In September 2022 I discovered my role was “at risk” as part of a redundancy. I felt a rollercoaster of emotions: guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, excitement, relief, self-pity — I was bouncing from one to the next every few minutes. That last one though, self-pity, scared me. I knew that if I allowed myself to wallow in it, it could be a downward spiral. So, I quickly shifted my perspective, looked at this as an opportunity, and got to work on a process for redundancy that I’ve nicknamed the “AWW” framework.

Stage 1 — Assess

Calmly, professionally, and carefully assess the situation. You’ll have a hundred thoughts flying around your head, and being methodical with it will help calm those thoughts. Here’s how you can assess what’s happening so you can move forward.

1. Read your contract. Make sure it’s the most recent one if there were any amendments made to yours over the years (request it from HR if it isn’t). You need to understand what your contract says regarding your obligations, and understand what your company’s legal obligations are to you. You’ll usually find you can’t talk disparagingly about your company, for example, so refrain from posting negative things online. There may also be a clause which means previous employees cannot hire you if they have an open role (this would have been in their contract, of course). If that’s the case, discuss this with the company to see if that clause could perhaps be waived for those ex-employees should there be a role in their company.
2. If you’re part of a collective redundancy in Ireland, be aware that you’ll need to elect a representative for your group. I did not fully understand what this meant at the time, but you need to make sure this is someone organised, competent and as non-emotional as possible. They’ll be dealing with a lot of angry, upset people.
3. Calculate what you’ll receive, after tax, in the severance. This will tell you what kind of timeframe you have as a buffer until you need a new job ASAP. In Ireland, citizensinformation.ie is a great resource. For me, it meant all of my severance was tax-free, which is nice.
4. Understand what you can say to recruiters. Ask the company what is and is not ok to say. Clarify this via your representative.

Stage 2 — Work

As I mentioned, I myself could not let myself wallow in self-pity for fear of kicking off a downward spiral. I needed to work. For me, this meant that instead of my days consisting of leading product teams in building software, they instead started with working on my CV, networking, and rekindling old connections that might be able to help me in my time of need.

1. Keep a routine. This one’s a bit personal, but for me I needed to maintain a routine. That meant getting up in the morning as normal, making coffee, and getting to “work” looking for my next role, leaving Linkedin recommendations for colleagues, updating my CV based on continuous peer feedback, and creating content.
2. Network. You should always be maintaining some sort of network, but if not, now is the time to get back out there. For me this means attending meetups, asking for referrals for roles, and reaching out to people you’ve never met for help/chats/feedback.
3. Cancel/pause large purchases. We had just bought a house, so it was too late to back out of that one, but the kitchen table and sofa set we were looking at were immediately put on hold till we saw how this was all going to play out.
4. Organise the transfer of your health insurance and pension if you have them with the company. You don’t want to lose something important like health cover.
5. Ask your colleagues (both at-risk and not) for things like Linkedin referrals or letters of recommendation. Don’t let your anger get the better of you and steal this opportunity from you. At this moment, anyone remaining in the company will likely feel a strong urge to help you out. Let them.
6. Apply for roles you don’t even really want. This is a tactic I used to simply get back into the practice of interviewing. Interviewing is a skill, and you need to be good at it. I didn’t want to be interviewing for a role I really wanted, only to be thwarted by my lack of practice. Having some “throwaway” roles you know you can get an interview for are great at getting back into the swing of the world of corporate interviews.

Stage 3 — Wander

Your freedom for this stage will depend on your assessment earlier of your situation. Depending on your country’s employee rights and the amount of time you’ve been with the company, it might not be long at all. For me, it meant that I basically had 8 weeks of paid vacation, with a tax-free lump sum payment at the end of that to boot. I couldn’t live off it for months on end of course, but it took the pressure off the job search and let me explore, or “wander” a little, which I took full advantage of, of course.

