Mini Katana YouTube Success
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A story about how Shaan discovered and analyzed a successful e-commerce business selling mini katanas (small Japanese swords) through YouTube marketing.
"I see this guy, I've been seeing him for a while now, and he sells mini katanas on minikatana.com. The website does about 1-2 million monthly visits, which is a lot of traffic for an e-commerce store. He tweets about their revenue sometimes - he said 8 figures, so it does at least $10 million a year in revenue, but I think it's probably closer to $20 million.
They're crushing it with YouTube organic content. They built their YouTube channel up to 2 million subscribers. They do these unboxings with cute girls who are into katanas nerding out about them as they unbox them. They moved their Facebook ad budget into hiring a full-time female creator to do this content.
The founder, Isaac, shares all the backend metrics on Twitter. They got something like 200-300 million views in the last year, and they only started this past year. They're getting 8 million views a month.
What's interesting is they don't do that many videos - looks like they do 1 or 2 a month and they all hit. They basically found people who are strangely and unapologetically obsessed with Japanese culture and just sell them things. It's a 10 out of 10 execution at a 5 out of 10 opportunity."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.