Staying Real for the Love of Mushrooms (23/11/2023)

When we first started Cylocybe, we promised never to spend a single penny on marketing. We wanted to be organic and true and we did that very well.

But after 6 years and a tonne of new competitor on the scene fighting for business and armed to the teeth with slick social media campaigns, dark marketing and SEO tricks galore, we’ve lost our top spot on Google and slipped down to 9th spot.

It’s not a fair fight anymore. It’s not organic. And it’s not going unchallenged.

So what are we going to do about it?

We will first off have a little fun with it and arm ourselves with similar marketing, social media campaigns and SEO. As well as some nifty innovations we have in store. Gloves are off, so to speak. It will be a fair fight now.

One thing is for sure, we will always look after our customers, even at the expense of our business.

Behind the scenes, we do all sorts of things to look after you which you don’t know about. For instance, did you know we built our own custom dispatch system instead of installing Royal Mail’s easy Click and Drop? Instead of Royal Mail tapping into our shop and siphoning vast amounts of data they don’t need in the first place, we generate a CSV file with the bare minimum order data needed to buy your postage label so they don’t even know what products you are buying, your IP, metadata, etc. Not to say they are untrusted, but if they don’t need the data to carry out their service, then why give them it.

There’s more:

• We use a rented bare-metal server to host our webserver for security.
• Our entire email system runs through ProtonMail to keep your communications private and secure.
• We employ a self-hosted bitcoin system to ensure your order information stays between us, rather than being sold to a third party.
• We learned how to develop Woocommerce / WordPress so we never needed to give site access to any developer who could see your customer data.

We know fine well that the majority of our customers probably couldn’t care less about the extra mile we go, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel an obligation to do so. When you shop with us – we’ll go out our bloody way to make sure you, your money and your data are treated with respect – the way society used to be. Mushrooms make us care.