Introduction:
Sergey is the man behind the project, a YouTube blogger picking up an audience and a very good friend of mine. At first he promoted Brutal Potion on his own, dropping ad spots into his own videos.
When it came to scaling the project up, he came to me for help.
All there was at the start was a description of the product and a handful of reviews in a VKontakte group. For a full site there was not enough content, not enough audience and no proof that the product works. So we agreed to start with a small landing page and grow from there if it took off.
Stage 1. Building the site.
1.1 Put together the Brutal Potion visual identity.
1.2 Write the content for a one-page sales site.
1.3 Build up social proof for the purchase and put it on the page.
1.4 Implement a full purchase flow in the first version of the site.
1.5 Connect online acquiring — the Unitpay solution, specifically.
We put together a content plan and settled the deadlines. Sergey prepared the copy and the ideas himself; later his material was finished off by me and by outsourced contractors.
A week later the first mock-up was ready and the template was in place. The first version, mobile first from the outset, looked like this:
Hover or tap and the site scrolls. ⛶ — open full screen
By the middle of the second week the home page was ready and I was wiring up acquiring and finishing off the payment side. The order flow came out short: a person does not have to think about what to click next.
Hover or tap and the site scrolls. ⛶ — open full screen
The second version of the site was built without the rush: the project had launched and was making money. Most of the time went into media content — the video clips on the home page, for instance.
Stage 2. Building the second version of the project.
2.1 Update the visual identity based on user feedback.
2.2 Rework and expand the structure of the project completely.
2.3 Carry out a full redesign of the site.
2.4 Add more social proof.
Video published on 8 July 2021.
This version managed to keep the simplified checkout. An order is placed in literally three moves between pages of the site.
Hover or tap and the site scrolls. ⛶ — open full screen
Sergey and I were afraid the new version would turn out harder than the old one and people would go back to ordering “by hand” through direct messages. It went the other way round: CTR grew by more than 30%.
The third version was needed not so much to improve how the site worked as to make it easy to widen the range. At the start the project assumed a single flagship product, Brutal Potion, but it kept growing — so meet МОХъ!
Stage 3. Building the site for МОХъ, a men’s cosmetics brand.
3.1 Rebuild the existing Brutal Potion site structure on a custom engine.
3.2 Build an admin panel for adding new products easily.
3.3 Rework the site logic completely to turn it into an online store.
The main changes, I think, come across perfectly in the video walkthrough below:
Video published on 16 July 2022.
The site is finished by now, and Sergey and I are working on promoting it together.
Client feedback:
Sergey recorded a video review a year into the project.
Video published on 2 July 2022.
For anyone who wants a look at the МОХъ brand site.
Go to YouTube!For anyone interested in Sergey’s Tsmok Blog channel on YouTube.