Rachel Rofe makes a small fortune selling imprinted coffee mugs on Etsy. Her secret is that she fails her way to success by creating hundreds of coffee mug meme experiments. Most don’t work out but the ones that do sell thousands. This is a great example of the “build-measure-learn” lean startup approach in action.
Rachel comes up with meme ideas such as “World’s Greatest Mom” and mocks these up on coffee mugs. It takes her just minutes to create a digital representation of a mug and post the image on Etsy. This MVP or minimal viable product gets viewed on the platform. When a sale happens the mug is printed on demand. Her partner company does both printing and fulfillment.
Rachel admits that she has posted thousands of mug ideas….perhaps over 5000. Most never sell…but a small percent sell very well. The Etsy platform allows you to see sales counts by vendor so it’s fairly easy to see what is selling and what is not.
What makes her “fail her way to success” possible is that it costs virtually nothing but her time to post a new mug idea. Each new mug design is an experiment with potentially high upside.
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