My Startup Failed!

For Valentine's day I made my wife a really cute window planter box. I bought her a potted rose, which is nearly dead now, and I bought some herbs. The herbs have been doing alright. I was most excited about the box. I love to make things from wood. I had some leftover pine from a previous project and so I slapped together this box. I antiqued the wood using a blow torch, and it looks awesome if I do say so myself.

I figured that this is the sort of cutsey, craftsy thing that people would love to buy. I currently live in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University (go hoosiers!). This place is made for window gardens. There are so many apartments, so you can't really grow things outside. I thought this was the perfect idea. I thought that since it was spring, people would be more interested in growing things! I figured I would make them and sell them over spring break.
I also wanted to buy a new power saw for the project. I figured I better have some customers lined up in order to justify the purchase. I posted this image on the Facebook Marketplace, and a few local online yard-sale groups. I have one person interested for when they move in to their new place in July. I needed to sell two in order to justify buying the saw.
I don't have a new saw.

What went wrong? 

The short answer is that nobody wanted to buy my product. Duh.  Maybe it was the way I phrased the ad. Maybe I'm just used to the Utah culture where everyone really likes gardening. Maybe people who would be interested in this already have a similar product. I checked the marketplace before posting and there wasn't any competition there, but maybe there is local competition in town, perhaps at a farmer's market. Maybe the problem has been that we've had a really cold and snowy spring so far. It has snowed most of spring break, so people probably aren't thinking about planting gardens yet. If I was really sold on trying to make this a big business, I would look into these things and do some market research and testing. But this was just a spring break project, so I'm not overly concerned that nobody was interested.

What went well? 

I didn't buy any materials. My startup cost was the two minutes it took to post the listing on facebook marketplace. All this can be summed up by saying I failed early, and easily. Failure isn't that big of a deal when you don't have much to lose. I wasn't emotionally tied to this project, and so I let it die. I still have the listing up because I enjoy wood working, but I'll move on to other projects. Most people have failed startups because they make something nobody wants to buy. I'm a firm believer in the nail it then scale it model. Get it right before expanding. There's a great book on the subject if you're interested.