1. Find courses to take. No I don’t mean how to make a pivot table in Excel or something, I mean learning to cook a certain cuisine, how to fly a plane, how to make great cocktails, or how to save someone’s life. There’s tons to learn and explore.
2. Find volunteering opportunities. There are a lot of worthy causes that could do with your time. Seek them out and you might also learn something too. I’ve been meaning to learn first aid for years, so I’ve applied to join St John’s Ambulance as a volunteer where that is part of the onboarding curriculum. If you’re in Ireland, I found volunteer.ie very easy to use and full of opportunities.
3. Consider alternative roles in adjacent, or totally different industries. It’s entirely possible that you’ll look back on this time as an inflection point in your life. Has there been something niggling at you these past few years? A business idea you know you’d be passionate to pursue, but the time was never right? The universe might just be giving you that push you need…

Forest Fires

Forest fires are destructive, indiscriminate and merciless, a bit like redundancies. However, forest fires are also necessary for a healthy ecosystem. They clear away space and allow new, diverse ecology to sprout from the ashes.

Perhaps this time in our life is just a forest fire, clearing the way for new, brighter beginnings. If you made it this far I hope this post helped you, and if you need to talk, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m @cderm on Twitter and here’s my Linkedin.

Your success in life is directly correlated to your ability to take rejection. — Scott Galloway.

Helpful Links

• Collective Redundancies on workplacerelations.ie

These questions are simple to ask, but can prove very difficult to answer, primarily because they put boundaries on what the company can do. To senior leadership, this of course feels very dangerous. If you manage Product Managers though, I feel it is your absolute responsibility to insist on these questions being explicitly answered, because it empowers your Product Managers to say “No”.

1. What do we build, and what do we NOT build?

What does your product (or portfolio of products) do, and why? What are the features and use cases. What are the product ideas that you have decided not to build, and why?

The answer to this question will tell you if the company has a vision, an assessment of the industry its in and an understanding of where they think it’s going.

2. Who do we build for, and who do we NOT build for?

What segment of the market is your product a perfect fit for? This could be considered the primary target segment.

What segment of the market is it a poorer fit, but enough of a fit that you can sell to them and support them, and continue to innovate and solve for them? This could be considered a secondary target segment.

What segment of the market is not a good fit? These people are who you can tell your product managers to ignore during their product discovery phases, and who Sales team should make sure they do not pursue.

3. Where are they in the world, and where are they not?

If you’re in a company trying to grow, you will inevitably find yourself trying to answer the question “Does the product work in X” — where X is the country/region that Sales team have a potential deal in.

The problem of course is that moving into a new region is usually a lot more difficult than it looks. There are different payments providers, cultural differences in the product, local laws and regulations to deal with (and to continue to deal with as that evolves), and much, much more.

Without mindfulness around how you approach new regions, it can cause immense strain on the company, so knowing where your Product Managers need to pay attention to, and where they don’t need to pay attention to, is critical.

Without being able to clearly answer these three questions, it’s very likely that your company is using its energy inefficiently, as different teams and individuals pull in different directions, falling out of alignment.

Three years ago I joined Flipdish as their first Product Manager. Back then it was a startup that had found product market fit and just needed to execute quickly and grow. I had product experience, but I think the kicker that got me the job was that I built my own app to track things like tips and delivery addresses when I worked as a fast food delivery driver, so I could hold my own technically too.

I don’t code in Flipdish (officially) but I can’t keep my hands out of VSCode, so over Christmas I decided to build a co-working app with my fiance. She did most of the backend (node/Express/Firestore) and I worked on the marketing site and web app (Nuxt/Vue3).

Without realising it, I found myself building all the features that I saw make a huge difference to Flipdish’s success. I’ve never seen anyone write about these in a clear, easy list, so here we go. I wanted this list to be tactical, that anyone can take and build out a solid product with, so below are 5 things that I’ll be building from the start in all my future projects.

1. Audit logs

Being able to see an “activity log” of actions taken in a given account is immensely powerful. In Flipdish it’s used daily by clients and support staff to debug any queries that may arise, or just to understand general activity on a given account. For Reservadesk, it’s proven hugely helpful early on to not only understand account activity, but simply for quick development. I can see when I make changes and the before/after of what they were. I’ve written a separate post about best practices for audit logging if you’d like to learn more about what makes a useful audit log.

2. Granular user permissions

When trying to figure out what way to configure your user permissions, it’s easy to do something simple, like giving yourself and your staff an “admin” permission (god mode, basically), and your users something general like “guest” or “teammate”. This will bite you later on, and is a tricky thing to unwind.

