This month marked the official launch of the next phase of Breed.Ride.Compete. and perhaps the part that I was most excited to roll out – the custom pedigree reports. In my head it sounded like a really cool idea, but of course I am a breeding nerd so I always think stuff like that sounds really cool. I had absolutely no clue how it would be received by the public in general though, or if anyone would actually even buy one. I also wasn’t 100% sure just how long they would take me… I wanted to get a handful done first and see how they went.

When we opened the listing for sales, we set the quantity at 5 and I figured we’d give it a couple weeks and see how they went. It was pretty shocking to me to sell out in about an hour. Shocking but in a good way, because you have no idea how delighted I am to see how interested people are in this stuff. The whole point behind starting BRC in the first place was to make breeding info more accessible and help raise public interest/help increase knowledge.

The level of interest was a complete surprise to me for sure, but it’s also invigorating. If people are excited about this, I want to make sure that what they’re getting is something worth the excitement. Plus if I’m going to dedicate my time and energy to it and put my brand name on it, I want it to be something that I’m really proud of and pleased with. Not boring, not half-assed, not decent, but I literally want every document to be THE BEST I can do.

Which is how something that was originally conceptualized as being fairly simple in design and maybe 3-5 pages long has ended up being… um, not that. I dunno who’s surprised to hear that, but I’m sure not. I spent a relatively embarrassing amount of time tweaking the template, playing with layout and colors and the flow of the document, and what I wanted on each page. Charts, infographics… you name it, it’s probably in there. Once I popped I couldn’t stop. And do you know how many times I changed the navy by like the tiniest shade? Yeah no I’m not gonna tell you, you’ll have me committed. Did I completely miss Foal Friday last week because I was so focused on that? Indeed I did. Didn’t even realize it until Sunday. I’ll make it up to you this week, I promise.

But once I got the template in place (I mean, as much in place as it can be, every report will be a bit different depending on where the research takes me) I was finally off and running. The first two reports are now complete and have been delivered, and I’m currently working on the third. And so far, I’m actually enjoying myself. This is the fun nerd shit that I LOVE, following endless rabbit trails into oblivion, and it’s extra fun when I stumble across a juicy little tidbit of info that I know the owner will be excited about. On the other hand, I’ve also prooooobably underestimated how much time I’m really going to end up spending on these. I’m going to have to rethink the price point a bit, lest I end up not even paying myself minimum wage (which is how it’s trending at the moment). I’m certainly not trying to get rich by doing these, but also it’s a lot of effort and at the end of the day I have to make it at least somewhat worth my time in order to justify it at all.

Once I finish the rest of this first batch I’ll have a better idea of just how long they’re taking on average but I do know that so far they’ve ended up being 7-9 pages rather than 3-5. Technically I could scale it back but then it’s not as thorough as I want it to be, and if it’s not thorough why even bother?

We’ll open up spots for more reports in July but again in a limited number (the last thing I want to do is overpromise and underdeliver) and probably will end up having to raise the price a little bit. On one hand I don’t want to do that at all, because I want people excited about breeding and I want people to have this information. But I also have to be careful how much of myself I’m giving away. Honestly not a bad problem to have though, since in my head I thought we’d be lucky to sell 5 in the first month at all, so… I’ll take it! It’s been really fun to bring the idea to life.