This week I am saying goodbye to a project of mine that you’ve probably never heard of. It’s called Writer Wares.
The idea behind it was simple: I’m entrepreneurial. I’m creative. I like coffee. What if I made coffee mugs for writers specifically? It seemed great! And I dove in, with designs like this:
or this:
or this one that I’m especially fond of:
Why and How
The whole endeavor was meant to be as low overhead, low risk as possible for me. I set it all up through a drop-shipper, and opened a website. I had no idea how build a merchant website, I didn’t know what drop-shippers were. The end result was in less than a week I set up a new business website, and I was able to sell mugs that way. I didn’t touch order fufillment – the drop-shipper did. They made the mugs off the designed I uploaded, packaged them, and mailed them.
I did it for two reasons. One, because it was a learning experience: I’d never stood up a business before. Learning about how it works, what tools are out there, what you can accomplish on very little money. Two, because I talk a lot about marketing. I wanted a chance to focus on just the marketing side of a product – to buy my own ads, to analyze them, build campaigns, and see if I could make it work.
I couldn’t.
I don’t say that with shame, to be clear. Fundamentally, the goal was to learn, and I did that, and I really enjoyed it. But still, it failed. I did not make money. It was about $30 a month every month for access to the drop-shipper, which meant I needed to sell at least a few mugs every month just to break even. I didn’t.
Mistakes I made
Up my Design Game
One is I think I could have made better designs. I liked the ones I had well enough, but the fact is I’m not a graphic designer, and this is a skill I could improve on. I was also doing all of this in just Canva or Gimp; I didn’t even have Photoshop at the time. Fundamentally, a lot of people looked at the mugs but they just didn’t click through to purchase.
Time
I stood the website up in December, as fast as I possible could, and it went live ~December 10th. To have orders for Christmas, they needed to be placed by the 15th. Five days to get your word out there is pretty poor.
I also think I spent my time poorly. I spent a LOT of time in January working on setting up the Twitter, IG, FB feeds, and trying to come up with a clever and catchy internet presence that… didn’t really work. That was a non-trivial part of my time every. Single. Day. And honestly? The fact is when I look at the time I spent on that, the account had maaaaybe 150 followers (and I couldn’t bring myself to play follower games), and I garnered almost zero traffic from Twitter. A handful from Facebook, but not much. A $100 in Facebook ads reached literally two orders of magnitude more people than my attempt at “organic” social media could. And that’s because organic social media takes TIME to grow, and I wasn’t giving it that in an authentic way.
Instead of spending my time worrying about the social media side of things, I should have just worked on better designs and let FB ads do their thing. If people like what I have, then I can worry about that social media game.
Oh, and that COVID
I suppose I can’t talk about this without mentioning COVID as I think it is pretty clear COVID has textured all of our lives this year in 2020. I don’t blame COVID for this not taking off – no, no. But with COVID and everything else happening in 2020, I also just couldn’t bring myself to actually work on it. It seemed so gauche to be out there convincing people to buy my baubles.
Yes, I like the mugs. They are a fun bit of inspiration, and I loved having mugs that made me think of writing and motivating myself. But with so many people losing jobs and dying and the potential disintegration of democracy… look nobdy needs my cheap printed mugs, and I couldn’t bring myself to market them in good conscious. There’s a reason I almost never mentioned it on my own personal Twitter.
Winding Down… for Now
So, I’m winding it down. We’ve got a kid coming, and I need as much off my plate as possible. If I couldn’t bring myself to work on this during COVID times, I know I sure won’t during kid times.
Technically, it’s in stasis, not gone. WriterWares.com is still active, but there is just a dummy page that says it is currently down. The social media accounts exist and I am sitting on them for the foreseeable future, but they have been purged of all content.
I don’t have any immediate plans to come back to it, but I also know myself: I probably will, at least for another try. I still have a page of design sketches I’m trying, and I like playing with photoshop, and who knows where that will end up? And Facebook ads are POWERFUL – learning to take advantage of them is a definitely skill.
But for now, it’s winding down. Good-evening but not good-bye, ya know? And that’s okay.
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