The First Muse: The Conqueror Worm

The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued

…

Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm. – Edgar Allen Poe

So it seemed like a good idea at the time, laudable even. After all, more and more people are looking for ways to reduce, recycle and reuse. What if they could even make money doing it? Worm farming doesn’t take up much space, the little wrigglers don’t crow at dawn, they can’t kick you across a corral like an ostrich and they eat garbage. People were bound to be interested in a full course on worm farming. We could interview the top breeders (yes breeders), farmers, entomologists, the Secretary of Agriculture, maybe even get a foreword by Brian Herbert, Author of Children of Dune. So that was step one accomplished.

1. The first step in coming up with a muse is the idea.
2. The second is to find out how much the product would cost to develop and create. We shopped around and found a printing and fulfillment house that could do the packaging and printing and duplication and could put the whole thing together and provide a fulfillment back-end for the website for $30 + %20 of the difference between our cost and the sales price with a minimum first order of 50 and single orders after that. We didn’t really settle on what we wanted to “charge ourselves” for doing the research and interviews and authoring the course, but based on experience with non-fiction for traditional publication we put a ballpark at three months part-time and called that 120 hours.
3. The third step is to test market the idea before you spend any money developing it. This is where the system really paid off this time. We first built a simple three page site with marketing copy describing the product and links to buy the product. We were careful not to keep any individual information from visitors. There was a form to fill out to purchase, but we didn’t connect the form action. This was to protect the potential customer from any possibility of identity theft. We then pointed a Google Adwords campaign at the site and ran 1000 clicks through the funnel with targeted keywords like “raising worms” and “worm farming.” In the end we generated less than three hits to the goal page. We tried various price points between $50-$150 with similar results.

We used existing hosting and bought a domain, plus the Adwords. Total cost, less than $200.00

Result of the test: FAIL

Overall Result: WIN (the system worked and saved us from throwing good money after bad)

There could still be money in them thar garbage piles, and we may look into it again at some point if we come up with a different approach, but for now we won’t be spending any more money on worms. If you’re interested in taking a crack at the worm farming market yourself, feel free and please let us know how it works out. We removed the buy buttons and goal pages as well as the marketing copy, but you can see the site itself at yourwormranch.com

Geez, that forward by Brian Herbert really would have been nice to have though…

“Like tiny individual reflections of Shai Hulud in a crystal of shattered time, the earthworm is the agent of change beneath the earth. He who controls the worm, controls the garbage.”  — Never Said by Brian Herbert

Next, scary stories.