The latest version of All New Comics
A couple of weeks ago I posted to Twitter that we were working on a huge deal that I was really excited about.
Peter and I had an opportunity come out of nowhere which would have allowed us to buy a competitor outright for a fairly small amount of money. I was excited about their website as I really want to move All New Comics forward, but haven’t had the time, and I was excited to post a big press release saying that we had made a major acquisition.
Sadly, I didn’t get to make that announcement.
Their site is cool, but it would have been tough to integrate our stuff with their site. There were a couple of business caveats that we weren’t interested in. The timing on the deal was going to be incredibly tight. Their customer list is pretty small, and truth to tell we’ve acquired more customers in the last 6 months than they have. They also focus on products that we’re not interested in. We don’t want to be in the Variant Comics market, we don’t really want to focus on Statues and Figures. Our name is All New Comics and that’s what we’re good at.
In the end, we decided not to pursue the deal. A couple of weeks later and I’m not sure if their site is going to make it as it’s gone without updates for a couple of weeks, even their Twitter account seems to have gone dark.
We chose to forge on with what we’ve got. I created a Mail Chimp account and I’m now sending out our subscription emails through that incredible service. I’ve added a Twitter account that I’m updating weekly (and which is a way better way to communicate for us than the old site Blog…which drained me dry every month), PLUS we’re making some major plans to FINALLY get the new site up and running (as soon as my day job lets up just a little bit).
I’m happy where we are, and I’m excited about where we’re going.
I’m really looking forward to the Fan Expo at the end of August. You won’t believe how amazed I am to be saying that, but I genuinely love being on the other side of the table for this show…it’s too packed for me to wander around as a visitor, but being a retailer there I get to wait until it’s quiet to visit the show floor and do the laps, plus I’m a retailer from way back so I get a little thrill from stuff like “facing” and “shelving”.
We hired our first part-time assistant this year, and he’s making my life a load easier as he takes care of the monthly subscription update (a task which I dreaded more and more every month).
I’m excited to be back doing more of the cool marketing stuff and not doing so much of the day-to-day maintenance stuff. I spent the better part of the last two years just keeping the e-commerce side floating and didn’t do the important stuff like building better systems and making new ways for customers to interact with us. We’re back now though, and I’m excited about where we’re going.