scott.projectsomewhere

Just over a year ago we launched sailingbits into a bit of a test phase to see if the idea had legs.

And a year later we’re still here. So that’s a good sign.

We’ve expanded our product range from what started with some custom components for 18s, Moths and 9ers to include a rapidly expanding catalog from some high profile sailing clothing names like Gill, Zhik, SLAM and SEA. We’ve also lined up good products from Tacktick and Velocitek.

We’ve signed up with manufacturers like Bladerider to resell components and even whole boats. Then we have relationships with KA Sails and CST Composites to offer basically all the best bits we use on our own boats.

And we’re now testing the waters with fittings from Ronstan & Harken.

So our product range is expanding week by week, and our sales are trending up nicely, so we’ll be around for a while longer yet.

The selling-on-the-net gambit has been an interesting experience. Far from the passive income dream, it’s been far more work than any of us bargained for, and the workload is piling up faster and faster. Alex is still busy chasing money, John is still busy chasing products and customers and I’m still busy chasing technology. While we’re using technology in a rudimentry way to get products out there, I think it can be used better to make sure we know exactly where, when and how everything is going and how much its making at a point in time. I’m going to have to get my hands dirty at some point to try and get the workload to scale in a better-than-linear way. Sailing 7 days-a-week and spending the rest of the time in the office or rigging 18 footer masts hasn’t left me much time to do it, but the goal is to take sailingbits.com to the beta stage soon.

And while we’re battling away under the extra workload, we haven’t even started advertising yet. Our google adwords campaigns are small, and at this point returning a disappointing 0% ROI. We’ve avoided the traditional media completely, and haven’t started to engage with the popular online brands like anarchy or sail-world. We’ll get to that eventually. In the meantime we’ve done remarkably well by knowing pretty much who all our customers are directly and using some gratuitous plugs now and again. There’s still plenty of people we don’t know.

We’ve gone and sourced a couple of gucci custom made bits, and have plans to make even more.

While we’re notionally based in Sydney, to date a small majority of our sales would be to customers Internationally.

So things are good. 1 year down. We’re in business. We’re making a profit. And there’s still plenty of room to improve.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under sailingbits.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.