The Journey of Launching My First Product, “To Do Cal”

http://blackboardbubbles.com/

(They're bought by people for parties, weddings with photo booths, photographers, etc.)

I built a one page site and got a sale before we'd even created the product. At first, we relied upon a sibling with access to a college laser cutter and mailed out the product in expensive boxes.

Many of our adventures parallel that of Chris'. Weeks to get quotes progress on custom stickers, months of getting laser cutting quotes (including quotes from Asia or using material other than MDF), for the custom-made boxes we now use, handles, etc. We still paint the shapes by hand and cut/sand the handle shapes from broom stick dowel.

We've made some progress, but still have creases to iron out. Selling a physical product is an interesting adventure for someone who normally works on and builds virtual products/services.

I laughed at the photos of the room getting filled up with supplies. I've just installed new shelving in the garage to handle the 200 boxes we have folded and ready to go, the 600 cut-out pieces of MDF, the packing peanuts and bubble wrap, etc. Feels good to get on top of it all though!

"Fab is NOT automated, everything is done manually by emailing people back and forth a LOT. (At least when I worked with them). Everything is done through numerous people. There’s a person in charge of buying, editing your listing, shipping, accounting, UPS account setup, packing slips, payouts, etc… And they will all send you emails with forms, and excel spreadsheets, and instructions. It can get complicated on your first time through."

Once you're ready to expand, you ought to consider a calender that has the weekend at the end of the week, MTWTFSS, for those countries that have the week starting on a Monday.

I often hear people lament over "it only costs $3 to make China, why are they selling it for $19 here!" without realizing how many details and costs are involved.

It seems every month there is a new story on reddit/r/boardgames about someone with an idea for a killer new game who raises ten of thousands through Kickstarter but still can't ship the actual product.

Couldn't help but bring myself to check registration dates (this was a year and a half later after Day One gained huge numbers of customers).

Quite probably accidental, but what a way it would be to gain custom... :|

I guess your first run of 250 could count as the product testing, though.

Suggestion: What about putting holiday names in block capitals on the line in a very light grey? Then you can see the holiday name clearly, but you can also write over it without feeling guilty or the print being too distracting. The small black print looks like it takes up enough of the line to be annoying.

Edit: There are a lot of distracting spelling mistakes in the blog entry that would make me slightly hesitant about ordering a printed product.

He makes several strong points on ThemeForest's Avada theme. I recently read about this theme, it reputedly earned $1M for the author.

http://earnistan.com/inspiration/pakistani-freelancer-earns-...

However, as far as I'm concerned the only 'innovative' part of this is the day-of-the-week indicator. Calendars like http://www.amazon.co.uk/2014-slim-month-black-calendar/dp/B0... or http://www.amazon.co.uk/column-large-month-planner-calendar/... are actually better at conveying that information anyway and use less space to do so.

Even if the design itself were completely new (which I don't think it is), I'd be very reluctant to say that a calendar design idea is something that should be given a legal monopoly, so that even if someone else were to come up with the idea independently they should be barred from doing anything with it.

So I wish good luck to the poster, and thanks for clean design, an informative and interesting post, but also this: please compete on execution rather than trying to get the state to grant you a monopoly over an idea that is at best a small incremental change to designs that have been around for ages.

This and the accompanying graphic are 100% spot on. It's amazing how many times we continue read this same exact advice and continue to empirically ignore it in practice...especially for us techies. Sell first, build next.

The same thing was echoed by PG in the inc.com article that was posted recently [1].

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6278293

My only thought: You're going to use the profits to get rid of that PT Cruiser correct? ;D