Tesla and Another Business Concept

It was another week of working on AoE. I've been doing another pass to polish the prose and fix miscellaneous details This one is more in-depth than the last one so it's taking longer. Nevertheless, I'm slowly getting ready to push it out the door.

Last week I mentioned Tesla is bankrupt on paper. I ran across an article this week that puts it in a more sophisticated way. They're structurally bankrupt. It doesn't mean they can't recover. With enough cash they could. It just means they're bankrupt today and for the foreseeable future including all of 2018. They keep making avoidable mistakes.

I remember when Amazon only sold books and couldn't make a profit either. They were able to turn things around. Tesla could do something like that. Theoretically. Amazon expanded to non-book products. Tesla is kind of stuck in the car/battery business. Although, I personally think they could sell riding lawn mowers like this well-rated Ryobi. Only three one-star ratings out of 182. Very solid. Unfortunately, Tesla makes lithium ion batteries. The Ryobi is lead acid, which is much cheaper. A Tesla mower would be around $4,000 or more like this lithium ion Cub Cadet. They wouldn't have to make the lawn mower. They could do a licensing deal and take a royalty or do a partnership deal supplying the batteries. Where they would get the batteries for all the lawn mowers I don't know. The current Gigafactory wouldn't be able to keep up with their car demand if they could figure out how to mass produce cars. It would never be able to do car and lawn mower batteries both. They've already been talking about needing more Gigafactories.

They could sell a lot more than cars if they really wanted to. The Tesla brand is powerful. People would buy things just for that alone. Golf carts, bikes, aircraft. Or premium batteries that last. Consumer lithium ion batteries use a liquid core that leaks and doesn't last. Tesla makes a solid core battery that lasts practically forever. It's a completely different experience than something like a cell phone battery. Instead of selling hundreds of thousands of cars, they could sell tens of millions of other things. They wouldn't make billions like they could on cars, but unlike with cars they would actually be making a  profit. The reason they don't is because the profit wouldn't be enough to offset the massive losses on the cars. Other products would not save the company.

So, I've been talking about wanting to start a business and throwing out some ideas. Here's another one. A lot of people sell things on Amazon. It's not a real business, but it can make a lot of cash. One way of doing it is to find niche products that sell well and source them from China. I had to go to the dentist last week, and the dentist recommended a water flosser. I looked at different ones on Amazon, including this one, this one, this one, this one and this one. You might be thinking they're all the same one with different brand names. You would be right. People have sourced this product from China and China and China for a minimum order of 500 pieces at $16.80 each going down to $14.80 for larger quantities. To even get started selling that flosser costs over $8,000. Many products are way cheaper than that, but the figure I've seen for getting started on Amazon with a product for a real business is around $4,000. It can be done fast and dirty for less, of course. The way to do it right is to start a real company with its own web site and use Amazon as an extension of that.

For American readers I hope you had a great Thanksgiving yesterday. For international readers I hope you had a great Thursday yesterday. :)

Have a great weekend.