1 Year Ago - 0$ made, 0 events held, 0 products designed, 0 twerkflows (templates or workflows) made. That day I was working on the Canada Business Registration to make Miiru a real company (and agonizing over how/what/when to pick a name).
Today - $6,642 made, 16 events held, 5 products designed, 40 twerkflows made. Working on finding/rebuilding my work files on my new computer after my laptop was stolen from my car last weekend.
I set out last year to catalog and write about my whole process of building a startup as I went along....miserable fail on that since I ended up writing about 12 blogs total.
But starting today I think I have a very cool opportunity in front of me to start again with a daily practice about what I'm doing to build this business. To spin it a little, my daily piece will throw it back to one year ago and compare how different my activities are and how different my thinking is from then to now.
Blog, podcast, or video. It may be a different medium each day, but it'll be my absolute best effort that every day I'm working is a day started with a Then/Now piece about Miiru.
I heard once that 90% of startups succeed in doing something other than the purpose they were founded for. I appear to be no different. I have a slippery grasp on what direction my company will head this year. But since I registered on Feb.7, 2018 I have already changed from a retail model to a wholesale/importer model and 80% of my revenue has come from holding workshop events. Where I thought 80% of my revenue would be from fabric sales and the events would help as a supplement. Over the year, the events have been what I've been able to roll out and make a profit on, whereas the fabric sales are only just starting to fall into place this past month as I landed my first set of wholesale customers.
I'm sure a lot of you are looking at the numbers at the top and asking "How was he living on $6K of revenue?" The answer is that I wasn't. Side work, consulting, renovations and other odd jobs kept me afloat. Plus leaning on my family and going into heavy debt. But it took me that year and two trips to Asia in order to train my eye and find products that retailers actually wanted.
Sure, it could have happened faster. But it didn't. All that matters to me now is that I'm a little better in knowing what to look for and I have a boat load more confidence in what I'm doing. That the energy aimlessly spread around last year in trying to make ends meet, if focused on creating real curation value in my fabric lines, designing new kits with wild projects in them and throwing workshops and events where people are dying to come back for round 2 - I have a pretty damn reasonable shot at making this work.
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