#coastermatic

We had the opportunity to watch Tash Wong’s TYPO talk “Oh Sh!t, I Have to Make It Now. Stories of Becoming a Creative Entrepreneur”. In this talk she defines what success is for her and describes her experience as an indie designer.

Tash Wong is one of the founders of Coastermatic. 

“At Coastermatic, we help people like you turn their memorable experiences into cherished possessions and gifts. We do this by printing your photos on to premium, American made, ceramic coasters and delivering them to your door. Recently, we added designer coasters the mix. These sets incorporate an exciting range of illustrations to our coaster catalog.“

Besides Coastermatic, she also does product consulting for the New York Times and NY-based tech startups, as well as developing communication tools for teams. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

She talked about success, something that can mean different things to different people and uses the Coastermatic to exemplify the meaning of success to her.

Coastermatic began as a collaboration between two great friends who met at graduate school: Tash Wong and Tom Harman. In February 2012, they founded the company to pursue their interest in combining home objects + tech, and to fulfill the requirements of the $1,000 project. What started as the final for the Entrepreneurial Designcourse at SVA IxD turned into a passion for bringing photography into people’s homes in a unique way.

     Last week we were asked to write a reflection of Tash Wong’s TYPO talk ‘Oh Sh!t, I Have to Make It Now. Stories of Becoming a Creative Entrepreneur.’ During this talk Wong expressed what success meant to her and how the internet has broadened what is acceptable as success. More like you don’t know what it looks like, but when you see it you recognize it.

     Because of the nature of success, especially more recently, it’s hard to explain. The internet allows people to find new ways to become successful and in turn broadens the direct path to it each time someone does something different. Because you can’t talk about it as a stand alone one size fits all, Tash uses her company ‘Coastermatic’ to explain how she interprets it.

     Coastermatic was founded in 2012 by herself and Tom Harman during their days in grad school. It is an instagram to stone translation. You can place pictures you’ve uploaded to instagram and have them printed on coasters. This serves as a constantly reactivated mnemonic device allowing you to revisit and relive all of those moments you thought were worthy of capturing. This resinated with me in my path to understanding meaning in context for the individual as I push forward my Kickstarter campaign.

     When she began this project, success for her meant a sustaining business that could at least get her a roof over her head and food on her table. Since then she has found that when you get there, success is redefined. What you thought of to be the finish line becomes a checkpoint. I got this far, how much further can I go.

Week 41-42

Marketing! Getting traction for Coastermatic has always been a challenge. It turns out that when you make something, people don’t automatically flock to it. Over the past year, I’ve tried all kinds of things: social media, blogging, speaking, email marketing, ads, etc etc. Nothing has consistently worked, and I often feel like I’m shooting in the dark.

Recently, I’ve begun to get some clarity - YAY. Data, experimentation, focus, and funnels are now terms that actually make sense and I’m starting to build on. I found a couple of resources recently that’s helped make everything click: Hiten Shah, and a book called Traction.

Hiten is the co-founder of KissMetrics, and has given a few amazing talks about digital marketing. I found his talk, Lean Analytics (slides), super insightful. He walks through a formula for experimentation and uses case studies to express how each step worked. Said formula is the scientific method, so nothing new there, but the way he talks through it is what I’ve been looking for.

Traction is a book that was re-released recently. It’s a shallow book that covers a wide range of topics. As I read the intro, I thought - where was this 3 years ago! The first few chapters give you permission to be crap at marketing (turns out it’s hard for nearly everyone), and then gives you a framework to figure out what type of marketing to focus on. The rest of the book are short chapters on 19 different types of online and offline marketing. They’re very quick chapters, but it’s nice to have a high level overview of so much in 1 book.

Moving ahead, Coastermatic is focusing on press and holiday reviews, and also building a solid social media presence to show how awesome we are to all of the people who will find us through said reviews. Curious? Check us out on Instagram and Pinterest, or join our mailing list!  

