Dongar
Dongar aims to make driving safer by bringing dash cams to the masses through producing easy and affordable plug-and-play dash cam adapters. A study by the National Injury Research Symposium even found that there was a 60% reduction in the number of accidents when dash cams were used. With their simple, affordable, and easy-to-install product, Dongar is making safe driving more accessible.
Challenge
Lack of ecommerce and marketing experience and limited marketing connections within the founding team
Dongar was solving an important issue, enabling safer driving for the masses. The problem was, the majority of the founding team came from an engineering background within Silicon Valley. So while they knew how to build their product, they didn’t know how to market or sell it at scale.
They were getting thousands of visitors a day on their digital storefront and already had 45,000 customers with the goal to 3x their sales. Unfortunately, no-one on their team had the knowledge to optimize their Amazon or Shopify store, build a cohesive marketing message, manage their digital and creative assets for future growth, and define a marketing strategy that would get them to the next level.
Their primary network were all engineers or STEM focused, and what they desperately needed were ecommerce marketers – a skillset that was lacking in the valley.
My background is in engineering. I wasn’t in a place to hire people because we didn’t know what we didn’t know recruiting wise. There wasn’t great ecomm marketing talent in the valley. It was clear we needed to outsource hiring to find an expert who could hit the ground running. I needed someone who’s already done it in the industry.
Given the lack of time to recruit in-house, the desire to be cost conscious as a bootstrapped startup, and the lack of connections to find ecommerce marketing talent by themselves, Kevin Sayo, Founder and CEO, came to the conclusion that hiring top-tier fractional talent was the best solution.
Through a mutual connection, he was connected to Hello Generalist.
Solution
Hello Generalist helps screen, source, and connect 3 seasoned ecommerce and marketing experts with Dongar
After being connected to Hello Generalist, Kevin and the HG team set up an initial chat so HG could understand the ins and outs of their business, their main challenges, and what sort of support they would need.
One thing I loved about working with HG was they helped me make business decisions on the fly. They helped me understand who I should be hiring and for how long, what their project scopes should be, and really helped demystify the process of bringing on fractional talent.
After the initial conversation, HG wrote out the job descriptions for three different hires:
- Ecommerce Brand Lead to help create a more cohesive brand strategy
- Marketing Lead to own all top of funnel marketing initiatives
- Ecommerce Advisor to support the intersection of product, operations, and client implementation
After getting Kevin’s approval, HG was able to source multiple candidates for each role and facilitate the interview process. The HG portal made it easy for Kevin and his team to quickly scan through the candidates, giving them their Linkedin profiles, their personal stories, their availability, their list of relevant achievements, and their answers to Dongar’s prompts on why they were good fits for the role.
I liked how all the candidates were super high quality. I’ve worked in corporate before and even after screening so many candidates, you can still end up with bad fits. That wasn’t the case with HG. We had 3-5 people for each role, and we could’ve easily hired any one of them.
Thanks to the help of HG, Kevin and his team were able to make their hires within a matter of weeks from start to finish. More importantly, each hire was able to hit the ground running and drive immediate results.
Results
Dongar grew sales by 27%, orders by 37%, conversions by 19% (and even brought on one of the fractional hires as a full-time employee)
After hiring the three different roles, each hire was able to hit the ground running, own initiatives end-to-end, and drive immediate value for the Dongar team.
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Christina, who was brought on as the Ecommerce Brand lead, was able to own vendor management for their digital assets as well as spin up a 3PL for Dongar based on her previous experience running her own Ecommerce store where she was managing 3PLs, distribution, and customer acquisition. She was eventually brought on full-time.
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Emily, who was brought on as the marketing lead, was able to bring her experience building community at Rent the Runway over to Dongar where she ran campaigns to engage the auto community.
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Jason, who was brought on as the Ecommerce advisor, helped the Dongar team audit and optimize their existing Amazon store and workflow using his experience as a previous director at Amazon.
We were able to get insider knowledge to support our team that we just wouldn’t have been able to find full-time. The folks we hired wouldn’t normally be interested in working at a company of our size.
Across the board, Dongar was able to grow sales by 27%, orders by 37%, and increase the conversion rate by 19% – and they couldn’t have done it without the support of their fractional hires. As a bootstrapped company, growing revenue means growing the company’s runway, launching new products, and increasing their impact on enabling safer driving.
If you’re trying to figure out how to justify it, fractional hires can pull their own weight. If someone increases revenue by just 5%, it pays for itself. It helped us boost morale. It gave us people to bounce ideas off of. And the quality of people we were able to get was fantastic, both on the soft skills side and the hard skills side.
At the end of the day, hiring sucks if you don’t have an internal recruiting team or have never hired for the role you’re looking for, especially if you’re a small team. HG just handled it all for us, end-to-end. I couldn’t recommend them more.