This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up? Chris Guillebeau here, your host of Side Hustle School. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome as well to our Failure Friday segment. I always enjoy working on this segment.
It's a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. In other words, all the things that go wrong. Because, you know, I'm telling you success stories all the time, it's nice to hear what doesn't work. Or at least what doesn't work for a while and how someone is able to respond and adjust, perhaps even pivot. Now today's short story features Josh Band from platecrate.com.
Platecrate.com is a subscription box all about baseball. And the subscription box was going well, business was growing, the team decided to upgrade the website and make a big change. Everything went perfectly well. It was just incredible. There were no problems.
Actually, no, that is the wrong story. That would be a very boring Failure Friday story. No, in this case, the migration turned into a major headache and then in fact, a complete disaster. So let's hand it over to Josh for the story. I love the detail on this story and just how honest and transparent he is.
So Josh from platecrate. [Music]
My name's Josh and I'm the founder and CEO of platecrate, a subscription box for baseball gear. And I'm gonna talk about one of our biggest failures. In 2019, we were migrating from a completely custom website to Shopify, finally. It was a great call for us.
So I went online and I hired a designer for the website and I hired a developer to help us migrate that site and get on Shopify, finally, 'cause it was great for our business. After getting lots of quotes, I went with a quote that was a little less than some of the other ones. And what happened was massive scope creep. As we got into the project, the developer just kept adding more and adding more and adding more. He said he couldn't finish until I paid him almost three times what he originally quoted me.
So at the end of the project, we were into it about $30,000 when he quoted me closer to $10,000 for the entire project. That would have been enough to be something that stung us in the stage of our business. We were very small at the time and every dollar mattered, completely bootstrapped in just a tiny, tiny team. So we finally launched the migration from our custom website into Shopify in September of 2019. And right when we launched in those two weeks, we ended up rebuilding about 400 people that shouldn't have been billed.
So people's credit cards were being charged when we didn't have permission to charge them. And it was a huge, huge, huge mistake. So we built all of this revenue. All of our customers were reaching out to support. Everyone was canceling.
Out of all the people that were recharged, about 80% of them never came back. So we instantly refunded the money. We told them what was going on. We told them about the migration and we suffered a lot of cancellations. So at the time we had about 1,000 subscribers.
So 400 people getting rebuilt at that time was a massive issue for us. For what we were trying to grow, for our brand, for our team, it was very, very demoralizing. Out of those 400 customers that accounted for about 40% of our revenue. So not all of them left, but most of them left and they just never came back. So the subscription revenue from that we think is calculated at around $50,000 loss based on how long we think that they would have stayed.
So that was a huge, huge mistake on our end. And I think it stemmed from not doing our due diligence with our developer, but what came out of this was some great learnings. We learned how to vet people better. We took our time vetting people. We understand that you get what you pay for.
And we really understood our site, which we didn't before. We understood that people were billed at certain intervals, but we didn't understand the technical aspects of our site. So it really made us hone in on what's the right questions to ask when you're doing a project of this scale. A couple of years later, we're passive, but we're still using those principles that we learned from that failure to make our business grow and make it be better. So I hope that helped.
[Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is, in fact, the theme of failure Friday. You might also take the lesson, never confuse scope creep for a finished website. What did he say? Something like $10,000 in cost, $30,000 in cost, and it still had problems.
But fortunately he stuck it out instead of striking out, and now all is well. And of course, not just the development costs there in terms of the expense, but also all those lost customers, a much greater expense. Again, I appreciate the transparent and truthful story. We can all learn from these things. Listeners, check out platecrate.com.
Just platecrate, just like it sounds. Or follow them on Instagram and Facebook at what do you think it's gonna be? It is, in fact, platecrate. Josh and team have more than 1,200 published reviews. So 1,200 published reviews of this subscription service.
Obviously a lot of baseball fans have been enjoying their crates, so good work. And if you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions, let me know what you're working on, what's going well, and what your struggles are. And I hope you'll subscribe, follow, come back tomorrow, new episode coming up. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
