The Journey of Launching My First Product, “To Do Cal”

I was nodding along through a lot of this post. A while back, my wife and I started selling what are essentially speech bubble shapes cut from MDF and painted with blackboard paint. We sell and ship from Australia:

http://blackboardbubbles.com/

(They're bought by people for parties, weddings with photo booths, photographers, etc.)

I built a one page site and got a sale before we'd even created the product. At first, we relied upon a sibling with access to a college laser cutter and mailed out the product in expensive boxes.

Many of our adventures parallel that of Chris'. Weeks to get quotes progress on custom stickers, months of getting laser cutting quotes (including quotes from Asia or using material other than MDF), for the custom-made boxes we now use, handles, etc. We still paint the shapes by hand and cut/sand the handle shapes from broom stick dowel.

We've made some progress, but still have creases to iron out. Selling a physical product is an interesting adventure for someone who normally works on and builds virtual products/services.

I laughed at the photos of the room getting filled up with supplies. I've just installed new shelving in the garage to handle the 200 boxes we have folded and ready to go, the 600 cut-out pieces of MDF, the packing peanuts and bubble wrap, etc. Feels good to get on top of it all though!

Great blog and fun idea.

However, as far as I'm concerned the only 'innovative' part of this is the day-of-the-week indicator. Calendars like http://www.amazon.co.uk/2014-slim-month-black-calendar/dp/B0049MTCNQ/ref=pd_cp_kh_2 or http://www.amazon.co.uk/column-large-month-planner-calendar/dp/B0041H67O6/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1377678624&sr=8-13&keywords=calendar are actually better at conveying that information anyway and use less space to do so.

Even if the design itself were completely new (which I don't think it is), I'd be very reluctant to say that a calendar design idea is something that should be given a legal monopoly, so that even if someone else were to come up with the idea independently they should be barred from doing anything with it.

So I wish good luck to the poster, and thanks for clean design, an informative and interesting post, but also this: please compete on execution rather than trying to get the state to grant you a monopoly over an idea that is at best a small incremental change to designs that have been around for ages.

Did you do any product testing with the calendar with family/friends? Iterative design exists in physical products as well and I was surprised that you didn't mention any kind of testing/feedback before the actual sales.

I guess your first run of 250 could count as the product testing, though.

Suggestion: What about putting holiday names in block capitals on the line in a very light grey? Then you can see the holiday name clearly, but you can also write over it without feeling guilty or the print being too distracting. The small black print looks like it takes up enough of the line to be annoying.

Edit: There are a lot of distracting spelling mistakes in the blog entry that would make me slightly hesitant about ordering a printed product.