A Business Venture
- Pei
- Aug 27, 2021
- 3 min read
Okay, the tittle might be a little misleading, but this is the furthest I got up till now except for selling doughnuts in a high school food fair. In fact, I actually found the calculations of that doughnut-selling attempt real fun. Somehow calculating money makes math even more fun than it already is. We broke even before the day of the food fair, but there were teachers commenting on how expensive the doughnuts were and some other comments they thought we didn't hear. I'm not exactly deaf you know, but whatever, we hit the profit target in half the time with minimum labour and no waste so ciao ;)
Back to the point, I wouldn't exactly call it a business venture, it was more like a fun project. My partner and I wrote an A2 Physics notes last year and earlier this year because the lessons were going at a supersonic speed and nothing seemed to make sense at all. So yes, welcome to the nerd world, where people get very frustrated when things don't make sense. This led to a lot of thinking and discussion, such that the notes included some really sick derivations, which I don't take much credit for. As a disclaimer, I wasn't super interested in the Physics, but more so quite addicted to formatting the notes. We used Overleaf, an online editor for LaTeX, for the notes. Once, it took me 5 hours to figure out how to stop the words in a table from running out of the edge of the page. Although the main aim was to try to understand the topic, it was a bit unrealistic just to do that because it's A-levels, and A-levels people generally don't study to understand, people study to score in the exam. And so we included sets of answers from past-year marking schemes, and the star of the show, a whole definition list.
One fine day, I don't know whose brilliant idea it was but we decided to sell it. There comes the real fun. If I wanted to sell it, I'd want to create a site so that people could see the description and preview of the book. And because I'm such a lazy bum, I wanted to automate this whole process so we don't have to manually deal with each purchase, except responding to queries. Despite my attempts at learning how to create a website, I still can't really code one, so I went back to good old Wix.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the link:
It's not spectacular, and we didn't buy our own domain, but I think it looks pretty cool.
Now here comes the automation part. In the beginning, I had no idea how to get about this. After some trial and error, I found a Wix app called POWR. Oh how that solved all the problems, thank you developer. ( This is really cool I wna be the one developing next time) So I just used that and tadaa!
Although PayPal charges a fee for each transaction, it's really convenient. After payment, you'll be redirected to this page.
And finally, an email containing the notes will be sent automatically to the buyer. So we are informed of every purchase, tracked and automated. I know, I know, it's easily shareable, people don't need to buy one copy per person but let's be real, I don't think it's going to generate a lot of revenue, it was just quite a lot of fun making this.
Well that's that, and we'll just let it run and see how it goes. (Btw it's up on Nexus Notes too) The notion of starting university is incredibly horrifying, especially while being in a new country when unwanted microorganisms are floating around everywhere. I hope I survive both mentally and physically. Till next time!
~Carpe diem~
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