Teenage Mutant Business Hurdles

The origin story

Do you know how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle franchise began?

(Do you care?)

Well, there was indeed the mystery ooze accident, but rewind just a bit, and you’d find Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird swapping silly sketches while watching TV. Peter was illustrating for local newspapers at the time, and Kevin was working at restaurants, but they were both dreaming big dreams of making a living creating comics.

♪♫♬

(Please excuse my heart strings!)

Back to the sketches: They invented four turtle warriors and were so excited about the idea, that they wrote and illustrated a comic about them.
Then, pooling all their money (Peter emptied his bank account) and with a loan from Kevin's uncle, they printed about 3000 copies of the book and ran an ad in a comic-industry magazine. (Let's come back to that later)

Long story short: The book sold out, and things just kept building from there until Nickelodeon eventually bought the franchise for $60,000,000.

Double-take

Anyway, I heard the story, and something inside me said: “That's the way to do it! You've gotta find a buddy, make a silly passion project together, bootstrap your way to financial independence, have a melodramatic falling out, a heartwarming reunion and then $60,000,000!”

I was completely entranced by that image.

And I'm still not sure where he came from, but after a few seconds of blissful reverie, this mature voice inside me found his way to center stage and pondered out loud why "Starting a Business for Dummies" sells an estimated 2138 copies per month and has more than one page.

I stood bespattered in the iridescent drops of my burst bubble wondering how I had let that story run wild with my imagination.

I think it was easy for me to see myself in those guys, dreaming big comic dreams and throwing creative ideas back and forth.
Also, their road to success seems so attainable: They didn't raise huge venture capital. They were able to make it with their own skills, a small investment and a lot of creativity.
On the other hand, the long haul of working day after day, against fierce competition, to slowly build momentum, and not even be assured success, seems next to impossible and definitely not as fun.

And while this crazy venture seems to have gone pretty well, I think I have to be honest with myself and buckle up for the long road to creating a successful and profitable comic.

What worked?

Even though this story has been called a “happy accident” I think that Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman did do a few things quite intentionally that helped the comic take off:

1) They channelled the energy of that “wouldn't it be cool” moment into the two and a half month grind of actually creating a finished product.

2) Luckily for them, “Field of Dreams” wouldn’t premiere until around six years later, so they didn't assume that “if they built it, he would come.” Part of their first financial push included an effort to get word out to their target audience about their new book, which is not a given for the typically much less business-savvy creative crowd.

That’s all for now. Please let me know what you thought of this write-up!