Tactics backlog · Internal
Prepared for ownership · Papago Vans
The Tactics page is the plan. This is the list it draws from. Nothing here has been approved, budgeted or started, and several items are blocked on data that has not arrived. It exists so good ideas stop living in someone's head, and so the reasoning behind each one survives long enough to be argued with.
Made once, sells for years. The category's research behaviour is video-first, and Papago currently appears in almost none of it.
Stop advertising build time and start advertising the whole number, the one a buyer actually asks about. Twelve weeks from signature to driving away. Put it on the tier pages, in the ads, and in the first sentence a salesperson says.
Every builder in this category quotes the build and hides the queue in front of it. Boho publishes 5 to 6 weeks and means seven to eight months. Outside Van says 8 to 10 months. A shop willing to name the total number is doing something nobody else will, and it cannot be rebutted without a competitor saying their own date out loud. It also happens to be the Papago Collection product thesis stated as a sentence: the pre-engineered line exists precisely because the design queue is what eats the calendar.
What it needsOur own queue depth, which nobody has asked for yet. 6 to 9 weeks of build leaves only 3 to 6 weeks of queue inside a twelve-week promise, and a competitor's published guidance says summer slots stretch to 3 to 4 months. Confirm it holds across the year before it is printed anywhere. This is a promise, not a claim, and the failure mode of this entire industry is quoting short and delivering long.
A customer flies into Phoenix, tours the shop, takes delivery in person and drives the van home across the country. Film the whole thing. Shop floor, handover, first night out, arrival in a driveway in Vermont.
Most sales are East Coast, so this trip is already happening and is currently treated as a logistics footnote. It is the best first-trip story this product has. It carries the build tour, the proof, the aspiration and the shop tour in one asset, and it answers the distance objection by making distance the point.
What it needsOne willing customer and a videographer for three days. Nothing else.
Forty minutes, one van, technical, no music. Walk the electrical, open the cabinets, explain the payload math and why a decision was made.
The research named YouTube the dominant medium in this category and this format the one buyers watch repeatedly before contacting anyone. It does the work of a salesperson while nobody is working.
What it needsA van already in the shop and somebody who can explain a build without selling.
Thirty to sixty seconds each. Owners in their own vans, in their own words, saying what they were worried about before they signed and whether it happened.
Peer proof outranked every marketing claim in the buyer research, and the thing a prospect most wants is another customer with the same van, same shop, same year. A written review cannot do what an owner on camera does. 71 people have already said they were happy, so the hard part of the ask is done.
What it needsWilling owners, and a plan for filming people spread across the country. Three options, probably all three: capture it at delivery while they are in Mesa, send a simple self-film brief to the rest, or film a cluster on one eastern trip. Ask about the fear, not the features.
Show the paint booth, the warranty work, a van coming back at 40,000 miles for a fix.
Every substantive competitor complaint the research could reach was post-delivery: warranty disputes, defects at handover, unanswered calls. Papago has a real service operation and says almost nothing about it. This is the proof that answers the fear nobody voices.
What it needsPermission to film real service work.
Weekly short-form from empty chassis to keys, published as it happens rather than after.
Fills the six-month content gap, gives the nurture sequence something worth sending, and makes the wait visible as craft rather than silence.
What it needsA customer comfortable with their build being public, agreed at signing.
Things that change how someone moves from curious to committed. Each needs a real test before it needs a budget.
Put two retired demo builds into rental and measure one number: what share of renters request a build quote within ninety days.
Boho runs 40+ vans this way and converts renters into buyers. It removes the objection no brochure answers, which is committing six figures to something you have never slept in. Papago has no equivalent.
What it needsTwo vans, commercial insurance, and two quarters of patience. Do not chase forty. Above roughly 5% conversion the fleet pays for itself as marketing.
Choose one of the three Papago Collection plans, then work down a good-better-best ladder on each subsystem: fridge, heating and cooling, electrical, entertainment, finishes. The layout itself never changes. A running total, a running payload figure, and a delivery date that updates as you go.
