Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This is nuts, he's still making the same obvious mistake.

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461187

Relevant comment from that discussion:

"You targeted hardcore gamers, but you're not selling games. That's almost a complete non-sequitur. Your goal was to target people likely to purchase candy, or perhaps Japanese novelty items, via a mail subscription service. It doesn't appear that you made much effort if any to figure out what that audience looks like and how to reach it."

It doesn't seem like much has changed, he's just hellbent on putting effort into advertising campaigns without first figuring out who the actual target audience is that might reasonably complete a purchase, and what the product's best sales message is.

I mean, have you considered the possibility that people who make cosplay videos and the people who watch them mostly care about wearing costumes as their hobby, and that you might try targeting people who make videos about either various types of candy or various types of Japanese products because that's actually what your business sells?

Almost as if getting on the front page of HN with a story of a failed advertising method is it’s own sort of advertising

I think you’re probably right about that. But I bet he’d get just as much HN status and exposure with a post about how he figured it all out and nailed his ad strategy, so not sure that explains he whole story.

Well, they just got free marketing advice, so they can take that advice, succeed, and write another post on lessons learned for HN :)

indeed, I think you hit it on the nose.

It’s especially nuts when you compare his business with tokyotreats, a competitor who manages to get many millions of views for their unboxing videos. Their website is on another level as well.

Did you mean TokyoTreat? Because if you didn't, tokyotreats has to work on its SEO. I'm being sincere, I have no idea.

Anyway, I was expecting murder when I went to the Candy Japan homepage, but there are changes they can make right now that would help. White text on light-colored header, doesn't use professional typefaces, as great as the animated candy SVG is it takes too long to see a real piece of candy, body text is too small and in the background (just unchecking the 80% rule improves the readability by a lot), testimonials distracting the body and flow, the list of past boxes is a list of blog posts that I have to individually click on to see the contents of (which is a shame since there is associated prose that I would love to be able to skim through quicker).

Just some of the things I would change. TokyoTreat seems to be part of a larger network selling Japanese loot boxes so it's seemingly stiff competition and maybe that's the key here. Perhaps CJ can pivot itself as something more personable and intimate? You can even make your own content (vlogs, perhaps) on how you go about hand picking a selection. You also already have a cute mascot.

It depends a bit on how many of those videos exist and what kind of view counts they get. In this case the number are so small that they almost certainly do. I you were targeting say 100,000 subscribers tangentially related channels might be your only option.

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