Hope the business is still progressing well Lizzie. Have you finally revealed what the product is yet???!!!
Sim - I'm there! Got tired of Aussie Tycoon very quickly as soon became apparent that people were posting their generic "blogs" on there en-masse or self publicising - very little help or info or feedback.
Steve - still ploughing away. It seems like every path we follow, with an end in sight, infact, leads to a concealed bend where we discover a better way - or more often tripping face down over a root and finding the rarely discovered, alternative and better-business pathway.
Have gone from buying in heat compressed plastic sheeting, to contracting to have our own manufactured via a third party that took some serious finding(fell over), sourcing the raw materials ourselves for pressing, to investigating buying equipment to shread and press sheeting, to sourcing directly the only heat compressing company in Australia (they don't advertise), to trying to source the raw materials, to collecting over 100kg of HDPE bottles from people's recycling bins, washing and delabelling 100kg of smelly bottles, to sourcing someone to shread for me, to having shreader look at my sample heat compressed sheet (made in my oven) and advise they can give the same effect but with injection moulding, still sourcing raw materials ... and now the injection moulding boss is in China for 2 weeks.
Throw in getting designs CAD drawn, proto-type modelled, redrawn, redrawn again for router cutting which is no longer required if we go injection, MYOB training, admin setup, trying to get made overseas with no success, packaging, marketing etc ...
May have to change our initial product to something different (already designed) during to marketing timing.
Throw in some house reno's and family stuff just to keep it interesting!
Ah well, better to do it properly than rush and get it wrong. Best thing is that, after being very cynical and negative at the start, hubby is 110% on board. He and my international sourcing/import/export agent monopolised a coffee meeting the other day with their brainstorming!