four pictures to show how paying for things has changed over the years

The world of business is changing and evolving all the time and so should your business. Monk Makes has been going for 12 years and over that time we have seen a lot of changes and made a lot of changes.

When we first started we had our own website and sold direct to the public - every sale was so exciting and we learned a lot as we put together our first product, Electronics Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi, on a shoe string. We owe a great deal to Alan O’Donohoe who got the word out for us as he loved the product and soon it became clear that if we had more sales channels we would be able to reach more customers.

We tried selling on eBay and Amazon and it was very interesting to see how effective each channel was but also the costs associated with them. Because of the additional PayPal costs it quickly became apparent that actually Amazon gave us the better deal because although the up front sales cost was more they would pay direct into our bank account and we saved on the PayPal costs - might not be the same case now! Selling direct to the public is labour intensive though and we decided to try Fulfilled By Amazon - what a learning curve that was!! It did get us selling internationally though as I had to learn how to send big boxes full of products to Amazon.com which meant learning about shipping, tariffs and the various legislation required.

We got our first retailer when we signed up with CPC (part of the Farnell group) who we continue to sell through. We definitely prefer to wholesale our products and are lucky to have lots of really nice retailers!

Somewhere in all this we also had a couple of Kickstarter campaigns although weirdly good Kickstarter sales didn’t always lead to popular products - in fact we still find it really difficult to predict what will sell and what won’t so now we manufacture in small batches at first and just see how things go.

We’ve been involved in several big ventures such as the Living Space project which saw us manufacturing thousands of our CO2 sensor boards (now discontinued and replaced by the CO2 Dock for micro:bit and the CO2 mini kit for micro:bit). Our speaker board was used in a project by Open UK.

We’ve been paid in different currencies and used currency brokers before deciding that we could just charge people in GBP.

The last few years have been more challenging with Covid, Brexit and the cost of living crisis but we are still here and still evolving and learning. At one time all you needed was a website but then came Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and all sorts of ways and means to try and put your brand in front of your customers and its ever changing. And anyone who’s anyone is on social media now! Yet more ever changing rules to get you in front of your target audience! But its exciting and actually quite creative.

So if you’re thinking of running your own business give it a go. There’s no one way of doing it and what works for one business won’t necessarily work for another but there’s no shame in trying something and changing if it doesn’t work for you. There is a wealth of information out there to help you and I really don’t think its ever been easier to find out how to do something!