BadAss Paddles: the First Four Months

Burning Rubber and the BadAss Paddle line launched just about four months ago. It's been a fun and exciting time seeing the company grow and an audience develop for the blog. In some ways, this has been my most successful product design ever— it's certainly gotten more attention in a much smaller time-frame. The paddles have also opened the door to meeting a lot of amazing people. Although they haven't made me rich (yet), the paddles have at least sold well enough to recoup the initial start-up costs. Not a whole lot of small businesses can report a profit at the end of the first quarter.

I figure it might be interesting to share some of the numbers with you about how the company is doing. For a small blog-based business, I think there are four numbers that matter: Sales, Media coverage, Traffic and Community (not necessarily in that order). So, let's take a look:

Sales to date:

15 sold retail from Burning Rubber site
4 sold wholesale to reviewers
25 wholesale to JT's Stockroom

What would I like to see? Well, if I sold 1000 paddles at retail I could just about pay off my mortgage after production costs (it was a cheap house, mind you, and the minute it's paid for I'm tearing it down and rebuilding). Of course, if I  did sell 1000 paddles tomorrow, I'd be locked in the workshop for the two or three months.

I've got about $1200 so far into developing the product, buying materials and tools, shipping, etc. (not including costs like hosting fees, phone service, which I'd be paying anyway). With $1923.74 in sales, that leaves a $700 profit.

That's not too bad for a brand-new business, though it's certainly not enough to live on. If you figure the time put in blogging, manufacturing and marketing, I'm probably making about $1.45 an hour. (No, I'm not whining… in the big picture, this is good. In the small picture, there's a lot of room to improve. That said, the next 44 paddles will be more profitable since some of the costs were one-time purchases.)

BTW, if you've been on the fence about getting a paddle, you've got two days left to take advantage of the Valentine's Day Sale. What are you waiting for?

Media Coverage:

BadAss Paddles Frickin' rock the media! They've appeared in adult films, on cable television, radio, print and online magazines, newspapers and of course blogs. Pretty much the only form of media where they haven't yet appeared is books (it's only a matter of time, right?).

At the time of this writing, Technorati ranks Burning Rubber at 23,036 with 321 links from 79 sites. By contrast, my studio blog only comes in at 81,366 after almost a year, and a new blog with no links in starts at 1,107,878.

I've been really happy with the quality of links as well… A number of high profile sites have featured the paddles, including collision detection, BoingBoing, Fleshbot Grist Magazine, Treehugger, and Sugarbank. On the other hand, many smaller sites have said really nice things, which makes them every bit as important. Anyway, I may never make the Technorati top 100, but I am quite happy with the response to the blog. (and, yes, I am bragging just a little.)

Traffic:

According to TypePad's stats, Burning Rubber is doing pretty well:

Total number of page views: 83681
Average per day: 727.66

Those numbers are a little bit misleading… for instance, almost 40,000 of those page views (that's half of them) are a result of the Valentine's Day Sale post getting picked up on CollegeHumor.com (which netted me no sales and one comment. Note to self: not all traffic is useful traffic). TypePad also doesn't tell us how many unique users have viewed the site or how many pages people read when they visit. Fortunately, Sitemeter gives a much more detailed account.

My Sitemeter account registers traffic for all four of my blogs, so it's not exactly pure data. Right now, I can tell you that Burning Rubber accounts for about 90% of the traffic you see reflected on Sitemeter. (I never really expected to compete with the A-list bloggers here, so yeah, I'm pretty happy with where I stand).

Community:

Community-building is a big part of blogging, and here, I feel that the site is really exceeding expectations. With 101 posts, I'm showing 69 comments, many by readers who frequently take the time to share their opinions and support. Now, sure, if I wrote a frothing at the mouth political blog or something I could get twice that number of comments on every post… but, you know, that's really not what I'm looking for. What I do enjoy is getting to know my regular readers… many of whom I've come to regard as good friends already, despite never having met them in person. I love getting feedback about the paddles, which helps me make the best product possible.

At present, I've got about 30 subscribers to the RSS feed, which is more than my other blogs put together. That makes me happy. And when I look closely at the stats on Sitemeter, I see a good number of people who visit half a dozen or more pages. Knowing there are people who enjoy the blog enough to really explore it is satisfying, a lot less like typing words into a vacuum.

I think the best part of the Burning Rubber experience has been the feeling that I can speak more freely than in some of my other blogs. Generally, it's an open-minded crowd that finds their way here. I don't have to worry quite as much that I might accidentally offend someone, which makes it a lot more fun to write. I kind of feel like I've "found my people" in a way that blogging about art never quite did for me. Cool beans.

That pretty much wraps up the report. Thanks to all for your support!