Two years prior, a friend of mine started a company called mygamedaytshirt.com and it was focused on creating simple t-shirts with Virginia Tech-themed designs/slogans on them. I loved the idea. Unfortunately he shut the company down about a year after it started. The business model was wrong. He was having to come up with the designs himself. He was focused on selling direct to consumers at tailgates and football games. He didn't have a presence on Facebook or any social media outlets. He wasn't using the power of the internet.
As I sat there reading that article, I knew right then and there that the Threadless business model could and should be applied to his concept. I texted him right away. He replied w/in 5 minutes and said, "wow, what a concept!". That was June 2008. One year later, GamedayPassion was born!
Almost two years later, let's take a look at some of the key challenges that has confronted GamedayPassion as compared to Threadless.
Community
Threadless is a community of artists who want their work to be seen. They are passionate about seeing their designs on t-shirts and about receiving feedback on their artwork.
GamedayPassion is a community of sports fans who are passionate about a particular team. Most are not designers by trade, they simply love their sports team. This has been a challenge for GamedayPassion as the level of innovation and level of creativity has been hindered. To offset that, we have engaged some designers who have helped spark some of the creativity that has led to new designs.
Scalability
After being in business for two years (well almost - two full football seasons anyway), GamedayPassion is still targeted towards one target market, Virginia Tech. One of the key reasons is web scalability and web design. All web design/development has been accomplished in house to date, but I think we're at a point where we need to engage a user experience expert and need some help creating a design that will allow for scalability when adding new schools to the portfolio.
The other main reason we have been hindered by this issue is financial, see next point.
Constraints
My partner and I have been very conscientious about our investment and are both somewhat risk adverse so we have put limited funds into this venture to date. We do realize though that in order to grow, we'll have to put some additional investment into the company. All profits to date have been reinvested.
Other constraints have been time (thanks to this MBA program) and other business applications (we use that wonderful program called MS Excel to manage our finances and inventory). Because of the large volume of business that Threadless has been able to generate and because they have a community of over 500k, they haven't traditionally had any of these issues.
Seasonality
Threadless does not have any issues with seasonality cycles. GamedayPassion, on the other hand, does have some seasonality challenges based on the nature of the sales and marketing strategy. The current target market is on one particular university, but the vast majority of the business is generated is during the football season. We have also done a little bit of marketing during the basketball season as well, but the key focus has been the football season.
I think we have something excellent started at this point and I really enjoy owning this business, but there's a long, long way to go to make it a sustainable and worthwhile business for us!
Check out the site @ www.gamedaypassion.com and of course, make sure you become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
First of all- Good luck with your venture. I hope it works out for you and your business partner.
ReplyDeleteDo you see yourself having the time and energy to bring your business to the next level in the future? (Once we're done with this MBA thing!) Do you think there is growth with other schools/teams beyond the VA Tech market?
Great post Murph, really enjoyed that story.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments guys. Ann - I definitely see the potential to grow this venture and I know there is growth beyond the VT market. Our differentiating factor is our uniqueness our creativity.
ReplyDeleteBut the question is how can we make this venture worth our time? My vision is to make this a sales & marketing company whereas I don't have to worry about website maintenance, product fulfillment, back office functions etc. I want to focus on marketing the heck out of this company, building a strong, fun brand and outsource the rest of it. Is that viable? I think so, but only time will tell. We've come this far, we need to give it our best shot!