This past year I have been trying to apply the teachings from the books on entrepreneurship than my mentor had given me to read (I’ll be doing a blog post on that very soon.) I had been working on a prototype for a card game I was hoping to Kickstart when I found myself in need of money towards the end of April. I decided to put everything I had learned into action to try to bring in money on a short timescale.
I believe nearly everybody has thought of a business idea at one time or another. I’ve thought of many over the last few years. The hard part is knowing which ones will work, (answer: most if done correctly) and which would work for Me (answer: I’ve got no flipping clue.)
As I thought about various ideas that might work I happened upon a short comic that i had seen a few times before and absolutely loved.
I had seen this comic in many different places online, particularly on an image-sharing website called Imgur.com. This particular time, I looked at it and thought “there’s a market here…”
Testing Testing 123…
One of the first things you learn about starting a new business is that you have to test your market to see if it’s viable. With this, testing was simple. Handmake a tiny Smaug from clay, make re-creation of the comic using photos of the figure, and post it to see if people were interested.
I posted this on Tuesday the 19th of April. My post was immediately flooded with people admiring it and many requesting to purchase one.
Prior to posting the image I had set up an etsy account, but in my haste I had neglected to take photos of tiny Smaug or make any listings. As the comments and interest flooded in, I rushed to take a photo and finish up the etsy store and posted the link for people to purchase.
Over that day and the next, I received 6 orders for 8 dragons. At $11.50 dollars each plus an initial estimate of $3.50 shipping, I earned $113. I was thrilled.
It was time for the handmaking. I won’t go into detail on the process, this isn’t meant to be a how-to for clay sculpting. But these penny-sized dragons required a good bit more work than I had thought. The painting took the longest, but I had them all done and shipped within 10 days.
As I made them and thought about how to approach advertising them, I thought back to some things I had learned in the books I’d read. One of them, I can’t remember which, talked about how people buy things they can “see” being in their life. In other words, If they imagine how it would fit in their life, and see a place for it, then they are much more likely to buy it.
I had seen a number of etsy stores and kickstarter projects reach the front page of Imgur, and what most of them had in common was a story. They told the story of how they started their store, their love of their craft, etc. As I thought about that, and about how I could make this appear to be something that fits in their lives, I had an idea.
The subject was perfect. With a cute dragon who wants a hoard, I was reminded of a children’s book I had read as a child, called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
I took the pictures, wrote up the story, and posted If You Give a Dragon a Penny to Imgur, on Saturday, April 30th. Life got awfully busy after that.
I gotta say, posting a story about a tiny dragon’s day around the house works wonders for advertising. Everybody loved it. The story had exactly the effect I was looking for. So many people commented something like “I need this. Not want, need,” and “How might one adopt a tiny Smaug?”
From that one post, I sold 28 orders of dragons in 18 orders. Together with shipping, this totaled $421 earned. I was ecstatic. However, I quickly realized that this was not the get-money quick scheme I had hoped for.
This is where things start to go a bit south for this little venture of mine.
Making all of these by hand too a week longer than I thought it would, a week longer than I had told my customers it would. The size and especially the detail did not lend themselves to mass production or efficient handiwork. It took up all of the spare time I had, and I soon realized that this was not a sustainable business model.
I experimented with a few different ways to speed up to process, but it nothing helped enough. I decided that once I was done, I’d shut it down.
Since then, I’ve gotten a few people asking if I’m still making them. I do plan on automating production at some point. 3D printing companies like Shapeways are a perfect place to produce and sell figurines like this, especially as . This will probably be a project for next year, but I’m looking forward to it.
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