From now on, all of my projects will have granular user permissions from the outset. It has minimal up-front cost, and gives you flexibility down the road. You can always “bundle” your granular permissions together so that it appears in UI as a general thing, but you’ll have that flexibility down the road should you need to sell to enterprise or grow into different markets/regions.

In Flipdish, since we’ve exploded across the UK, Europe and North America, we have country managers, support staff, success staff, contractors etc, and they all need specific permissions to different things. Had we not had granular user permissions from the outset, this would have inevitably slowed us down and hindered growth.

3. Image manipulation API

It’s pretty rare that the projects you build won’t have images in some form. Before joining Flipdish, I think I was simply serving huge images in my sites/apps with minimal optimisation. Rookie error. I’ve since discovered a whole new world of intelligent image optimisation via services Imgix or imagekit.io. They both offer what is effectively an API layer on top of your images, meaning you can build your UI and simply pass in query parameters to “transform” the image based on what the UI needs at that particular time.

For instance, let’s say your user uploads an huge 1000px x 1000px image, which will only be used as a small icon. You don’t want to load that massive image on a mobile device.

With the image manipulation API you can request that image, but at a smaller size, like 40px x 40px. The service will transform it on the fly for you. It’s very impressive. Once you start using this, you’ll never go back in my opinion.

4. Localisation

I can see you rolling your eyes at this one, but hear me out. You don’t need to localise your app into multiple languages from the outset, but building in i18n from the start is something I’ll do religiously from now on, for two reasons.

1. The cost is low. I still dev in English, but then quickly create the strings in localise.biz (or similar service) before finally building a release for production. If sometime down the line I see that the app is popular in a given region that has other languages, it’s fairly trivial to get your app translated and you’re away.
2. You can let your customer define their own locale customisations. This gives your app a layer of customisation that’s relatively simple to achieve, but can be a real differentiator. Users can sometimes just want a certain word to say something else. In reservadesk, we built a system where our users can define certain words themselves, like the main call to action to reserve a desk can say “book now” or “reserve” — whatever the customer wants. In Flipdish, we have customisation requests every single day from clients and our ability to accommodate their requests has been central to keeping them as clients.

5. Referral scheme

This one doesn’t necessarily need much dev work initially, but it’s something I’ll be keeping in mind for all future projects. Letting your customers who love your app be rewarded for sending others your way is an absolute win-win. In Flipdish we’ve had partners and affiliates as a key strategic element of our growth plans across the globe. Having a robust system for rewarding your best referrers in a systematic way will absolutely help you down the line.

Bonus — your API is an asset

One huge thing I’ve learned in Flipdish is that your API isn’t just something you need for your UI to work. If you go about it right, building an open, public, well-documented API can make magic happen. You’ll find that companies start building things on top of your APIs for clients who need it, making them extremely sticky to your platform.

My 9–5 just became a Unicorn. was originally published in Startup Stash on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What are audit logs?

Audit logs are effectively an activity log of things that happened in a given entity (usually an “account”).

For instance, for one of my side projects that I built with my fiance — reservadesk.com, we log all activity within an “organisation” so that admin members (and us internally) who manage the organisation can see who changed what, and when. It makes it very easy to debug customer problems, as well as simply being able to track active accounts and see what people are doing as they poke about at your app.

What’s more, a lot of large clients will expect this kind of thing, and are willing and able to pay for it.

What audit logs are NOT

Audit logs are not like console logs in the console, or backend logging in your API like you might have in Datadog, Rapid7 or some other log provider. Those type of logs have equal, if not more importance, but they serve a different purpose. Those types of logs are for your developers or technical support to interrogate and check for problems. Audit logging is for your customers themselves (so they can see changes to things over time) and also your support/success staff for issue resolution and, to a lesser degree, usage.

Learning from Flipdish

At the time of writing, Flipdish just reached Unicorn status with our latest round of investment. Since joining three years ago, it’s been a whirlwind, to say the least, so right now feels like a good opportunity to pause and reflect on some of the things I’ve learned.

I’ll share that list shortly, but one of the big things I learned from Flipdish is the value of audit logs. When a customer calls in and asks why their app seems broken or buggy, being able to track down who changed what, and when, is a powerful tool to have in your arsenal to get the issue resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible.

BTW — we’re hiring across ALL types of roles — get in touch if you’re curious about any.

What should be logged?

