You are reading 3Bits & Change, Joseph's weekly email about building a direct to consumer business on the internet. Today’s email was written to a classical station Alexa chose. Follow @josephrueter on Instagram or Linkedin. Follow Vivront.com on Instagram and Facebook. If you haven’t already, subscribe!
Good morning,
I woke up and realized it’s Wednesday. It’s not Tuesday. Ha. So a Tuesday email is being sent on a Wednesday. Welcome to the effort.
Thanks for the idea to just blow out the backgrounds on packaging shots Tim. Like, duh. I have a 1.4, 85mm. Here is an example of a new shot on the way to a webpage near you. I bet Google’s product feed will reject it because the background is not white. I’ll solve that problem later.
A fun week last week. Packaging updates and design bleed over to shipping the knife skills course this week. YES! It’s shipped. Positive effort there. We’ve added two new states to the shipping catalogue this week (MT and NC). We’ve set up a mtg with a national influencer in school lunch and a different mtg with big food blog org for next week. Looking forward to both of those.
As for this issue, the course, realtors and logistics are on my mind.
Bit #1
In an effort to design a way toward achieving a consistent 25 knife sets a day I’ve wondered about the kinds of things that happen regularly that could be attached to knife sharpening.
Could it be filling up your gas tank? Meh. Happens to often? It’s not tangential. It’s a gas station. What else do people do on a rhythm? Maybe it’s going to the meat smoker place? That’s a parallel experience and it happens maybe once or twice a year? Maybe. What else? What about buying a house?
So, I’ve been talking with some realtors about partnerships. Knives are changing drawers and a lot about a person’s life and possessions gets evaluated during a move. Maybe a sharpening kit makes sense as a gift a realtor provides. We’ll see where that goes. It increases the need for an automated “gift buying” flow in Shopify that does not yet exist. This is similar to the shipping issue we’re going to need to solve with an API. More work to do there. But, it’s an exciting idea.
What realtor do you know that you’d share knife sharpening with? They could provide it to their clients when they purchase a new home. We could build a semi-predictable flow of knife sets enough to hire our first staff member when we get to 25 sets a day.
Bit #2
Logistics are nuts right now. The shipping issues with actual ships are a big deal. But the local USPS is seeing silly delays too. Mail that usually gets delivered around 10AM is getting delivered after 6PM, sporadically. That’s not going to cut it when we’re aiming to turn knife sets around ASAP.
So, we’ve picked a new postbox, at the actual Post Office. George helped us set it up. His 40 plus years of service did not need to be displayed via pins on his badge for me to know that he has rented boxes a few times before. Thanks for the help George! We’d love to come stand in your line to see you but we thank you for ensuring the mail will be in our box by 10AM. Here’s to keeping a blazing fast turnaround as our standard.
Know someone that can help us keep the mail going for 10 days in DEC? Let us know. The shop will go still while we’re out of town.
Bit #3
The skills course is live. If you’re in it already, let us know how it’s going. If you want in go signup on the fancy flyout modal at vivront.com
We’ll see if this does a better job than the Free Shipping offer we’ve been running for over a month with less than 10 people signing up from a few thousand unique sessions. :)
The course is 13 emails over ~20 days covering a set of common kitchen things from raw cutting boards to how to hold a knife. Join up, on the bottom of this page vivront.com
Sum
Good progress being made on packaging. We’re looking for a stable 25 knife sets a day from our cold start here. Maybe realtors are a way to get to that stability. We’re going to have new landing pages for packages soon to share with the co-ops and barbeque stores.
On Your Way
May you be making great progress on your adventures as well. Hit reply. I’m interested in how your building is going too.