Searching for Motivation and Wisdom

  For those in the suburban and urban areas trying to homestead, the question is:  How do you start selling?  Whether it is crops from the garden, or something you make if you have a product you need to be able to sell it.  
 In my case I was trying to sell small scale production of vermicompost, I thought I had people interested, I got a process working and when the time came to sell I could not find buyers.
 My issue is that craiglist and facebook turned out not to be worth the hassle( also huge amount of scams ). I tried some of the local places but they were either not interested or wanted it cheap by the truckload.  
 I am looking for ideas and suggestions from people that have already started small and worked their way up.  Their stories and wisdom can be very helpful for those of us feeling overwhelmed.

I don't know about selling vermicompost though I read an article in a magazine that piqued my interest.

When I excitedly told dear hubby about my idea he shot it down.

So I can understand having problems selling the concept to folks.

Were you trying to sell completed kits or the compost or the worms? I assume the worms do multiply.

Have you tried going the online sales route?

Sounds like you successfully identified one thing you cannot sell. Make sure the steps you took are well documented, noted, and saved for future reference. While documenting, you may find that you did not try a certain marketing method. More likely you will find that you really did give it a good go and it is not for you. Great! Move on to the next thing. Don't fret too much about it. You learned cool stuff.

How about a visit to local farmers markets and chat up the farmers. Many market vendors are small scale with gardens under an acre and they may be interested in small quantities of what you have to offer instead of truckloads.

Common mistake.
Standing dreaming in front of a pile of dirt and dream how this product will sell like sliced bread in a baker shop...
But any market analysis hasn't been done in person and at multiple places where the competitor sells it.

-Checking around who is selling your idea already and how successful turns it out.

With more invested time, but for free cash wise, you could have visited a garden center, builder's market or shop where vermicompost is sold in bags.

First of all check the bags for bleaching out and, dust layers and other signs/damages which gives you an indication how long the shop is already carrying them around, without selling.
If the bags looking "old" lets you stipulate, the professional seller doesn't sell more that a few bags in a week.
This will tell you, you will not sell anything at all.

I my work history I was a builder's market manager for more than 7 years and just because of attracting customers you need to have also these so called "sleepers" in your shelves, for the one person per week who asks specifically for this product.
Result: This customer will spread the word "They sell everything"

If you have now produced a lot of worm castings and you are on a streak of loosing, think of evaluating and ennobling.

Here one example, let me use pumpkins:

Plant Pumpkins in it and get some harvested, they fetch (e.g. 250%) more money than vermicompost.
Investment: Your physical labor, your product which doesn't sell.

Oh, the market is flooded and also Pumpkins are thrown for almost nothing at the customers?
Then ennoble them even further.

Get some Glasses, pickle your Pumpkins and pressure can them, give them a nice label and these pumpkins proper canned will last 6 month on your shelf (which is hopefully not the case) but also have increased their value another 300% (as example).

investment in:  Glasses, herbs, vinegar and sugar and again your physical labor.

If you design your labels professionally with a nice picture and info "naturally grown, nutrient facts (Google knows), century old recipe" you might be selling your vermicompost as an ennobled product called Grandma's Pumpkins sweet & sour.

Beside this:
Selling dirt online is more difficult due to the weight of the bags. Everyone will think first moment about transportation costs. Why should I buy dirt online when its already in every garden center available, packed in nice branded bags with a detailed description?
But this garden center has not "Pickled Pumpkins sweet & sour grannie's style" for sale.

To sell it you could start on a car boot sale, flea market or have some wholesale buyers, in weekly fresh markets...
This could eliminate mistake nr 2 which is:
not to have already customers before you produce...

I can highly recommend Mike McGroarty's site for information.  He is geared to running a small nursery, but the business model adapts well to many things in the permie field.  He sells information, but also gives away tons and tons of great info for free.

I'm not affiliated, this isn't a paid endorsement, blah, blah.  I just really like the site, and Mike seems like a heck of a good guy.

I have a friend who sells alpaca poop, $5/lb. The trick she figured out,  at least for her, is marketing. She is in the alpaca fiber market, and used to raise alpacas - and still has a mountain of poop. Incredible fertilizer is a great byproduct. She sifts it, packages it in brown paper bags with celo windows and instructions on the back, for using it in house plants. For those wanting bigger quantities, she doesn't sift & package, and sells one small tractor bucket full (amounting to about 2well-stuffed 5gal Buckets) for $10, u-pick up - firm. Sure doesn't make a living off of it, but for a byproduct, it helps out around the farm, almost paying for the fuel to cut & roll the hay to feed the 'pacas.

This is a difficult question, because if I am reading it right, what the original poster is asking is:

At what point do I relegate this idea as poor, and thus move on? Or do I take this as just a set-back and keep going?

If that is truly what is being asked, none of us can really say. I will say that it often comes down to gut feelings. I have found that my gut feeling seldom lets me down, so I tend to use that as a motivator. My suggestion is to do the same thing; really mull over the idea and give it some thought as to the validity of the idea. If it still seems sound, go with it, and take this as a set-back, and nothing more.