The first logical question when tackling audit logs, is what actually should be logged, and what shouldn’t. A good rule of thumb is if something changes in your database, it should be logged. Typically, this means all POST, UPDATE, PATCH and DELETE requests. GET requests typically would not be logged, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be if you’ve got a compelling reason to know when someone viewed something, for instance.

Ask yourself the question “As the customer managing the configuration or monitoring of this app, would I like to know when this activity has happened, by who, and when?”. If the answer is a yes, then you need an audit log.

What should be in an audit log?

For me, there are a few key elements of an audit log that need to be there in order for it to be effective and useful to your team.

1. The entity that was changed. What was the entity that was created/updated/deleted etc. In the example below, the entity was a “resource”.
2. The type of event. Was it an update, a deletion, or something else? Being able to glance at an audit log and know the action that was taken is essential.
3. When was the event? You need to know when the event happened, and of course if you’re showing a list of events, they should be in chronological order. Bonus points here if you show both the time, and relative time (eg “10 minutes ago”)
4. Who did it? Knowing who made the change is essential. Was it a support team member, or the customer themselves? Bonus points here for including the user ID, to make chasing down the culprit that bit quicker.
5. What was changed? Understanding the properties that were changed, the previous value, and the new value, is essential. Without this information, your audit logs are a lot less effective.

Audit log example

How long should I keep audit logs?

This is up to your business, but in my experience, typically any more than 3 months is overkill. If there is anything to debug, it’ll usually crop up in that time frame. The only caveat to this would be large customers who want to retain logs for longer. This is of course an opportunity to upsell those clients onto a longer log retention period 😉.

Apps that do audit logging well

Of course I’m going to say Flipdish first, with reservadesk.com as a close second!

Other apps I’ve noticed that do it well are Stripe, split.io and localize.biz — although in localize’s case it’s more of a light activity log.

Anything else I should know, Chris?

I’m glad you asked. Once you have your audit log system set up, and it has appropriate filters, you should link to the audit logs from every entity that has them. In our examples above, this means that if you’re logged in as an organisation teammate, and you view a resource like Desk 1, you should have a link that goes directly to your audit logs list page that has the filter pre-filled for that resource.

Or even, better, display the logs for that item in the UI itself, no need to redirect the user.

Did you like this post? Subscribe for more tidbits in product development and more.

Would you like to work with me? We’re hiring in Flipdish across roles in Engineering, Product and more.

Remember when you were a kid, and there was this other kid who stole your toys? He was a dickhead, right? (Yes kids can be dickheads!). I’m that kid. I steal your toys, not because I want to be a dickhead, but because it makes me better at my job.

Let me explain.

I’ve been working in Product in one form or another for about a decade. Sometimes for companies like Mindgeek, Hostelworld or most recently, Flipdish.

When I wasn’t working for a company, I was trying out my own things, like making €20k selling used cardboard boxes, or more recently making web apps like mydevportfol.io, referextra.com, or livedata.ninja.

Product “ownership” versus Product ownership

I realised recently that there was a fundamental difference between the two types of product ownership that I’ve been doing the past 10 years. In once situation, I’m hired and paid a salary to make incremental improvements to a product, and in the other, I literally owned the thing.

If I hired a marketing person to promote one of my own products, there’s absolutely no way I’d tolerate them doing something I didn’t think was correct. The reason is obvious, it’s MINE. I’m not gonna let someone ruin something I own, and I’m definitely not gonna let them waste my money either.

But in a company, there’s these layers of abstraction that mean I’m not quite as invested. Why do I really care if the company’s spending 30% more on a marketing campaign than I think is necessary. It’s not directly my money, even if I’ve got shares in the company.

What that means is it’s very easy for me as a Product Owner to forget about all those things and just make sure the devs have tickets ready for the next sprint.

This is obviously bad. So, how do I actively combat this mentality now to make sure I’m making products the best way possible? Why, by being a dickhead of course!

How it usually goes as a Product Owner

More often than not, as a Product Owner you’re implementing someone else’s vision or idea. Your CEO or senior manager tells you the initiatives for the next X number of months, and you create a roadmap to cater to those initiatives.

This is normal, you likely don’t have the insight they have (yet). But as I mentioned above, this can easily lead to sub-standard work, and we don’t like sub-standard.

