Building Be Awesome
Building Be Awesome - Holy Crap, We Sold Something!
I made a sale.
Actually, that's not quite how I found out.
I was looking at my bank account and noticed a deposit from Etsy for eleven dollars and some change.
Huh.
What's that?
So I logged into Etsy.
Holy crap. We sold something.
Someone bought a pack of be awesome. note cards.
Our first sale.
Now, I realize we're not exactly ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange here. It's one pack of note cards.
But it's one pack of note cards that somebody exchanged actual money for.
And that feels pretty damned good.
Wait. Who bought them?
This is where it gets even better.
The person who bought the cards isn't a friend of mine.
They're a friend of one of my Instagram friends.
That's only one degree of separation, but it's an important degree.
Since I started this little experiment a month ago, friends have been incredibly supportive. They've followed the account. They've liked and shared posts. They've encouraged me. Some have told their friends about it. The reach isn't huge, but it isn't small and grows a little each day.
That's wonderful.
But eventually, if this is going to become something, the idea has to travel beyond the people who already know me.
This time, it did.
Somewhere along the way, be awesome. traveled from me, through someone else, to someone I don't know.
And they bought the cards.
That's pretty cool.
So, naturally, I did math
Nothing complicated.
Back-of-the-napkin math.
I have an unspoken goal for this little business. I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I don't want the number to become the reason I'm doing this.
But, of course, I know what the number is.
So I looked at the sale, looked at what I actually made from it, and started scribbling.
Turns out, if I could repeat this particular sale about 18 times a day, I'd get there.
Eighteen.
That's simultaneously a very small number and an absolutely enormous number.
One sale doesn't mean I know how to get to 18 sales a day.
It doesn't mean I've proven a business model.
It doesn't mean we've cracked Etsy, Instagram, marketing, e-commerce, or anything else.
It means we made one sale.
But that's different from zero.
Zero is theoretical
At zero sales, you're still wondering.
Will anybody actually buy this stuff?
Do people like the idea enough to spend money on it?
Can this thing I've been building move beyond friends politely clicking the little heart button?
I don't have all of those answers yet.
Not even close.
But I have one data point I didn't have before.
Somebody I don't know saw something we made and said:
I'll have one of those.
Then Etsy did its thing.
Printify did its thing.
And eleven dollars and some change mysteriously appeared in my bank account before I even knew what had happened.
There are now be awesome. note cards making their way to someone who wasn't in the room when any of this started.
I love that.
Next week we'll get back to figuring out templates, campaigns, products, marketing, Etsy, Instagram, and all the other things I don't know what I'm doing with yet.
Today?
We made a sale.
We're gonna need a bigger napkin.