In other random news, I am helping the company I work for develop a generic domain we own – www.MovingTruck.com. We’ll be initially focusing on helping people find a moving truck, figure out which moving truck rental is the best, evaluate moving companies, and find cheap moving boxes. We’ve also thought about having reviews on moving trucks and companies, and having people post their funny/horrendous moving stories. Stay tuned! Right now it’s just a placeholder site, but big things are on the way.

Total Orders: 81
Total Customers: 64
Percentage of customers we knew: about 50%
Total Revenue: $2700.58

I haven’t run the final numbers on profitability, but we probably came up just short. If we would have sustained our November/December pace, we would have been quite profitable, but the pickle pace slackened in the beginning of the year, and we lost motivation.

Now, on to bigger and better things!

In the end, postage killed us. It turns out $9 pickles are just too much to stomach, even if they do tickle the tastbuds, and arrive in delightful green packaging. The $20 price for the 4-month subscription seemed to appeal to a wide range of pickle lovers, but the additional $16 in postage usually killed the purchase in its tracks.

Lesson learned – don’t ignore the obvious.

Looking back, a lack of motivation played a part as well. We started off wonderfully, but as the month dragged on and orders did not take off, we lost our vigor. Not that that’s bad, it’s just a fact of life.

Lesson #2 learned – things become tedious when there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

I don’t mean to sound too down, the lessons and fun earned from POTM far outweigh the sadness of shutting it down. It’s been the source of bushels of laughs, smiles, lessons, strange looks, and countless other moments of joy over the last year. In fact, it even played a part in me getting my last job, and has opened up a number of doors since. Who would have thought?

Well, that’s enough rambling for this Sunday afternoon. May you always have wonderful, tasty pickles.

Pickliest Regards,
Doug

Until we flesh out a bit more of the site, we’re keeping things on the DL (that’s the down-low, for our older readers). We just have an email sign up right now, which we’ll keep up until launch. What are you wating for go sign up now!

Stayed tuned for updates, including screenshots and general tomfoolery.

More to come next week.

Check out the guide to making sweet beer shirts I made – http://www.squidoo.com/beershirts/

It almost makes our slow sales worries disappear.

Mike and I are pretty excited to see what kind of response we get for the pregancy pack. We’re hoping that we generate decent enough sales from that to offset the decline in regular pickle of the month subscriptions. I guess we’ll see!

I have made some gradual progress though. The staging site has the new product bundle (minus a good picture of a pregnant person – Dubs, I’ll be emailing you shortly to get that last piece taken care of). I also think I’ve identified the last component for the Proud Parent Blast – it’s a bib with a “lil pickle” on it. It’s cute, functional, and the right size for our packaging needs. My initial thought is to resell the one I found online, then create our own version if this proves to be a popular offering (and thus increase our margins).

Pickle sales are what one might label as slow, and by slow I mean Slowsky slow, so we’re hoping the new offering and the incremental advertising pays dividends. If not, we’ll just try something else. Afterall, we’ve got plenty of ideas…

Is this great or what? Combine this with a Big Papa and Hot Mama pickle, and you have yourself baby gift nirvana that’s fun for the whole family.

I’m here because I’m killing time while my wife goes to grad school. As it turns out, killing time is a lot of fun at Gil’s, mostly because they have two of my favorite beers (New Glarus Spotted Cow and Texas’ own Shiner Bock) and some rockin spinach artichoke dip. I learned to appreciate Shiner Bock while spending time in Houston as an Accenture employee. My advice to other first time visitors – enjoy the beer, but avoid sucking any crawfish heads. Trust me on this.

The aforementioned delicacies (beer and dip, not crawfish heads) were perfect complements for my detailing out the list of changes necessary to push ahead with our pregnancy-themed offerings. 45 minutes of web surfing tells me the pickle+pregnancy+baby market is horribly underserved (much like the monthly pickle market). With that in mind, here is my plan:

Step 1, itemized list of what needs to change (did this tonight)
Step 2, create the copy and upload the pictures to our staging site (Thursday).
Step 3, promote to the real site and test (Friday).
Step 4, sign up for Google AdWords advertising and see what happens (Fri-Sun)

I’ll do a separate post on Friday explaining our use of AdWords, because we think that’s a pretty powerful (and quantifiable) means for little guys like us to advertise like big companies.

Hopefully, our pickle pregnancy offering will be less controversial than Shiner Beer’s “Get Caught with Bock” campaign, where this image was found.