Adopting the dickhead Product Ownership mentality

To overcome this, you must be the dickhead kid who steals the toys. You have to effectively steal the idea away from your manager or CEO. You have to convince your brain that YOU thought of it and that it’s YOUR product. Only then will you have the emotional investment that will make your good at your job.

So remember, be a dickhead. The “Product Owner” title isn’t just a fancy term you learned at an overpriced course in a smelly hotel. It’s more descriptive than I initially realised.

Bonus

In case you’re still not convinced, being a dickhead is also cool:

I recently moved house. As a moving present I bought myself a slow cooker. This device is amazing, it’s really broadened my horizons as far as cooking goes. So to celebrate my new-found mad kitchen skills, I decided to invite some friends around for a meal. Maybe it’s my stupid brain not being able to turn off from work, but the experience taught me some lessons that I’m bringing into my role as a Product Owner at Hostelworld.

Calculated risks with the resources available

I’m still getting to grips with this whole “adulting” thing, but I really wanted to nail this dinner, so I put some careful thought into it. It was to be 3 courses — a starter, main and dessert.

I wanted to try out new things, but didn’t want to blow the whole dinner by messing something up. So, I approached it how I approach building products — assessing what resources I have available, and taking calculated risks to put them together in a way that I hoped would work out, and gauge the results.

In this case, my resources included a slow cooker, the knowledge that I knew how to make an amazing slow cooked hoisin duck (I’d been practicing), and that I knew my friends and what they’d like (or at least so I thought).

What they like is cheap knock-off desserts. For about a decade we didn’t eat Cornettos, no, we ate “Generic cone shaped iced desserts”. That’s not an exaggeration — we literally used that exact phrase — it began as a copyright joke and just kinda stuck!

So, knowing that I’d have the dessert in the bag, I was confident that I could take a risk or two with the first two courses, since we’d be ending on a high with some cheap ice cream.

The mains was to be the slow cooked hoisin duck — but this time I’d try it with noodles instead of the rice I made last time — a small risk, but a risk nonetheless.

The biggest risk I took was with the starters. I decided to get a little crazy with it. I like black pudding, and a friend recently hosted a dinner where he served stuffed roasted peppers. A plan formed in my head.

After some Googling for some extra inspiration, I settled on what would be the most controversial dish of the evening — roasted red peppers stuffed with black pudding and diced, caramelised apple, topped with grilled halloumi cheese.

I was happy with this approach, the riskiest dish was first, and I knew that the last dish was the least risky of all, hopefully leaving my guests with a fond memory of the evening, even if I screwed up the starter!

The Results

I had 4 guests. Here’s how each course did

• Starter: 2 of the 4 guests liked it
• Main: 3 of the 4 guests liked it
• Dessert: 4 of the 4 guests liked it

The starter didn’t go down particularly well, but I know now for next time that it needs a LOT more cheese (you can never have too much cheese!)

Overall though, I’d call that a successful evening. So successful in fact, that we all decided to make it a regular thing, with my brother Brian up next to the plate. I knew the generic ice creams would smooth over any mishaps!

How it reminds me of product development

The thing about food is, no two people are the same. There are foods that will get some people’s mouths watering, and other people reeling in disgust — brussel sprouts, Marmite, pineapple on pizza, (for the record — I’m PRO pineapple on pizza — cue the hate mail).

What I sometimes struggle to remember though, is that not everyone experiences things the same way I do. This is true for software as well as food.

The experience reminded me that assumptions need to be tested, and that it’s ok to take calculated risks in order to get some good feedback.

And if all else fails, give your users cheap ice cream. :)

Cover photo credit: Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash

This post is part of a collection, documenting my past business ventures so that I can celebrate the wins and remember the mistakes. In upcoming posts I’ll talk about other stages of my career, including wholeselling wholefoods, upcycling whiskey barrels, as well as a 2-year stint in the porn industry. Follow along at chrisdermody.com/follow

Yep. You read that title right, I made money selling used cardboard boxes. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, which is why I love telling this story. It was one of my earlier lessons in business, entrepreneurship, web development, and luck. I learned a huge amount from this side-business, but the key takeaway for me was the concept of resources, how they can be overlooked, mis-spent, and how one man’s trash truly can be another man’s treasure.

