Stage 2

Ok, as promised, despite me having trouble typing today.

Well we had some early conflicts with our sudden competitor, for obvious reasons.  But actually things went pretty well.  We had a lot of steady customers, and really things sold way better than I thought they would.

We launched with just the one product line, machines and scripts, and I scrambled trying to keep up to reviews and demands.

We went to a whole new design within months, and a year later to a 3.0.  Also I started making collar devices that were intended for RP purposes.  They would parrot triggers and commands, allow a dominant partner to lock behaviours, send subliminal messages, and force the wearer to move around in certain ways.

I eventually scrapped much of that line as the collar business is a much bigger one than the mind control fetish.  The D/S community in SL is huge, and customers wanted crazy feature sets, compatibility with dozens of systems, and all kinds of things that I couldn't keep up with at such a low price point.

Our biggest problem actually came in the form of our third partner.

We kept growing, and selling more and more.  We had 5 people hanging around the shop most of the time, much like we do now, but we had no place to put them.  The shop at the time was very small in space, and had a small prim limit (the number of things we could have inside)  We could only actually have 2 or 3 machines in place without exceeding our limit, and the rent was rather high for that need.

When we broached the topic with our partner/landlord, she was unhappy.  Her solution was to move us to a place with twice the limit and floor space, still too small, and double our rent.

Instead we found another place which charged less, and had ten times the space and limit (you can see just how terrible a deal we were getting from our partner).  She responded with a lot of yelling, and by cutting off all communication with us.. You get a lot of drama in SL sadly.  Same as with the rest of the internet, anonymity breeds crazy.


Anyhow, things took off.  From the start I had opened the system up to third party writers.  I gave out API docs so others could write things that would work for our system, and let them sell through us for a share of the profits.  Pretty soon we couldn't keep up properly, and many scripts just didn't get converted for sale.

I couldn't implement other ideas people had for improvements fast enough, and soon enough other places opened up using some of those ideas.  By the way, I love innovation, and didn't have any issue with any of those other places (except Hypnotic Magic)

I still have a long list of things that I am supposed to be making "one of these days" from the simple add on, to new toy, to complete redesign.

We launched new lines, revamped old ones, and relocated yet again to a smaller space (turned out the one we moved in to had way too much floor space for us, but we still needed the prim limit).  We were doing very well in sales.  Not enough to quit my day job.  Not even enough to switch to a part time job.  But enough to pay my grocery bills, so that was nice.

But more and more the place needed customer service.  No one had problems with our products, but the vendors would break, or someone wouldn't get delivery due to a server error, or etc.  And I'd need to step in to fix it.  More and more of my time was spent fixing, and less and less was spent creating.

I started to burn out, and stop making new things for sale.  And at the same time, I had less and less spare time to spend in SL.

Finally last year, when we re-located yet again.  I asked Winter to buy me out, and let him take over running everything himself.

Since then there haven't really been any new products put up for sale, and he's had many problems just maintaining the code base.

But, now I seem to have a wealth of free time, for a while at least, so I'm considering working up new things for sale.

The challenge seems to be once again, getting winter to draw up signs so we can get them for sale =)

I do hope anyone who hasn't will drop by and take a look around.  It's free to browse, and I guarantee it will be interesting at least, even if you don't decide to stay ;)

Tomorrow.. I have no idea what I'm going to post tomorrow.