Beta Test Weeks 1 & 2

Welcome to part one of my series on officially launching my small business! For those of you may not be familiar with the Super Mini K-pop Shop already, it’s my soon-to-be pop-up shop that sells curated K-pop merchandise (albums, posters, photocard packs, and more), and also hosts events for fans to socialize.

From joining a two day business bootcamp last December to completing a ten week class for beginning entrepreneurs in May, I’ve been working on my business plan for a whole year. When this December rolled around, several factors lined up to make it the perfect time to finally launch my business. My logo is almost done, it’s custom project month for me in the Praxis program, and the upcoming holidays are a great excuse to put on a shopping event.

I decided to approach this event as a beta test for my business, meaning that this event will only consist of the basics to determine whether or not my business is even feasible. This helps eliminate the pressure on my end to create the perfect first event. I only have to consider my MVO (minimum viable offering), or whatever I can get away with that will allow me to test for purchase feedback and gain a better understanding of my customer’s interest in my shop. According to The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, which I’m currently in the middle of reading, building an end-product first causes missed opportunities to get feedback and find out earlier what is going to work. Therefore, I’m not aiming to create an “end-product” event.

So, keeping the basics in mind, I created an outline for my next three weeks until the event. It’s not fancy or complicated, it is simply a list of the actions I need to take if I’m going to get my business off the ground on time. Here’s week 1 and 2:

My first action was to check in with the designer who made my logo. She’s done a fantastic job creating a design that reflects my shop. It’s cute and fun. The only thing we’re still working on is finding the right colors for my logo. When I followed up on our last exchange about the final stages of the logo, I heard back that it would be another 2 weeks before the results would be in.

Since I was on a time crunch, though, and needing business cards for my visit to the K-pop stores in Atlanta later that week, I decided to create cards in Canva with the overall aesthetic of the logo. I took the current colors of the logo and added them to the cards, along with elements from the logo such as the sparkles and music notes.

I think they turned out well for their temporary use, and I brought them with me to Atlanta. It was important to me to present myself as an official business owner, so that I could be trusted by the Atlanta shop owners selling me their products.

When I got to the shop I’ve been planning to resell from, I spoke with the owners and introduced myself. I told them that I was interested in reselling their products, and that I would be happy to credit their business/advertise them at my event in exchange for a discount. The owners were very kind and they didn’t have a problem with me coming in and buying a small portion of their inventory, but they did say that their products were already priced as wholesale items so no discounts could be given.

That was okay with me for the time being, since I didn’t know where else to get products for my first event. I paid full price for all the items, and now I’ll aim to break even when I sell them.

My haul from the Atlanta K-pop shop consists of albums, photocard packs, photocard holders, poster and sticker packs, and regular posters. I specifically chose items that I know for a fact nobody can get from Barnes and Noble or Target, who are my big competitors. Those stores typically only offer the merchandise of the biggest K-pop groups, and they neglect more niche K-pop groups, and also special versions of ordinary albums.

Photocard packs are the most difficult items to find because you either have to order them from overseas or drive all the way to Altanta to purchase them in-person. It’s a shame, since photocards are arguably the most valuable and beloved pieces of merchandise a K-pop fan can own. By offering the packs at my pop-up shop, I’ll be saving my customers the hassle of waiting a long time to drive to another city or get photocards delivered.

The last thing I did during my first two weeks of trying to launch my business was post a reminder about the NCT Nation movie that happened on Sunday. It was a K-pop concert shown through the movie screen, and it was only available at select movie theaters in the U.S. Lucky for upstate South Carolinians, one movie theater in Greenville was showing the movie over the weekend.

I posted a simple reminder with time and location information on the Super Mini K-pop Shop’s Instagram account, since I’m trying to establish my business as the information hub for all things K-pop related in the upstate region.

Next week I’ll be back with another blog detailing how I made a deal with a bubble tea shop to collaborate on this event, and how I’m working to advertise this event in my area.

Thank you for coming with me on this exciting journey! See you next week.

-Noah