33 Lessons about Beer, Life, and Building a business
Dave Selden, 33 Books Co.
- A graphics artist by background. Starting a business stretched his comfort zone.
- Background
- Went to art school and journalism school. Main lesson: beer is awesome.
- Ended up in advertising.
- Art/Journalism school is great, but doesn’t teach you everything.
- They teach you critical thinking skills and art skills, but none of the business skills.
- But you can teach yourself…
- Started a blog (Blog Sober Brewing Co.)
- But art school taught him how to see possibilities.
- Scout Books: 32 pages, 100% recycled. You can customize the cover. Local, family business with emphasis on sustainability.
- Gave idea that he could create a book for beer tasting.
- Made a spreadsheet to estimate costs and profits.
- “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
- “33 bottles of beer book”
- 3-pack is 99 bottles of beer
- Each page has:
- a flavor wheel with characteristics like: linger, body, bitter, sour, burnt, toffee, alcoholic
- stats like IBU and ABV
- notes
- beer name, brewer, etc.
- http://www.33beers.com -> website to sell beers. nice looking, emphasis on how much it costs and where to buy it.
- But building a website isn’t enough… You need to get people to go to the website.
- PR doesn’t have to start with bloggers.
- Simple intro letter to bloggers with link to website, low-key solicitation. Every person contacted took the free sample.
- It’s a given that you should avoid stupid stuff like attaching a 3 mb pdf to the email.
- Some of the blog reviews were totally awesome… but it generated at most a dozen orders after each post. Good, but not enough.
- But seeding blogs like to some other sites picking it up: an online beer site reviewed the product, and that generated 150 orders in one day.
- And that led to traditional print publications like Food & Wine, and Sunset magazine reviewing the product, which has led to even more reviews.
- “Beer can be tax-deductible”
- blog project to taste 999 beers in 999 days.
- the blog draws search traffic, which helps sell the product.
- so the cost of the beer is an advertising expense.
- E-commerce can be simple…
- Just string together a little PayPal and HTML.
- USPS is great, and easy.
- Pricing isn’t easy.
- Subsidizes shipping to keep it simple.
- Shipping out books takes 30 minutes to an hour every night.
- Retailers are important:
- He gives them a free sample. Of those, about 75% will actually decide to sell the product.
- He makes the display stands himself from recycled wood.
- The other thing that is awesome is that as a web person, he felt like he missed the green thing. Now actually making a physical product, he can make a green product.
- The time to expand is when you have orders.
- 33wines
- You don’t want to run out of stock. Especially you don’t want to run out of money to reorder stock.
- His wife is very supportive, which is critical. She ships when he has to go on business.
- Other facts:
- Hops and marijuana are 99% genetically similar.
- Q: How does it work with retailers?
- A: When I first got started, I asked to put the book in the store, and they paid me only if the book sold. Then later, it worked out that I sold the books in bulk at discount price to the retailer, and then the retailer sells it for profit.
- Q: Are you continually doing marketing and PR, or does that diminish?
- A: Doing less now than I was before. I’m spending more time doing fulfillment than marketing. I used to have a sales week, in which I would approach retailers, and then a marketing week, in which I would approach bloggers.
- Q: Are you doing any affiliate marketing on the website?
- A: Oh, that’s a great idea… I should do that.