He launched an online shop with one product and a dead navigation menu

Ash Young already ran a digital agency and had seen car mats being sold badly by other people: poor product presentation, poor customer service, an obvious gap. He launched carmats.co.uk in 2020 during lockdown.

To avoid spending months building a catalogue before knowing whether the idea worked, he launched with a single product populated. You could buy Ford Focus mats. Every other navigation link was a dead hash link. He pointed Google Ads straight at the Ford Focus page and watched what happened.

He put £5,000 into the business and £5,000 into the domain name, and describes taking no other real risks: the company was profitable after month one and stayed profitable. In the early days he published a phone line and pushed customers to talk to him at every opportunity so he could hear the objections directly. He still reads customer service tickets.

Once the catalogue was broad enough, he stopped bidding only on model-specific terms and went after the broad ones. The business reached £5m in revenue, was heading for £7.5m, and he could see £10m ahead.

“We launched carmats.co.uk with only one product populated. If you went to the navigation to try and buy any other products, you couldn't click on them.”

Ash Young, speaking on MozPod