Ask HN: My company is dying, what can I do to save it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My company is dying, what can I do to save it?

3 pointsthrowaway1425365 comments

I work at a small online retailer in a sports apparel niche. For years we were quite successful, but over the last few years things have taken a turn, and the owners have decided to sell or liquidate the company.

I'm the sole programmer and my job ends in a few weeks, except as needed for emergencies on an hourly basis.

The main reasons for the decline are:

- Our organic traffic from Google suddenly declined by 1/3 two years ago. Where we once ranked in the top spots, now you'll find Amazon, REI and other large retailers. We have no idea why this happened.

- Customer acquisition costs have increased. Where AdWords ads were once a great source, now the CPA on many keywords are no longer profitable or barely profitable.

- Our shipping expenses have increased due to consumer expectations for free shipping. Because of our size we can't really negotiate low rates.

- The company built a large office/warehouse, with an eye towards expanding or renting out the extra space, at the height of the real estate market. Needless to say we didn't expand and have never been able to rent it out. The mortgage is a large expense.

So, HN, how can we turn things around?

Turnarounds are unlikely with such a short time constraint and what sounds like a desperate situation. This is probably where life moves on and you go elsewhere soon.

If you don't have too much to lose, this is where you could conceivably try some short term growth hacking strategies/gaming Google in a last ditch effort to boost your search ranking. Go nuts with buying links and doing all of the stuff Google doesn't want you to do. In the long run that will fail without other changes but you might be able to squeeze a bit more life out of this and maybe learn something in the process. Odds are against it though.

If you're just an employee rather than an owner, your limited remaining time at work is probably better used applying for jobs and brushing up on technical stuff for your upcoming interviews.

First stop the bleeding, sell off everything possible and cut costs to bare min.

Then try new ways to start growing again: 1. Try selling product on the Amazon Marketplace to take advantage of the SEO traffic they gained. This will cut your CPAs dramatically. If this works, expand to other marketplace partners. 2. Find local retail partners to sell products or open your own store. 3. Sell products at relevant sporting events. 4. Consider selling training, information, services or other high margin products.

None of this is easy nor a sure thing, exommerce is a cut throat game these days. Best of luck.

Those are a lot of factors to face but depending on the sports niche and assuming that your product is superior/ well designed, then I might suggest focusing on getting a strong following with that niche and growing from that small position of strength.

For example, say it's biking apparel, I might reach out to bloggers/biking sites and perhaps doing guest features or creating something of value with them (giveaways?).

You should be able to help your SEO by creating content of value around your niche and getting links to it (organic SE rank is likely tanking just because people are getting what they need at those sites first and not bothering with smaller players). Same with your AdWords - you won't be able to compete with the massive marketing budgets of the bigger players so you'll have to be creative about using words further down the tail. Look for other acquisition opportunities by figuring out who your core target is and how you can get them to spend more (perhaps an email newsletter highlighting news/new products/trends in your niche?).

Just a couple of suggestions but hard to say for sure without knowing more specifics of what you're dealing with.

SEO is longer term, and you may never be able to regain the top spots. Google is becoming more and more biased towards Big Brands, coincidentally the same brands that spend 8 figures a year on AdWords.

Short term fixes can be selling on Amazon Marketplace (possible to escape warehouse lease, use Fulfillment by Amazon if cheaper?), eBay (yes, tons of people still use eBay) or Shopping.com (yes, people use this site) and other marketplaces. You'll still have to pay per sale or click to your site, but it will typically be much less than AdWords.

If you are competing on price in a commodity market, you probably can't win. If you have a differential, valuable feature that isn't easily imitable, people may be willing to pay a premium.

I would suggest growing weed in that warehouse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com