Day 64 of Building a Product to Make Millions... (sarcasm)

This is not what I expected

I stared at the box on my counter.

It stared back at me.

I couldn’t believe it. It was finally here.

After months of glaring at a computer screen, fidgeting with font color, and communicating with a print shop, my planner had finally arrived.

After years of creating digital content, it feels really good to make something I can hold in my hands. Even better, to create something I made for myself.

A reaction

I started writing these newsletters to update people, mostly as a reaction. A reaction to successful people on the internet who take advantage of people’s hope by selling them a dream.

Do this, and you’ll get rich!

Buy my course and live the life you want!

Buy my ebook for unlimited success!

Followed by countless stories of people who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I even enrolled in one. It was incredibly disappointing and cost way more than it was worth. That’s when I decided I would figure it out on my own and write about it. No curtain, just my little adventure. Follow along, or don’t; it’s up to you.

Where are we?

Let me catch you up to date, then we will talk about some lessons learned and mistakes I made.

In case you’re wondering, this is a quarterly focus system I’m designing. I call it the Hyperfocus System, and it’s designed around the Duration Framework, which I created. Its purpose is to narrow your focus on what matters most. I’m using Adobe Indesign to create it.

After finishing the final draft, I went in pursuit of a printing company. This wasn’t too bad, as I discussed last time. It turns out I have a lot of connections in the world of printing and was given multiple recommendations.

After many dead ends, I landed on a print shop I liked, where I finally finished haggling out a price and the details. That sentence encompasses at least 2 weeks of navigating time zones and language barriers. That’s when I encountered my first shock, which we will talk about in a second.

After that, I sent them my final draft, and they printed the book and sent me a copy for free to review, which is the copy I have right now. Now, I’m going page by page, analyzing each period and line, making sure it’s perfect before I tell them to print the rest of them. After all, I’m making this for me first, so I want to make sure I love it.

Mistake #1

You’d think I would have figured out what my profit margin would be before going to all this work.

Nope.

It’s kind of one of the most important aspects, but there I was every morning, laboring for hours and hours and never bothered to see how much I might make off each one. Big mistake. There were plenty of people I could have asked, I just didn’t.

When the printing company sent me the total price, I almost spilled my hot chocolate. The price per unit was way higher than I anticipated. I did some rough figuring, and if I sell all 100 that I bought, just to cover my time, I’d need to charge at least $30 plus shipping.

That’s a lot more than I’ve ever paid for a planner, which is a whopping $0.

It really made me stop and think. Did I really pack enough value into this product that it can be worth spending $30-$40 every 3 months?

It’s a sobering question. Sure, that’s the cost of 2-3 meals at McDonald’s, but still.

So I started thinking.

How much time does this planner save me each week?

I figure around 4 hours. That’s 16 hours a month and 48 hours saved per quarter.

How much would you pay to have an extra 48 hours per quarter to do whatever you want?

Perspective is everything.

Mistake #2

Always assume the process will take longer than you think. The whole printing process took far more time than I thought. It even followed me on my vacation a bit, which wasn’t cool.

Lessons

The first lesson I learned is to do my research fully before getting too deep into a project. Figure out exactly what you will spend and how much you will get back. Luckily for me, it all seems to be working out. Worse case scenario, if no one buys these, I’ll have planners until I’m 70.

The second lesson I learned is to ask whether or not the product has the value to make the price worth it. What exactly am I hoping to save myself and others? In this case, time, attention, and energy. But it would have been helpful to define that before starting.

Lastly, be careful playing with settings I don’t understand. I messed some colors up in my file with no idea how to fix them, and it slowed printing down quite a lot. Even something as simple as the dimensions of a book. Here again, I never checked and made my whole planner 8x6 inches only to realize afterward that the standard is 8.5x5.5 inches. These are the sorts of things that need to be figured out before, not during.

When it’s finalized, I’ll give a full tour and explain exactly how I made it. If you want to read about me struggling on day 17, read this.