Friday 12 May 2017

Diary Excerpt from an Amateur Entrepreneur


Friends, today the star of Print Me Happy had a catastrophic public meltdown.
If my enormous pink printer were a toddler, it just threw an electronic tantrum so embarrassing that it required me to walk away and abandon my child in a crowd of strangers.

In about 2 hours time, I have to go and get it and bring it home.

Enough time for a blog post then.

How I saw this business working and how this business is working (or not) are such unrelated concepts that they couldn't even be thought of as third cousins. Indeed, I now believe all business ideas are in fact shimmering commercial mirages that lead the gullible into throwing money at other businesses you didn't even know existed yet.

(How do I become a business that other businesses throw money at? Now that's a question worth answering.)

The two concepts that have kept me strong throughout the delivery errors, the software glitches, the transport mishaps, the blue-screen-of-death episodes and now the epic public electronic tantrum are:

1. I must be learning something by going through all this pain.
(Devoutly religious people have flagellation, I have a deeply flawed printer from China).

2. The best way to become successful is to fail forward ie. fall over, get up try something else, short-circuit, get up unplug machine...

The other very real problem I face is that my revenue model isn't working out so well.
At the moment, I charge $4 per photo, with $1 from every photo going back to the school or charity that is running the event. People LOVE the printer, but they don't always want to buy a photo. I need to sell LOTS of photos to make decent money. So far my highest sell has been 35 photos :(

Today I decided I have to close the doors for a little while and think about how to go forward. I need to fix the technical issues, and I need to change the revenue model too.

The life of an Amateur Entrepreneur is never easy, but if you have any bright ideas or want to give me some business advice, I'd welcome it with open arms.

Here's to Print Me Happy 2.0 in a few months time.




1 comment:

  1. Keep going! More homework and you will get it right. I have faith in you and your idea's

    ReplyDelete