Startup Reference An Example/Template

Startup Name : Tropaion Publishing

Area/Sector: Books & Education

Startup Year: 2011

Founder/s :  Tucker Max

Website: N/A

Startup Details :

Publishing Books... Just that.. Nothing fancy... It was sold it within a year. The Gross Sales of 2012 was 2mm and the Net Profit was 1.4mm.. We were just 2 full-time employees.

My publishing company, in summary, contracted with the author to write the book (that would be me, obviously), did all editing and production work on the book, and paid all up-front costs for printing and distribution. Simon & Schuster handled the printing, shipping, warehousing, sales, accounts receivable and returns.

This means I went from just another author with the same royalty deal every author gets — 15 percent of hardcover price — to owning my own publishing company and taking 89 percent of net receipts. In practice, the amount of money I made on each hardcover book sold went from about $3.60 to about $12(before distribution costs). Nothing else really changed.

Funding/Mentorship/Other Feedbacks:

It took me a LONG time to face the music from my first company and learn from my mistakes, but I eventually did it, and by doing that I was able to correct them.I learned so much, it’s hard to write it all down.

This company was extremely successful by any measure for a start-up. In our first year we were not only profitable, we made over a million dollars, and we did it with effectively two full time employees (me and Ian Claudius).

I think the key thing that I finally started to understand was not just business, but how the world actually worked. I stopped getting pissed and railing at people or systems that I thought were unfair, and instead focused on doing the job at hand. I think the big shift for me emotionally was asking myself the question, “Do you want to be angry at the injustice and fail because of that, or do you want to go around their bullshit, be effective at what matters, and succeed?”

Be clear: It wasn’t that I had to compromise my ethics or do things I thought were wrong. It was more about realizing that bitching about how unfair and bankrupt the entertainment and publishing businesses were wasn’t getting me anywhere but pissed off. So my options were to either get in the ring and do something about it, or stand on the sidelines and ineffectually bitch. I got in the ring. It was pretty genius, and the only way I could have pulled this off would be if I stopped trying to fight an unfair system, and instead worked to outsmart it. That’s partly being smart and experienced enough, but it’s mainly about being able to emotionally let go of anger or a defined course, and instead being willing to see other ways.

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