The Battle of the New Zealand SpeedCubers

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

It's the battle of the Speed Cube Titans, or alternatively, the Speed Cube Wars of New Zealand. Welcome to Saataso School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. What exactly am I talking about? Well, I am talking about speed cubing.

That is right, speed cubing. It's a hobby that I knew nothing about before researching this episode. So if you've never heard of it either, well, you'll be learning along with me because speed cubing in short is all about 3D puzzles. You'll hear more in the story, and working on this episode reminded me of several other topics that I've learned about these past three years. I've learned about all kinds of stuff in the research for the show, and hopefully our longtime listeners have learned as well.

Just to name two, I was trying to think, what are a couple of things I've learned about recently? First example is gloving. This is episode 973. Raver turns LED-powered gloves into bright future. So what is gloving?

Well, performers who are called glovers wear these gloves with LED microlights and use them to share their own light shows at concerts. So that is a thing, and maybe you knew all about it, but it was new to me. And the second example is pond hockey. Pond hockey episode 999, wildlife biologist shoots and scores with pond hockey gloves. This is an extreme sport.

If you think hockey is a challenging sport and the rink is cold, just try spending all day outdoors in temperatures as low as zero degrees Fahrenheit. In places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, parts of Canada, of course, people go outside when it's absolutely freezing and play hockey on ponds. I feel like the longer I work on the show, the more prepared I'm gonna be to solve the New York Times crossword, especially the hardest day of the week, which is what, Saturday or Sunday? I forget which day it is, but let's move forward with a new topic. In today's story, a Kiwi puzzle master is in search of a way to pay for his travel fees to international competitions.

He ends up with a monthly profit center and a lot of unused fidget spinners. You never know what you'll learn. Today's story, the Battle of the New Zealand Speedcubers is coming right up after this shout-out to our sponsor. Thanks, sponsor. [Music]

Speedcubing is a little-known, but much-loved sport that involves solving 3D puzzles.

Common 3x3 Rubik's Cube is one of these puzzles, but the sport gets far more complicated. You can try five-by-five cubes, additional magnetic challenges, pyramids, 12-sided puzzles, and more. Oliver Jenks, a high school student and experienced puzzle solver in New Zealand, enjoyed competing in SpeedCube competitions. He especially loved when he could save up enough money to travel to an event in another country and meet players from around the world. After graduating from high school, Oliver realized there was no dedicated SpeedCube shop in New Zealand.

Most people, including himself, ordered their cubes from a shop in Australia, the U.S. or China. With more time on his hands, it stuck out to him as a problem he could solve. He got together with another Speedcuber friend who'd done some dropshipping. Learning the ropes from that friend, Oliver created a bare-bones Shopify store.

The friend connected him with the name of a manufacturer in China. When Oliver called them, they gave him a quote, "$1,000 for an assortment of popular Speedcubes." He could then resell that inventory. He knew it was a trusted manufacturer, and he believed the cubes he was eyeing were likely to sell. Now he just had to commit. He wired the $1,000, all the money he'd been able to save at his job, and started listing products on his store.

Within a few weeks, the products had arrived, and in July 2016, Oliver launched cubesforkiwis.co.nz, or, as they would say there, .nz. He set up his Speedcubing events in weekend markets across the country, talking up his new products. People slowly started visiting the website, not many, but some that he met from the events. It took four weeks, but cubesforkiwis finally got its first online sale. Oliver had a plan to collect emails on the site.

He set up the usual social media pages, and he kept making connections at events. In August, he made three sales online. In November, he made 30. He was quickly becoming the guy to buy Speedcubes from in New Zealand. The growing sales did not go unnoticed, and November brought another challenge, his first local competitor.

Someone else in New Zealand was setting up shop, and Oliver didn't want his hard work to be consumed by this newcomer. He had to do something to solidify his name as that go-to reseller, and he had to do it fast. He didn't have many resources to launch a big marketing campaign, and he wasn't bringing in enough money to focus on the store full-time. What could he do that would be bold, yet affordable? On a whim, he sent an email to speedcube.com.au, the leading Speedcubing store in Australia.

The store was well-known in New Zealand, too. It was the most affordable place to shop for competitive cubes in the two countries. Oliver told them he was a fan and that he had a business proposition. The owner of the store agreed to meet, so Oliver hopped a flight to Melbourne. When he left that meeting, he came out with a fresh vision of the future.

He would disband Cubes for Kiwis and build speedcube.co.nz, taking on the brand name and brand recognition of his Australian counterpart. He was essentially entering a fairly loose and flexible franchise agreement. He could ship product at lower prices through his partner, get bulk discounts, and benefit from their reputation. All he had to do was pay a percentage of sales back to that partner. He switched the domain of his site and set up the speedcube branding.

Thanks to his new ability to acquire more products at lower costs, he was able to lower prices, thus undercutting his new intra-island rival. That month, his sales doubled, and within a year, they had quadrupled. He had won the speedcube battle of New Zealand, but that wasn't the only puzzle he had to solve. Oliver struggled with the accounting and keeping up with the import fees and taxes turned out to be a frustrating challenge. He eventually outsourced this task to a freelance bookkeeper to take away that burden.

Another problem, at the height of the fidget spinner craze, Oliver ordered a couple hundred of them, hoping to make a quick buck. Within a few months of getting the shipment, however, he received a letter saying he was infringing on a patent. Turns out that in his haste, he had ordered from a counterfeit supplier and now owed several hundred dollars to the real patent owner. It could have been worse. Oliver paid the fee immediately and stopped selling the products.

In 2019, the speedcube shop experienced 9% growth month after month on average, generating somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 in net profit each month. Oliver loves running the store, especially since he's been able to use a share of the profits to attend competitions all over the world, in Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Malaysia, and elsewhere. He has solved the puzzle and he's having a lot of fun. [Music]

So Oliver's greatest marketing success was in partnering with one of his larger competitors. Took that bold step to email the supplier in Australia, Pluto Melburn, basically came back and rebranded himself, all in a pretty short period of time because he didn't want to be taken out by that new competitor.

And by taking on their brain recognition, brain recognition of the larger partner that is, he was able to increase his sales dramatically. So lots of lessons there and I for one at least learned about speedcubing. By the way, do you like puzzles? I once went to a party dressed as a jigsaw puzzle. It was a pretty cool costume, but I didn't love it because in the end I just felt like I didn't fit in.

Thank you listeners, I'll be here all week, every day in fact. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1102. That is episode 1102. Coming up tomorrow, we've got a question about starting a blog.

We've got something about getting started on social media, how to create a must have service and some tips for Etsy. All kinds of good stuff, so be sure you're subscribed. This is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.