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