Bootstrapped ProfessorString.com reinvents guitar string retailing and online micro-commerce

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Despite the highly competitive digital retail space, there continues to be many micro-commerce sites that have found their product niche and thrive in today’s market. Some of these sites are owned by small start-up companies featuring a unique niche product or service. Most of these micro-commerce sites are bootstrapped and provide a consistent income for their owners. A micro-commerce site can earn from $50K up to $500K a year in income with just one, or several, people running it. Few people know about the folks behind some of these intriguing websites. I caught up with Brad Beiermann who runs ProfessorString.com. He gave us the background on his inspiring micro-commerce site.

 

Professor String is a website that was an inspiration for me to find information about strings used on musical instruments, primarily guitar and bass. It was hard to find information about strings beyond a manufacturer’s website or Wikipedia. The website offers an e-book I wrote about guitar and bass strings. At the time of creation, there were no books available about the subject either. In addition, the site offers handcrafted guitar and bass strings. Every string is handmade either here in Chicago or a small sheltered labor shop in Wisconsin during peak season. Each set of strings is packaged in a small wooden box which is also handmade. We even print and hand cut the packaging labels by hand. Nothing is made by electronic machines or automation. We are pretty much the only ones who do this today for steel strings.

 

I had another retailing website that was very successful at the time and it was mostly a passive income. Also, I had left my executive position at a major software company. So, that left me with some extra time on my hands. So, I started this website as both an experiment and a hobby around 2007. I did all the full-stack coding, sales copy, articles, marketing, artwork, and digital strategy behind it. It took me about six months working on it part time work to get everything going. In total, beyond my own personal time, I spent thirty-two dollars to get the business going. The money was spent on a refurbished hard drive for a server I owned. At the time, I needed it to run Apache for the site from my house. Today, it is hosted but I still maintain everything else in addition to string production. 

 

Last year the site brought in a little over two-hundred thousand dollars.

 

This was just to be a hobby site and a branding experiment to practice my marketing and coding chops on. I already had another online site that was making myself a stable income, and I was doing some e-commerce consulting too. Professor String was to be something fun. In fact, the professor logo is an inspiration of Christopher Loyd’s character “Doc” from Back To The Future. Over a period of time, the site grew with information, articles, FAQ section, Strings 101 section, and an e-book I wrote that could be purchased for $19.95. For a long time the main product was just the e-book. It was an information site. People came to expect the site to be a giant Wiki about strings. In fact, the homepage and the rest of the site seldom change anymore. Most folks do not want it to change at all...just like Wikipedia or Craigslist.

 

Quite frankly, I originally did not want to get into musical string retailing. Again, the site was to be just information. However, I recorded a video of myself in a professor costume making strings on a winding machine I designed and built for just two-hundred bucks. The video was to help sell the e-book, which sells for $19.95, and demonstrate how steel guitar strings could be made by hand. The video did well, and converted visitors to buy the e-book. They liked the book. However, it left them very curious about the strings being completely handmade. I started to get emails almost daily of people wanting to know if they could buy the strings being made in the video. Again, I had no intention of making strings as a business because it would require significant investment. For example, one automated string winder is typically over thirty-thousand dollars to build. However, one day, somebody claiming to be with Prince contacted me about making some strings for him. At first I thought it was somebody playing a joke. Then other artists started to contact me. Soon I set-up shop in my basement with another manual winder I had built. Since I had an engineering background and a masters degree in manufacturing, starting an assembly production was second nature.

 

The entire site is open source. Since I am the only one doing the coding, I try to keep it simple. It also helps not having to change the content continuously. I originally built the site on the LAMP stack with PHP being the back-end scripting language and MySQL as the database. The main e-commerce store is a very modified version of OpenCart with an MVC architecture. Recently, I have introduced some Node.js. I am hoping to get the site into an Isomorphic JavaScript code base in the future for easier maintenance. The front-end is mostly static, but there is some animation with JQuery and a few calls to the Angular framework. 

 

For analytics, I mostly have a Google dashboard setup. Since the site is low traffic, it really helps me to cut through the noise and see what is happening. It has been fun over the years tuning the site sales copy for conversion. For a micro-commerce site like ProfessorString.com, it is better to have lower traffic with high conversion. It keeps the costs down, the unqualified customers out, and takes less of my time. In fact, to keep the traffic low, there is no advertising beyond affiliates, no discount promotions, and no artist endorsements. It is solely word-of-mouth and borrows a chapter from underground promoting.

 

Much of our customer base is repeat customers, or guitarist who simply want to see what a handcrafted set of strings is all about. Part of the appeal is to get something that was handmade specifically for them. All the strings are made to order and take one to two weeks to get. Handcrafted strings are a different experience than cheaply made mass produced strings. Handcrafted strings are homemade ice cream. Homemade ice cream tastes nothing like store bought ice cream. Old fashioned homemade ice cream even requires a hand crank to make it...just like our strings.

 

I get emails all the time from some band or artist’s manager looking for me to sponsor them. That includes major recording artists. I give them all the same answer: No. I like to think of Professor String similar to the old Lamborghini marketing model. You never see a commercial for them. Their product is a niche. Their production is limited. Their quality is high. They are not cheap. They are not easily available, and they do not need to talk about who drives their cars. In some cases, they select who can by the product. In short, the philosophy is this: The things people want the most are the things they cannot easily have. Likewise, guitarists do not need custom handcrafted strings that cost over two-hundred dollars a set...they have to want them. Handcrafted strings are an experience, and they are only available at our website.

 

No. It is for the same reason there is not a Lamborghini in every garage. However, I did an experiment last year where some strings were offered for a lower price on a music auction site. None of them sold. However, there was something interesting that happened. While the strings were on auction, I received some emails on our own site from a couple of customers trying to warn me that somebody was offering “counterfeit” versions of our strings on the that auction site. [laughs]. They did not first believe it was actually us selling them! Apparently, it is very well established, and hardwired into our customers minds, the only place to get our strings is on ProfessorString.com. No exceptions.

 

My first passion is making money online with technology and digital marketing. Although ProfessorString.com and my other sites have provided some financial independence, I have kept a steady career working as a technology executive. In addition, I have worked as a consultant in various roles with larger companies in IT, e-commerce and the digital industry. I stay easily accessible for opportunities. It is important to continuously keep growing and learning new things. It is also critically important to help grow the people around you and help them recognize their goals and ambitions. In the end, it is were happiness comes from. The business is people.