I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has contacted me personally or left a comment online about my work, and the new venture 360woodworking.com. It is incredibly encouraging to hear and see this kind of support. Glen and Chuck feel the same way, and the three of us have been hard at work on the new site. I posted this on Woodnet yesterday, and thought I would also share it here:

Suppose there are these three guys who have spent their entire lives around donuts. Their paths cross when they work together in a donut shop, and after several years they start thinking “maybe we should open our own donut shop?” They tell each other “that’s a crazy idea, who in their right mind would want to get into that business?” Eventually they start thinking, “what if we did things differently? What if we didn’t follow a business model from the last century? What if we let the donutmakers run the donut shop and focused our attention on making really good donuts that people liked?”

Maybe they could do the things they are good at, get the people they know in the donut business to help out and come up with something nobody had ever seen before, sort of a cross between a blueberry muffin, a cinnamon roll and a chocolate donut with chocolate icing. Maybe they could figure out a way to put bacon inside, along with maple icing. Maybe they could use the best of available technology to make donuts that people didn’t complain about because there wasn’t enough raspberry filling in the jelly donuts. Maybe people would like a combination of flavors that suited different ways of eating and maybe they would enjoy donuts with high nutritional value.

Too bad these guys don’t know anything about business. They’re liable to treat people nicely, give them plenty of free samples, and not try to sell the day-old donuts as fresh. They don’t know beans about marketing either, so they won’t know to send a zillion e-mails out to the people who just bought a donut, hounding them to buy another. They’re naive enough to think that people might just come back again the next time they get hungry and they might bring their friends.

just a thought . . .

——————–
Bob Lang
http://360woodworking.com/

The three of us will be recording a podcast tonight for the Modern Woodworkers Association, and we’ll likely be a bit less obtuse than we have been up until now. I’m not sure how long it will take them to edit the interview and get it online, but it should be soon.

The best way to keep up to date is to head over to 360woodworking.com, give us your e-mail address and hit “subscribe”. We hate spam as much as you do, so we promise not to bug you unless we have something important to announce.

  — Bob Lang