10:17 – Yesterday we made up 60 small parts bags for the biology kits. Today we’ll make up a batch of small parts bags for the chemistry kits. We’re in better shape on chemistry kits than biology kits, so this coming week I’ll start making up chemicals for another batch of 60 biology kits. We also now have everything we need in stock for the remaining kits for the virtual school AP chemistry order, so I’ll work on those. I’d like to get them shipped by Friday. And I’m also still trying to get migrated over to the new computer, which is now running Linux Mint 15 KDE.
I’ve mentioned that Barbara and I are watching the TV series One Tree Hill. One of the teenage characters, Brooke, has an eye for clothes design. She decides to sell her clothes on-line, and gets a geek friend to set her up an e-commerce site. So I’m watching this developing train wreck, knowing what’s about to happen. Sure enough, they bring up the e-commerce site and orders start flooding in. The only problem is that Brooke is getting ten times as many orders as she can fulfill. “Make it stop!”, she tells her geek friend. That’s a situation I never want to find us in, so I’ve avoided doing any advertising or promotion. Selling 50 or 100 kits a month is one thing. We can deal with that. Selling 50 or 100 kits a week is another thing entirely.
But we are going to start promoting in 2014. I have Abby working on a logo and hand-out sheet. Most homeschool conventions give goody bags to attendees. Conventions typically offer vendors of homeschool products the opportunity to have their hand-out sheets included in those bags for $80 to $100 per thousand. We’ll start small, having maybe 5,000 hand-out sheets printed and getting them distributed at four or five conventions. Our goal for 2014 is to sell 1,000 kits. We’ll see what happens.
You seem pretty busy now. I don’t see why you’re going to promote your business when you already have enough work to do.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m trying to get into the 1% so I can dine on steak and caviar after the collapse OFD predicts.
Only kidding. I don’t actually like caviar.
There are different kinds of caviar. Maybe you just haven’t found a kind you like. Or the right way to prepare it. Tip: don’t season it with the tears of the peons whose dreams you’ve just crushed. Caviar is already salty.
Oh, and don’t forget the cigars which you light with hundred dollar bills. Though inflation has made that less impressive than it used to be, you can make up the difference by having poster-sized prints made up of you cackling evilly as you light a cigar with peon blood money, then distributing them at the next Occupy gathering.
I was thinking more on the lines of King Louis in History of the World: Part I shooting skeet using cheap peasants instead of expensive clays.
You could make a morality play out of that, after the OFDerific collapse. You’ll have plenty of food n stuff as well as the skills to get by. Most of the masses will be cold and hungry and generally pathetic. You can build a trebuchet, then tell the masses that if they offer up one of their member to be flung, you’ll feed nine of them for a day. When they (inevitably) go along with that, it’ll be a capsule demonstration of the modern parasitic morality that led to the collapse in the first place.
RBT: Regarding your posts regarding Netflix, you may be interested in this from today’s LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-netflix-ted-sarandos-20130825-dto,0,1864697.htmlstory
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-netflix-ted-sarandos-20130825-dto,0,1864697.htmlstory
Thanks, great article!
“Its Internet streaming service now boasts 38 million members in 40 countries, who watch about a billion hours of TV shows and movies each month — a dramatic rise from the 6.7 million customers it had in the DVD-centric days of June 2007. ”
Wow, is it ever becoming obvious that the future of TV is streaming over the net? OTA is dead, Comcast will not be able to force you to buy cable in addition to their internet because you will go to wireless. I use AT&T u-verse internet at the house (18 mpbs DSL line, I think, $50/month) because Comcast refused to sell me internet. Now they want me.
“The company reported net income of $29.5 million for the latest quarter ended June 30, nearly quintuple its profit for the same period in 2012. Revenue shot up to $1.1 billion, up 20% from a year ago.”
And streaming is cheap compared to setting up a satellite network. Good and cheap always win over their competition. As Pournelle say, “good enough”.
I still use DirecTV for TV and am considering upgrading to a Genie. I currently pay $100/month. But the daughter uses Netflix back in her room.