Background
In one of the student organisations I joind at NTNU, I met Isak. One day Isak would tell me a sad story. It turned out Isak had found the coolest computermouse in the world, but there was one way to buy it! It was out of stock. After a bit of resuching, we found out it was also out of production. So, one morning early 2022, bolth me and Isak woke up and felt an imence calling to fix this crockedness with the world. Together we decided that since noone sold this mouse, why could we not do it?
Project
The project was to start up production of theese computer mice and sell then thrugh a website. The computer mouse is cabled and with a big chanber filled with water/oil and a flooting rubber duck.
Website
We started with the website. This was manily to see if we truly were invested enough to buy a large quantity of mice. Beeing developers we obviusly wished to create this website ouselvs and wated it to have some of the same energy as the product itself. We also wanted the tec stack to be lightweight and intresting. Isak had some experience with Gatsby and the speed it promised seemed cool.
Tec stack:
Or GRTT as the cool kids say. We quicly found that gatsby became cubersome and hard to work with. Its a while since I wrote the website now, but I remember it as mutch more cumbersome than astro. Other than that this was my first meeting with domanes and domainshopping. I quicly found out that that one indevidual canno’t own more than five ‘.no’ domains.🙃 We wanted to use Vipps for payment, but found it hard to sett upp, so we decided on stripe instead. Other than that, the development was relativly straight forward. The compleate website is now upp and running on duckmouse.no.
Production
After we had came a long way in creating the site, we decided we wanted to buy the quanta. We found the manufacturer on alibaba, and started chatting. They could at a minimum manifature 500, so that was the number we went with. Some would prehaps say its a bit expensive considering each mouse cost somwhere between 50 and 100 kroners. I might agree.😅
Legality
A big part of donig this project was learning about how one could go about selling a product. We tried to read upp on what we were legaly obliged to do and how to manage the income. We figured that if we sold for less than 50,000nok in a year we were not obigated to tax moms, but our earnings would obviusly be taxed as with a regular job. We bolth registred an ENK and taxed thugh that. We also read upp on terms of business and added them on our product. I beleve we actually did everything by the book, and if I’m right I’m also quite proud.
We got the mice after the summer. When they arived at the door we started to understand the true scope of what we had done. It turnes out that 500 hundred of annything is a lot. Truly a lot…
Sales
We now only had one isue left. Selling theese mice. We started with quite a few sales to friends and friends of friends. We bought some stickers and gave them with the mouse. It quicly became apparent that even though I had found the prosess of building the website and buying the mice to be fun, selling them was mutch more tidius. Isak had quite a few good ideas on marketing, but we sadly never came round to do it. As of wrighting this post we have sold 48 mice for 200nok each. This is prehaps not as manny as we had hoped, but its entiarly our desition as we have been to lazy to create any marketing at all. (Excluding stickerbombing some public toilets that is…) Prehaps marketing is somthing we will do more of in the future, but first we have to fix another small thing.
There has sadly apeard a problem. The mice have all started to leak oil. They were not as well seled as it looked and we are slowly beginning to understand why nonoe else is selling theese mice. We have tried with a viraiaty of glues to stop the lekage, but as of now we have sadly had to pause buisniss.🙁
Written by Gerhard
20/08/2023
