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We’re closing in on the one year mark since I made the fateful decision to start selling physical products. That’s not the point of this post, but it seems like a useful reference point.

Because this past year has been a constant series of stumbling into some struggle of some kind, overcoming, and stumbling right into another, different struggle. Rinse and repeat.

THIS ISN’T A BAD THING!

What’s that saying? Experience is the best teacher? In my case, that seems especially true. I’ve always been an experiential learner. Try something, break it, figure out why I broke it, start to learn the shape of the thing I’m working with, and so on.

Knowing what I know now of how my brain works, gotta admit, it’s tempting to take that and rabbit hole back down my entire life’s experience with learning. But I’ll save that for later!

Anyway, that’s been the pattern. Stumble. Overcome. Stumble into something else. Overcome.

What’s that look like?

I could probably burn an entire post talking examples. But for everyone’s sake, I’ll keep it to one.

Instructions & Insert Cards

In the beginning: for products that needed instructions, instructions were printed, cut, folded, and placed into the box.

Struggles: I quickly found myself managing not just product production, but instructions production. Printing, cutting, storing. Having to interrupt fulfillment to print more. Not to mention the overall mediocre experience of this little, awkwardly-folded, poorly cut piece of paper.

Solution: Insert cards & product guides! Instead of printing instructions for every single thing, I got insert cards printed up for different products. These featured QR codes that pointed to product guides, where instructions can be found.

This immediately alleviated the printing-and-stocking instructions thing. And the product guide setup means I can also easily update instructions down the line, bring in additional elements like research and other builds, and so on.

Struggles: The first cards were large – like 5×3 – making them a pain to store and access. Especially when I got them printed for every single track variant. Plus, as I introduced other tracks that didn’t require that size box, well, 5×3 didn’t make sense.

Solution: Resize the insert cards down to business card size, and get them printed at FedEx to cut the lead time from a week or more to a day. The business card size fits my 4x3x2 boxes quite well, and is much easier to store, especially in variety.

Struggles: As the product line grew, card variety became unwieldy for other reasons. Running out of, say, T48 cards when I still had tons of T62 cards was annoying.

Solution: Simplify around subject. Everything produced for any M24 Chaffee now gets directed to the M24 Product Guide. Same for the M1008, T28, RSO, you get the idea.

In the rare cases where there are enough products to justify maybe a subcategory, that will be considered. For example, I recently got VVSS Track Set cards printed up, and it’ll kinda live on as a second-level product guide. As I run low on T66, T80, and T84 cards, I’ll probably also consolidate those down to a single HVSS card.

So far, this approach has been working exceptionally well over the past few months with all the new T28, M24, and now RSO products launching.

Look at any aspect of the business, though, and I can drag out similar evolutions and iterations.

Optimization Spirals

Who cares if larger cards are slightly more unwieldy?

I do. Not because I want to. But because I have far too many things I want to do, and what feels like never enough time to do them. A lot of this comes down to my fucked-up neurodivergent relationship with time, but some of it’s also just math. The more time I have to spend fetching insert cards (or cutting instructions…) the less time I have for design, or for site improvements, or for learning new skills. Especially as order volumes keep increasing.

I’m 1000% comfortable saying that there is no way the systems I had in place a year ago could withstand the current pace of orders and production. Not a chance.

But. (There’s Always a But)

Chasing optimization can lead to a certain nearsightedness. Everything becomes a game of inches and seconds, and when things get hectic, larger strategic priorities that aren’t immediately urgent can get pushed.

Then you blink and it’s been two months and you haven’t touched them.

This happens to me all the time. I hate that it does. But it does. I have design things I keep meaning to learn. Business arrangements I keep meaning to actually operationalize. An entire STL/digital side of the business I keep meaning to revamp. And yet it (and Patreon with it) mostly sit collecting dust because there’s always something in front of it.

A Pause and a Surge

Things are going really well right now, but I can also feel the weight of technical, operational, and learning debt piling up behind me. I have things to fix, things to learn, and things to refine. Heck – I’d also like to consider maybe building something again at some point!

So I’m going to take a page from experience. I tend to do best in pause-and-surge cycles. Maybe it’s an ADHD thing. I don’t know. But in the months where I slow down to consolidate, things have had a way of slingshotting forward immediately thereafter.

That’s what October is going to be. Not a hiatus or anything like that. More like…space. An intentional focus on some larger, longer-term strategic things alongside the day-to-day. From the outside, the only really noticeable change will be the shift of a number of planned launches from October to November. And even that’s largely about giving myself some breathing room for packaging and inventory purposes.

But after October, look out! November, December and January are going to be bat-shit with cool new things. I can’t wait to start showing them to y’all.