09:18 – This is pretty cool. We started selling science kits in June 2010. In the first 18 days of August, we’ve sold more science kits–units and revenue–than we did in all of 2010. For that matter, to-date August sales exceed our cumulative sales for the first six months of 2011, and for the first three months of this year.
And what’s really cool is that we’re starting to see a fair number of repeat customers, people who bought a biology kit last year and ordered a chemistry kit this year, or vice versa. I think our original plan of building the business slowly and depending on word-of-mouth is working pretty well.
Outstanding! And good call on your part.
Mrs. OFD enroute to Montgomery, Alabama this morning from Wyoming and Colorado. Very quiet here on the Bay so fah.
It’s just as well that you’re not doing the traditional marketing route of sending brochures to homeschooling groups, placing ads in newsletters, and such. You’d never be able to keep up with the orders.
Although… If you were any kind of real Mad Scientist you’d have already spliced another arm or two onto your torso. You’d be able to perform manual tasks much faster, once you’d practiced a bit. Or you could put chips into the brains of monkeys and have them do the manual operations. This has the added benefit that you could update the program in their brain chips and convert your monkey workforce into a monkey army.
The things one could do with a monkey army! The mind boggles.
Word of mouth travels at the speed of sound, but only when it is in operation. Home schoolers are quite vocal about stuff like this, so your plan should work fine, as long as you want to stay small. SteveF correctly points out that traditional methods would soon swamp you.
Yeah, we’re working on that for next year. Abby is creating a logo and a letter-size, two-sided, four-color handout. Most home school conventions provide handout bags to attendees. We’d send them a bunch of the handouts and they’ll stuff them into the attendee bags pretty inexpensively, typically $0.10 each or thereabouts.
I figured we’d get 5,000 or so printed up and try having them distributed at a few early homeschool conventions to see what happens. I figure there’s no reason we won’t eventually be able to ship 10,000 or more kits a year, but we’re sure not going to do it without employees and without commercial space for the operation.
I got all excited when I read
Wow! Cyborg monkeys! Four-armed Frankenchemists!
… Oh. Four-color brochures. How… exciting.
No, the Cyborg monkeys aren’t on the schedule until at least 2020, and the Frankenchemists are even further out.
I appreciate all the advice about hiring employees, renting industrial space, and so on, and eventually we’ll probably do both of those. But not yet. I’m inherently conservative. If I were a military commander, I’d specialize in defense. Those great offensive generals like Custer and Patton simply have completely different mindsets.
There’s no question, lots of people found Custer greatly offensive. And Patton too, come to that.
Well, I was unjust to Patton, who was a superb tactician. Custer, on the other hand, was basically a mad dog. He just attacked.
Well the Cyborg Chemists are in the Defiance TV show along with the Franken Monkeys. The Franken Monkeys are big suckers too, around 7 ft and 400 lbs. The cyborg chemist / doctor is just freaky though. She is very devious character and way too knowing of explosives and body possessions.