It’s a common position for potential business owners to be in.  I think a lot of very talented people that would start successful businesses get scared away by the financial uncertainty of starting their own business.

My advice – eliminate all of the uncertainty by using a job to fund yourself. Here’s what I would do if I was graduating today and starting out again from scratch tomorrow:

1. Get a non-career job where you can work 30 – 40 hours/week and make enough money to live off of. It might not impress your parents, but that job bartending or waiting tables or being a barista or bank teller is going to afford you the opportunity to do what you truly want.
2. Pick a potential business idea…then start a related service for under $100. Let’s say you’re like me and want to run lots of successful web apps.  Starting a web app from scratch and building it to a point where it brings in solid revenue is very difficult and many times doesn’t work out.  Instead, start a web design business first.  $100 gets you some business cards, a simple website, and a Skype phone number.  Throw and ad on Craigslist, work Twitter and Facebook, go to a few local networking events, and whatever else it takes to get your first clients for free.   For more ideas, check out my post How To Do Client Work Right that I wrote just after we got rid of the service side of our business.
3. Use the remaining time to work on your “ideal” business. If you still want to build that web app, take advantage of all of the free time that you have to slowly-but-surely build it without the stress of needing it.  Build something that has true value to people, even if it takes a year or two to do it.  The more stress, the more you need a web app to succeed, the more likely you are to press and make drastic changes instead of being patient.  Great websites take years and years to build.
4. Pump profits from your service into growing your “ideal” business. Since you are living off of your job, you can “reward” yourself by spending some or all of your service profit on growing the web app.

Here’s how your average week likely breaks down:  30 – 40 hours working, 15 – 25 hours on your service, and 5 – 10 hours on your ideal business.  ~60 hours is no joke, but it’s also not a bad deal for how much benefit you’re getting.

This is a very low risk, high reward path that gives you TONS of future options:

• If things don’t take off, you can try again or get a career job.
• If the service grows, you can quit your part time job or stop working on the web app.
• If the web app grows, you can stop providing service or quit the part time job.
• If they both grow and you can cover your living expenses, you can definitely quit the part time job!

There are several advantages of taking this approach:

1. There’s no time limit. Totally flop after trying for 6 months?  Start over without any real penalty.  You still have your job so you can take a few weeks off from entrepreneurship and then get back into it when you’re ready.
2. You’re financially stable. You don’t need to worry about owing creditors thousands of dollars because you’re advancing yourself cash to live while the business struggles.  By keeping your business money separate from your personal money, you really do eliminate any real financial risk.
3. By bootstrapping, you learn the importance of every dollar. I love the fact that we’ve never taken outside financing.  We’re pretty minimal in our spending.  We value every single sale we make.  Would we be nearly as stingy if we had $1M from a VC to play with?  Probably not.  We also probably wouldn’t be nearly as efficient or nearly as successful.
4. You keep your motivation. Nothing keeps you more motivated than doing a job that you don’t want to do every day!  That annoying customer who badgers you all night and never leaves a tip?  He’s the reason you work so hard after work.
5. You’re learning constantly. No matter the business you work for, you can learn things.  What do they do that works?  What doesn’t?  How would you do it differently?  You’re getting paid to learn.  Those clients you work with are the same.  To do good work for them, you’ll have to work pretty hard to learn the intricacies of their businesses.
6. You avoid living in a bubble. Running a business solo can be lonely.  I know.  Working a job gets you out of the house, gets you some social interaction, and builds some relationships.  Same goes for doing service work.

My business partners and I sort of did these things, mostly by accident.  I got a job with the intention of funding SportsLizard, but it was a career job and became too conflicting.  Mike and George worked part-time jobs to bridge the gap as they got their start.  Greg was still going for his MBA while he was starting out.  I did SEO service work to keep myself afloat while I tried to grow my websites, which eventually led me to my current partners.  George and Greg did physical detailing to fund Detailed Image.  All along the way, the knowledge we learned from all of those experiences has cumulatively helped us in every aspect of our business.

Who?

His name is John. He’s our accountant’s son. He just graduated from High School and will be attending college locally at Siena. Both he and his father are into detailing. His father actually came in on Christmas Eve last year and did some last second shopping for John for the holiday.