Papago already publishes prices, which nobody else in this category does, and a configurator is the full expression of that. It outputs an all-in number so the conversion-only comparison problem disappears, it earns the price-comparison search traffic that currently lands on our worst pages, and anyone who completes one is the most qualified lead this business can produce. Crucially it is also the Papago Collection spec made visible: the option ladder, the prices and the build times are the product definition, so the tool cannot exist before the product does and is mostly data entry afterwards.
What it needsPapago Collection defined first, including every option and its price, weight and build-hours impact. Then a staged build: version one can be a well-made form with real arithmetic rather than a 3D scene. Budget somewhere between a few thousand for a competent freelancer doing a form and $20,000 or more for a visual builder. Do the cheap version first and find out whether anyone finishes one.
Pick a tier, pick a chassis, see the real all-in number. Published, not gated.
The whole category hides pricing and Papago already publishes. Half the advantage is thrown away because we quote conversion-only while competitors quote totals. A calculator fixes the comparison problem, earns the price-comparison search traffic that currently converts worst, and is the most linkable asset in this market.
What it needsThe three conflicting price lists reconciled first. Blocked until then.
A simple tool showing what a given build weighs against what a given chassis carries.
Payload is the structural constraint of this category and buyers routinely get it wrong. Being the shop that tells the truth about weight buys more trust than any claim about craftsmanship.
What it needsReal build weights from the shop.
Changes to what is being sold, not how it is advertised. These outrank any channel decision.
Replace the standard deposit structure with payments tied to dated, photographed build milestones.
Six documented shops took customer deposits and failed mid-build, one now a federal fraud case. The industry norm hands a small private business tens of thousands before any work begins. No competitor found is doing this differently. It is the highest-leverage change available to the offer and it costs process, not money.
What it needsOwnership agreement, and a working-capital conversation since it moves cash later in the build.
A lender who will actually underwrite the finished build, not just the chassis.
Lenders value the base vehicle and ignore the conversion, so buyers fund the build from cash or a personal loan. This silently disqualifies people who want to buy. Boho advertises twenty-year financing on van and conversion together.
What it needsLender relationships. An ops project with a marketing payoff.
Take trade-ins, recondition, resell with a warranty.
Resale is a live objection at this price, with one published analysis citing 42% depreciation over five years. A builder who stands behind resale removes it. It also creates a lower entry point without discounting new builds.
What it needsCapital and floor space. Probably a year out.
Being where this buyer already is, rather than buying attention.
Sprinter-Source, Ford Transit USA Forum, ProMaster Forum. Answer technical questions. Sell nothing.
Where the skeptical high-ticket buyer vets a shop, and where every competitor complaint in the research surfaced. Costs attention, not money. Marketing that reads as marketing gets destroyed here.
What it needsA person who can answer a real electrical question, posting as themselves.
The East Coast edition, given where the buyers are.
Overland Expo West drew 28,000 to 30,000 attendees with 41% first-timers, which makes it top-of-funnel rather than a loyalty event. If the money is East Coast, the eastern show is the one to test first.
What it needsBudget and a van to bring. Measure it against cost per sale, not badge scans.
Not a second shop. A recurring physical reason to be east: a delivery day, a service partner, a dealer relationship, an owners' meetup in a state where several builds already live.
Most sales are East Coast and every touchpoint is 2,000 miles away. The research also found the category's failure mode is post-delivery service, which is exactly what distance makes hardest. Whatever closes that gap cheaply is worth more than an ad campaign.
What it needsKnowing where eastern owners actually cluster, which the sales records answer in an afternoon.
Plot every past buyer. Weight search bids and any event spend to the real clusters rather than treating the country as flat.
We know sales skew east. We do not yet know whether that means the whole seaboard or three metros. Those lead to different budgets. This is a report, not a project.
What it needsBuyer geography from item 04 of the data request.
Papago against the Winnebago Revel, against a factory Class B, against a DIY build. Concede what we lose.
Buyers are running these comparisons anyway and currently find competitor-written versions. Conceding the dealer-network and warranty points openly is what makes the rest credible.
What it needsWillingness to say out loud where a factory van wins.
The buyer already flies to Arizona and drives home across the country. We have been treating the best story we have as a shipping problem.
Discipline