Always be ready for a sale - I wasn't

Yesterday, I blogged about the economics of producing a DIY vinyl sleeve for Pantaloon Descendo’s “7 inches of bliss” and posted it on reddit in the /r/vinyl subreddit.

To my surprise, the post did really good and was upvoted way more than I thought it would. That means the post gained traction and went up in visibility on reddit, driving good amounts of traffic to this blog.

To put you in context: before I published the post on DIY vinly sleeve economics, I had 187 pageviews total for this blog. After I posted it on reddit, this is what happened:

You can see a spike. 

That's definitely a spike.

At the moment of writing this current post (24 hours after the article on DIY economics), it had been viewed 2137 times (so far). To a lot of well-established bloggers, this is nothing. But for me, this means worlds. 

It's been viewed way more than any of my previous posts:

In all honesty, when I posted on reddit, I wasn't trying to make a sale. 

My aim was simply to provide information on the mechanics and costs involved; if other people can learn from my experience, I thought it could help them.

However, I was not ready for people to actually be interested in ordering copies. The release date isn’t set for at least another 2 months. I just thought it would be cool to showcase the product and provide some metrics. 

Man, I wasn't ready for that.

In fact, the web store isn’t even ready yet; the simple option of ordering through a few clicks is not even functional yet. 

That’s dumb, I know. I should’ve been ready. I wasn’t.

But then again, surprise customer interest is a good problem to have.

I had to come up with a solution.

I offered interested people to e-mail me at The Mustache Club's email address, which would then allow me to invoice them via PayPal. Thankfully, my PayPal account was already set up.

Or so I thought.

After I created my first PayPal invoice, it asked me to confirm my e-mail address: can't send the invoice yet.

Crap!

I don't have access to my The Mustache Club e-mail account at work; I will have to wait until tonight to confirm my PayPal account. 

Re-crap!

I hate to make people wait.

Re-re-crap!

That will be a valuable lesson: always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always be ready for a sale.

***

As a way to counterbalance the fact that the ordering process was a little bumpy, I decided to mail advance copies to all redditors who order by Friday. Instead of asking customers to wait until it's actually released in 2 months, I thought it would be a nice gesture to send it now.