Being profitable isn't enough...

Now that I'm back producing T2 items, I updated my own spreadsheets to check profitability and got cracking on manufacturing the most attractive looking items. More recently I've obviously been trying to sell them, and since I've managed to almost double my output, it strikes me that there's more to building than just choosing the most profitable items. Once you can produce a decent volume, you have to really worry about how fast you can sell.

So I played about with my spreadsheet a bit and came out with this:

To explain as simply as possible:

• The Y axis (side) is just the daily sales volume in Jita. (I changed it into a logarithmic scale only because it's easier to view the output). Further up the graph = higher number of units sold per day.
• The X axis (bottom) is the millions of isk per hour profit I make. This is calculated by dividing the profit of the item by the time it takes to build. Further to the right = more profitable.
• Each little blue diamond is one item I can make. They are not labelled here because I'm not giving away all my secrets! The point of this post is to show you how to build useful tools, not give out freebie advice.

So in the end we have 4 quadrants, high volume/high profit quadrant (top right) containing the best items to make.

The most profitable items don't sell many units per day, so I've got a bit of an overstock of them that will probably take me a while to shift. They end up in the bottom right quadrant - low volume but high profit. I do want to keep manufacturing them, but if I devoted all my slots to that I'd make more than 10 times what I could sell and end up with a lot of T2 stuff hanging around my hangar floor.

Building a spreadsheet like this is extremely helpful when deciding what to manufacture - it wasn't until building this that I can really focus my efforts. If you know how profitable your items are (and you should!) then all you need to do extra is find a source for the volumes. I used Eve Tools. It's really not hard to do.

I hope this sort of analysis helps other budding Eve entrepreneurs!

February in review

The wallet journal downloads seem to have gone a bit wrong (thanks CCP!), which is going to make my corporation reporting a pain. Here's a few basic things this month (it'll probably take me a while before I can do the full reporting I did previously):

• My POS got blown up when I was away, my own fault really, I forgot to refuel. Had to relocate as there were no moons left in my old home, and also buy a new POS. Bummer.
• Despite this I still managed to increase the corp wallet by around 200m isk.
• Partly this was down to dumping my stockpile of PI products, bought back when they were not PI products, for a sizable profit. A one-off divestment to counter my (hopefully) one-off investment in a new POS.
• Other than that I've been doing some PI (and blogging about that this month) and that averaged 1.6m isk per planet per day, 20% below my target although that includes a 7 day cycle.
• Invention is working nicely with the use of base items to boost my chances. I ended up with 62% success rate (112 successes out of 181 attempts to be exact).
• And of course I've also been selling T2 as well, which is generally up in profitability as discussed in the last post.

In summary: a lot of fiddly tasks done (anchoring a POS, much hauling, setting up planets) but things are set up well for March when I should also be able to bring more manufacturing online and work through the backlog of T2 blueprints that the use of base items in invention has allowed me to generate.