Growing Pains

Aloha and welcome back to the blog of Raven J. Ravary and Infinity Archtops.

It’s the longest day of 2024 and my website has been up and running for better than a year. I have received an e-mail or two from friends that have somehow found me, but the serious client has yet to. I have begun to discover that having a nice website means little if there is nothing driving the potential client to that site. I have been told that a few times, now I have my ears open and am truly listening. It seems that I need to either pay someone a decent wage to take on the unusual work known as marketing, or pull a new hat out of my bag of tricks and learn it all for myself. After all, I am a hands on kind of guy. But I have to admit that it is not in my wheel house and I have so much to learn that I get dizzy just thinking about it.

Being in the shop is where I am at my best. Self motivated, engaged, constantly thinking ahead and purely in my element. I tried for an hour this morning to put up a simple post on Instagram. I could not. That follows yesterdays’ attempt… when I could not. I know that these platforms are designed to do just that and much more, but somehow, I stumble over the lowest of obstacles and mountains arise out of mole hills. It’s embarrassing and deflating. My eyes scan the Home Page over and over but cannot see the way to progress. I mumble and cuss, wondering if I am the last lonely Luddite or if my semi expensive Mac is worth the money I paid for it because “it’s so intuative”. I have yet to find it to be intuative in the least. To be honest I know in my heart that I am the problem, not my computer, and also that I will prevail if I continue to apply my energies in this direction.

I can remember many such obstacles that I eventually overcame in my long road down the streets of education. I made my first website back in 2010 or so when the now massive Weebly platform was just an upstart. My Maui friend and remodel colleague Kristen was an interior designer who claimed that her business was enjoying a good boost thanks to her then recent exposure to the newish Internet. Her nephew had helped start this website building company and helped her make a site that had doubled her business in just a few years. I took her advice and saught out his. He was so kind, and the business was still so small, that he came out to my house personally and taught me how to drag and drop photos and fill in Text bars. I believe his name was Josh, and I am forever indebted to him and his generousity. You just don’t get service like that from anyone anymore… the “world has moved on” as Steven King once wrote in the Gunslinger series.

Back on Maui with The Maui Ukulele Guild (MUG) at our annual show at The Queen Kaahumanu Mall. Our one big day every year.

My Maui friends are much missed; Edmond far left speaking with Jason, and our leader Hinano, star of the whole show. Best Wishes and much Aloha!

I used those talents the other day when I decided that I wanted a Display Notebook to be on my display table when I show my works at the upcoming Appalachain String Band Festival ( also known as Clifftop) in early August very near to where I now live in Fayetteville WV. Clifftop has a decades long tradition of showcasing many genres of Appalachain music, including Old Time, Bluegrass and Progressive. I am very excited to be a vendor there. I am also shaking in my boots, as it were, because I have rarely sat behind a table posing as a vendor of instruments in my entire life. So I thought that having a story picture book on the counter would be a good idea. I entitled it “From Concept To Creation” and whipped it up in a day on a great site available through CVS pharmacy. I outlined the many steps that creating an instrument from scratch entailed and filled it full of pictures. They let me use up to five pictures per page, and I could place my Text boxes wherever I wanted. I liked it. Then woke up the next morning and refined almost every page. And then again the next morning. Finally, I submitted it when they offered a ‘buy one get one free’ sale, and suddenly I have a backup for when some dirty little urchin grabs one off the counter and smears his ice cream cone remnants all over it, yelling “Mommy. Look at the Pictures!"

I struggled mightily those first few days with my early website. It was so alien to use that PC . I had to learn to upload all those pictures and it took forever waiting and watching for them to be ready. I had primitive Internet service UpCountry on Maui, out in the middle of the ocean. I guess I was lucky to have it at all. Everything that could go wrong did. Entire pages would disappear and I would find myself yelling and exasperated, only to have them reappear after they had been replaced, so that now I had two. My text would acquire a new font for a while, and then be larger, or smaller, or red when I wanted green. All those fun things that happen when you are learning something new. It seemed to take forever and looking back on it, it turned out to be almost juvenile. I mean, an amateur did it after all, and it showed. I did my best and all that, but in all honesty, it could and should have been done so much better. Yet, to be fair, Archtop Ukuleles.com helped me to sell quite a few instruments, and gave me a reason to have some business cards printed up.

This time around, I had a good friend who had taken the website building classes help me out making the site I am typing on now. He insisted that my old site was innadequate for the primary reason that it was not secure, that I needed to have a “Buy Now” button that people could trust. So with his enormous help ( he is a very large man nicknamed ‘Tiny’), we created this new site. I spent days taking the pictures, and making up the text. He clicked and flipped his way easily through the technical portions and continously reminded me not to ramble on like I tend to. Short and sweet, Rave, Keep it Simple!. We don’t need twenty pictures of one guitar… four will do just fine. And we made a much better website than I had before. It is secure. In theory, I guess… no one has attempted to buy anything yet that I know of. We did the test buys so that we were sure the banking was set up, but that’s the extent of it. I keep a close watch out, but so far it’s all quiet on the western front.

Which leads me back to the start of all of this rambling; that I need a social marketing director, and it might end up being me. I have watched quite a few tutorials and all of those guys and gals speak as if I had just graduated social marketing college and was up to speed on metrics and advertising and all those things that I have yet to experience. It’s mind boggling. I just want to sell what I have in stock and get some custom orders flowing. They want me to learn spreadsheets and decipher ‘sales vs ad money spent’ flow charts and stuff I have never dreamed of. Or to simply throw money at it and let someone else take over. I was talking with my wife the other day about what being a vendor at Clifftop was going to cost me between Vendor dues, site prep, time off, Display books, banner, Secure storage, meals and more. I will have a thousand dollars in by the time the show is over and chances are good that no sales will come immediately out of it. I have to build up my brand. It takes time. Down the road it will hopefully all work out and be well worth the effort, but I have no immediate hopes of striking gold on my first venue. Then I check my weekly site visits and discover that they are dismally low. I realize that at my present stage my company is little more than a ghost. I have to do something, and now is the time to do it. I got Growing Pains. It’s time to get Growing. Aloha, Raven