Follow Ups

I'm going to try and give some updates on some earlier stuff I talked about if anyone's interested:

Relationships - January 18, 2008
I talked about how a relationship with one entrepreneur might help skyrocket my company given a talked about partnership agreement. Like many things I find in the entrepreneural world this has not come to pass. In fact, not only has it not come to pass but the other entrepreneur is shutting down her business. If I remember I'll talk more about that another day.

Google Adwords - February 5, 2008
I signed up and am running Google Adwords and while it hasn't gotten me a ton of business it has brought in some good wholesale leads which may or may not pan out. So far for the $50/month I'm putting into it I'm pretty happy. I had at one point thought about running a seperate ad for the new product I'm getting ready to release in the next 6 weeks but think instead I'll just replace the current ad with the new one since I'll be doing a fair amount of marketing to retailers at that time to the point which I don't think Google Adwords will bring in a significant amount of additional wholesale business.

Company #2 - February 14, 2008
It's going well, albeit slowly. I think there were a few weeks when both my business partner and I wanted it to go gangbusters but then we remembered that this is much more of a "hobby" business for the two of us then anything else so to just take it easy. We're about to start doing some marketing to retailers with the product so perhaps that will help move things along. However, I just found out that my business partner is moving to Denver. We're still going to keep the business up and running but we need to work out the logistics of who does what when.

Just In Time - March 12, 2008
I did send some of the new professional photos to the trade publication and they really seemed to like them. Enough so that I actually got a call from their reporter who asked me a bunch of questions. Hopefully we will be part of their article which is due to come out in May. Actually, the reporter was pretty excited when I told her about the new product (which will be released the beginning of May) so I have high hopes they'll do a good piece on the new product which should generate some interest (hopefully!). We're also going to be doing a mass mailing to 12,500 retailers at the beginning of May to promote the new product so I'm starting to worry about how much inventory I need to have on hand. 200 units? 500 units? 1500 units? More? I'm really not quite sure!

Lastly, at some point I mentioned that I there was a potential trademark infrigement on my company's name by another company (I can't for the life of me find that post). My trademark attorney sent their attorney a letter back in January letting them know that there was a potential trademark violation and we never heard back. That got me all fired up so we've put an injunction in with the trademark office which alerts the trademark office of a potential problem and puts their trademark application on hold for 90 days. So that is still unfolding...

As always there's a million and one other things going on as well but that's a good overview of where we currently stand. Now I need to get to work.