This venture was back in 2006–2008. I’m happy with what I did right, but I made a lot of mistakes too, which I’ll get into. It’s also how I got into web development as a career, but that’s another story. Let’s start at the start.

A Retail Upbringing

My parents started and grew their own brick-and-mortar retail business “Get Fresh”, selling fruit and vegetables to Dublin (Ireland) and the surrounding area for over 30 years. It was more than a mom-and-pop operation, with 15 stores across Ireland’s capital at its peak. Not to be sniffed at by any means.

Naturally, as soon as I was able to carry a bag of spuds to a customer’s car, I was working in one of the shops. Throughout my teenage years it was mainly part-time work. Then, after completing a degree in Product Design, due to a downturn in the economy (totally not because I was a bad designer), I went full time as a greengrocer.

Eventually, I moved into the wholesale operation of the company. I was driving a van, a welcome change from forcing smiles for customers. However, with fruit and vegetables being essentially all I had done for work up until this point, I was looking for something else, anything else, to turn my hand to.

The Opportunity

A regular problem we encountered was when customers would request that we keep them empty boxes for moving house. The boxes that the trays of eggs came in were highly sought after as they were plain brown cardboard, were usually reasonably clean and in good working order, but most importantly, they were large.

This posed a problem. Space was always at a premium in the store, with every nook and cranny usually filled with stock. It was frustrating, but we aimed to please, and so we did what we could in the name of customer satisfaction. As a store, we didn’t want to keep what was essentially rubbish lying around because it got in the way, was untidy, and more than half the time, the customer wouldn’t even come back, probably forgetting they ever asked us to keep them in the first place.

For customers moving house, it must have been time consuming, inconvenient and unreliable to drive around to multiple small retailers in the hope they kept you boxes. Surely there’s a better way…

The Idea

Ok, I can’t take full credit here. The idea originally came from my mother (thanks Mammy!). “Why don’t you try to sell them online”, she said to me one day. At first I thought it sounded ridiculous. I mean, who would pay money for a used cardboard box? That couldn’t possibly work… could it? But, if it did, it would solve all of our problems. The store gets rid of rubbish, the customers get a steady, reliable supply of boxes for moving house, and I get something new to try out.

So, I had a Google. There were indeed companies selling cardboard boxes online. However, I didn’t see anyone selling used cardboard boxes anywhere. Another thing I noticed was that their websites were terrible. They were slow, difficult to navigate, and difficult to buy from. They had low-res images, and often had a checkout process that required 5 steps and creating an account. It was clear they were targeting industrial clients, not individuals looking to move house.

As well as website issues, I noticed other issues. Delivery would take up to 10 days, far too long for someone panicking because they left it till the last minute. Also, figuring out the physical sizes of boxes on offer, as well as figuring out how many you’d need in a given size, was like some high level math question. Buying boxes should NOT be this complicated.

All of a sudden, I start to feel like I could do a better job than these companies (just a hint of arrogance). I had been looking for an excuse to teach myself web development anyway… hmmm (strokes beard).

Validation

So far all I’ve got is a market that seems to be under-served, and notions of selling second hand egg boxes. Before I could proceed with this hilarious idea, I needed validation. I figured this is where the idea would falter. I like to think of myself as the efficient type, so I didn’t want to spend much time or money finding out if it’s a runner or not. I turned to local classifieds sites.

I had recently picked up a whopping eight megapixel point-and-shoot Canon camera, the height of photographic sophistication at the time, and decided to put it to some use. I took some really poorly lit snaps of the boxes, arrange all fancy like in zig-zag patterns and everything. I suppose I was trying to be interesting…

Up they went on some local classifieds sites, Donedeal, Adverts and GumTree. A few lines about what they are, and how big they were. The price? €2 per box, with a €5 delivery charge anywhere in South Dublin. I really, genuinely thought I was going to get calls and messages laughing at me that I’m an idiot for trying to sell used cardboard boxes.

A Sale!

Someone bought ten boxes. What??? Is this real life?? They send me a message with their phone number, asking me to call them, so I did. They were in Knocklyon, a 5 minute drive from one of the stores. All they wanted to know was can I deliver the next day. “Sure”, I said, followed by “so that’s €25 euro total then?”. “No problem”, the customer replied. Well… ok then.

