanks for the kind words; the font selection has been a mess of
compatibility, so I appreciate your response very much.

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acconrad
I have nothing to add from a business prospective, but from a UI/UX
perspective, you NEED to change that header font. It's not legible. Your logo
uses a serif font, so you should use a serif font for your headers (that's
legible), such as Palatino.

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petervandijck
Looks great.

1\. Might be nice to let me cycle through products from the homepage.

2\. When you show the price, always show the shipping cost (or at least an
estimate) right there as well. Don't wait until checkout.

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bryanh
Clickable: <http://beadifulrosaries.com/>

