January 2012

Be careful what you wish for (or: scaling up is hard to do)

As explained in a previous post, we ran a “promotion” with a discount coupon site called DealChicken on December 19th, and the resulting flood of orders was pretty overwhelming.  We’re now back to having things more or less under control, so I have the time to tell a little more of the story, as I experienced it.

First, some numbers for perspective:  we’re a small family business that’s trying to grow large enough to be sustainable (i.e. profitable...