Big whoop, one sale, wanna fight about it? A fluke, surely. The next day, 1 more sale for €35. €10 the next. Then, on the Thursday, a call. It was a primary school in Tipperary who saw the ad and wanted some boxes. I explained to them that I don’t deliver to that part of the country. They then replied saying “We need 200 boxes for next month”. That’s €400, for used, second-hand egg boxes. I decided to start delivering to Tipperary…

Logistics Problems

Now, at this stage, I had about 5 stores that were kind enough to keep me their egg boxes. Each store went through about 10 boxes per week. Roughly a third of the egg boxes would get damaged in transit, or an egg would break on them, and they’d be unusable, or at least I was uncomfortable charging money for them. That meant I had about 35 boxes per week at my disposal. Even if I had zero other sales, I still didn’t have enough to fulfill the order. But I wanted that €400.

During my time working in the warehouse, I had gotten acquainted with our “egg guy”. I casually asked him where he gets his egg boxes, and he told me about a box factory up in Navan, about an hour’s drive away. I got their number and called to ask if I can pop in and pick up some boxes. It was clear they usually only sold to businesses, but they also weren’t going to turn away some kid with a bunch of cash ready to buy. I get there, and discover that I can get any amount of boxes I want, brand new, for €1. Well there’s my supply issue sorted, and my margins are still solid!

The next problem was getting the boxes to the customers. This was fine at the start when I was only selling to my local area, but more and more people from further afield needed the boxes too, so I took the opportunity with the primary school to set up an account with a courier company (shoutout to Vincent on the Sandyford beat for FastWay, top guy). They could take 35kg to anywhere in Ireland for €11, with next day, signed-for delivery. Amazing, I just solved my distribution problem too!

A Website

So far, I was only making sales via online ad sites. As I mentioned earlier, I was looking for a reason to get into web development, and took this as my opportunity. Aside from about 2 hours learning about the existence of HTML in college, I was a total newb. But one of the great things about web development, is that anything you need to know is just a Google search away. It’s one of the few creative outlets where you can find information about the craft through the craft. You can’t ask a tree how to make a dovetail joint, or a jumper how to do a cross-stitch, but you can ask a website how to make another one just like it (sorta — you know what I mean). Through a combination of Google, random blogs and StackOverflow, I cobbled my first website together.

It was basic, but my lack of skills forced me to keep it simple, which solved one of the problems I identified earlier with my competitors. Their websites were complicated, with long checkout processes. I wanted it to be as quick and simple as possible, so I went with a Paypal “buy now” button. It worked a charm! I did have some feedback from customers who didn’t trust Paypal, and rathered cash. These were usually in Dublin so I could deliver them by hand and accept cold hard currency.

Amateur Photography (First Mistake)

It was around this point that I made my first misstep. I knew I needed good product photos, but I also knew from a little research that photographers are expensive. I was trying to bootstrap the business as much as possible, so I tried to manage the photography side of things myself. What followed was 2 months of buying a camera, buying a lighting setup from Amazon, and spending weeks trying to take good photos, and then when I couldn’t, butchering them in Photoshop while trying to make them better.

Finally, I gave in and enlisted the help of a local photography professional. She was amazing, and actually helped me come up with a solution to the problem of conveying size of the boxes. We agreed on a package of 7 images, and within a week I had the high resolution images on my site.

Using Images To Improve UX and Sales

From my initial research into the market, I saw that my competitors weren’t paying attention to the images they were using. Often they were tiny, poorly lit and generic. Different sized boxes had the same standard image. The pictures were doing nothing to help the experience whatsoever! I saw this as an opportunity, somewhere my site could outshine the others.

Another issue that quickly became apparent from the get-go was that people couldn’t understand the size of the boxes. In every ad I posted, I clearly stated the size in both metric AND imperial. And yet, the questions kept coming in via message and phone, “how big are the boxes?”. This was causing friction in the buying process, and was frustrating for the customer, as well as myself.

A simple solution that came up during discussions with the photographer was to include common household items in the product images. This serves to not only add colour and life to what would otherwise be a monotone and boring affair, but it also immediately provides the user with a scale of reference. They intuitively know how big the boxes were without having to ask.

Problem solved, and lesson learned. If something isn’t one of your personal core strengths, outsource it to a professional before wasting time and money.