Myself, I think understanding people may be the big reason for the set-back. According to statistics, 85% of American's have less than $1000 in the bank, and currently gas prices are pretty high, were just a lot higher, and inflation is through the roof. That just means people don't have a lot of extra money to spend on things non-essential. I think most want to spend money doing the right thing, and want things to aid in that, but right now there is a lot of competition for the average family's dollar bill.

So, there are workarounds to that. A person can either try a different approach so that potential buyers feel spending their hard-earned money is really worth it, or maybe reducing the cost of the item itself. Maybe the vermicomposter could be in kit form so the price is cheaper and there is a DIY feel to the build for the customer? Or maybe the original poster makes plans and sells them instead of selling the actual item itself prebuilt.

I don't have all the answers here, but I do cringe when I hear the words "give up". I say that because we cannot bring in big corporation mind-set into niche marketing, because a different approach is exactly how niche markets thrive.

This coming spring I'm planning to hold 2 plant sales in my urban neighborhood to see how it goes.   It's an experiment.   I got a greenhouse this fall to aid in that endeavor.   I'll test it out as sort of a "tag sale" idea and depending on how that goes,  maybe I'll do it monthly in the spring.   If this creates a small group of local folks that express interest, perhaps it will extend to a produce stand as the season progresses.  

Before giving up, try fishing in a bigger pond. It may be that for many reasons your local market isn't ideal for yoru product. Maybe people don't have money. Maybe they aren't interested in gardening. Maybe there's an issue with how you are marketing it. Maybe your friends thought they were being nice saying they were interested in buying when they really weren't.

If I was trying to sell vermicompost and maximise my profit, I would package the finished vermicompost in small quantities, no more than a pound or so, in inexpensive brown paper bags with a pretty label that can be made on a home printer. Maybe even tie it with a ribbon, if I can get some at a good price in a thrift or somewhere. Choose a size and quantity that won't cost much to mail and source cheap or free packaging. When I ran an online used bookstore, I recycled cardboard boxes cut to size and sourced free bubble wrap from supermarkets and other stores who threw it away, so my only expense was tape to seal the packages.

Write a little ebook about how great your vermicompost is for houseplants, when to use, how much, etc. Write a really good description and get some excellent photos of the product, including nice green flourishing plants fed with your compost. Make it look as good as you possibly can. Then list it on Etsy or Amazon or ebay, where you will reach a far bigger pool of potential buyers who are ready to spend money. To start, only sell places with no upfront fees where you pay fees per item sold.

Obviously my target market here is urban/suburban women who love their houseplants and like pretty things. There are plenty of other ways the same product could be packaged and marketed to appeal to different audiences.

I hope you find a way to make it work for you, as it sounds as if you already invested a lot of time and hope in this idea.

Thank you for all the information in the above posts.  
I was hoping that some people would reply about their own experiences from starting their own business ventures.  Be it a new farm or some homesteader selling something they made we all have to start somewhere.  For many that have been doing it for a while they might have not thought about those starting moments but every business starts with that first sale.  Be it a a road side stand, farmers market or some other means there is a starting point and I am trying to find those people and see how they got started.

There are a few permies here who sell produce from roadside stands or farmers' markets, Duane, and many others with home-based businesses, though not all will be specifically farm or homestead oriented.

My businesses have been selling used books, developing knowledge and skills to find better priced books in thrifts and yard sales; and in writing and selling fiction, so probably not what you're looking for.

I wonder if you could edit the thread title to attract the replies you want?

I don't have the experience you're specifically looking for, yet, so feel free to skip right over this...

When I moved to NZ one thing that stuck out to me is how frequently you come across a place with a road side table or stand with an honesty box just in front of someone's house.  Mostly selling eggs or lemons, things that if you have them you have an abundance of them, but sometimes other things.  Urban, suburban, rural doesn't seem to matter.  That's where I'd start - make it super easy for people to indulge in their curiosity and get their goods immediately.
Instead of widening your audience, I'd hyper-localize.

Our neighbours over the road sell their excess eggs through a Facebook group that only serves people in our rural, sparsely populated valley.  They post that they've got a dozen or people ask, the eggs get put in the letterbox and there's a glass jar for the cash.  

Jane, you are actually on the right path for what I am asking.
In your case how did you start selling, what was your first book sale?  Thrift store?  To a friend?  Tag Sale?  How did you take that idea and actually get some money for it?  I am trying to find out how people get the ball rolling, what setbacks they might have hit and where they went after that first sale.  Experience can be a great teacher!

In the past, the forum has had some great threads about ideas to generate income on the homestead.

