A Skinned Knee
I don’t know if you’ve had the pleasure of skinning a knee lately, but I did today. I was rushing from my house when I fell face-forward, and yes, it still hurts, and the two band-aids aren’t doing a lot for me.
Why mention this on The Hundred Dollar Business experiment site?
Mainly because I think the reason behind the skinned knee was my lack of sleep. I’m not really a mystic person who assigns cosmic meaning to normal experiences, I just think I’m running on such low energy that apparently walking is starting to be a difficulty. Not a good sign. But wait, it gets better.
The Marinara Fiasco
A few hours later, I managed to spill an entire tub of marinara sauce on my lap as I was driving back to the mall. I still can’t decide which was worse, the knee or the marinara.
Walking inside the mall with 8 ounces of tomato sauce mashed into my skirt was also highly unpleasant. Perhaps the enticing smell of tomato sauce is the reason we did fairly well today?
Anyway, here’s the deal– I have been staying up grossly past midnight, and according to the experiment, that’s off-limits. So I need to change that.
Skinning my knee is a great, painful reminder of how sleep deprivation can also affect my ability to make and execute plans for the business. So, I’ll make this post as short as possible so I can unplug for a bit. 
Sales, Sales, Sales
Someone posted a comment last night about retail holiday sales, which I haven’t had a chance to reply to yet. Anyway, she gave a great suggestion, that instead of worrying about “selling”, that it’s better to create an environment where people feel comfortable to look, pick things up, not feel pressured, and enjoy themselves. That was an awesome concept that really helped today.
Some of the things we are trying include:
1. Pulling the inventory out of the packaging as much as possible,
2. Putting some of the dolls on lower levels so the kids can reach them.
3. Having samples of the Nutty Guys nut trays and Channing’s Bundt Cakes so people will try them… like them… and buy them!
4. Giving the customers some time to browse before approaching them. (If they wandered to the kiosk on their own).
5. Consolidating the products and sorting them, so they are easier to process visually.
And more. I can’t remember the rest.
But I’ll be honest, I’m starting to worry about sales. We’re having sales, and have had them from day one, which is amazing for a five-day-old startup, but I am constantly wondering if it is enough on many levels. For break even. For ROI. For doing as well as we have the potential to do. For making a gazillion dollars, besides.
I guess that’s the plight of every business owner, right? The good thing for us is that for the most part, we don’t have overhead– though each of us has a breakeven figure, whether that is for product, time spent, or remaining portion of the lease. What we have is completely do-able at the pace we’re taking, which is great news. But…
Are We A Lifestyle Idea or A Fundable Idea?
When I was brainstorming the experiment, I remembered reading Brock Blake’s recent post about how there’s a difference between a “fundable” idea and a “lifestyle” idea. The main difference was that a fundable idea would provide a ROI 10-30 times the initial investment, but a lifestyle idea provides income for the owner & some employees, but not much beyond that.
So on one hand, we’re doing really well, as a “lifestyle” idea, and also technically as a fundable idea (with the investment being $100, an ROI of 10-30x shouldn’t be hard to hit). I think The Hundred Dollar Business as a concept is a fundable idea, but running a kiosk is a lifestyle idea. At least, running one kiosk. Thousands of kiosks… could be fundable.
But either way, I want to maximize the opportunities that we have during this month. And what I’ve realized is that even with the improvements we’re making in salesmanship, presentation, etc., there is still a cap to how well the kiosk can really do, so I’m starting to turn my thoughts to other ways of growing business as well. At the same time, I definitely want those new ideas to be a quality effort.
By the way, someone inquired as to how much sales per day we are at. I don’t know if that’s totally appropriate public info, but hey, it’s my blog, right? So far, on a slow day in early December about $150, and on average, $200-$250, and on a great day, $350. Then again, we’ve only been here 5 days, most of them typically sloooooow mall days– Mon, Tues, Wed. Our goal is to get to $1,000/day as soon as possible, however– which is totally reasonable for a mall during the holidays.
How to Monetize the Model?