Manufacturer visit

A couple of weeks ago, I made the trip out to visit the coaster factory! It was fantastic to see the team who make the coasters again, and work through a bunch of production questions. Here’s a couple photos from the trip - a box of CM labels, and the so-to-be new coaster press. 

Finally, it has happened to me Someone in Asia completely ripped off Coastermatic. I’ll refrain from giving you their name, cause lord knows they don’t deserve attention. I heard about them a few weeks ago, and was very surprised to discover that they’d used 100% of our selection flow, js, html, images and all! I quickly learned the extent of my rights, and it turns out that I can sue, amongst other things.

Instead of doing that, I reached out to them to let them know we welcome competition (there are a lot of tables in this world), but we don’t take kindly to our code being copied and that they needed to take it down. To my surprise, they actually did…for a week. When the site popped back up, they’d simply updated class names and hidden their js a bit better. But, it’s still the UI Tom and I built and designed. *sigh*

A lot happened last week, I went to Hawaii to spend some time with my family, I found a sales rep to take Coastermatic to a few trade shows, and I got engaged to David Bellona!

Life is crazy and exciting.

This week is basically catch up on last - I've got mountains of email to get through, and am thinking it's time to create a system so I can have someone help me do this. Do you have any tips on how to outsource email management? Lemme know.

I'm also creating a bunch of coaster sets, which is a lot of fun. I've enlisted the help of April Walters, Sarah Adams, Liz Tan, and David Bellona to help me get the 2015 Coastermatic Collection together. The Brooklyn based American Design Club will be representing Coastermatic at the Las Vegas Market and NY Now. The first batch of 6 sample sets went off to the printer last night, and there are a few more in the works. I'll post photos of them on the Coastermatic instagram account, so check that out if you'd like to follow along with their progress. If all goes well, you'll be able to find Coastermatic coasters in stores across the country come October.

Following my big realization from last week, I had another one: Oh sh!t, I'm almost out of money.

One mistake we've kept making with Coastermatic has been expecting quick financial success (and by success, I mean ramen profitability). In our first year, we did really well on initial press and our first year of holiday sales. We also had really low expenses because we were grad students, living on either savings or loans for a couple of years. In the summer of 2013, we thought we could take the 10k we'd made from holiday sales and spin it into a living for both Tom and I. However, plans changed, Tom left the company, I moved to SF, and student loan repayments kicked in. For Coastermatic Round 3, I'd saved about 12k from a contracting job, and assumed that the 3 months of work it would fund would be enough to propel us (me + CM) into the new year.

My assumption was wrong only in terms of finances, which is actually amazing. 

I discovered that leaving the institutions of work and school, to go it alone on a solo project is incredibly difficult. There's no team to schedule with, no project goals or deadlines, there's also no one/thing to complain about. You have to construct every single part of your life. This includes:

The "get a job, no one wants these silly coasters" voice in your head.

Deciding what to work on from one minute/day/week/month to the next.

Learning to be ok with being bad at things. 

Deciding when not to work on things, because sleep/exercise/healthy food are important.

Trying not to worry about money.

Dealing with being alone most of the time, and building support networks so not be.

Now, 4.5 months of full-time work on Coastermatic has taught me that I can deal with all of the issues above, and actually thrive because of them. I LOVE the life I've created for myself over the last few months. I am fulfilled and challenged by everything that I'm doing in a way that's very different than anything else I've done before, most likely because I have to pay attention to my whole self, not just "Work Tash". I also now fully believe that Coastermatic is an awesome product that brings joy to people.

The next frontier is figuring out how to fund the next few months of Coastermatic. I have a new marketing plan I'm confident about and want the time to execute it. I'd like to keep control of CM, so my options moving ahead are: part time work, credit cards, bank loans, friends & family.

This week I'm working on spending plans for the next few months. The goal is to do a few different versions - if I roll with credit cards, if I had 30k, 50k, etc. What could I do with CM in these different scenarios? Also, how would I repay this? How do you put together realistic projections for these possible futures?