There are a lot of people who are bad at business.
A $40 paper flower, and a $2000/mo lease. Assuming you are sole proprietor and have zero employees, and need an additional $2000/mo to live a meagre existence (food, apartment, etc.) and it takes you 15 minutes to fold each flower.
Minimum revenue to stay afloat, 800 flowers per month. You’d need to fold for 200 hours, or approximately a 40 hour week of folding. That leaves zero time to do any marketing. So you’re relying entirely on foot traffic, or you’re marketing as overtime.
To reach 800 sales per month with something so trivial, you’d property require a reach of at least 20,000 customer touch points per month, each who has the time to chat about paper flowers, because your conversion rate is going to be shit. If it’s passive reach, you might need to get an ad in front of half a million per month. You’d need to be a tiktok celeb or something to get this reach without adding expensive ads. And that’s a fucking gamble and a half.
There’s no way this model works. And the fact that someone tried it isn’t something to celebrate. They possibly poured their life savings into the drain, went bankrupt, and hopefully concluded they were bad at business.
If you want to sell paper flowers, do it as a side gig from you home. Or make them so luxurious that you can sell them at $1000 each, and rich people buy them as wedding presents – then you only need to sell four per month and can spend the rest of the time marketing.
Jesus this isn’t a comic strip, this a 4 panel graphic novel
It’s like an essay in dialogue form, pasted over clip art. It doesn’t really work, but I admire the effort and hope the artist keeps at it.
David Malki has been doing it for 22 years, I reckon he knows his limits!
ITT people that have never read Wondermark before.
My favorite of his are:
This is the most readable font I’ve ever seen in a comic!
Was this written by AI? It doesn’t follow logically. The first panel is a man wanting to buy origami flowers. The third panel is the woman admonishing the man as if he were the origami owner.
The “you” in the 3rd panel refers to the hypothetical shop owner referenced in the 2nd panel, not the dude she’s talking with.
It is a confusing way to frame a sentence though, saying “you” in the context of an acted out conversation with someone who isn’t there
It’s a valid and moderately common construction. This is called the generic (or indefinite) form of you. It’s primarily used as a colloquial or less formal substitute for one.
But yes, you do have to infer whom you is referencing from the context, so I could see why some might find it more confusing.
Not only that, but the art is strangely copy pasted between panels, and has no consistent style between elements. I suspect each bit was independently found (or AI generated), and then the creator used Photoshop or the like to compose it together.
Dude’s been making this webcomic for over two decades. Try reading it again more slowly if y’all don’t get it the first time.
phones r bad
