Hippie CEO Life #05 - A is for Analytics

May 13, 2022

Building a business, like building anything new, is often a leap of faith. You quickly discover that there is a seemingly endless list of things you’ve never done before that you have to somehow figure out how to do.

When we first started 33 Sticks, i had no real idea how to do a lot of basic things like business accounting, tax strategy, build legal documents, paid marketing, sales, the list goes on and on.

And every new venture that we go into, introduces even more unknowns but it is through these unknowns that we learn, we grow, we become powerful.

Our latest challenge has been figuring out how to write, illustrate, and self-publish a children’s book, A is for Analytics, to help kids get into learning about data.

On top of learning how to do something we’ve never done before, we selected an incredibly challenging time (global logistical challenges, raw material shortages, and the list goes on and on) to self-publish a book.

The biggest challenge we faced is that the print partner that we selected, while struggling to deal with increased demand and paper shortages, didn’t have the same expectation for quality that we did which resulted in about 40% of the initial order of books (500 units) being faulty, literally pages falling out of the binding.

What made this worse is that the printer didn’t even care to check before the books were sent off to customers. A quick look at the book before stuffing it into a mailer would have instantly alerted the printer to the issue but no check was completed and it was only after we started hearing from customers that we knew there was an issue.

For us, the next step was a no brainer. Shut down printing and fulfillment until we could identify and solve the problem.

And at a substantial cost to us, we quickly located high quality prints of the book and sent out a new copy to everyone that ordered in the first round of shipping, regardless if their book was defective or not. It just felt like the right thing to do. It’s how we’d want to be treated as a customer.

We ended up selling and fulfilling 500 units during our initial printing of the book.

As we were quickly running out of inventory, we continued to work diligently with our print partner to address the quality issues that arose but time and time again, they showed that their commitment to quality was in misalignment with our commitment to quality.

This left us with only one real decision, find a new print partner knowing that this decision would result in the book going OUT OF STOCK for 3 months at a minimum.

As painful as it was to see the book go out of stock, it was the right decision. We would much rather suffer the consequences of going out of stock (losing our Amazon ranking, losing the Amazon BUY NOW button, losing market momentum) than the consequences of putting out a product that was misaligned with our brand values.

Fast forward 4 months, we found an amazing new print partner, we upgraded our print from digital to offset print, we upgraded our binding from glue to stitched, and we decided to go all in on the book, placing an order for 2,500 copies!!!

The books arrived, we quality checked them, setup our fulfillment process, reenabled our listing on Amazon, and began to rebuild excitement around the book.

This has been an incredibly challenging journey but oh so worth it. We’ve learned more than we ever imagined and we’ve created a wonderful book to introduce children to data, which we view as one of our most important missions.

Through almost 20 years of experience, one of the biggest problems we’ve observed, not just within companies but within schools, communities, and the world, is a general lack of data literacy. Not only has this lack of data literacy translated into missed business opportunities to create really positive experiences for customers, but in a more important and serious way, the lack of data literacy has allowed companies, journalists, and politicians to effectively distort data in order to create divisiveness and chaos.

If you want to help support us, give a beautiful book to a child, or perhaps learn a little more about data yourself, you can purchase A is for Analytics now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0578328216/

✌🏼💛