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Mark Zhang: A Brief Intro
Mark Zhang, the CEO & founder of Manta Sleep Mask—the only mask made for the deepest-possible sleep in any environment—will be sharing his e-com secrets and tactics on how he was able to scale his Manta Sleep from zero to an 8 figure and growing business.
I first met Mark in 2016. He was still in the FBA space and then transitioned into Shopify to make himself independent from Amazon. He and Ben founded the Manta Sleep Mask brand, which now grew to more than eight figures in revenue, and has more than 20 employees.
The brand has been featured on multiple platforms such as Forbes, Men’s Fitness, Journal, and so forth. In this podcast we are talking not only about his branding idea and its positioning, but we are also discussing the tactical levels like paid media stretch.
Also, we discussed the way that they generate user generated content to help with increasing their conversion rates on their site, and many other tips. If you get anything out of this show, please like, share and subscribe. Other than that, if you’re interested in scaling your eCommerce store via Google ads, then visit our website.
Today, my friend Mark was on the show, together with his co-founder, Ben. They grew Manta Sleep Mask from a Kickstarter campaign up to into the eight figure range. During this journey, they faced many challenges, but they’ve also had quite a few wins.
If you want to connect with Mark, we have a Facebook group. Mark will be also part of that group. And this is only for e-commerce owners. So feel free to join us.
Episode Highlights
Making money was good, but it felt empty, and kind of boring. So, we sat down and thought what can we do here that’s actually what we’re passionate about, and what’s also a good market to go into. And that’s how we arrived at Manta Sleep.
I’ve been a light sleeper since I was 15 years old. I’ve been using sleep masks since then. We always thought we could do something better. That’s how we came to the conclusion of starting Manta Sleep with a Kickstarter campaign. 2:57
If we purely went to the market based on market research, we would have never done a sleep mask, because even back when we started, it was an extremely saturated market, with very competitive tons of different models.
If we were purely evaluating a market opportunity for a quick buck, it would not be the industry that we would go into, but we went into it knowing that it’s going to be a long term play. 8:37
In terms of product differentiation, I think it really helps the fact that I’ve been using products like these for so many years. It kind of developed an intuitive sense in terms of what can work—or what can’t.
What we ended up developing were these eyecups that nobody has tried before. 9:07
How Did You Get Into E-com?
When I started this many years ago, I was hanging out in Singapore for a couple of years. I just wanted to get my feet wet, if you will, and start some sort of business.
I don’t know how to write any code. I didn’t have any other skills. And so, I thought, what can I do that I can learn relatively quickly, without needing to learn coding or something like that.
I didn’t go into writing because I had nothing to talk about.
And physical products—eCommerce—just seemed like the natural path to go. I have a fascination with products.
It’s developing products with Ben, my co-founder, that brings me a lot of joy. I like to come up with ideas and play with them. That’s how I got into it, it’s how we arrived at Manta Sleep.
In 2014/2015 we were selling random products on our Amazon account to generate more revenue and more cash. At some point in 2016 we got together and had a chat.
Making money was good, but it felt empty, and kind of boring. So, we sat down and thought, you know, what can we do here that’s actually what we’re passionate about, and what’s also a good market to go into. And that’s how we arrived at Manta Sleep.
And it felt like we were just growing that business for the sake of making more money, which was good at the beginning, because I don’t know about Ben, he seems pretty, pretty, pretty baller, but I’ve been poor for a lot of my early 20s During this entrepreneur journey.
So making money was good, but it felt empty, and kind of boring. And so we sat down and thought, you know, what can we do here that’s actually that we’re actually passionate about that we’re actually excited about and that also is a good market to go into. And that’s how we arrived at mantas sleep. I’ve been used. I’ve been a light sleeper for, you know, since I was 15 years old, been using sleep masks since I was 15 years old. And we always thought we could do something better.
And that’s how we sort of came about came to the conclusion of starting Manta sleep with a Kickstarter campaign.
Manta Sleep: An Intro
The customers. It’s more or less about demographics, and more about their behavior. I think it’s called psychographic.
The unifying factor that ties all of our customers together is that they are light sleepers.
They’re aware of it, and they value it. We don’t target people who sleep really well. They don’t need a product. We also don’t target people who don’t realize the importance of sleep, it’s a losing battle to try to convince somebody who doesn’t care or is not aware about the importance or wanting to improve their sleep actively.
We have shift workers, we have people suffering from insomnia. We have people who are generally sensitive to light noise, who tend to wake up, have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. But, the unifying factor is that they’re late sleepers, and they’re aware of it.
How Did Manta Sleep Differentiate?
If we purely went to the market based on market research, we would have never done a sleep mask, because even back when we started, it was an extremely saturated market, with very competitive tons of different models.
If we were purely evaluating a market opportunity for a quick buck, it would not be the industry that we would go into, but we went into it knowing that it’s going to be a long term play. We were going to stick it out, because this is something that we’re interested in.