Getting Traffic (second mistake)

Great, I had a pretty website that was miles ahead of the competition in terms of both user experience and ease of checkout. But, like most first-time website owners, I had never considered how people would actually get to my site. I naively believed the trope “build it and they will come”. That may be sort of true about problems in general, but Google’s algorithms don’t seem to abide by that law unfortunately.

Again, stubbornly, I refused to pay someone to solve this problem for me. I was determined to figure it out for myself. Long story short, I ended up spending months and a lot of money on wasted ad campaigns trying to get Google to notice me and send me traffic.

Eventually, I relented. A company got in touch that promised to get me ranking higher for some targeted keywords. Now, I don’t think this approach would work nowadays, as Google is fairly clever in how it deals with sites that are being artificially bumped up the rankings by dodgy links. After some back and forth regarding pricing and timelines, we eventually came to an agreement.

Within 3 months I was receiving regular traffic from Google for those keywords and keyphrases. Again, I’m not advocating for shady online business practices, but the lesson here still applies, when something isn’t a part of your core strengths, outsource it. For me nowadays, this might be content marketing, or building an ad campaign, but not paying a company for links.

Cruise Control (Third Mistake)

And here, we see the third mistake I made. It spanned the entirety of the business’s life, and is potentially what killed it.

I went into a sort of autopilot mode. What I should have done is outsource the nitty gritty. Instead, I stayed in the trenches collecting cardboard boxes and packaging them to be shipped. This meant I got bored, and the business didn’t grow as much as it should have. How could it, when the only person working on it was me.

This was doing the business an injustice. I was working in the business, not on it. I’ve since read this common pitfall again and again in numerous books and blog posts. It’s a common occurrence it seems, when founders don’t realise that what got you here won’t get you there. It’s essential to grow and adapt with the business, otherwise it will likely stagnate, and you won’t be ready when disaster inevitably hits.

And then… It Hit.

The housing crisis of 2008. Suddenly, people stopped buying new houses, and instead opted to improve their own with renovations or simply held off on moving until the value of their homes recovered.

Part of me felt absolved of responsibility. What can you do when an entire industry collapses in front of you. But in retrospect, I could have been more prepared, or at least have grown faster and made more money by getting out of the trenches and focusing on the next thing that would push the business forward.

I wound the business down, locking the lessons away in my head, to be fed into my next idea (and into this post). It might be one of the projects in my portfolio, or it might be something new altogether. Who knows.

Why it worked

Buyabox.ie worked because it was filling a niche in a market. An underserved portion of the box-buying community. It didn’t work because I was selling cheap boxes, or a green reduce, reuse, recycle type of product for the eco-conscious. It worked because I was selling convenience. Customers often knew they could drive around to lots of shops and ask them to keep boxes for them. But it could take them a whole day and it wasn’t guaranteed.

Figuring out what the actual value proposition was took me a lot longer than it should have. I thought it was the price, or the eco-friendliness. In the end though, if you simply appeal to people’s laziness well enough, you can make money.

The business collected me over €20,000 in one year (its best year). There was a year and a half building up to it, and about 6 months afterwards. The real value for me, however, were the lessons.

They are

• If you’re looking for an idea, look around and see what resources you have. It could be time, money, knowledge, cardboard boxes even. Use that as your unfair advantage to get a foothold in an established industry
• Know what you’re selling. It might look like I was selling cardboard boxes, but the actual product was convenience. Most people knew they could get boxes for free by asking local stores, but they wanted them delivered to their door the next day, and were willing to pay for it.
• Know when to outsource. If it’s not one of your core strengths, then you need to delegate it to someone else, or run the risk of wasting a lot of time and money.
• Talk to customers. Use any opportunity you can to engage personally. Pay attention to repeated customer enquiries. If you’re getting asked the same questions again and again, address the problem at its source.
• Make sure you grow with your business. If your day-to-day at the moment is the same as it was 6 months ago, something’s wrong and you need to fix it

Follow me on Twitter and sign up for email updates so you don’t miss out on more stories like this one.

Since wrapping up this business and moving onto building and managing websites as a career, the housing market in Ireland has bounced back. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for an enterprising warehouse or factory worker with lots of boxes lying around to pick up the torch?