Geographic availability:
- UK only
The Product:
- the 1000 most popular e-liquid concentrates. could be from any company. and we will mix it, steep it using a homogenizer and send it to you along with the nicotine shot. all you need to do is just to fill the short fill up to the “mark” with nicotine and you will have your e-liquid with the exact nicotine amount you have requested…
The pricing (including the nic shot):
-
£5 for 4 lots of 5ml bottle
-
£4 for a 20ml bottle
-
£10 pounds for a 50ml bottle
Pricing and incentive for creators:
I have been thinking a lot about this pricing and incentive. My original plan was to give a total of 20% equivalent of the sale price in reward points to the customer and the creator, 10% each (if the creator orders his own recipe, naturally he would get the full 20%). On the other hand, I wanted to offer prices that I, as a vaper, thought will be fair, and hence the prices above. Which, on average, is about half as much as an average e-liquid. More precisely, in the three websites I have checked, which are vapestore.co.uk, vapesuperstpre.co.uk, and vapeclub.co.uk. the mode price for the 50 most popular 10ml e-liquid bottles were 3.99, 3.99 and 2.95 respectively (mode is the price that is most common). there is of course onepoundliquid.com which offers, well £1 e-liquids. Although their costs will be much lower as they can mas produce very cheaply, compared to when there are a 1000 ingredients that the production line has to support and each e-liquid bottle could be potentially unique.
For creators outside the UK, They will still be receiving the points but unfortunately right now I can’t think of any solution to compensate them monetarily. I have considered cryptocurrency but I do not know much about it so it has to wait. Also we might be able to just offer the monetary equivalent to them through traditional money but that will increase the overhead of the business by a lot which is not practical for the first year or 2 perhaps.
But, after I did more through analysis of all possible costs I could think of. That rewarding system with this pricing scheme wouldn’t be profitable, at least not until we get 1000s of customers that I can for sure say that we will be profitable. there are always unforeseen costs. So I changed the rewarding system to be 5% for the creator and 10% for the purchaser. But if my costs will be equal or less than I think. Then I will change it back to 10%:10%.
but I think we will have enough customers to break even (will need 600 customers to just break even). Also, given the highly personalised nature of the products, there are no ready made machinery I can purchase. even pre-build machinery is outside my budget, let alone a customized one. So this business will only be possible if I can design and implement some parts of the production line. I am thinking Legos will be the only possibility for some sections! Laugh all you want but more on that later!
The operational hell and Lego Mindstorm to the rescue
You are right in thinking this is just a tad too crazy, I think that too. But those who have worked with Legos know what I’m on about, I have designed some robots etc. using the Lego Mindstorm kit for a big uni project so I am hoping it’s gonna work. but of course I am aware of the magnitude of the task at hand and the it is more likely than not that it will fail. So far I have managed to design a virtual mock-up of the system using Unity game engine, which is almost complete. it represents the physical system to a high degree of accuracy so that there wont be any surprises during the real world implementation. and surprisingly the system can handle about 1 bottle every 50 seconds using 5 highly connected Lego robots. anymore than 10 robots in the gird and the system gets congested and the robots could get stock. so still need to improve the algorithm, first to avoid gridlock situations, but also improve the path finding algorithm so each robot can work faster. Also each robot is super expensive so, I cannot financially afford more than 5 for the beginning so it should be good (again at least in the virtual mock-up)
Recommendation engine
A big part of our offering will be the recommendation engine. If we manage to get quite a few recipes and customers, I am thinking of implementing a very powerful recommendation system as I think it will work very nicely given the nature of the products. I will be implementing the system myself to reduce costs. Although it is not a priority right now and will only be done when I get the time, or have enough profit to get a machine learning engineer who will (almost definitely be better than me) do it.
The Forum
Initially I wasn’t planning of making a forum as I though ELR is doing that perfectly and better stay in my own lane. But I now think a forum is essential as customer will have questions. Unless I can pass them to ELR for any e-liquid related questions which I am not sure is going to work, as These are two separate entities. And maybe ELR might not want that.
and as a final note, all that I have stated is subject to change as the business is still in the planning and development phase.
So hopefully I have answered many questions you have had. Again, I have invested a lot of time already on this, so your feedback goes a long way. Also please take the poll.
) That’s actually a huge portion of “Small Business”
~!!
to be totally honest).