Insomnia

There is one thing to be said for a bout of insomnia - it gives you a lot of time to think about the business! In truth it wasn't an actual bout of insomnia but the fact that I was tempted by a piece of dark chocolate that was coffee flavored (real coffee - not extract). I don't drink caffine and am apparently uber-sensative enough that just a little bit of dark chocolate sends me into an insomniac tailspin.

Regardless, it kept me up and as such I was thinking about work.
Pretty much my mind was racing between two scenarios: 1. What if this new product is a total flop and 2. What if this new product is a wild success. I don't know which actually makes me more nervous. If it's a flop then I'll have to eat the packaging costs I've already incurred which while not pleasant wouldn't necessarily break the business - though not having that new product income into the business will hurt. But I think I may actually be more nervous about what happens if it's a huge success as I'm totally stressed as to how much inventory to have on hand. I'm trying to have 50 orders worth ready to go by May 1 but with my direct mail pieces going out to 12,500 retailers i have no idea if that will be enough or not (I'm assuming that maybe only 30% of the direct mail pieces will be read and then even out of that only a small fraction will be interested in the product and, sadly, only a fraction of that will actually ever get around to ordering. Since I did put a promo code on the direct mail pieces I will be interested to see what the response rate actually ends up being).

One good thing did come from the insomnia though. Despite managing to work myself up into a tizzy I did realize that in addition to trying to trademark the product name (which the trademark guy is working on), I should also buy the domain name for the product and have it direct to my main website just to prevent anyone else from going in and grabbing it out from underneath me. I'm sure if I owned the trademark I could probably fight someone else buying it but this way is a heck of a lot cheaper by simply getting it outright from the start for $9.99.

Now if I could just find my web guy to get my website redesign underway it would all be good!