After 10 days of waiting, I finally received an email from my designer with the finished logo. Not quite what I was looking for, but it definitely gets the point across. So, without further ado, I reveal to you…the first iteration of nerd10 branding!
Our first logo.
It’s quite nerdy, but that’s what we’re going for. Branding will be going up over the next day or so, followed – hopefully – by an ad buy. Stay tuned!
And now…the wait. I’ve decided that I’m not going to be doing all too much with promoting my store until the logo is complete, most likely in the middle of next week. After that, I’m pondering an advertisement buy on Google, Reddit, or perhaps Overclock.net.
I will keep looking up new products though, and monitoring my prices and the prices of competitors. I’ve even got a few promises from people around the ‘tubes to buy some of my products!
What good’s a store without a unique logo? They’re the first and last impression that anyone gets – and I don’t yet have one. Now, I’d make one myself, but I’m not a graphic designer. I can barely draw a face in photoshop without it looking like something out of a Dali painting, so I’ve hired a designer to create one. Hopefully, within the next week, I’ll have a nice custom logo for some site branding. And perhaps, after that, and advertisement buy on Reddit or with Google. We shall see!
So far, this has been the trickiest part of the whole operation. Since I’m limiting myself to 10 products (plus some super savers), I needed to make sure that what I was selling was the best and the cheapest in each category.
In deciding what sort of things I wanted to sell, I just thought of what I, as a nerd, would use frequently. My backup keyboard and retractable mouse are invaluable to me, so I put them up there. HDMI cables are incredibly overpriced in most brick-and-mortar stores, so it can never hurt to have those for cheap. I use ethernet cables up like crazy, so those are definitely in. And my little kit of computer tools is incredibly useful, even outside of computers, so that’s a must-have on the site.
You can probably figure out why I picked each of the things that I did, so no need to go over every single one. The more interesting part, I think, was the pricing. I looked up the prices of every single item on multiple prominent online retailers for electronics and made absolutely certain that my prices were lower, or, if that was impossible, the same. Some of my goods have steep discounts when compared to the other retailers, like the Radeon 5850 and the Plasma Globe. The service that I’m using to manage my sales encouraged me to use broad “markup categories,” where I would put an item in a category and it would automatically mark it up by a certain percentage. I didn’t think that was right, and the prices came out very ugly. So, I went in and priced everything by hand, at the prices that I would personally be willing to buy them at. I hope that my fellow nerds appreciate it!
Finding a domain actually proved to be much easier than I anticipated. I knew what I wanted my business model to be – the top 10 products for nerds. So, Nerd10.com was one of my obvious first choices. Thankfully, it was untaken! Not going to lie, that surprised me a lot. The supertubes are smiling upon me, I suppose.
I got the domain from Godaddy.com, and it was fairly easy. The menu navigation is pretty cluttered, but I managed to figure it out. All in all, I payed about $20 to Nerd10.com for two years and Nerd10.info for one. Not bad at all. Now the only thing that I’m waiting for is for my supplier’s servers to propagate the changes I made in the settings that would make Nerd10.com the official domain name.
Next up – finding what I actually wanted to sell! It was a bit harder than I thought, but a lot of fun, too.
(Note: Unless I say otherwise, these posts will usually continue where I left off in the last one. Just FYI.)
So that motivation that I got was good and all – but what to do with it? How could I turn the desire to have an online store into something real? On Reddit.com, an internet news aggregation/all around fun site that I frequent, it’s common to see people making things and then selling them online. Things like hand drawn custom shoes, or a crocheted C’thul’hu, or a snuggie that’s been customized to look like bacon. But none of those are really my thing. “I’m not an artist,” I thought to myself, “I’m a nerd!”
And that was it. That’s what I know, that’s what I do – nerdiness. Nerddom, nerditude, nerdliciousness. I build computers, I frequent reddit and digg, I play RPGs and I overclock my video card. This was my calling, this was my niche.
But that presented me with a bit of a problem – we nerds are pretty self sufficient. We know what we want, we research our choices, and then we buy whichever product has the best value for price. But still, there’s some things that we all need – so I decided that I would sell only the top 10 products that I felt every nerd couldn’t do without.
And thus, Nerd10.com was born. I set up an account at a dropshipping company, bought a domain on Godaddy, and started setting it up. More on that to come!
You know that old saying, the one that goes “A journey of a thousand miles begins with just one step?” Well, I think I finally understand that. See, a while ago, I got the idea in my head that I’m not really all to different from all of those people making money online. Sure, some of them have MBAs, some of them used to work for massive companies – but not all of them. Some internet entrepreneurs are just passionate about what they want to sell and the type of customer they want to have – I count myself in that latter category.
So I took the first step. I researched, I read reviews, I looked up products and suppliers and networks – and I dove in the deep end. Enough procrastinating, enough waiting around for an opportunity to fall into my lap – it was time for me to stop asking, and start taking.
This blog will act as a public diary of sorts, detailing my experiences in starting my own small internet business. Hopefully, this blog will make it easier for people to follow in my footsteps and start an internet business themselves – although preferably with a different client base!
So look for a bunch of updates here as time goes on and my business advances.
Thanks for reading!
The Nerd10 Diary 