So, I think that really helps. And then, in terms of product differentiation, I think what really helps is the fact that I’ve been using products like these sleep masks for so many years.
It kind of developed an intuitive sense in terms of what can work—or what can’t. What we ended up developing were these eyecups that nobody has tried before. That seemed to have worked really well. It helped a lot with marketing, too, because they just look weird, right?
Our customers often say that these look like mini bras for your face, because they have little holes and little cups in them. That sort of weirdness at the beginning stage really helped to attract initial interest. Once the people have tried the product and realized how amazing it is, that helped us to further the growth in the years later.
From a branding and differentiation perspective, there are a lot of sleep brands out there that are focused on calm blue, dark purple and other kinds of calming colors. Instead, we went for something that’s very bold—from a product design perspective, as well as web presence and overall design language perspective. If you go to our website, you can see red, blue, bright blue.
The reason for this is because it’s not really about light sleep, it’s about what light sleep can do for you. Our brand positioning is very bold, it’s very different. We want to focus on empowering our customers, so that they can do more with their life.
It’s very much focused on what you can do with a great night’s sleep, rather than the calming aspect of sleep itself. That’s the branding differentiation.
Manta Sleep’s Successful Marketing Pillars
At the beginning, when we started with the Kickstarter campaign and the Indiegogo campaign, I ran Facebook ads, which was one of the major factors that helped us grow.
Facebook ads are still a critical pillar. Even after iOS 14, five point update is still a critical pillar of the business. But, we’ve also been running ads on Google on YouTube, and recently just started experimenting with Tik Tok.
There’s definitely a huge paid acquisition channel on the front end.
Many DTC companies are in the same positions as we are. What we have been trying to focus on is diversification, because it’s quite expensive on Facebook ads.
Focusing on Tik Tok, Google and YouTube is one pillar. The other pillar is to acquire emails, first party days; you want to own that relationship.
What we had going on with Facebook was actually really good. I think that we all sort of forgot how good it is.
But before Facebook came along, the way that you did it was to run search ads, get emails and get people into your own list. Rather than running purely acquisition campaigns, this year, we are allocating a certain budget specifically on acquiring high quality emails through Facebook, and then trying to build a relationship using email marketing, growing that into sales.
One other thing you can try using—which is what we’ve been doing—third party analytics tools. We’re using a tool called North beam. They basically install a pixel across your website that really helps with tracking.
These tools aren’t perfect, but they give you different data points to use to triangulate what’s actually happening.
You don’t really know whether the customers are still there. You don’t really know if they’re converting or not. But, tools like these could give you a secondary source of information to make decisions.
Facebook Ads is one of the most critical pillars for succeeding as a brand. Then, it's email marketing.
These tools can be a bit pricey.
It’s because they have many attribution models. Once you get to a certain size, there’s the halo effect.
Just looking in Google Analytics, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s actually happening. These tools aren’t perfect, but they point you in the right direction—beyond Facebook ads, as well.
When you’re running multiple channels, multiple front end acquisition and ad spend, it gives you an overview of what’s actually happening in the business, which I find helpful.
How Important Is User-Generated Content (UGC)?
We’ve never done an AV test to see how statistically significant having UGC is.
I assume that it’s a pretty important thing, something that will help with convergence. We have a collection process, meaning, three ways of getting there.
One is through our ambassador program sponsorship. Content creators ask the people that we sponsor to create UGC.
Another way to do it is through our ambassador program. We recruit our best customers to come in and incentivize them with special deals and gifts to create content.
We also have discounts for existing customers, after two months or so.
We send them an email requesting for UGC in the form of ads, videos and images.
We then use them in our advertising efforts. Even though we haven’t done a split test, I’m almost certain having UGCs results in better conversion, especially when it comes to our ad efforts. A lot of organic content, we can cut them into videos, we can split them in different ways. That’s been really helpful for the advertising effort.
Mentorship: Is it Important?
There were a couple of things.
I think you talked about communities, consultations, experts, etc. I think that the Ecommerce Fuel Forum is a great place.
There are many seven to eight figure e-com business owners.
I don’t know if they accept six-figure e-com business owners, but once you pass a certain stage, you’re able to join that community, and it provides a bunch of great resources.
I think going from zero to two is like a high six-figure in terms of revenue, we can probably just do it searching up YouTube videos.
Last Tips For E-com Business Owners
If I were to do this over again, I would sit down and think a bit more about profitability, as well as the product roadmap and how that would create value for the business.
When I look at supplement businesses, I always get very jealous of their reocurring income into repeat customers, where we’re working on creating more value for our customers by creating different accessories that support the overall mission of empowering people, rather than just sleep masks.
The more your lifetime value of a customer is, the more you can spend to acquire customers and that’s how you beat the competition.
