Origins

This is a post that was originally written by my dad about how he came up with the idea for the interchangeable temple inserts.

Downtime

Back in 2006 I was in Wenzhou, China on business. I was already a seasoned China traveller by then, but even the best of us succumb to the intestinal distress that the cuisine and local water supply can induce. The two days I spent in bed staring at the ceiling gave me a lot of time to think. With that much downtime I felt compelled to reinvent the wheel and other equally great feats of mental gymnastics. (Editors note: As a seasoned China traveler myself I can attest to this. I once spent several days in bed having a recurring fever dream about moving large amounts of sand around a desert with my mind. The cause? A bowl of noodles with some water that obviously hadn't been quite boiled all the way through)

Bored

During the latter half of this illness I started thinking about reason I was in China in the first place: scouting out new styles of sunglasses and reading glasses for my customers. I was having a real tough time with eyewear in general because it was so boring to me. The styles never seemed to change; they only got recycled. I also noticed that there seemed to be a total disconnect between eyewear and fashion even though eyewear is considered an important fashion accessory. Most of the stuff I was seeing just didn't seem to have any concrete link to "fashion".

Vacant Real Estate

Wide temples for sunglasses were back in vogue at the time and that wide-templed look had even migrated over to reading / prescription glasses. Then it hit me, all of that "vacant real estate" on the wide temple arms could be used to make the frames more fashionable. My first thought was, "We could make 'clothing' for temple arms to dress them up a bit." The rest of the idea followed almost immediately. I knew that this "temple arm clothing" would have to be easily removable. People changed their clothes every day, so why wouldn't they want to change their temples as well? This initial idea and my early sketches of this concept would later become a patented eyewear design in August of 2008. You can check out the patent for yourself on Google Patents: US Patent #7261409

“Dogfooding”: You’re Doing It Wrong

Background

The term “dogfooding” is a slang term of sorts for the phrase “eating your own dog food”. In general terms, this means putting yourself in your customers’ shoes by using the products or services that you sell. According to this Wikipedia article, the term originated in an ad campaign for Alpo Dog Food where Lorne Green made a point to say that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another origin story has the founder of Kal Kan Pet Food eating a can of their product every year at the annual shareholders’ meeting.

Value

“Dogfooding” seems to have caught on especially well in the software industry, so as a software developer I’ve participated in “dogfooding” before. It really is a valuable exercise and can illuminate shortcomings in your product. Depending on what your company sells, dogfooding might not always be easy, but I recommend it whenever possible. I wear the sunglasses that we sell on a daily basis not only because I really like them, but also to evaluate them like a customer would. It also never hurts to have people ask me where I got them; I’m always happy to point them in the right direction!

How Can You Screw This Up?

The point of this post doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with bootstrapping a business, but I’ve never understood how the most obvious dogfooding scenario in the world often seems to fall flat. I worked in a lot of restaurants when I was broke college student. Every place I ever worked would charge the employees to eat the restaurant food. Some places offered a discount, but none of them would encourage the employees to eat the food by doing the obvious: make it free. What better way to improve the quality of the product than to have the people who prepare it also eat it from time to time? Admittedly, I didn’t always work in gourmet establishments so I suppose some of my former bosses didn’t really care much about improving the product. Perhaps they were focused more on keeping costs down to maximize profits. I’m always in favor of keeping expenses low, but I never want to be involved with a company that isn’t committed to having a great product and constantly trying to improve it.

If you’re starting a business, I think you’ll find it a lot more rewarding to put in the countless hours necessary if you believe in the product and are committed to making it the best it can be.

Introduction

I created this blog to help organize my thoughts regarding a business venture that my wife and I launched into a couple of months ago. Starting a business ended up being far more work than I ever imagined. I’ve started this blog to talk about my experiences starting this business. Success or failure, I plan to write about it all here.

What is Bootstrapping?

I don’t know the origin of the term ‘bootstrapping’ for certain, but as it pertains to starting a business it’s come to mean that the business is being started without external assistance. This basically means no start up loans from a bank, no investors, and no big up front expenditures. Being a software developer by trade I’ve read many stories about software start ups that got going both with and without external help. 

Like everything, there are pros and cons to bootstrapping a new business. Since software can often be created using (mostly) free tools, software startups often lend themselves to getting started without external help.

Even though I’m a software developer, the business I’ve started has nothing to do with building software. Instead, I’ve started an online store selling eyewear.

 

About the Business

My business is called PiX Eyewear. We design and sell sunglasses and reading glasses featuring a channel on the temple that accepts inserts that can feature different designs. The idea is that the inserts are sort of like “clothes” for the frames that can be easily swapped out. We can make new insert designs very quickly and easily. We have dozens of existing designs, but we also solicit designs from our customers who might want to create some inserts that match a particular article of clothing that they have. The design of the temple channels and corresponding inserts is patented and currently can only be manufactured and sourced by a single factory.

A lot of “start your own online business” programs have you start out by doing market research to find products that will sell. I don’t listen very well and skipped that step entirely. I knew what product I wanted to sell before I even started the business. In fact, if I hadn’t known about this product I probably would have never started the business in the first place. Why did I do it this way? Because it let me cheat.

We’re Cheating

The reason I picked this product is because the patent holder happens to be my father. I also used to work for the guy who handles the manufacturing. A lot of retail businesses need to make a very sizable up front investment to get their hands on inventory, while I was able to use these existing relationships to establish a “pay as you go” inventory acquisition program. This lets me start selling inventory without having to shell out a bunch of money up front. That said, there are other ways to get into the online retailing game without having to buy a bunch of inventory up front. For example, sites like Zazzle.com let you design products to sell for free. They even source and drop ship them for you, giving a you a royalty percentage of each item sold. In this way you get to focus on designing, marketing, and promoting your products. I’m a big fan of this model and endorse this kind of cheating as a way to avoid huge cost outlays.

What’s Next?

I maintain another “customer facing” blog on my storefront site. I’ll probably end up putting some posts up in both places, but I think certain posts will probably only end up on this blog. I have a goal of posting ~3 posts a week between the two blogs but we’ll see how that goes. You can find my storefront blog here: http://www.pixeyewear.com/blog

If you have any feedback, questions, or hate mail for me you can leave a comment here or e-mail me: jesse@pixeyewear.com

While I don’t know exactly what will end up on this blog, I have some rough ideas for future posts including:

• What start up costs could I not avoid?
• “Dogfooding” products
• Wearing a lot of hats makes your head tired
• Work/work balance (and trying to have a life)
• Online Advertising: Lessons Learned
• What is SEO and why do I not care about it?
• Evolving the product