You are reading 3Bits & Change, Joseph's email about building a direct to consumer business on the internet. Today’s email was written to Mayer’s Born & Raised.
Good morning,
The bits are developments in Vivront today - a status on the business.
Bit #1 • Not the right time, for them
For a number of weeks I was sending 5 outbound emails to co-ops a day regarding our retail package. Every other day or so I’d change the pitch a bit. I’d test the replies. My questions were things like: Which part of the Vivront story matters to them? How to frame it successfully as a concept first (before the buy) because this is a new idea. What’s the so what for them?
A few keys we’ve learned through our series of no replies:
Customers with sharp knives [tend to] purchase more meat and produce.
With Vivront, you can serve customers and their knives without customers EVER bringing them into your store.
If your butchers sharpen knives they are both distracted from their primary tasks and taking on the liability of potentially hundreds, even thousands, of dollars of customer property.
We even sharpen serrated knives and perform repairs too.
After each “No” I’ve received from these stores I’ve asked what about the offer or the pitch or the deal would need to change for them to consider it again. Here I thought they’d want more margin or what have you. That’s never come up. Rather, in every case this week the reply has been some form of “there is nothing.” Roughly put it goes like this, “There is nothing to change. It’s a nice, even good, idea. We want to do it. It’s just not the right time. We’re still short staffed. We’ve not done a formal category review in two years and we’re not ready to try something new until things are back to normal.”
I get it, but also, ug. Are things ever “going back to normal?” If they did, what does that mean? How would we know we’re back to normal? I wonder if trying new things is more about time and “feeling” than things going back to normal. Simply, more time needs to pass before some people are willing “feel like” trying new things. Afterall, it’s only been a few months since going to a coffee shop to work on a laptop was normalized and not “new,” again.
Sometimes there is nothing to do to make someone or some team buy your thing. The product is good, the brand is good, the pitch is good… all good. You’ll just have to wait them out or go find others who are ready to buy. :)
Bit #2 • Keep at it
We have three potential deals for a retail space under negotiation. This comes after months of outbounding to brokers and landlords of preferable locations in every chanel we could think of using (yes, even written letters). We’re getting closer.
Last week I gave my history of entrepreneurship talk to a design thinking agency as part of their quarterly retreat. I even had two graphics to map the process and remembered a few projects I had forgotten. Ops. Anyway, the CEO of the agency mentioned afterward that the team has taken on a “Joseph hustle” phrase to describe adding new outbounding behavior to their projects.
Yes. Agreed. AND, just keep at it. It’s hard. Things frequently don’t move, much less move as fast as you’d like them to move. I get it. I’m waiting on replies to more emails than I can track - hundreds. However, I don’t control responses… only outbounds, and keeping at it. Keep at it.
Interested in a creative spark for a team you lead? Ping me. The presentation is ready and can be tweaked for the message you’d like to rally around for your team.
Bit #3 • Teach what you’ve learned
We’ve been training in a new sharpener. It’s been a blast. I’ve taken the keys to sharpening from my perspective and distilled them, re-arranged them and adjusted the training process from the way I learned. This has also been informed by my learning and development experiences in past roles. It’s been great. More to come as time goes on here. But, good things coming here.
We’re doing happy hour knife classes, starting this weekend, around the island at the house. The idea is to create a space for folks to experience a number of different knives on a number of different foods. Participants will leave knowing more about the parts of knives, how to hold knives for different cuts, if they like more handle heavy or blade heavy knives, etc. There will be bubbles and meat, cheese and the vegetables we slice and dice.
In MPLS and want to run point on gathering your friends for one of these experiences? We’re eager to teach what we’ve learned in an experiential way.
Sum
I have three “sometimes” to take from this post:
Sometimes, as you’re building things, there is nothing you can do to speed up the decision making of potential customers. They’ll move at the rate they’ll move. There is nothing for you to do.
Sometimes, when you have a solid thing… you just have to keep at it. Keep focusing on what you control and how to make it better for various audiences.
Sometimes, [all the time] teach what you’ve learned.
Change
With the help of some outside eyes we updated our product pages and our home page last week. Conversion rates have doubled. That’s great. We’ll need to double again to be on par with the industry. Then it’ll be time to fan out on paid social with more testing. Count the win.
The design agency we hired has been working on a series of new marks/logos options for the company. We’ve heard nothing from them since they started three weeks ago. Hope it’s going well.
Jesse passed this Hidden Brain episode my way this week, Money 2.0: The rich and the rest of us. Here is the quote that resonated most: “We got free lunch and that meant that we were the poor kids and that had never occured to me before. And so, that awkward moment standing in the lunch line suddenly increased my awareness of not only the inequality in my classroom but the implications of what it meant to be one of the poor kids. And so, I started thinking about myself differently.”
On Your Way
It’s raining in MPLS. I’m dealing with it by leaving the “rain jacket” in the closet and walking extra slowly from the car to where ever. Funny, I wondered today, why we have labeled those jackets that way. Afterall, do you have a “sun jacket?” :) Maybe we should.
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