Side note: it’s a pretty good endorsement when your accountant wants his son to work for you. I mean, he gets to see our numbers. More than anyone, he knows how good of a company we are and has a pretty good idea of the company we’ll become.

Anyway, I think working for us is a pretty good gig.  I would have loved his job when I was 18.  It pays more than a job like Target, you have flexible hours, you can wear mesh shorts and a t-shirt to work, you can listen to your iPod while you work, and the labor isn’t all that intensive since the majority of our products are small and light.

Why?

The most obvious answer is because we can.  We’ve had a great year, which has afforded us the luxury of hiring someone without worrying that a few bad weeks could cause us to miss a payroll.

Plus, it was time.  We’re a few years into this now and we need to start learning about employees:

• How good are we at managing them?
• How much productivity can we realistically expect from them?
• How long does it take for them to pick up on things?
• How can we improve at training them?
• How much time do they really save us?
• How do they fit into our company culture, which is very strong and somewhat unique (being that we’ve all known each other almost our entire lives)?

We’ve talked about all of those things at length and discussed so many scenarios that it makes my head spin.  At the end of the day, the only way to know is to try.

Benefits

Greg has been training him this week.  He’ll be the primary person that John reports to.  I was there on Monday and Tuesday, and both days I personally already benefited from having John there. His main tasks are to help pack orders, stock shelves, make boxes for orders, and break down boxes from deliveries. Those tasks can be time consuming, tiring, and unpredictable on top of an already busy day.  There’s nothing worse than getting in “the zone” only to have a delivery show up that takes an hour to unbox. Now we can just leave it for John and get back to work.  That’s so valuable.

Greg is probably the only one who hasn’t seen the benefit because he’s shadowing him and teaching him. It’ll probably take a few weeks of that for John to be totally up to speed, which is obviously to be expected.  But Greg is the perfect person to be doing this. He’s done quite a bit of soccer coaching (he played D1 soccer in college) and in general has a personality that lends himself towards being a good teacher. He explains things well, he’s got a very positive attitude all the time, and he’s very patient (something I don’t think you can say about the rest of us).

What’s Next?

Right now he’s working 3 days/week from 9:30 AM to 2 PM (his choice), giving us 13.5 hours per week. That 13.5 hours will help us a lot and cost us very little. Assuming this goes well, I think we’ll try to shoot for having 1-2 workers from the hours of 9 AM – 3 PM every day. With that, we could probably quadruple our size before having to reassess things.

The problem is how you fill those hours. Is it a combination of part time employees? Or is it one full time employee? Both have pros and cons. I think for the time being we’re content to just see how this plays out over the summer and then move from there.

Fun and exciting stuff though.  It’s new territory for us, with a new opportunity to learn about and improve upon our business.

Yet those things are easily lost when all you can think about is next months sales or that new feature. After a not so good January, I really needed to trim my life back a bit and focus on getting our new e-commerce platform done. I did, we got it up on 5/1, and it’s since paid off more than we imagined it would. We’ve had a few huge months where we’re hitting revenue and profitability numbers that I could only dream of in January. Remember that huge Black Friday we had? That’s now a normal weekend. It’s nuts. We’ve turned a corner in the sense that we’ve become very self-sustainable. If things keep up like this we shouldn’t have any troubles meeting our financial goals for the rest of the year: have a profitable year, pay ourselves a bit more, expand to a few new product lines, and hire a few part-time warehouse workers (we have our first starting on Monday).

For the Biz

So what’s next? For every person and every company, the answer would be different. For us it starts with our personal goals, which pretty much all align, and then trickles down to the business. We don’t want to have 100 employees. We don’t want outside investors. We don’t want a 500,000 sq-ft warehouse, nor do we want to run fifty e-commerce sites. Other people would probably take our company in that direction. I think it could be done. But it isn’t the type of company we want.

We like not having set hours. We like emphasizing productivity over hours put in. We like going to the warehouse 2-3 days/week from 9 -3. We like working from home on the other days. We like having the flexibility to work more or less if we want to or need to. We like being able to do whatever we think is “right” for our customers. We like not having to deal with the HR issues that inevitably come along with having a lot of employees. Basically, we like owning all of our company so that we can make all of the decisions. To me, that’s what makes running a business fun. We can do whatever WE want. If we had a bunch of investors to answer to, it would be like a job to me.

