Just want to let all of you know
that you'll be receiving a few more emails from us between
now and the end of the year regarding our book, The MouseDriver
Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time
Entrepreneurs. If you don't want to receive the book emails,
just let us know. Otherwise, there will only be a few,
so if it gets too annoying, just delete 'em! For a little
more info on the book, visit Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738205737/mousedandplat-20.
Lessons
Learned
We'd be doing ourselves a terrible
injustice by not self-promoting the book a little more
in this Insider, so here goes. This thing is going to
be BIG! Well, actually, we really have no idea how big
it's going to be, but intuition tells us that the book
is going to do pretty well. If it does poorly, it definitely
won't be from lack of effort. We've been putting in 80-100
hour weeks over the past month or so developing a marketing
plan for the book, coordinating stuff with the publisher,
solidifying schedules and basically ramping up for the
release in January. To tell you the truth, it's been pretty
damn exciting...nd the recent reviews that we've received
have only helped to fuel this excitement. According to
Kirkus Reviews, we "share copious amounts of information
with generosity, humor, and All-American spirit" and the
book is "a must-have for those in the business of business".
Not too bad for a couple of dudes hocking computer mice
out of their kitchen.
Before we get too caught up in
the book, let's revisit our original marketing strategy
once again. Remember, the strategy has always been to
tie a "story" around the product (The story being why
would these two Wharton MBA's bypass all the great opportunities
of 1999 to bootstrap a novelty computer mouse company
out of their apartment?). We felt that if we gave people
an emotional tie to MouseDriver, we would give them another
reason to purchase besides the fact that it was an ultra-cool
novelty golf gift item. Think about Coca-Cola. Whenever
you see that one hour special on the history of Coke,
it kind of makes you feel like going out and buying a
Coke, whether you like the drink or not. That's what we
were kinda after. So, given that the book is the "story",
it plays right into our original strategy. We're really
hoping that the book helps to drastically increase sales
of MouseDriver. That's the whole point, right? You develop
your strategy, you patiently execute and you pray that
you chose the right strategy. If sales don't increase
because of the book, well, at least we tried and hopefully
learned what went wrong. At least we get a book out of
it!
Let's talk about irony. This whole
time, we've been waiting and waiting to get into the department
stores and the mass merchandisers. Well, now we're there
and it's an enormous headache! Here's the deal; once again
we have no leverage with the big retailers. Just because
they buy, let's say 15,000 MouseDrivers, doesn't mean
that we'll actually ever get paid for that amount. The
sales process works something like this. Somebody like
Lord & Taylor gives us a purchase order. We honor the
purchase order and ship L&T product. L&T receives the
product, but the label on one of the boxes is supposedly
off-white instead of gray. So we get a notice from L&T
saying that they are going to charge us $150 b/c our label
was the wrong color. Now it's up to us to prove to L&T
that the label was actually the right color and that the
chargeback was unjustified. In the meantime, L&T just
sits on our invoice until they've sold through all of
their MouseDrivers. If they don't sell all the MouseDrivers,
they either 1) send them back to us (with a check for
what they sold minus the $150 chargeback) or 2) they discount
the price, sell their inventory and then pay us (what
they owe us minus the $150 chargeback and whatever amount
that they had to discount). It's brutal, frustrating,
time-consuming and extremely labor intensive. And expensive...especially
if they charge you back so much that you end up owing
the department stores money! It makes you really appreciate
distributors and all of the warehouse folks who have to
deal with this on a daily basis. We only hope that we
end up collecting on all of our department store accounts.
We're getting absolutely crushed
by our inventory holding costs. In business school, we
always knew about holding costs, but it was never really
a "visible" expense. Now that expense is crystal clear
and it sucks! Think about it. Our product really just
ships a few months out of the year. The month leading
up to Father's Day and the two months leading up to Christmas.
During the other months, we're just taking up space and
selling onesey's and twosey's here and there. But, because
our warehouse and fulfillment center in Reno doesn't like
to have little guys like us around, they decided to levy
a $1500 minimum monthly fee. So even if we don't ship
a single unit during the month of January, we get hit
with a $1500 charge. That's $18,000/yr in minimum warehouse
fees! And that doesn't even include the labor expense
that is incurred during the several months in which MouseDrivers
are shipped. Needless to say, we're trying to alleviate
this inventory holding cost issue and are searching for
other companies out there. We're also hoping that in 2002,
most of our inventory investments are made based on purchase
orders that we receive beforehand. That way, we just drop
ship product in our customers warehouse and they incur
all of the holding costs. We'll see what happens.
What We've
Done
- Sold the UK and Commonwealth country
book rights to Simon & Schuster. They will be releasing
the book next Summer.
- Spoke at the Inc. Magazine Thinc Out
Loud Conference and a Glasshouse dinner event (Glasshouse
is a UK based entrepreneurial organization.pretty cool).
- Solidified all of the viral marketing
plans for the book and met with Perseus to coordinate
schedules and gain a better understanding of what to
expect in January.
- Sold a MouseDriver clamshell bundled
package to a couple of retailers for them to test during
the Holidays. If it goes well, we hope that they'll
order a ton of product in 2002.
Priority Goals
- Continue to approach mass merchandising
buyers in hopes of blowing out MouseDriver in 2002.
The book should help in bringing awareness to the product.
- Continue to try and figure out what
we're going to do moving forward. Do we build-out the
company, go into consulting, take "real" jobs, start
something else, etc? Big decision here.
- Make sure that we do all that we can
to market and promote the book and convince people that
it's not only educational, but also motivating and inspiring.
- Collect on the majority of our accounts
receivable from the department stores, pay off all the
company debt and try to figure out what to do about
our next inventory investment.
Mood Meter
You're 8 years old, it's the night
before Christmas, it's snowing outside and cookies and
milk are sitting next to the fire place to welcome Santa
Claus. You know that feeling of excitement, sleeplessness
and the whole "I can't wait" attitude that you had...that's
how we feel. If you don't celebrate Christmas, substitute
another holiday, or your first date, or a big game...you
get the picture.
Questions, comments, or criticisms
about the Insider? Email us at info@mousedriverchronicles.com.
