Design Meme

DJ “Yirmumah” Coffman, the backbone of PV Comics, is the latest cartoonist to leave that webcomic group. I share his sense of disappointment for a creative company that at one point seemed to have so much potential, and now seems to be ending not with a bang, but a whimper. On his blog, DJ talks about the genesis of comiXpress, the other comic-related company I worked on last year and how this took the momentum away from PV Comics.

Logan DeAngelis had asked me to help him setup the website and e-commerce system for PV Comics, and when he asked if I’d collaborate with him on this new project, a print-on-demand service for comics, I was enthusiastic – it seemed like a more profitable idea than PV Comics. People were reluctant to pay for online content, but afforable printing for indie comics seemed like a sure thing. I suggested calling it comiXpress, Logan registered the domain, I installed OSCommerce, and we setup a quick printing cost calculator. We didn’t really spend much time with a business plan or any formal business arrangements. In hindsight, that was a mistake.

I don’t have an MBA so I began reading some introductory business books, like Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible (which I highly recommend). I started to realize that our basic business model had some serious problems and wouldn’t scale very well. In order to offer printing at such as low price, our profit margins were too narrow. The greater the demand, the more time and effort would go into printing the books with no room for increasing capacity. As months went by, the turn around time increased, and the backlog of print orders continued to grow. We were working hard, not smart. I started spending a lot of time trying to think of options to make comiXpress more profitable.

Around the turn of the new year, one of the big comic companies got in touch with me and asked about licensing comiXpress titles for development into movies. ComiXpress doesn’t retain any rights to the creator’s intellectual property—so there was no room to explore this without changing comiXpress to more of a traditional publisher model. We thought about giving people the option to be published by comiXpress which would be different from simply having their comics printed.

At the advice of my business advisor, before spending any more time developing business plans or making deals with other companies, I wanted to make my partnership with Logan more formal. Unfortunately, we couldn’t reach an agreement, and I decided it was best to cut my losses and stop working on comiXpress and PV Comics.

Rather than think of it as time wasted, I consider the work I did to be learning experiences in e-commerce, “virtual” companies, and the necessity for formal business plans and structure. It’s great knowledge to apply to future projects – both the things that worked and the things that didn’t. Everything I’ve read about business success says that it usually follows several other business attempts that didn’t work out—the key is not giving up.