How A-Case won early buyers with slim phone cases
Mohammad Shayan runs A-Case, a phone case business built around slim designs, better materials and a less bulky fit. The early growth story is not about a big launch but about marketplaces, direct outreach and a lot of manual follow-up before SEO and the website became more important.
The earliest customers came from work that could not easily be scaled: answering questions one by one, following up closely and building trust directly. Later, the focus shifted toward product pages, SEO and making the website feel credible enough that buyers could find the brand on their own.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
A-Case started because we wanted to offer phone cases that look premium without making the phone feel bulky. We focus a lot on slim designs and better materials. We also try to make the products feel a bit more unique than the usual cases you see everywhere.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Right now a lot of our business comes from marketplaces, Google and social media. We are working more on SEO and growing our own website. In the long term I would like more people to find A-Case directly when they are searching for a case and come back to us again.
Where did your very first customers actually come from, and what did you do to get them that wouldn’t scale today?
A lot of the early customers came through marketplaces and direct outreach. In the beginning, you do things manually. You answer every question, follow up closely and spend a lot of time getting individual customers to trust the brand. That works early on, but it is difficult to scale.
What’s one channel or tactic you kept betting on that never paid off, and what did you do instead?
We learned that just posting more content does not always lead to sales. So we started improving our product pages and SEO while putting more focus on the right products and what customers actually want.
If you were starting again tomorrow with no audience and no budget, what are the first three things you’d do to get customers?
First I would make the product and website look trustworthy from day one. Then I would focus on very specific searches where people are already looking to buy. After that I would create simple useful content around the products and keep putting it in front of the right audience.
Thank you to Mohammad Shayan and the team at A-Case for telling the story of how it actually started, not how it looks in hindsight.
Have you got a first hundred worth writing down?
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