We’re a business, right? So we want to make profit. As much as possible? Yes and no. For example, we’re trying to determine the best ways to monetize our online presence, as well. But, I don’t want to cheapen the blog, you readers’ attention, or our concept. Yes, unfortunately, we want to do things the classy way.
We’ve had some great suggestions from you about ways we can monetize the concept more than we are already. Some of them are fairly easy, and we may do them. The winners currently are to:
1. Integrate a shopping cart option on this site so people can order our Nutty Guys holiday trays, Channing’s Bundt Cakes (they’re shippable, y’all!), Kelly’s princess gear, etc.
2. Put affilate links to our vendors’ online stores.
3. Make t-shirts on zazzle.com or cafepress.com or another site.
4. Use AdSense.
5. Write short articles & charge .50 or $1.00 each for them. (This actually sounds fun– I’d like to do something like “The 10 Most Amusing Things That Happened Today“.
(Just as a freebie, today I was handing out bundt cake samples, and one gentleman (mid-fifties? keep in mind that I’m 25.) said, “oh, that looks sweet.” and when I tried to give him one of the samples, he declined, giggling and saying, “I was talking about you.” It pretty much made my day.)
6. Use YouRep to host our pictures, and receive revenue from that traffic.
Anyway, not to run my entire business plan by the entire Internet, but I wanted some feedback from the blogosphere– because I think that there needs to be a meaningful product/service, not just any product or service, and I certainly don’t have free time on my hands to waste.
Do you like these ideas? Would you buy or participate in any of these products/services? (Would anyone else? Would a lot of anyone else?) And, of course, what are your better ideas?
By the way, tomorrow, courtesy of local video production team, Copper Rain, we are filming a couple of short interview videos to talk more about the ideas behind The Hundred Dollar Business and our experiences so far. They said I couldn’t wear my sweatpants. And here I thought I was the boss.
Thanks for reading. Your comments are fabulous, and I’m answering them as I have time & Internet access! And now, I’m off to sleep!
2 Comments
December 7, 2006 at 7:02 am
Hi Carolynn,
Johnathan again, of the AdSense suggestion.
In terms of your other monetizing ideas I think most of them are good, except that since your motivation for going brick & mortar instead of online was to cut down on the online learning curve, things like adding a shopping cart might be a little… curve-intensive. A cafepress store certainly couldn’t hurt - but in terms of potential revenue vs. time invested I suspect that one or another of the affiliate ideas will be the lowest hanging fruit.
I take your point that you don’t want AdSense (or any other affiliation) to cheapen the site, but I will offer a couple counterpoints to consider:
1. AdSense will let you customize the look of your ads pretty extensively - so you can use a smaller ad block, text instead of graphics, matching colour scheme, etc. as ways of making the ads less glaring. Really, internet users are quite good at ignoring them (though see point #3 below) but more importantly I don’t think anyone reading this blog would begrudge your using them, as long as they’re kept unintrusive. (Just so we’re clear, google doesn’t do blinking flash ads and popups and the rest of it, if you choose text only, understated text is all you get.)
2. Google will actually only serve 3 ad blocks for a given page. This is to prevent people scamming the system by creating pages with hundreds of ad blocks but for you it means that even if you added one to each post, Google’s magic would stop it from becoming overwhelming.
3. A surprising number of people click on the ads. On my own blog I get about a 5% click-through rate which, to me, implies that they aren’t particularly hateful things to include. Not that you said they were or anything, it just comes back to the refrain that most readers understand why the ads are there, and many will even use them. This is probably helped by google’s ability to make the ads relevant.
I’m really not a google spokesperson or anything - I just know that my own hosting bills are paid for a couple times over by adsense, and my blog is just a random collection of thoughts, whereas yours stands to build a regular, daily readership.
December 8, 2006 at 8:39 am
Johnathan,
You are such a good salesmen– even if you aren’t working for Google!
I think that I will look into AdSense a bit more, and perhaps try it out?
Thank you so much for your explanation! I really appreciate you taking the time to give me more details. And I like your other ideas as well.
Keep reading and giving suggestions, we love it!
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