This is one in a series of posts where I document my startup journey. If you just landed here, go to this link and you’ll find all the other posts in the series.
As we step in to the new year, I wanted to write something reflecting on the seven months that went by. It seemed only right.
226 days — that is, a little over seven months — ago, I was experiencing what might have been some of the most exhilarating few hours of my unremarkable life. We were getting ready to launch our bearappeal.lk website, and I was on top of the world.
The next few months flew by. We were enjoying ourselves, quite profoundly. We were never short of orders, or happy customers. It might sound like a cliché, but it’s true.
Now that I look back, I can see that we’ve had it easy so far. Yes, we’ve had our fair share of blunders and screw ups, but we’ve never been in a situation that threatened the survival of the business. We’ve run into multiple delays with suppliers, mixed up deliveries, and been called out on our bullshit by customers. But these were all simple problems with simple fixes.
As Jason Fried says, business gets harder, it never gets easier. And we’re ready to accept that.
We’ve never been big planners ourselves, so 2018 isn’t the next chapter in our Grand 5 Year Plan. We surely know what we’re going to focus on, but there’s plenty of room to try our hand at new opportunities as they arise, too.
Our customers constantly keep asking us to introduce new products, and we will surely listen to those requests a little more this year. But we will stick to the core promise of our brand, of offering high quality basics with warm and friendly service. We’re big fans of a “niche down” approach, and we will not waver now.
From the days before our launch, up until as recently as yesterday, I’ve been asked, “just how many t-shirts can you sell? Isn’t your business going to stagnate at some point? Wouldn’t you have to cast a much wider net?” And the truth is, we don’t know. We’d like to think that the past 226 days have offered enough proof for the validity of our concept, but things might change drastically in 2018. While it is good to be prepared for all eventualities, we don’t think it’d be smart to shy away from this position we’ve already secured for ourselves, albeit in a rather small scale. So in 2018, we will push harder.
And as we get ready to face what’s in front of us, I am mindful of how grateful I should be to the people in my past and present. You know who you are. If you’re reading this now, know that I’m profoundly thankful. If you’ve bought from us, and put up with us when the website crashed occasionally and your payments didn’t go through, replied to my annoying text messages, shared your feedback, showed us a little love on social media, know that I’m grateful. Even if you didn’t do any of that and was cheering from the sidelines instead, know you that your support meant a lot.
I wish that you’ll find the strength to make 2018 the best year of your life yet, and I thank you for being part of mine.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
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