An engineer at the plant device startup Easy Bloom shares how the 2008 economic crash forced them to rethink their product launch. Instead of abandoning the failing device, they pivoted their marketing strategy and turned it into a success.
There was a company called Easy Bloom and they made a plant device. And this was before there was really wi fi or even like reliably like it is now, or iPhones. It was a device which you put in a plant and it would measure the soil, the temperature, the light, and you'd stick it into your computer with a USB port and it would tell you what to grow. As an engineer, I thought this was really, really cool. And also as somebody that had killed many plants, I thought this was really, really cool. So this company at the time was eight people. They had just come out of manufacturing and they were about to go ready to launch. And I was like, this is the perfect job for me. So I went and worked there and it was the perfect job for me because it was fun. It was also the perfect job for me because we launched it at probably the worst time you can launch a gardening product. So we launched this product in November of 2008. The students here are too young to remember this, but 2008 was right at the beginning of a global meltdown around mortgages. So everybody was giving up their houses, cutting discretionary spending and not buying household goods. Plus, November is a terrible time for garning product. Nobody garns. The bright side of the story was, so the first month we'd expected to sell around 500 units. If we thought it was bad, 1,000 units. If it was good. We actually sold 12 units. Like 12. We had made all these plans for what if there's a huge surge of people calling and asking for help? How do we get more units from China in a hurry if we need more units? Planned this elaborate launch, we'd actually sent the support person in a bunker to answer all the support calls we anticipated getting. So we got 12 calls. I mean, so we got 12 units total. The bright flip side of this was I was the product manager at the time, and I told the boss, the founder of the company, like, hey, maybe I should try doing some marketing. I was like, oh, marketing? And I was like, I know how to run Google Ads. I could run some Facebook ads. Maybe I could also whip up some other stuff here. And he's like, here's my credit card. And so I got us by trying different stuff, I got us so that we made a million dollars in sales in a year. And it was all because things were going so badly. They could only go better. And also because it was a brand new company and they let me experiment. Just any success at all they saw as a success. So a lesson from this is even if you're working at a failing company, you have this great opportunity. How worse could it go?
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
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