I spent a couple hours making a spreadsheet last night. This might not sound like much for someone who has been using computers since the early ’80s, but it is in fact the first spreadsheet I have ever made (unless you count all the copies of the “invoice” template I’ve used for contract billing). I wanted to figure out how much it would cost to build a rhythm robot, as a function of the size of the production run. It’s an interesting curve: there are steady price breaks at 10, 25, 50 units, then a big drop at 100 – but almost no improvement at 200. I didn’t track price breaks larger than that, because it’s difficult to imagine producing, selling, and shipping that many items without making a full-time job of it, but it might be interesting to do the math anyway just to see how the production would work out.

Next I need to estimate what the “demand curve” for this product might be: how many units could I sell at each possible price? Once I have that information, I can join the two functions and figure out whether there is any range of prices at which I could profitably sell rhythm robots.

Of course there are always more complications around the corner. I’d still need to figure out how much it would cost to advertise, how much to factor in for assembly time, and then there’s the whole terrifying nightmare of taxes and lawyers and incorporation, which might just kill the whole thing… I’m not actually sure there is a real business here, or that I really want to pursue it even if there is. Regardless, I’ve never done this kind of analysis before, and it’s an interesting learning process.