The good, the bad, and the scary!
May 27th, 2008
So much has happened in the past 12 days that I almost don’t know where to begin. Some has been good, some has been bad, and some has been just plain scary!
Let’s start with the good. On Friday, May 16th I spoke with my primary mentor Christina Blenk. It was a great “get to know you” conversation. I think we are going to get along really well. I had two great take-aways regarding my website: 1) make sure your customer “gets it” within 15 seconds of landing on your homepage, and 2) don’t give them too many decisions to make at one time. The first one is so important for a product like mine that requires some education before a purchase. People ask me all the time to further explain my products. I have decided to include a flash component on my homepage that will visually explain what we have to offer at www.redkoala.com. It will require some additional dollars spent, but I am sure it will be worth it in the end.
Her second piece of advice applies to the number of options we give our consumers when designing their art. Instead of taking away some of those options, we decided it would be best to use categories to reduce the number of decision made at one time. For example; I want to offer a large number of size options. However, a long list of sizes can be overwhelming for the average consumer. The solution is to offer small, medium, and large categories and within each of those list 7 sizes. Now the consumer is choosing from one out of 7 instead of one out of 21. It reduces the number of choices that have to be made at one time, without reducing the number of options available. This is great advice for anyone with a complex product being offered over the internet.
I also had a great conversation on the same day with Matt Ledford from Fast Pivot. He’s a very energetic and fun person. I really enjoyed his enthusiasm about my company and his genuine desire to help me achieve my goals of owning a business, while also raising a family. He challenged me to really think about what I’m offering and what people would be willing to buy. He suggested that I offer a lower priced product that consumers would be willing to purchase to “test the waters”. I am working on this, but haven’t come up with the answer yet.
Now on to the bad; my dog needed surgery last Tuesday and has required a great deal of attention. No problem with three kids and a business to start….yeah right! And here’s the scary, on the same day of my dog’s surgery we were hit by a tornado. YIKES! It has been a solid week of cleaning up the mess. I watched them use a crane to lift my beautiful old oak trees over the house for the logging trucks to pick up. Someone was watching over my family when all of those trees fell and only one hit the corner of the house. It was the scariest day of my life, but I feel blessed because no one was hurt. The kids have been slightly traumatized and I’ve worked very hard to get things back to normal for them. So between the dog and the tornado there hasn’t been much time for work. I’ll be busy this week catching up. It always seems like work gets it the way of life and life gets in the way of work. My quest to balance the two continues!
