First and foremost, shoutout to Ryan Daniel Moran, author of the book I’m reading: 12 Months to $1 Million for commenting on a previous post with some very encouraging words. He’s out there finding random blogs and rooting for us! Cheers.
This brings me to my current obstacle on my road to earning more than a doctor: finding my customers. If you’ve been following along, I recently launched an ultralight tripod adapter on Amazon targeting a specific niche of backpacker known as “Ultralight” backpackers. I’m actually very new to backpacking but a friend with over a decade of experience sold me on the idea. It combines elements from minimalism, zen, and works as creative thinking exercise in ways to reduce total weight of my gear. I totally geeked down this rabbit hole and had a lot of fun planning my gear, counting ounces (even down to grams) and found that the planning was something I really enjoyed in the off-season. i found myself constantly browsing for higher quality, lighter options to upgrade my gear. Then it occurred to me that there were things I wanted that I couldn’t find.
I thought about some specific pain points from my backpacking trips. The first of the was the “group picture”. There’s only so many selfies you can take with a group. There are enormous breathtaking landscapes where you can’t fit without shoving half of your face into the picture. Finding people to help you with pictures become increasingly difficult the further you get away from civilization. I found that the “picture person” in our group wanted to take more photos with her in it, but ended up taking awesome pictures of all of us. She was left out and it made me feel bad. The other pain point is bothering other people to take a picture. This is my personal pet peeve. If I’m backpacking, it’s because I want to get away from all the people and their narcissistic tendencies of social media. If they had this product, there’d be more peace in the backcountry.
After rushing inventory and trying to get the product launched asap, I didn’t do any of the deck stacking Ryan mentions in the book. I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible and now I’m sitting on inventory that isn’t selling. The category is very broad on Amazon and I’m getting lots of clicks withouts conversions so it’s more of an awareness building campaign. I tried finding outdoor groups on reddit to advertise too during Christmas which only led to a few sales. After reading and listening to this chapter a few times, I started brainstorming where I can advertise to my customers. My limited research has found plenty of niche websites, gear places, and it’s going to come down to seeing how big of a bang my dollar can get.
I decided to layout the foundation of my social media campaign. I started accounts on Instagram, TikTok, & YouTube with a focus on making one video a week at home featuring the product I’m trying to sell in creative and fun ways. This hopefully will generate buzz and a following that will drive sales of this product and the next ones. This is a longer type plan and I’m quite limited in funds right now with inventory purchases for other products. I also have some time-sensitive personal debts I need to take care of this year which puts me in a very tough financial decision. Do I put cash toward business or risk not having enough for rent? It’s a tough call. I eventually want to put myself in a good position where I can go all-in on the business. I’ll probably use 2023 as my 12 months to see if I can scale this effectively. I’ll keep you posted on the way. This blog may migrate to the new venture: Ultralight_Ideas —-Keep hustling.