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mike  ·  1231 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Story of Limitations

I get your point. A lot of our customers have expressed surprise that we are delivering on time. I suppose they are the ones most experienced with KS and know that on-time delivery is unusual!

Yes, for us KS has been great for marketing. We decided last year to expand our hobby to a tiny business. We have many tiny businesses we're running at the same time and think puzzles could become the largest. Sales is the hardest part. We sold puzzles at some local fairs, visited a few local shops, got our puzzles in 3 stores in the city, did a mailing of samples to 20 stores, two of them bought a few packs, and we started to plan a sales road trip around the country for fun when corona hit and killed our plans.

Selling 2 puzzles a day from our webshop is definitely hobby-level, but that is 30x increase from before we did the kickstarter. We also picked up 3 stores, 2 in the UK and one in the US that want to sell our puzzles, so from a marketing perspective our KS has been a hit. 2 puzzles a day plus 6x $10k KS next year is over $100k in sales and that's no longer hobby but small business. And if we can increase sales 30x again next year then it's really good business.

We got a new machine we'll order this month with large cutting bed and double heads that can make 50 puzzles/hour. With enough sales we can employ someone to assemble and avoid manufacturing overseas, which we've tried and quality is a problem.

My wife's been enjoying posting updates on KS, which lots of personal touches and touches of Norwegian culture. Some have been loving the updates and many have signed up for a newsletter, so she's going to start a blog on our website and build this brand-loyalty by drawing our customers into a kind of friend group.

Fun stuff.