Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: first post(er) 4
It would appear that I exist. First national retailer to carry one of my products (other than CafePress, which doesn't count). I certainly didn't expect such a leftie standby to be my first big reseller when I started this whole vast thing of making a company, but, boy, it's nice to see it there.
Of course now that it's up, three other national resellers contacted me within a week sounding suddenly more interested in picking up my stuff. Cool.
Of course, being me, I'm now terrified that I'll screw it all up. Took me over three hours over the course of a week to psych myself up to mail them my first stocking order (as in "please send us twenty for now to stock our shelves"). All the fears that they'll hate it, send it back, hunt me down and laugh at my shoes. In other words, I know that I should be relaxed by now but I'm sure not.
I was convinced when I picked up the print run a few weeks back that they were unusable. The type showed signs of anti-aliasing software ("that's what happens when I don't get to run the output device personally" I unreasonably think), the hed had lost the subtle Photoshop effects that I'ld worked so hard on. It was trash. Good only for wrapping fish.
Then that same day I drop by my best local customer and without batting an eye, they buy twenty-five of them. I'm still convinced that the posters are dreck ("they're only buying them because their customers are students with no concern for esthetics", say I) and go home to mope and bewail my fate.
A friend of mine who used to do art for folks like Dark Horse Comics and Eclipse comes by and says that, well, yeah, she can see that the hed isn't as sweet as I'ld hoped but it's basically fine. A few days ago I had the same talk with a friend who's the main editor for "my" company (and should thereby be the final word), has multiple Ivy degrees in relevant fields, and works every day as an editor for one of the big publishing houses. Still I worry. The paper stock is terrible; the colors are bland. You get the idea. Hmmm. Maybe I need to work on this perfectionism thing a bit more.
Nobody told me that selling a physical product is kind of like always having stage fright. When you're consulting you know if you're good or not. You know if the solution worked or not. When you're selling a tangible product, especially through retailers you don't own, you never really know who or what is behind your sales. Are they thrilled? Are they preparing to knock it off? Was that one cluster of sales in one bookstore some class or did the manager just temporarily have it in a more visible location? Suddenly all that stuff about dishwashing liquid companies getting into fierce feuds about shelf positioning and stocking frequency is a lot less abstract.
Back when I was studying econ I still thought of myself as a pure techie who would, at most, perhaps someday end up heading a company in which other people took care of this sort of thing. So I used to make my way through my industrial organization textbooks thinking of it all as fascinating discussion of some intriguing but very far away culture. Doesn't feel that way now.
Anyway, I should stop being anxiety-ridden, take a minute, and be glad. I'll do that.
Soon as the letters to the other wholesalers are written. And I really should finish that long-form chrono, and of course the packaging issue needs some thought . . .
Planning someday to disappear to the coast of Spain and sit in the sun for a few months as soon as I've got a bit of free time,
Rustin
Of course now that it's up, three other national resellers contacted me within a week sounding suddenly more interested in picking up my stuff. Cool.
Of course, being me, I'm now terrified that I'll screw it all up. Took me over three hours over the course of a week to psych myself up to mail them my first stocking order (as in "please send us twenty for now to stock our shelves"). All the fears that they'll hate it, send it back, hunt me down and laugh at my shoes. In other words, I know that I should be relaxed by now but I'm sure not.
I was convinced when I picked up the print run a few weeks back that they were unusable. The type showed signs of anti-aliasing software ("that's what happens when I don't get to run the output device personally" I unreasonably think), the hed had lost the subtle Photoshop effects that I'ld worked so hard on. It was trash. Good only for wrapping fish.
Then that same day I drop by my best local customer and without batting an eye, they buy twenty-five of them. I'm still convinced that the posters are dreck ("they're only buying them because their customers are students with no concern for esthetics", say I) and go home to mope and bewail my fate.
A friend of mine who used to do art for folks like Dark Horse Comics and Eclipse comes by and says that, well, yeah, she can see that the hed isn't as sweet as I'ld hoped but it's basically fine. A few days ago I had the same talk with a friend who's the main editor for "my" company (and should thereby be the final word), has multiple Ivy degrees in relevant fields, and works every day as an editor for one of the big publishing houses. Still I worry. The paper stock is terrible; the colors are bland. You get the idea. Hmmm. Maybe I need to work on this perfectionism thing a bit more.
Nobody told me that selling a physical product is kind of like always having stage fright. When you're consulting you know if you're good or not. You know if the solution worked or not. When you're selling a tangible product, especially through retailers you don't own, you never really know who or what is behind your sales. Are they thrilled? Are they preparing to knock it off? Was that one cluster of sales in one bookstore some class or did the manager just temporarily have it in a more visible location? Suddenly all that stuff about dishwashing liquid companies getting into fierce feuds about shelf positioning and stocking frequency is a lot less abstract.
Back when I was studying econ I still thought of myself as a pure techie who would, at most, perhaps someday end up heading a company in which other people took care of this sort of thing. So I used to make my way through my industrial organization textbooks thinking of it all as fascinating discussion of some intriguing but very far away culture. Doesn't feel that way now.
Anyway, I should stop being anxiety-ridden, take a minute, and be glad. I'll do that.
