New old side project: careerconversationcards.com

Just bought careerconversationcards.com for my latest project.

It’s official once you bought the domain, isn’t it? 😉

Back story

Truth is, I made this product back when I just started indie hacking in 2018. It was part of an online store called Outsprint Store selling and sharing design tools for public good, and I built it as part of my 12 startups in 12 months challenge (I called it #1mvp1month on Twitter)! It’s a spin-off side business built off my existing design consultancy business Outsprint, which works mainly with governments and non-profits to design better public policy and social services. Having done many consulting projects, I developed many tools along the way. Tools to help shed light on public and social issues around employment, technology, government-citizen relationships, and more. Tools that others have asked me to share. So I thought, “Why let these tools go to waste, after a project is done?” So that’s why I created this online store to share and sell design tools for public good. But the ecommerce store site had faded away over the years due to neglect and lack of demand. But the career cards had always had market demand, mostly through organic searches, word of mouth, but on an adhoc basis – I sold 2 decks to a local career coach in Sept last year. In the past, I’ve shipped this to the US before.

So I’m reviving it as a side project, just for fun!

What’s the product about

This deck came from a project to understand people’s career aspirations. The team first used these cards as part of design research for the project, but that’s when something surprising happened. Participants were coming back to tell us – post-interview – that the session had been akin to career counselling, even therapeutic. Some said it helped them have better clarity of their career journey, and the questions we asked were questions that few people had asked them, not even their employers. Throughout the project, one thing that really stood out was how there was a hunger for such open conversations around career. Career conversations with employers and HR tend to center around compensation and performance. What seemed to be missing – and therefore the hunger – was talking about the why. Why do you work? Why do you want to work here? What really matters to you? It’s definitely not only money and promotions for sure. We knew we are on to something then, and these cards could play a role in making these conversations more common beyond the project. We improved on the deck thereafter, and here it is.

Business model - how it’s run

The business model is fundamentally a dropshipping business. I keep a few at home for local customers. And dropship the rest for international customers. I use Moo Cards for printing and shipping. The beauty of Moo is that they can print 50 different designs on 50 different cards, so that works for a card deck product. I just need to create a print job, and add my customer’s shipping address and they’ll take care of everything. I don’t have to hold much inventory, nor handle any shipping myself. The trade-off is that it does cost more – at US$100 per deck of 50 cards, it’s not cheap. But my customers are usually companies or people representing companies (often in HR or career coaching roles), not individual consumers, so $100 is within reasonable limits of their price sensitivity. I get around 80% prfit margin after accounting for the printing and shipping costs. That compensates for the IP and content work.

Tech stack

It used to be built on good old Wordpress ecommerce theme, because back then nocode wasn’t hot yet, and the only stack I knew was Wordpress. It served it’s purpose back then as a ecomm store that can show multiple items for sale. But currently I’m thinking of just selling a single item (the career cards), it’ll be just a single item sale ecomm site, so I don’t need a full fledged ecomm capabilities this time. I’m thinking a Carrd landing page, maybe integrated with a Stripe payment link or with Shoprocket for shopping cart (as I need shipping address).

Looking forward to setting it all up and launching!