It's really easy to do when you first start your own business. You just opened that new business bank account & you gotta spend money to make money, right?
Well, yes & no.
You gotta discriminate where your spending goes. That first year doing Mad Munch in San Diego, I wanted to print mailers, flyers, T-shirts, stickers, brochures, pamphlets & business cards right off the bat. I wanted to buy ads in the local paper, in magazines & on the radio. I even thought about hiring one of those planes to fly over the beach with a banner that read: "Mad Munch. Eat Great. You've Earned It."
Sure, advertising your product/service is important to "get your name out there." But, without any initial customers (i.e. sales), all of that investment is gonna come outta your pocket. You need to find out who & where your customers are before you start throwing money at deaf ears & blind eyes.
Research & development is way more important early on. Spend your time, money & energy on finding out what the people want and/or need. Find your unique niche & meet your new customers there. Get out there & start selling in places with plenty of traffic where you can be seen & heard (& in our case with food, smelled) doing your thing.
It took us over a year to finally break even & by then we had a pretty good idea of who our target customer was. They found us under our tent every week, making Cheezers on the griddle.
Like one of our fellow farmers market vendors, Joe once said, "You can put lipstick on a pig. But, at the end of the day, it's still a just a pig."
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