This last week, I listened to the book Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. One of my biggest takeaways is the need to create a perpetual marketing machine. The goal of a perpetual marketing machine, from my understanding, is that your marketing will grow on its own. That's to say, at a certain point, your marketing can take off and bring in revenue greater than the effort because you have found a hack or inefficiency that you can leverage. As I reflected on this concept, I reviewed the different marketing channels that we try to use, such as social media, email, and influencers. The effect of the changes Facebook made to Instagram over the last year has really affected...
A little over a year ago, I wrote this post announcing that I was going to spend the next year trying to start a company. I assumed if I could find work that I truly loved, I would be passionate about the work, which would in turn help me be successful. I tried really hard to sound upbeat and confident when I wrote this post; the reality, though, was that I was scared out of my mind. Initially, my plan was to launch three different products on Kickstarter within one year to see if I could turn one of them into a company. Once I got into planning and executing the first Kickstarter, I found that it would be...
First thing’s first, please forgive me for not getting this update out last week. We have been in discussions with our manufacturer to resolve some issues that have risen in the last two weeks. I didn’t want to publish an update before resolving these issues. Now to the issues. We expected to ship the backpacks out to all of the backers before the end of September. To accomplish this goal, we needed to get all of the materials to the manufacturer by the end of August. I was in charge of ordering and shipping the leather and hardware, and they arrived by the middle of August. However, we placed a large order to have the fabric produced specifically...
My Kickstarter went live this past Tuesday, and wow, it has been some crazy week! First off, I’d like to thank all of you for your support. You have really come through and made a huge difference! If you’ve been reading along on my blog, you’ll know that I have been working on this Kickstarter for a year now. After launching my campaign, I have put to test the theories expressed in the books, Lean Startup and Nail It and Scale It. These books are on-trend right now with the current advice for startup companies. These books essentially tell you to take an idea for a startup, throw it out on the market, and test it out. Once you...
I am now less than one week away from launching my Kickstarter campaign. To be exact, I have only five more days until it launchs. These final weeks have been absolutely crazy. I have spent the last couple of weeks preparing the Kickstarter campaign page. You can see a preview of it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/94088589/1922921953?token=59854100. Please go check out this page and enter you email to be notified when we launch on Tuesday at 8:00 am. I will post in more detail the process of setting up a Kickstarter page after the craziness calms down. Until then, go fund my project on Tuesday at 8am! Also, if you haven't followed me yet on Instagram follow me there @bretoncompany. Have a...
