Building a business is lonely.
I spend many hours every day sat behind my desk thinking about Apex, talking with Jamie, and trying to work through small (but significant) problems that need fixing. All business is, in reality, is solving problems. But solve enough of them and you succeed. (Or, more realistically, you get the pleasure of working on even bigger problems).
It reminds me of this quote from the character Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) in The Martian:
“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you and you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end.’ Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.“
Now, business is rarely life or death. But, the premise is true.
You solve one problem and the next. And if you solve enough problems the business is going to grow.
At the point of writing this, Apex isn’t a big business. We’ve just about sold out of the Apex PRO 3.0 sock and in the process of launching our new football sock. The work isn’t glamorous and everything is uncertain.
My biggest challenge right now – outside the manufacturing of the sock – is figuring out how to sell through our stock at a substantially higher rate. If we can’t clear inventory faster, we’ll have less free cash to engineer new products and scale. There’s obviously a lot of nuance to that, but that’s the bottom line.
Right now, one of the needle moving aspects of selling our stock faster is getting the product launch right. So, I’m spending most of my time thinking about the launch waitlist and how we can get more people on it. We have a waitlist, a referral programme for new signups, organic content is about to go out, and we’re just beginning to think about paid media too.
I think over time these posts will get more structured, but these posts are largely just an exercise in clarifying my thinking. If anyone reads these posts, that’s cool. But it isn’t the point. I’m writing as an exercise in thought.
The football sock market is a mess. Not only have there been very few advances in football sock technology over the last couple of decades, the main advance (the grip sock) doesn’t really solve the problem it hopes to solve – namely, reducing internal slip inside the boot. Poorly constructed socks – those that use cheap base materials and silicons/PVC grip pads – cause blisters and sometimes slip more, especially when the sock is damp from rain or sweat.
The reality is that grip pads on a football sock are a feature, and not the solution. Players don’t want or need grip socks. What players really need is a high performance football sock. And if grip pads are helpful in achieving that, then they can be added.
All of this is to say, in very brief, that no footballer in the modern game should be looking to buy grip socks. Instead, they should be looking to buy a sock that helps them to play better football. And this is exactly what we’ve done with our new sock.
This post isn’t particularly insightful or thoughtful. Nobody will read this anyway. But, I want to get to a point where I share the struggles and thought processes that go into building a business.,
I’m in this game for the long run and whether we go 5% or 500000%, I hope these posts will be full of interesting lessons for me and others for many years to come.