We’ve decided that for the time being our main focus needs to stay with Detailed Image…probably through 2010. We went through our list of planned projects the other day. There is easily 1 year+ worth of work there, but each task is easily identifiable as something that will make us more money, save us more time, or eliminate common problems/mistakes.  In addition, with a few part time employees, we should be able to knock each of us down to 2 warehouse days/week and get rid of most of the grunt work that is tiring and eats up time. We’re able to make those improvement claims with relative certainty because we’ve been in business for a few years now.  We have data, we know our customers, and we (think) we know the direction that the web is going.  DI is becoming a much more mature business.  I’d imagine that by the end of 2011 we’ll be close to being the largest US based site in our niche, which in and of itself is a nice business, but not something that we’ll be satisfied with.

The other limiting factors are cash flow and warehouse space – we can’t just grow in e-commerce with reckless abandon because we don’t have the credit available or space available to risk stocking $30k worth or products that don’t move.  Not to mention the other time and work involved in another e-commerce venture.  At this point, I’d imagine that non-DI e-commerce expansion isn’t going to happen anytime soon (unless it’s done with a dropshipping model, which we *may* do on Tastefully Driven because of how much organic search traffic it pulls in).

Then the next logical question is:  is Pure Adapt just Detailed Image?  And if so, what happens when you do hit that wall in 2010 or 2011 or 2012?  On the e-commerce side, we’ll have to start up again on the fitness and poker sites that we had planned, both of which have had success on TD and Amazon for us.  But as I mentioned above, e-commerce expansion is tough and it might still be in a year or two.

To me, the key is SportsLizard.  Not SportsLizard per se, but the SportsLizard model. I spend about 1 hour per month answering emails and maintaining the site.  We spend $0 marketing it.  We make money from eBay ads and Price Guide subscriptions (a web app I developed).  It’s not enough to live off of, but it would be if you had a few SportsLizard’s.  That’s exactly what I want to do – between Mike and I, develop a few more SportsLizard’s in the next year.  Z.ips.ME doesn’t really count, but it might surprise me and make us a few dollars here and there.  First things first, we want to expand Hotteeez, which despite not being updated in a year makes us pretty decent money.  With a few new well-planned shirts each month, it could easily become a SportsLizard by the end of the year.  Beyond that, we have two other planned projects that I think could do the same.  Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but over time some of them will hit.  And hopefully one or two is even bigger than SL. If not, there’s really no loss for us and we can just try some more until something works. How fun is that?

For Myself

On a more personal level, I couldn’t be happier with the first half of ‘09.  However, since I spent every waking hour through May working on getting the site up, I lost a little of the work/life “balance” that I had achieved prior.  I followed the site up by moving, so I’m only just now getting the opportunity to get back to a spot like I outlined in my productive output post.  I’m only checking email twice per day on weekdays, at 7 AM and 5 PM, and then once per day on the weekends.  Since I’ve got everything filtered pretty well, my inbox is usually near empty when I open it.

I’m not really setting a time constraint on my working “hours”, but I just want to make sure that I spend a little more time with my friends, family, and girlfriend.  In particular, there are a handful of people that I just haven’t had time for the past six months that I want to make sure I get back in touch with.  An hour phone call or a night of drinks needs to be OK now, whereas in March it wasn’t unfortunately. It sucks, but there’s always a trade off. If you want to go balls out on a project something is going to suffer.

I LOVE the fact that with a few part-time workers I can get my warehouse days down to 2/week and eliminate things like stocking shelves and breaking down boxes. At this point, all of our time is much more valuable than that. The more freedom I have, the more driven I am, the more productive I am, and the happier I am. I feel like we’re really really close to hitting that point where my job is almost “perfect”, which is exciting. Instead of focusing on getting to that point, I can focus on achieving some higher level business and personal goals.

