I’m writing this between the Georgia Apple Festival and the start of the Christkindl Market, which is an odd time to write about quitting markets. We’re in the busiest stretch of our year for in-person events, and a huge share of our sales comes from them. So let me be clear up front: we’re not…
Our first website did its job in the narrowest possible sense: it existed. It had products, a cart, and a checkout, and nobody ever told us it was bad. That was the problem. Most post-mortems are about something that failed loudly. This one is about something that failed quietly, which turns out to be harder…
At a farmers market, you find out what people think of your products in about four seconds. Someone picks up a bar, smells it, makes a face or doesn’t, and you watch the whole verdict happen in real time. We built a lot of this business on that loop. Wholesale doesn’t work that way, and I…
I already flagged this one as a problem back when I was figuring out how to price our products. Wholesale runs at roughly a 50% discount off retail, I said, and that’s not a footnote, that’s half your margin gone on every unit. At the time it was theoretical, a warning to future-us about a channel…
Some products don’t fail because customers didn’t want them. This one failed because thermodynamics didn’t care how good it was. The product Our Whipped Tallow Body Butter was, by a wide margin, one of the best things Celeste Naturals has ever made. High fat content, seriously moisturizing, the kind of texture that made people stop at the…
The Start Here page has been promising this explanation since the beginning: why the blog is named what it’s named. Here it is, finally: where the phrase actually comes from, why I picked the version of it I did, and what I think most people get wrong about it. Where the phrase actually comes from Voltaire…