These two forums come to mind as places to get ideas:

Cottage Industries

https://permies.com/f/197/ci

Agile Work

https://permies.com/f/199/agile-work

There are lots of ideas though I picked out a few that you or others might like:

https://permies.com/t/16339/making-marketing-craft-Share-work

https://permies.com/t/146393/Hey-agile-nomadic-mobile-fabulous#1372870

Also, some ideas might be found in the PEP BB (Badge Bits):

https://permies.com/wiki/148877/pep-commerce/Start-Cottage-Industry-home-PEP

https://permies.com/wiki/115130/pep-commerce/Develop-residual-income-stream-PEP

https://permies.com/wiki/118748/pep-commerce/Perform-sort-labor-internet-paid

The forums have a wealth of information.

It is my hope that you will find some motivation and inspiration from these threads and from what others have suggested.

I mainly used the Evil Empire, Amazon, in both cases. Though there are other options, it tends to be where the bulk of buyers are. Best is to use Amazon AND all the other available options.

It's very easy to open a second hand bookstore there or list books on ebay, though harder to sell them! Requirements are a reliable internet connection, access to cheap but good packing materials and a post office, and most of all a keen interest in books.

The second hand bookstore was almost an accident -- or a God thing, depending how you want to look at it. I read a lot, hubby reads a lot, and we have a small house. I started selling books simply to make space. At that time hubby and I had a weekend thing of visiting two local car boot sales on the weekend and I saw books there for pennies that I had recently sold for more, so bought a few books to resell. (Car boot - it's a UK thing, like a yard sale on steroids, where all the people who would have had yard sales takes their stuff to a field and pay the field owner a small fee to sell it there instead, so we got to shop 40 or 50 yard sales in one place).

Then I started looking for other book supplies and made contact with local thrift stores to buy the books that didn't sell in store, which often turned out to include some very good books among the piles of trash. That started when I discovered they'd thrown out a book I'd hesitated  over risking a small purchase price on, which had a buyer waiting at 60 GBP! At that time, they trashed good books after two weeks on the shelf! My best buy was a signed first edition Samuel Beckett that sold for over $500 in a pile of "trash" unsaleable books a new-to-me thrift in a town we were visiting was going to throw out next day. When I went to the counter with a stack of books from the shelves, they asked if I wanted to buy the forty boxes of books illegally blocking their fire exit at a very low cost. I bought, with no idea what treasure it contained, and made back 2000 or more times what I paid for those books.

It's more difficult now as a small seller since bigger businesses moved in to the used book market. It's simply not worth the work of selling lower priced books. But if you have an area of specialist interest where you know what books are selling for or a knack for spotting good first editions there's still a side income to be made this way. A local thrift might put a permaculture book in the gardening section with a $3 price tag, when used copies sell for $30 or more. It might not sell in the small-town or suburban thrift, but will find a buyer quickly on Amazon or ebay if it's priced right. For two years, I did bookselling as a full-time home-based business. Then things changed, I needed more income when hubby got sick, so went back to my main profession for a few years. I don't actively sell other author's books at all now, as my own keep me plenty busy enough.

Writing and publishing books - I started writing simply because I loved to read and write, had always written since I first held a pencil and was the kid who maxed out her library card at every possible library, every week. It was a lifelong dream to be published but real life always got in the way.  Approaching a big number birthday, I  decided to go for it.  After a few practice books that will never be published, I started pursuing traditional publication for my fiction and had some serious interest from the publishers I had been targeting. But I felt strongly guided not to go with that and to self-publish instead. I worked for months with an editor, made my own cover, put my first book on Amazon and prayed, then got busy with the second book. I posted a lot to online reader groups, also did some low cost paid ads, gave away a bunch of ebooks, and books started selling. I'm now working on book 28. I'm not a mega bestseller, very much a lower-end-of-the-mid-list author. I'm never going to get rich this way. But I am doing what I love and it earns a decent enough secondary income. It's also something that can be juggled with family responsibilities and homesteading. I suggest someone wanting to publish should choose a niche market they have an interest in rather than trying to compete with the big names. That works for non-fiction as well as fiction.

(In case you are interested, this is me: https://www.amazon.com/Autumn-Macarthur/e/B00N9KRHKY )

Anyone with access to a computer or even a cellphone can write and publish a book. Ideally, they'll get a good cover design and have the book edited and proofread before launching it! But it's completely possible to publish a quality book at no upfront cost at all. Reaching buyers is the harder part. And how to do that depends on the book. Non-fiction marketing is very different to fiction. The basic thing is to get your book where the readers who will want it can see it. For a permaculture book, that would be listing the book here, putting it in your signature, commenting actively on related posts, guest blogging or other related sites, sharing what you know and just "by the way, I also have a book on this." I also know authors who do good business selling their books at farmers' markets, even fiction authors. Having a book table at the back of the room at workshops. There are so many different ways to promote books, but it's not one-size-fits-all.

I feel the main way to earn an income is to follow your passion rather than doing something just to make money. A bit of a cliche, but your love of what you do will attract buyers for your product.  And just like any good homesteader, it's wise to diversify. Aim to have multiple income streams.