At NTNU I joined a student organisation called DotKom. There I met Isak. One day Isak would tell me of a computer mouse he had found online. A mouse with a small compartment of oil with a small rubber duck floating inside. As you can see this mouse was perhaps the coolest computer mouse in the world. The only problem was however, that not only was it out of stock, but it was out of production as well. After some contemplating we realised that even though no one else was selling these mice, why couldn’t we?
Website
We started with the website. Mainly because this was the least difficult. We also wanted the tech stack to be lightweight and interesting. Isak had some experience with Gatsby so we went with that. We wanted the styling to be unique and made by hand so we went with Tailwind for managing CSS.
Tech stack:
Or GRTT as the cool kids say. I did not become a huge fan of Gatsby, but it worked well for the project and was technically interesting to work with. I then set up the domain, as I had no previous experience with this. Although I had read about DNS and domain names, actually setting it up was a nice way to anchor the knowledge. I also found out that one individual can’t own more than five ‘.no’ domains.🙃
We initially wanted to use Vipps for payment, but found it hard to set up as it required us to be an actual company if I remember correctly. We therefore decided on Stripe instead. Other than that, the development was relatively straightforward. The website is still up and running on duckmouse.no.
Production
After we were more or less done with the site, we needed to get ahold of the actual computer mice. After some reverse image searching and research we found the manufacturer on Alibaba. The smallest quantity they could manufacture was 500, so that was the number we went with. Some would perhaps say this sounded a bit stupid as 500 is a lot. But some also say the earth is flat, so there is that.
Entrepreneurship
A big part of doing this project was learning about how one could go about selling a product. We tried to read up on what we were legally obliged to do and how to manage the income, expenses and so on. We figured that if we sold for less than 50,000 NOK in a year we were not obligated to pay VAT, but our earnings would obviously be taxed as with a regular job. We both registered an “enkeltpersonforetak” and taxed through that.
Later that summer the boxes of computer mice appeared. When they arrived at the door we started to understand the true scope of what we had done. It turns out that five hundred of anything is rather a lot.
Sales
We now only had one issue left. Selling these mice. We started with quite a few sales to friends and friends of friends. We bought some stickers and gave them with the mouse. It quickly became apparent that even though I had found the process of building the website and buying the mice to be fun, selling them was much more tedious. Isak had quite a few good ideas on marketing, but we sadly never came round to do it. As of writing this post we have sold 48 of the total 500 mice.
There sadly appeared one tiny tiny problem. The mice have all started to leak oil. It turns out that making computer equipment with oil inside is not a great idea. The mice were not well sealed and we slowly began understanding why no one else sold these mice. We have tried to stop the leaking with a variety of glues, but as of now we have found no fix. Duckmouse is therefore for now over and shut down. However the website is still up, and who knows. Perhaps we figure out how to fix them or maybe we find another usage for them altogether.