It’s 2025 and there were some lessons learned in the year of our lord 2024 that I want to put out there… but I feel the need to channel my inner “Clint Eastwood” when I do it.
So, here are the good, the bad, and the ugly as a way to force myself to reflect.
THE GOOD
I am happy with the fact that I’ve kicked things off over here and there was a bit of a response. This web presence has had sooooooo many fits and starts (both in my head and in real life) that I have completely lost track of them all.
That being said:
- I rebuilt the website in WordPress
- I connected it to Woo Commerce
- I made sales
Most importantly, the small but mighty amount of sales this site has achieved have come from people I don’t know in real life. That’s been rewarding to me in a way that I did not expect, although I probably should have…
Also, I thought that fulfilling orders would be the opposite of fun and it turns out that I was dead wrong about that. I actually lowkey enjoy it. Who knew?
2024 Stats
I really like it when people build stuff in public and share their numbers… especially when they are starting out and the numbers look kind of dumb. Also, this wouldn’t be a very good recap post without some stats, so here are the numbers from July through December 2024:
Another good thing that happened in 2024 is that I reengaged with the Instagram account and posted a bunch of stuff that made me laugh. It is a bonus to me when other people like them too, and I enjoy imagining to myself that anybody who likes what I post is laughing as hard as I am on the ones that really “get me.”
This account gained 1,276 followers since I started posting regularly again. Nothing world beating, but good times.
On the vanity metrics side of the house, my very best post received 500,000+ views with a current watch time of 206 days. I think that’s pretty funny and it definitely makes me part of the problem. #lol
I connected the Facebook page to the Instagram account, and that took me entirely too long to make happen, because it’s like I just needed to flip a switch in an Instagram setting, but it got done. So the Facebook page gets all of the same Reels, Posts, and Stories as Instagram and I think that we live in a world where that can make sense.
There are currently 199 followers on that page, which is about double the size it was in June.
And that is a small miracle to me, because Facebook seems to work very hard to NOT share anything with anyone unless you pay them to do it.
These were all good things that I am happy about.
THE BAD
I’m going to get a little vulnerable here… the original sticker business model (yes I made a spreadsheet model and messed with it a lot) was based on me outsourcing the actual sticker production process to StickerMule. I still really like that business model but it has one major weakness.
Stickers are a “hits” business.
I’ve seriously got something like 30 sticker concepts on my hard drive and not all of them are winners. The major downfall of the original business model is that I need to buy in bulk to drive the per unit cost down and achieve the crazy margins my spreadsheet model was telling me were possible.
Sidenote: I like stickers for lots of reasons… the business nerd in me is fully jazzed about the per unit margins that are possible with this medium.
This is a risk that I researched and discovered could be mitigated with a capital investment in printing and cutting hardware coupled with a “can do” attitude. Basically, I learned that I could buy a high quality printer and cutter to make short runs of all my sticker designs myself. Theoretically that allows me to make as few or as many stickers as the market will bear.
So I pulled the trigger and later learned that the only problem with the do it yourself approach is the learning curve.
Making stickers isn’t hard but it is a skill that requires a time commitment to get good at. You have print settings, paper thickness, and paper quality – plus the cutter software, sensors, and calibration – and all that adds up to a great big learning curve that requires a time commitment to overcome.
It turns out that I WAS NOT interested in spending any amount of time on this learning curve whatsoever in 2024.
Therefore, no new stickers were developed and the sales momentum that was building up ended up dropping back down to zero. Which makes a lot of sense from an audience standpoint and solidified a key learning for me… I need to feed the beast with new designs.
It was bad that I didn’t.
THE UGLY
With no new designs being made and no new orders coming in, I am ashamed to admit that I abandoned this project for a few months. I was still pushing some memes on the Instagram account at a slower clip, but I was NOT engaging with the website at all.
I have since learned that this meant that the plugins weren’t getting updated… including the Woo Commerce plugin that had an update that required me to update my WordPress theme, which I have now addressed.
But it could be that people weren’t able to buy stickers over the past few months even if they wanted to… making it all a self fulfilling death spiral that I am now embarrassed to admit.
That was ugly.
Well then, I feel better… Moving forward, I am very aware that I need to get over the sticker production learning curve so that I can push more of my ideas out into the world. I am a rather large procrastinator, so it helps that I am running out of the funding I set aside for this project and hope to be able to use that fact as the necessary change agent for me to get over sticker production frustrations.
If you’ve read this far, thanks. We will see what 2025 has in store for this project, and if I will be able to take it to the next level.
Time will tell.
