10:17 – Yesterday we made up 60 small parts bags for the biology kits. Today we’ll make up a batch of small parts bags for the chemistry kits. We’re in better shape on chemistry kits than biology kits, so this coming week I’ll start making up chemicals for another batch of 60 biology kits. We also now have everything we need in stock for the remaining kits for the virtual school AP chemistry order, so I’ll work on those. I’d like to get them shipped by Friday. And I’m also still trying to get migrated over to the new computer, which is now running Linux Mint 15 KDE.
I’ve mentioned that Barbara and I are watching the TV series One Tree Hill. One of the teenage characters, Brooke, has an eye for clothes design. She decides to sell her clothes on-line, and gets a geek friend to set her up an e-commerce site. So I’m watching this developing train wreck, knowing what’s about to happen. Sure enough, they bring up the e-commerce site and orders start flooding in. The only problem is that Brooke is getting ten times as many orders as she can fulfill. “Make it stop!”, she tells her geek friend. That’s a situation I never want to find us in, so I’ve avoided doing any advertising or promotion. Selling 50 or 100 kits a month is one thing. We can deal with that. Selling 50 or 100 kits a week is another thing entirely.
But we are going to start promoting in 2014. I have Abby working on a logo and hand-out sheet. Most homeschool conventions give goody bags to attendees. Conventions typically offer vendors of homeschool products the opportunity to have their hand-out sheets included in those bags for $80 to $100 per thousand. We’ll start small, having maybe 5,000 hand-out sheets printed and getting them distributed at four or five conventions. Our goal for 2014 is to sell 1,000 kits. We’ll see what happens.