Revisit decisions.
#14 • Stories & Lessons of Founding Baron Fig
“You guys probably won’t listen to me when I say this, but you shouldn’t ship the books yourself.” My friend Meredith was sitting cross-legged on our purple couch, fresh off a successful Kickstarter the year before.
Our own Kickstarter campaign had just ended. We sold 8,760 notebooks to 4,242 backers in 30 days. (I’ll never forget these numbers.) It was a wild journey, to say the least, and now we had to move foward with getting all those books to all those people.
“I think we can handle it,” I said. We had just signed the lease for a near-1,000 square foot studio, purposefully big enough to store and ship the thousands of Confidant notebooks that were in production.
If we changed our minds the large space would become excessive. Because of this we felt locked into the decision to personally ship the books.
“I thought the same thing,” Meredith said. “In theory, what’s a few thousand packages? In practice, though, you’re looking at weeks of packing — especially if it’s just you two. There’s no time left to run Baron Fig, let alone grow it.”
“Shit.” I looked at Adam. “We need to find a fulfillment partner.”
“I’m with you,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
And, just like that, it clicked. Meredith wasn’t the first to tell us to outsource shipping, but she was the one that laid down the argument simple enough — with experience to back it — that got through to Adam and I.
We both realized that shipping in-house would create a negative feedback loop for ourseleves. The better we did — the more books we sold — the more time we’d have to spend packing, and the less time we’d be able to spend building the company.
Instead, we wanted to create a positive feedback loop. More sales should give us the morale boost to spend more time working on Baron Fig — and by outsourcing fulfillment, that’s exactly how it would be.
We were committed to shipping in-house for over 5 months, yet it took less than 5 minutes for us to change our mind. And that’s okay — being able to make switch decisions is one of the benefits of being a small company.
Joey Cofone is Co-Founder & CEO at Baron Fig. The Founding of Baron Fig shares the stories and lessons learned on the journey of creating our startup.
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