From Selling Drugs to Selling Mugs

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The lack of updates on my last big make money scheme means it went nowhere. Not for lack of ambition, rather for lack of courage and action.

It’s time to move onto the next make money quick scheme!

I drink coffee in the morning, as I’m almost sure you do as well. I drink it as part of my morning routine, which includes writing a few Morning Pages.

When I drink coffee, it’s important that I pour it into a nice mug. Our mugs consist of a bunch of plain white ones, an old Hillary in 2018 mug (our Trump 47 mug hasn’t arrived yet), a “Nasty Lady” mug (remember those lame post-Trump protests? They’re still lame…), and a big one with an O on it.

I’ve hunted for mugs with cool math formulas on them for a long time, because I love math. The only ones you can find are plastered with a bunch of random formulas, or have $E=mc^2$ on them. I am not interested in popular science mugs – I want to see the [Law of Quadratic Reciprocity](your reddit comment), or a proof of Gauss’s Theorema Egregium, or a derivation of Riemann’s Zeta Function.

And I thought the other day, maybe other mathematicians would like to get their hands on coffee mugs with serious math on them. Hence, the Math Mug!

My plan now is to make and sell a hundred million Math Mugs and get rich. I’ll follow Kagan’s blueprint in Million Dollar Morning, first target people I know, and hunt for suggestions to make these a no-brainer purchase. Maybe I’ll open an Etsy shop as sales start picking up!

I am a Drug Dealer!

About a day after coming up with my new scheme, I had started to think about ways to cut costs hard so I can maximize my profit. And then it hit me – this is exactly what I did when I failed at selling drugs back in high school.

This was back in the 1990s Wisconsin. I had two classes of friends back then – computer-math wiz kids, and dirtball druggies.

I was, at the time, pissed off at the former, because someone had stolen an image I made, pixel by pixel, on my TI-85 calculator. It had taken several days to complete. It was supposed to be the splash page for a new calculator game called “Death Run”, and had a pretty good silhouette of Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard chasing someone with his gun drawn.

The thief used it as a splash page for his own game, which was a text-based game where you tried to get rich selling drugs. Everybody in school was playing this game that used my image without attribution!

The goal of the game was to buy low and sell high so your cash flow is always positive. That gave me an idea – maybe I could make some extra cash (and get popular) by selling weed!

Pretty much all my druggie friends helped me get started – sourcing the product, explaining the product sizing (dime bag, nickel bag, etc.), and even finding customers. I still blew it!

After I bought the largest bag of weed I had ever seen, it was hard to resist not smoking some of it. In fact, it was impossible. After enjoying myself for a few days, I decided to split my stash up into saleable bags. That’s when my heart sunk. I could no longer cover my costs with the remainder.

So, I did what any good entrepreneur without scruples would do. I made the bags light. I sold maybe one or two to the gullibles. After about a week, my friend who had hooked me up with the supply was flabbergasted that I hadn’t sold the whole thing yet. In order to help, he got one of his friends to buy from me.

This friend was a year or two older than me, very cool, and very muscular. I did not want to disappoint him. When he came over for a nickel bag, and looked at the bag I gave him, he said “what’s this, a dime bag?” (that’s half a nickel bag). I panicked, got frustrated, and just gave him the rest of my weed, which ended up being a bit more than what he’d asked for, and he left happy.

I never sold drugs again.

Lessons Learned

All this came flooding back as I thought about how to maximize my Math Mug gambit a few days ago. And I realized, I will not be that little kid anymore, but rather work to gain the respect of my customers.

Here are a few things I will and won’t do with my new gambit:

1. Don’t use from your own inventory

What my cheap younger self should have done, is maintain a strict separation between my inventory and my own stash. In other words, I should not have smoked the weed I intended to sell, but rather bought another bag for myself. NOTE: I don’t smoke weed anymore 🙂

This translates to my mug biz like this – I want to drink MY coffee from Math Mugs! So instead of nipping one or two from my stock of sellable mugs, I should buy one when I’ve made enough profit to do so.

Maybe I can convince my supplier to send me a sample.

2. Make a high quality product

My dope biz suffered from poor quality control. My bags were light, so my customers did not get their money’s worth. Not only did this fail to make my business profitable, but it risked destroying my reputation on the day of product launch.

For a coffee cup design company, this means do NOT find the cheapest possible supplier, or use the cheapest possible printing process. It doesn’t mean find the most expensive, either. It means to find a high-quality supplier, and make sure the mugs are worth the trouble for my customers.

I look at that old Hillary in 2016 mug I have, and see that it’s barely legible now. After a few runs through the dishwasher, it is clear that this was a cheaply made product, not worth the few dollars I threw at it.

My mugs will be the kind of mug I want on my own shelf for years to come.

3. Do not overprice the product

In my panic to turn a profit, I charged customers more than my skimpy dime bags were worth. If I were one of those customers, I would find a new dealer.

My goal is to make money. However, I also want to grow a business. You can’t do that if you treat your customer like a quick buck, by swindling them. You do that by building a reputation as a straight dealer who respects the people who choose your product, and send you their hard-earned dollar.

Growing money is not made by stiffing individuals, but by volume of sales. Tonnage. I want customers to come back to me for more. And I want them to refer customers, who refer groups, who refer departments, who refer entire organizations to me and my products. That doesn’t happen if I’m clearly trying to bilk my customers out of an extra buck or two.

However, it also doesn’t mean I should lose money. I’ll use some math to figure out my cost of production, do some research on competitor pricing, and use those to make sure my mugs are priced fair.

Conclusion

My two first designs are sprinkled through the article. One mug shows the Pythagorean Theorem, and gives a hint on how to prove it. The other shows Carl Gauss’s statement of the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, and presents a chart of some examples.

Ready to elevate your coffee break? Be one of the first to own a Math Mug! The first 25 who order one get a 10% discount.

Still not convinced? Share your thoughts in the comments below. What other kinds of math-inspired merch would you like to see?

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