Soon as the letters to the other wholesalers are written. And I really should finish that long-form chrono, and of course the packaging issue needs some thought . .
Planning someday to disappear to the coast of Spain and sit in the sun for a few months as soon as I've got a bit of free time,
Rustin
Huh? (Score:1)
I don't get it, the poster seems like it is something that would be used in a negative analysis of US military history, so surely right wingers wouldn't be interested in it. Huh?
Oh and I agree, getting a proper print out of anything is a horrid task. No matter what the quality is, it never quite looks as good as it did on the CRT.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
You see, for the FOR, they wanted about what you'ld expect. America did Bad Things! Look at how awful *they* (almost never "we") are. But the VFW wanted a clear readable document that showed just how many places their members had been going off and getting shot at and then coming home and being asked "Laos? Where's that?" or even worse, "We aren't at war with (China/Guatamala/the Dominican Republic/etc.,etc.), how could you have been in combat there? You must be (lying/a mercenary/a spook)."
I've found that people who look at this data closely are ALWAYS surprised how many "bad" things we've done but, just as much, how many times our soldiers have been at the absolute leading edge of maintaining, or in fact advancing civilization.
Whose slave patrols shut down much of the North African traffic? Ours.
Who first said NO to the Barbary Pirates and backed it up with real force? We did.
Who defended prodemocracy activists over a hundred years ago in the face of superior military force? The U.S. Navy.
In other words, my initial goal (other than chances to extend database stuff I was working on and the desire to make a living on my own) was to provide data that, as my site says, is meant for strategic decisionmaking. If somebody claims the right to vote about whether we should be at war with Iraq then they should bloody well at least understand the twenty-plus times we've been gun barrel to gun barrel around there already and what that implies. It's not about "Us Good, Them Bad", or even "Us Bad, Them Good". If anything it's about providing the context to document that that is a destructively oversimplifying way to try to understand the issue.
We (and I say that as both a proud American in general and somebody in particular whose ancestors played a small role in this from very early on) were a nation of reality hackers back when most of the West was still doing things "because that's how it's always been done". That's why John Paul Jones, Lafayette, Kosciusko, Jefferson's and Franklin's parents, and all those others were on the republican side. But an implication of that, especially when combined with how poor we were in finished goods, is that we were, from Day One, a nation of traders, intermediaries, and, yes, smugglers. You can't grok who we are as a people without coming to terms with our inherent internationalism and you can't come to terms with that without getting to know the role armed struggle has played in shaping us, our relations with the world, and the world itself.
Want to understand the Caribbean? You should understand that much of the governmental structures of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and a slew of others there and around the world were literally designed and implemented by the U.S. Marine Corps working with small bunches of, well, let's call them U.S. ministers without portfolio. Good? Bad? Wrong questions. First get the data, then you'll have earned the luxury of judgement.
Of course, one sheet of paper, no matter how lovingly stuffed with info, is a piss-poor level of information. But it appears to be an effective starting point and memory cue. Show somebody this thing and they almost always say "oh, yeah!, I remember that now!" But different people have meant each of the following (of the ones that I remember) when they said "that":
The occupations of Cuba
The Seminole wars
The "Pig War" vs. Canada
1950s actions in Indochina
and so on.
Does all that make a bit more sense?
Still trying to learn how to answer questions in fewer then ten paragraphs,
Rustin
Your shoes are fine. (Score:1)
As to your fears of inadequacy...insubstantial. Just acknowledge that, yes this is scary, and yes it is exciting, and go forward, doubts and goosebumps notwithstanding. And those fish are likely to never go back to brown paper after being wrapped in the US military history. Why would they want to after experiencing such a far superior wrapping
When you start to doubt yourself, find the friend that you are in closest proximity to, and have them tell you otherwise. Maybe if enough people tell you what reality actually is, you'll start to believe it yourself. Though if it requires multiple ivy league degrees for you to believe someone, that severely limits your prospects
So you're planning on going to Spain. It sounds like you're in for a blast. Sitting near the ocean, on the patio of the quaint restaurant that the locals recommended. Having tapas and sangria, watching the sun sink into the horizon, and the colors bleed across the sky. Listening to music faintly wafting in, on a salty Mediterranean breeze. (Or that is what I would picture doing in Spain
_____
PS. Answering questions in fewer than 10 paragraphs...please don't. I don't think that you could possibly synopsize your lengthy comments and maintain the underlying passion and personality that they contain. If your answer is brief, let it stay that way, if you feel the need to write a 10 page treatise on how forks are redundant and all anyone really needs is a ladle and chopsticks, so be it.
Congrats! (Score:2)
I work on a software/systems engineering project with huge cycle times (and by huge I mean "H00j")
and it seems that we never have the perfect product. Even for school projects we delivered great things, but they were never perfect.
Thats why we have revisions and editions. Any errors or priting imperfections on your map will be fixed in the second edition. That gives you a new product to push around. If your map gets extensive use by a certain class (college, HS, etc.) when you update they'll be obliged to get the latest and greatest.
But forget all of that. I'm sure its your perfectionist drive that has propelled you to where you are. As long as you aren't too OCD about it, its okay
Or, perhaps all this fame and fortune will go to your head and we will shortly see you on VH1 "behind the posters." (probably not)