Then There Were None: Progress Update Month 1

Happy Monday! It’s Lea here, checking in with the first progress update for Jonathan’s new illustration business - Then There Were None. In our timeline, we’re into month 2 of the business so I thought it’d be useful to summarise what we’ve done so far to get to this stage…

Month 1 of Then There Were None

Naming the business

For a few years, Jonathan owned the domain two4joy.com - he loved it and when we were discussing the idea of his first business, he naturally felt this was the name he wanted to use. Only one problem…we no longer owned the domain and someone else now has it

And so we went back to the drawing board. For weeks. This was actually one of the things that delayed the launch and creation of the site because we couldn’t find a name which (a) we liked (b) that worked and (c) that was available as a .com domain.

We did some more brainstorming around the focus of Jonathan’s illustrations - obviously the theme of wildlife and nature is a big one - but it was still too broad.

It was while we were watching a programme on TV - The Lost Land of the Tiger - that we realised we could combine the idea for this business with a little bit of do-goodery too and give the business a real, tangible mission: to help save endangered animals by donating some of the profits to charitable causes plus helping to raise the profile of the goal to save endangered species.

Having figured out the concept and the mission behind the idea, we finally came up with the name: Then There Were None…

The only thing we questioned about it was the possibly negative connotation - but decided that it would serve as a great reminder to us and others - and made the final decision to go with it.

Fleshing out the concept

Hurray, we had a name!!! Now we needed to get the site up and running…faster said than done!

We started out with the idea for an online shop selling products with Jonathan’s illustrations printed on them, but let that idea sit for a while. Something didn’t quite feel right about it.

What bubbled to the surface was the fact that we didn’t want to set up a shop like all the other ones out there which would require *constant* marketing and huge amounts of traffic just to make a few sales which generate peanuts (I’ll be sharing the financial details & progress so far - YAY, there has been some income already! - in the zero2illo newsletter, out later today).

So we decided to try and get a bit smarter about the online shop concept, using what we’ve learned about running a business online and selling digital products for the past couple of years. That’s how we came upon the twist for the shop…

1) Regular, ongoing launches of limited collections - plays into the idea that you typically generate the most sales when you launch new things. With an online shop, we wanted to replicate that without constantly adding new products to a shop which just keeps on growing with the potential to become unwieldy and unmanageable for us and overwhelming for customers.

2) Products available for a specific period of time only - you’ll know that many people use the scarcity marketing tactic online to encourage people to buy. The idea of scarcity is a little difficult to replicate when digital products are endlessly available but with physical products, we wanted to leverage the concept of exclusivity which ties in really nicely with the idea of extinction, given the nature and mission of the business.

3) Focusing products around celebrations & occasions - as illustrators and artists, we’d all like to think that people will buy the beautiful things we create…just because. Unfortunately they don’t - so we wanted to give people extra reasons to buy and what better way to do this, than to tie the release of collections to celebrations and occasions where people naturally give gifts?

From Jonathan’s perspective, all of the above also become more manageable and give him a solid structure and focus for creating his actual illustrations (which as you’ll probably know by now, is a constant challenge!).

Building the shop

Domain name bought, concept fleshed out…time to build the shop which was my task. While Jonathan was busily creating the graphics for the site - all custom illustrations, as you’ll see - I got the basic site structure up and running.

For the techies amongst you, here’s what we’ve used:

• Self-hosted WordPress, hosted on Bluehost [aff]
• The latest version of Headway [aff] - we’ve had a sneak preview copy of version 2.0 for a while now - it’s even more awesome.
• Aweber [aff] for the mailing list

The site itself has:

• A blog
• Links to our online shop profiles (more about those next week - boy have they caused us pain!)
• Donate buttons for the WWF

The site took about half a day to build and another couple of hours to complete once Jonathan’s illustrations were ready. We unofficially launched the site with no products available for sale (this month’s task) to begin the mission and spread the word. And we still haven’t “officially” launched it yet - that’s coming up soon!

Next week, I’ll be talking more about what’s happened so far in month 2, including:

• Researching the products & online Print-on-Demand (POD) services
• Setting up the online shops
• Our basic marketing strategy for the new business

As I said, I’ll be sharing the financial details of the business in the zero2illo newsletter (out later today along with a fun Halloween Sale - you’ve been warned!!), so if you’d like to know how much we’ve made so far (waaay more than we expected given we’ve not actually launched yet!) and how much we’ve spent getting to this stage, you can sign up over in the sidebar.