In 2010, I attended a workshop in London on "Global Sales Strategies for Ambitious Entrepreneurs." The workshop was hosted by Kenneth P. Morse, Managing director of MIT's Entrepreneurship Center.  

The session was fantastic — but what ended up being more memorable was that during the event, a volcano in my home country of Iceland erupted (Eyjafjallajökull).

All flights got canceled back to Iceland, and as a result, I ended up having dinner with a few friends near Covent Garden.

Partially motivated by enthusiastic entrepreneurs at the workshop — an idea came up: "What if we market and sell the ash?". Several jokes came after — but then the group talked about how pricing and packaging could work and if the quantity of what people were buying mattered.

Having decent answers to half of the questions, the group agreed, "let us try it!".

We guessed that selling this in a cosmetic glass container made sense. So we contacted an owner of a cosmetic brand in Iceland, hoping to buy 200 bottles from her, promising we were not in for the competition. She was willing to sell each empty bottle for $2 per piece (they cost around $0.02 if you bought in bulk). We agreed.

I called up a friend who was finishing design school in Australia. I asked him if he could help out and send a design that would roughly show how this product would look like with ash in the bottle, a bar code, and a small brochure.

The design looked great.

We downloaded the latest copy of the Grapevine in Iceland (Iceland's biggest and most widely read tourist publication.). We then compiled a spreadsheet listing every advertiser in the paper, collecting contact information we could scrape from their online websites.I spent the rest of my day on emails and calls with stores. I sold ash worth $2k on day one, promising that we would get the product out and into stores ASAP when flights opened up.

After flights opened up, part of the team drove to the south of Iceland, helping a local farmer clean ash from his rooftop. We ended up with a filled plastic container, typically used in the fishing industry in Iceland. Up next came marketing, sales, and producing more products. We had created a business.

To clarify, in all of our minds, this was a side-gig. We all had other jobs. We were first to market, but at least 16 other competitors had the same idea in some shape or form soon after us.

In the end, we were out of interest and out of ash. Operations closed down. We made a little bit of extra income on it - but mostly learned about building and selling a product.

Years later, I hosted a class on business models at the University of Iceland. I used Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas to explain key operations of Lava Productions (that's what we named the company). I also showed students the actual numbers behind our operations. Unit economics, costs to start, revenue, and tools and spreadsheets we had at the time to make decisions.

We got hundreds of guesses wrong and some right. I truly believe in learning by doing. There needs to be a balance between consuming and creating. If you haven't tried building anything on your own yet — I strongly encourage you to "find your own ash project"; you never know what it might lead to.

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On May 18th, 2010 (twelve years ago when this is published), the Lava Production team launched its ash product.
Last Friday (May 13th), another company I co-founded, 50skills, announced a funding round. That company started with the side income put aside from the ash business.