December Updates: Taking a Step Back
Re-focusing on what matters when balancing small business with a full-time career.
Welcome! Small Business Chronicles is a blog where I candidly share my journey to build a creative small business while managing a full-time job as a product manager. If you’re a Medium member, you can also receive these post updates directly on Medium instead.
I’m building Joyfully Books — a place to find the most personalisable storybooks to give as a joyful gift to a special child in your life.
Recap
In my last update, I:
Launched my website landing page (on Webflow)
Illustrated new pages for my first storybook, ‘Timmy Eats’
Reflected on my (good) Medium and (poor) Tik Tok traction
So, what did I get up to since?
Hitting pause on my content channels
I’ve been posting my progress consistently twice a week on Tik Tok for 5 months.
That was until last month while on holidays in Western Australia — I’ve decided to take a break (from content).
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It wasn’t until this holiday that I reflected on my year and realised I couldn’t remember the last time I allowed myself to rest without feeling guilty about it.
I deliberately pursued the creative lifestyle business route to avoid the hustle-and-grind startup culture to make space for a more balanced life — and yet here I was, right on the same path to burnout.
So, I cancelled the 12-week goals I had set for myself for the remainder of the year (sell my first prototype storybook and continue growing my content channels), and gave myself liberty to unwind, reflect, and only build when I felt an itch.
There was another important reason, too: I’ve started a new job!
I had been looking for a new role after feeling stagnant in my current one. This month, I’ll be starting with a new company — still in Product Management, and still in HealthTech, but with different Product challenges. It felt necessary to put my side pursuits on the… well, side while I focused on this new change.
Re-focusing on writing
My consistent struggle with creating content has been spending so much time on content creation, that I made little progress on the actual business.
Until now, I’ve been maintaining a Tik Tok channel and writing on Medium in addition to this Substack blog. It was too much for me to handle three separate platforms while finding time to actually illustrate and work full-time.
So, one of the content platforms has to go (at least for now).
And that platform is Tik Tok. Primarily because as a visual form of content, it suffers most from having no tangible progress made on the business.
I figure once I have a product to sell, creating short-form video content should be easier. I am afraid that the Tik Tok algorithm will hate me for taking an elongated break. But life’s too short to be dictated by the pressure to keep up with an algorithm.
So, for the short-term, I’ll be focusing my efforts on this Substack, and my Medium.
Starting small with… stickers? 🌱
In my last update, I reflected on wishing I had started with a smaller product, instead of tackling an entire storybook to start.
With that, I landed on the idea of creating personalisable children’s sticker labels:
The intention is to offer something small that I can sell to a target audience that closely matches my intended future target audience. Along the way, I’d also be able to build my skills in illustration, marketing, branding, supplier management, e-commerce, and more.
I touched on this idea previously when designing this ‘sticker set’ gift for my nephew starting school:
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I had them printed through Printful.com and was supposed to film a part three showing the results… but the quality was TERRIBLE. It was such a disaster, I put the whole idea on ice.
My nephew loved them regardless. I’ve since mentally recovered from the disappointment, so I’m willing to give them another go.
Creating stickers is harder than I thought 🖨️
I’ll spare you the full details for another time, but to create that single sticker sheet, I needed:
A high quality photo printer
A craft cutting machine (scissors could also work)
High-quality sticker paper
Self-adhesive laminate
Craft tools
Those are just the materials. Then there’s the trial-and-error to get to the desired result.
If I was a small artist selling my art, I would strongly advocate for having them manufactured by a supplier to save myself the time and hassle (but definitely not with Printful). It’s not an option for me given each sticker is individualised (unless I batch printed multiple variations of each customisation option).
—
This was a quick update mainly to say I’m still going (slowly) and am hoping to have more exciting updates to share in the new year.
I’ll be spending this holiday period on a quick road trip, prototyping stickers as gifts for friends and family, and revisiting my strategy for how to balance building Joyfully with a new job.
Until then, happy holidays! 🎆🎄
Joy