Don’t Panic! How to Handle a Disappointing Product Sample

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What do you do when your first product sample arrives and it sucks? You either throw the whole idea out as stupid, or you maximize your improvements and try again.

If you’ve read one of my earlier posts on the Growth Mindset, you know it’s important to use failure as information that fuels improvement.

It’s easy to take failures and use them as bait for your Inner Critic to come out and punish you. This manifests in product development as the urge to can the whole enterprise.

The growth mindset says, maybe the evidence suggests an improvement that can be made instead.

I sold a few math mugs! Three were to myself, of course, as samples. Two were sold to my father in law, and two to an old friend I used to work with. They are math people – my father in law has written several articles about math history, and my friend just published a book on the discovery the principle of least action by mathematician Pierre de Fermat.

Sure, both sales can be chalked up to sympathy buys, but they helped me complete a few full start-to-finish tests of purchasing. Both my customers also provided valuable feedback – for example, maybe don’t put the whole proof of the Pythagorean Theorem on the mug.

The real feedback, however, came when I got my samples. They were disappointing. My Quadratic Reciprocity (QR) mug, which is all text, was too small and blurry.

The chart, which should be imposing and thought provoking, was too hard to read that it appears as something you’re not supposed to read.

My Trigonometric Functions mug would have been great, except for the bluish ghosting.

And except for the microscopic image text.

My first reaction was that this was a dead idea from the beginning. Who will buy crappy mugs where you can’t even read the math? I cheaped out on production by choosing a cheap company – Printful. In general, stop doing this and stop having dreams of big profits.

Keep Going!

Then, I remembered my own advice, and decided to instead try to improve the product, and get the best result possible from the producer. Changing course like this feels like steering the ship into the wind – it takes almost physical force, even though it’s just mental work.

First, I got feedback from my Fermat friend. He said he actually likes the Pythagorean Theorem mug, but is disappointed in the QR one. “Not a good advertisement for your business!” he said. Instead of a refund, though, he wanted a replacement with better quality printing. In other words, he actually likes and wants the mugs!.

Second, I emailed Printful and asked why the mugs look so bad. Their response was, some crappiness is expected. But my imagery also was too small for the mug – I need to maximize the size of my images on the cups. So, I looked around on their site and found an actual template.

I used the template to maximize the space used by my QR text, and also added a little branding so my mugs now advertise my site.

Do Not Quit if You Don’t Know You’ve Lost

The story of the American Revolutionary War is inspiring. The war was devastating to the patriots who supported the revolution. The economy was broken, leading to widespread poverty. The continental army under Washington faced constant supply shortages, including lack of boots during the punishing Pennsylvania winters, and lack of basic foodstuffs. They suffered major defeats at New York and South Carolina.

But in the end, Washington defeated the British.

In a way, starting a business is kind of like fighting a battle against terrible odds. Your first battles might be defeats, but you shouldn’t quit just because you lost a battle.

Here are some tips to decide whether your shiny new side hustle is worth the effort:

1. Money Invested

In general, it should cost you VERY LITTLE to start your business. My mug business really cost me zero dollars. I designed my images using the free vector graphics application Inkscape, the free paint application GIMP, and the free math typesetting software LaTeX. Printful itself costs no money to get started.

The only thing I spent money on are the samples, which cost about $6 per mug. Now I have three interesting mugs to drink coffee from, and they didn’t cost too much.

If I had spent $1000 to start, and found myself at the same point, I’d stop.

• KEEP GOING if you spent what you consider a small amount of money so far.
• STOP if you have dumped a lot of money into the venture.
• STOP also if your expenses add up to more than your expected returns.

2. Time Spent

If you are studying up on how to start a business, you will have encountered the sentiment that “It takes work. A lot of work.”

While this is true, it shouldn’t take too much work to perform validation testing of your idea. Your first forays into the wild should be with prototypes, with the goal of getting feedback.

I dumped a few hours into my images and into actual mug design on Printful. Part of my early work was to post a request for proofreading on the r/math subreddit. The number and quality of people that helped in the comments told me, there was at least some interest in the concept of Cool Math On Mugs.

When I finally sent out my sales emails, I would say I spent 25% of my time on product development, 15% on setting up the online store, 10% on the sales email, and 50% convincing myself to take action. This added up to maybe 15 hours total.

If I had spent more time than full-time employment, or even part-time employment, I would probably turn my back and find a different side hustle.

• KEEP GOING if you sunk what you think is minimal time into the project.
• STOP if this has already become like a part-time job, with no clear return.

3. Experimental Evidence

This is the real measurement. If you actually brought in cash from sales, and the response was favorable, then don’t stop.

Like I said above, the response on Reddit was encouraging. The responses from my sales emails were as well. A few customers said, while they’re not willing to buy a mug yet, they had ideas they’d like to see on future mugs.

My Fermat friend gave the most encouraging response, though. After saying he thought the QR mug was just no good, I asked if he wanted a replacement or a refund. He responded, “I want the mug. Send me a new one when you’ve improved the design.”

• KEEP GOING if you get any feedback that indicates a demand for your product.
• STOP if you get no response, or responses that “it’s garbage”.

Pro Tip: Product Modification

Along with good and bad responses to your sales pitch, you should solicit suggestions for improvement of the product. In my sales email, I include the following line

“If you have any suggestions on how to improve this idea and make the purchase a no-brainer, or other math that you would like to see, let me know.”

If nobody buys your product, but you get some suggestions for how to modify the design to make it desirable, then make the modifications and try again!

I hope you found this article useful, and that it encourages you to try your own sales experiments. If you did try something, and it didn’t quite work, please leave a comment!

Also, go buy a Math Mug.

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