Phase IV - Status and Lessons Learned

Phase IV of Project Vulcan is underway with buy orders for material for structure construction up, the Nov 1 audit complete, new spreadsheet created, and investors secured to fund the next big step.

The audit I performed on Nov 1st took into account the current mineral stockpiles, components, and ISK in the wallet (both my investment and from selling shares). I valued the minerals and components at Jita buy order prices rationing that if I had to liquidate them for ISK that would be the fastest method. The final tally came to 50,295,522,390.26 ISK of which ~47.5 billion is actual ISK. Of that, 29 billion is reserved for purchasing the Azbel and Raitaru BPOs and the rest is seed money to start the manufacturing.

One of my concerns with restructuring and doing less line-by-line bookkeeping was determining the price to sell the things I construct. I still needed a method to get an estimate of the manufacturing costs of which 90% is material cost. My old spreadsheet had copy paste errors occasionally and was becoming awkward to use, so I started a new spreadsheet that uses lookups calls to populate minerals and PI4 values for my items that I build, and then fetches the prices using a market aggregator API (specifically Fuzzworks). This gives me a ballpark material cost of my products, and I just need to factor manufacturing and broker fee costs into that to know what price I can sell at and still make an approximate profit without writing down every figure for every action. I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself TBH.

However, I'm not so pleased with how the investment went. I mean, I'm happy I hit the investment goals in terms of ISK but I feel like I vastly underestimated the interest that it would generate and the amount of ISK people have to throw around. When I made the blog post asking people to stop sending ISK my wallet was over 60 billion ISK (and 12 PLEX). It didn't help that people had trouble with the instructions about where to send the ISK and how to use a calendar *frown*. I had to send huge swathes of ISK (and PLEX) back to people with my regrets. I guess ten years of being public about my playstyle has earned me a lot of trust, more than I anticipated. We'll keep that in mind for the next big project.

Now the big challenge is to produce enough stuff to sell to make the investment pay out! Procuring materials, both minerals and PI4 items, at a price that is not higher than market average is the big thing. I'm making agreements with miners and Planetary overlords, putting up buy orders, and looking for deals. If you think you have something I want at a good prices, let me know!