Taking the plunge
This is a story about my side project that I expect to write about for a little while. Like many Londoners, I used to spend a percentage of my time commuting on the underground, but in March 2020, that part of my weekdays was abruptly replaced by queuing outside the supermarket and following along exercise videos. As we gradually settled into a new routine, I was ready to take on a challenge. I had been half-joking about starting a company for perhaps a couple of years, but had been putting it off because it would be quite a commitment. Now that my day job has crept into my living room and has even blatantly stolen my personal time, I desperately need to draw some boundaries around it. Already I have tried taking up sewing and doing a yoga bet, but these hobbies got pushed aside every time a semi-urgent/important work deadline popped up. To fight work, I need more work. You might think I’m just going to stress myself out, but I see the business as a different kind of work. I will have full autonomy over what to take on and how to plan the tasks. It is daunting that it’ll be just me doing it all, but sometimes it might even be easier to not rely on anybody. So a few weekends ago, I submitted the registration form for my company, I committed. Since then, I have found it a lot easier to pull myself away from the day job at the end of the day and switch that part of the brain off to stop it from running in the background. I’m glad to have taken the plunge, and am excited to document my journey.
I would begin telling this story by winding back just a few weeks, though it arguably started a long time before that. Being a wuss that I am, I did do some research in the lead-up to the company registration. As my day job was already rather stressful, I wanted something low-risk to start with. I signed up for an account on a T-shirt print-on-demand service, and checked that it really wouldn’t cost anything to set up a store on the platform. I then did a few Google searches and concluded that I shouldn’t get into trouble as long as my designs respected intellectual property rights and were not offensive. There were still a few things I later had to check, but at that stage, the information was enough for me to go ahead and open up the page on Companies House.
The questions were largely straight-forward, so I simply whizzed through them, but when it came up to paying up, I hesitated. It wasn’t a large sum of money, but should I be paying this out of my personal account? I ended up doing that, because you need your registration to open a business bank account. In fact, you need more than that. That’s why I had to quickly tidy up my bullet points of a business plan into a few legible paragraphs. I was slightly disheartened because my application was initially bounced back, but at the same time, I was reassured because I had shopped around and picked this particular bank because I believed that it could be trusted, and it seemed to be taking their checks seriously. Eventually it got sorted out, along with the admin regarding taxes.
Then it was time to be creative! I chose T-shirts instead of, say, e-Books because they would give me an excuse to do something I used to do for fun as a kid. I enjoyed - and I think still enjoy - doodling but I hardly do that anymore because I don’t make time for it anymore. Now I have to and I aim to make a new design every month. To kick it off though, I decided to do two so my store wouldn’t look too bare. That actually has turned out to be less of an issue than I feared, but I’d go into that later. Nevertheless, doing two designs allowed me to really think about the brand and have it defined. I was buzzing with ideas, and I did some of the brainstorm through sketching… Ah, that’s why I don’t draw anymore! My sketches looked like something a 10-year-old would do, which made sense because that’s around when I stopped drawing. All I needed was just some outlines, so they’d do.
The next task was to translate them into vector graphics. I’d played with Inkscape once before to put together a humourous birthday card that basically took the mick out of my partner (so humourous for me, perhaps less so for my partner!). I had to look up almost every single little thing, even the button for drawing a line, and really I still don’t know how to set the thickness. Seriously I should just watch some tutorials and learn how to use it properly, but since I was only spending the time outside of my day job on this, progress felt slow already, so I just did as little as I could get away with to have a couple of designs ready to be uploaded. What took the longest was actually the logo. I read a bit about the theory, and I understood why Google had changed their font a while back, but that didn’t seem to help with my logo. I had to keep re-working it and I just made it more and more complicated. In the end, I just stuck with the one I started with so I could move on.
Even though what I produced weren’t perfect, I was still quite chuffed about them, and immediately I wanted to understand how copyright worked. Fortunately, I stumbled upon a series of webinars on the subject, and I signed up for almost everything else the provider offered for free too. The lockdown has turned out to be a great time to be start out, as so many resources have been made available online. Where previously I’d have to take half a day off to trek across the city for an event, I now just have to shift my hours around and listen to the talks on an app. As well as intellectual property, I learned about marketing, which to be honest I used to think of as fluff, but the lady made quite a lot of sense especially because she could back it up with data and analytics. I realised that, since my business was extremely easy to set up, most of the effort would actually be spent on marketing.
This is in no way proper market research, but I browsed the internet in the odd hours I got before and after work to see how the businesses I liked did things, and I logged onto some social media platforms for the first time in absolutely ages. The posts seemed to verify what the lady had said, as businesses really seemed to try to engage. I might not have needed to see these tweets to buy from them, but I suppose I’m from the older generation and they got me in a different way - I liked their packaging, or I recognised their names from an ad, and I tried the products. The same psychology applies in the digital age. They post frequently so their profile pictures pop up in your feeds, and even better, they get you to respond and the activities help them get a higher score according to the platform’s algorithm so they’ll get further exposure. Since I’m not a regular user, I feel I should focus on building the content of my own website first, and I began drafting the about page as well as some blog posts to try out the voice.
Finally it was the weekend and I could sit down at the computer to build my store. It ended up taking a considerably longer to set up, and I wished I’d done it during the week. I did a final check of the platform I’d signed up to before the company registration, but some aspects of it didn’t sit well with me, so I looked into other platforms for comparison. Having carefully read through the terms and conditions, I decided to go with another platform, but this platform had slightly different requirements for the graphics. I didn’t give it too much thought though and just went with what I had, but then I was blocked on their moderation process. It was the second time that I had to wait till the next working day for a response, and I considered changing my rhythm, perhaps by working compressed hours in my day job to free up Wednesdays.
Before making that decision though, I had to first work out how bad my previous decisions of not using Inkscape properly and not editing my designs according to the platform’s guidelines were, so I blew a large part of my director’s loan for starting up on a couple of samples. So much for wanting to donate some profits to charities! Preparing for the worst, I immediately watched some tutorials and the second video said not to use the free-hand tool… It was back to the drawing board it’d seem!