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.

7 inches of bliss – The economics of DIY vinyl

I’m currently working on the release strategy for Pantaloon Descendo's “7 inches of bliss”, which I will be laying out here sometime in the next few days.

It's taking a bit longer than anticipated to come up with all the details, because I'm freaking clueless when it comes to music marketing.

Uhm, how do you marketing?!?

While I’m ironing out the details for the marketing strategy, I thought it would be interesting to explain some details on the production of the sleeve for “7 inches of bliss”.

Honestly, the initial decision to draw all of them by hand was a cost-cutting measure. Pressing 100 7-inch vinyls with printed sleeves would have cost $1,500. On the other hand, printing them with blank chipboard sleeves (solid brown-ish cardboard sleeves) was $1,300.

So, according to my initial calculations, if I were to draw them myself, I’d actually save $200.

Turns out, drawing them was quite an endeavour. In pure DIY style, this is what it entailed:

FRONT SIDE:

1) Write out “Pantaloon Descendo” in a stylish way (7 minutes)
2) Draw the stickman (3 minutes)
3) Color the stickman’s face (1 minute)
4) Draw the stickman’s face (1 minute)
5) Color the rainbow (7 pencil changes:  4 minutes)
6) Write “7 inches of bliss” (2 minutes)
7) Add all the little metallic-colored sperm (2 minutes)
Total time for the front side: 20 minutes

BACK SIDE:

1) Draw 3x big sperms (3 minutes)
2) Lettering track list and numbering (4 minutes)
3) Contouring 3x big sperm (2 minutes)
4) draw all additional colored sperm (2 minutes)
Total time for the back side: 11 minutes

Total time per copy: +/-30 minutes.

30 minutes for 100 copies equals 50 hours.

So, it took me 50 hours to save $200. 

Was it really worth it? 

Based on time alone, every hour worked on it saved me $4.

But that’s not all there is to it. Let’s add the cost of the art material I had to purchase:

- it took me roughly 20 archival pens, ($2,50 each). Chipboard is really rough and ate through the archival pens’ tip very early.

- three white pencils ($1 each) to colour the face. 

- 7 coloured pencils for the rainbow ($1,50 each)
- 5 metallic pens to draw the sperms on the rainbow ($3 each)

Total art cost: $78.50

So, if we factor that in, I saved $2.43 per hour (or $1.215 per copy) since I was able to produce 2 copies per hour.

All in all, it took me 50 hours to save $121.50; not exactly a sound investment, because it means I worked at an hourly rate of $2.43. My day job pays waaaay more than that.

But…

The sleeves look fucking amazing!

Given the amount of time versus the money I saved… Would I do it again?

The answer is a reluctant yes, only because it looks really really good.