To begin ramping up, I started taking action to build a company.
First, the business entity:
On December 19th 2022, BowBars Archery LLC was born. Submitting the paperwork to the state, getting an EIN, and setting up a bank account took all of a few days and $200.
Next up, buying supplies:
With the five prototypes made, I ordered enough parts to make 50 sets of identical BowBars. The parts list was:
1 - 1/4"x4"x12' aluminum flat bar stock (cut by local supplier)
6 - 1"x10' rolls of adhesive backed rubber
50 - Thumb Bolts and Thru Knobs
50 - 1"x1.25" Bolts (for solid limb option)
1000 - No. 009 O-rings (its hard to get just 50)
And a bench top drill press from Craigslist for $100 to help make cleaner holes.
For $400, I was ready to build inventory.
Followed up with a website. BowBarsArchery.com
Using Ultraview Archery's website as an example, I purchased my domain name with '..Archery' in the url and opened a Shopify site (because that was what they were doing).
Another $400.
All in all, the total cost to launch came to be ~$1,000.
I now had a store to display my products, inventory being produced and was an official business. I was going places! (So I thought..)
With my confidence high, I even purchased a new 3D printer for $1500 to make archery levels that I had designed to use with the vise.
The plan was to sell the bars for about $100 so people could have a cheap bow vise using the tripod ball head they had laying around at home.
If they didn't have a tripod, I offered a list of ball head options on my site ranging from $30-$300 they could buy on Amazon to do the job.
I would make back the money invested in materials after the first 100 sets and be smooth sailing from there on out.
On January 19th 2023 BowBarsArchery.com launched!
And I was flooded with orders and made tons of money!!
Ha ha. Good one...
I sold one set of BowBars to a supportive friend (Thanks, Chris!) on day 1. Then nothing.
I made hype videos, ran social media ads (aka. watched a few hundred $ go out the window), made how to videos and ran polls on my website trying to see why people were not buying.
I watched as my idea seemed to go nowhere and traffic kept falling as friends and family began to hop off my band wagon.
For a while, I made fishing products to get use out of my 3D printer, which seemed like it might work, but ultimately had the same effect. The only people who purchased my items, where family and by special request.
All I wanted to do was give up and do something else.
I decided to tell my wife I was going to shut it down and accept my losses (now approaching a few thousand with the printer purchase).
Her response: "I'll be damned if you give up that easy!"
Now, there were some other words in there too but that was what it summed up to and she was right. I needed to keep trying.
She told me to try and find someone who had sold something and had been through the process.
I only knew one local business person who had done something like this and we had only met one time. We had been part of a group of people at our local maker space and he was explaining the business. What he was saying really resonated with me so I decided to reach out to him and see if he would take a meeting.
Long story short, he said yes.
