Well, look who came back! And if you didn’t, please be rest assured I’m only muttering slightly offensive things to you under my breath right now 😛
As promised, a summary of the startup journey so far:
- I learned everything I possibly could (and still am).
2. After an evening trip to the vet with my new puppy pooch, I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night, completely inspired with really random dog-related slogans (if you can call them that)?
I pulled out my laptop and just kept writing. This included things like: “Beware, my dog sits on people”, which in my mind was hilarious because both my dogs are or will be over 100lbs. “True things you’re not allowed to say out loud: My dog is less annoying than your kids!”…and many many funny things like that. But what to do with all this? I thought. It could be perfect for a t-shirt! And voila! I made my first decision to start selling t-shirts, and turns out many other things too!
3. We settled on RedBubble (yes, I am referring to myself as we, it seems less lonely :P). So we opened our RedBubble store! Like how I slipped that link in there? 😉
4. I started designing like crazy. I hadn’t done any graphic design the last 20 years, so there was a bit of a learning curve to get caught up on. By the way, no where near caught up yet! In retrospect, my first designs may not have been all that great…but hey, you gotta start somewhere?
5. I spent a week kicking myself between the POD design and KDP (self-publishing low content books, more on that later). I was exploring so many things, learning different design aspects and then rolling it out and posting my designs to my store. After 2 weeks, guess what happened?? Well, this “super easy” “get rich quick” plan, resulted in absolutely zero sales. Hmmm…
6. Time to start on the roller coaster ride of social media and self-promotion! For those of you that don’t know me, I’m not a big social media buff. In fact, I’ve had a Myspace account in the 90s and then a Facebook page in my teens. Never did more than that! Also turns out I hadn’t really been active on my personal profile in nearly 12 years…so ya, another learning curve for ya there!
7. My re-emergence into social society. I created a Facebook Business page and announced the launch of my new company, “Creative Creations”. I sent out an invite to what I thought was about 300 people…only 1 accepted. Thank you Ryan Bourdages! We haven’t spoken since high school but I really appreciated it! 😀
Here are a few things I learned along this particularly journey:
- Turns out, the invite only went out to 50 people, but still, only 1 follower people??
- Turns out, people were not nearly as excited about my new venture as one may have thought. I should mention, I am a bit of a hermit…and I think I did mention, I don’t really socialize right? People tend to forget about you after so many years…
- Also turns out, the company name I had chosen was actually already in use by several other companies!
Time for a REBRAND! I deleted everything from my Facebook business profile and restarted. Since I really didn’t know what I was doing when I started, the content there pretty much sucked anyway.
I spent an entire night trying to figure out a new company name. Did you know there are something like 4, or 40 million (I can’t remember which right now) new businesses started every year? Seriously! Do you know how hard that makes it to come up with a unique name that isn’t already in use? More on this story later, this post is getting way too long already!
On that note, I think I should end this blog post here to let you rest your potentially tired eyes. Or….not tired you say? Then cool! Join me in the next blog of this series and you can hear all about how I got suspended from Pinterest and stalked on Facebook! 😀 Exciting times!
Kaliverse Creations
Product Mockups
