| | Announcements - We Learned About Email Hell |
StereoManuals began business in the first half of 2001 from a standing start when we knew "nothing" about this business. By mid 2002, we were arguably the most successful seller of audio manuals on eBay but offering only a small subset of what we actually had. Even though successful on eBay, we didn't like trying to differentiate ourselves from the plethora of unscrupulous and dishonest sellers there at the time. (One major exception was and is John Stewart of AudioArchives). So we decided to move most of the business off eBay and do it direct.
When first starting that fall to put a website together, our initially ambitious intentions were to provide a separate description page including pictures for most if not all audio manuals and brochures we had. BUT, that was when we had about 10,000 items. Even then, we knew this "was" going to take quite awhile, but we intended to plug away at it till finished. Before we could make much headway on that, a new problem developed.
Goggle indexed the site and the partial lists of our (then) few thousand manuals in January 2003. We were "totally" unprepared for the email onslaught that followed. The Goggle indexing of our site, suddenly made "everything" available which was NOT like selling on eBay where only what we are offering at auction was for sale, with occasional additional requests. Our email inbox overflowed with folks all over the world wanting to buy this and that manual. The problem was that while we had a general idea of what we had, we hadn't actually laid eyes on most of them yet, let alone have descriptive and pricing information available.
Getting the initial descriptive information and doing the initial production is much more time-consuming that later production. Just knowing we were supposed to have something and actually being able to describe and price it are two totally different things. And because we refused to just "crank out crap", each new one required page by page cleanup and detailing to produce best results. Trying to make thousands of items available all at one time resulted in a totally unworkable situation.
We desperately wanted to answer everyone who wrote, but couldn't keep up. We desperately wanted to be able to give the descriptive info and prices, but couldn't because we had too many manuals, but had not had them long enough to have the info in a database yet. So, we fell behind on shipments for the first time ever. We found ourselves in a hell-hole of sorts and didn't know what to do to get out of it. Then it just got worse from there.
Just 3 months after the Google indexing, we took advantage of an unplanned and unexpected opportunity to make an acquisition of 40,000 additional manuals. Since we were literally still in a "startup phase" AND woefully behind, this new "blessing" was almost more "blessing" than we could bear.
In the midst of all this, that dastardly Dave Swaffer twisted my arm and forced me to cooperate with God only knows how much time, to produce our fabulous Pioneer Spec Bible. (Just joking Dave, you know I love ya...)
For about a year and a half, 120-140 hour workweeks were "normal"... just trying to get an idea of what we now had while attempting to keep a business running. Try as we might, there were large numbers of people who wrote and simply never received a response. Needless to say, it was NO FUN! If we had access to much more capital, perhaps we may have avoided those problems by hiring a bunch of people. But that just wasn't feasible at the time.
As we are doing a complete overhaul of our site (early summer 2004), we hope that previous visitors and customers will be able to see that much has changed over the past year and a half. We have completed the examination, page counting and descriptive work for several thousand of the most frequently requested items and have that information in an easily accessible database. We also have a much better idea of what we actually acquired in the "6000 pounds" of manuals in April of 2003. As such, can now fairly quickly get the descriptive and pricing information for anything we have. At the current level of contacts, we could easily respond quickly and stay totally current except for the backlog that has accumulated over the first half of this year. As soon as that is caught up, we think it will be much better "all the time" going forward.
It will make you cry... if you can stop laughing long enough... Much more on trials, tribulations, growing pains and our feeble attempts to overcome is available in the Collection of Old Pages and other Current Announcements pages. |