Hobbies are a different story.  I realized something these past few months – my favorite hobbies are running my blog (and all of the emails and meetups that result from it) and working on web-apps. Which is great, because both are beneficial to our business.  I just don’t really have the desire right now to watch movies or play video games or read fiction books or make a custom.  I see so much opportunity out there and I want to “throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks”.  Having the steadiness of DI allows me to just do whatever I want when it comes to the side projects without much financial risk.  The only real non work related hobby (if you call it that) I still have is working out.  I still am on my regular gym schedule and I enjoy going for regular hikes with my girlfriend.  That won’t change.  I’m constantly challenging myself to be in better shape and to eat better.  But the other stuff really does nothing for me anymore.

For Everyone

I realize that for a lot of people the lifestyle that I’m creating for myself and that we’re creating for our business would not be desired. Or maybe more appropriately, not ideal. That’s OK, as long as you recognize what is important to you. I value time and freedom over money. I didn’t leave my job to make more money. I was making more than enough at age 23. I could have made that salary with a 3% bonus each year and been monetarily satisfied. It was everything else that I wasn’t happy with – the purpose behind the work I was doing, the lack of freedom at a traditional 9 -5, and the bureaucracy of a system that prevented people from doing their best. For you, the goals might be different. If you want to solve the energy crisis or buy the New York Yankees, you probably won’t be satisfied with a business as small as ours.

I hadn’t thought much about this since then.  Until of course last week when I was at my parents house and I saw that there was a letter there for me from the Denver Broncos.  Apparently I am now eligible to buy season tickets.  4 of them in fact.  But I had to decide by June 16th, a little over a week after I got the letter.  Which makes sense because I’m sure a lot of people decline to buy or have forgotten about it or moved, so they need time to send more letters to other people on the list prior to tickets being sent out in July.

The letter also said something really interesting – that the wait had now grown to 15 – 20 years and that if I didn’t buy tickets by June 16th I’d be placed at the back of the line again.

After debating it for a little while, I ran it by my partners who emphatically pushed me to buy the tickets.  I ended up deciding to buy a pair and Mike decided he’d snatch up the other pair.  So here’s the deal – all season long I’m going to track exactly what we do with these tickets.  I’ll post when we sell each pair, how much we sell them for, and how much work is involved.

We had choices between two different sections, one for $580/seat and the other for $420/seat.  We decided to experiment and get a pair from each.  We ended up with 2 seats in section 524 and 2 in section 502 (map here).  The grand total – including an $8 service charge per ticket – came to $2,032.  The very nice lady on the phone informed me that I’ll be receiving the tickets in the mail in July.  At that time we’ll decide exactly how we’ll be selling the tickets.

However, if you do the math it looks like we’re already in pretty good shape if we threw them on StubHub.  We’re paying $52.50/ticket and $72.50/ticket if you don’t factor in the two pre-season games that we might not be able to unload.  Some games are already over $100 for the low…in June.  Season ticket packages start at $675, which means we could sell off the entire season right now and still make out pretty good.

It also helps that the Broncos have the schedule from God.  They have quite possibly the four best road teams coming in – Dallas, New England, Pittsburgh, and the Giants.  Then they have their three division rivals coming in – San Diego, Oakland, and Kansas City.  The only not-so-popular team is Cleveland, and that is their home opener, which always has high demand.  The two pre-season games that we get are essentially meaningless (Chicago and Arizona) – we’ll be lucky to get $20/ticket for those games.

The only thing working against us is that the Broncos might totally suck, considering that Josh McDaniels is insane and all.  Hopefully they’ll at least be respectable…or at least respectable until we unload all of our tickets.

All in all, if this can’t work with this team in this season, it probably won’t be worth my time to try it again with another team in another season.  Our goal is to get a 50% return on our investment by the time the season ends in December.  That’s approximately six months to turn $2k into $3k. Should be fun.

Below is a quick flow chart I put together of the process I use to decide whether or not I should keep something. I built it using the awesome (free) web app Lovely Charts – a big improvement from other flow charting software I’ve used.

I’m interested to hear what you guys think. How frequently do you do a “Spring cleaning”? Do you go through a similar process? Did I leave something out? What do you do differently?

Background

When I started using Twitter, one of the first things that piqued my interest was URL shorteners. Not only does it make no sense why Twitter doesn’t officially have their own URL shortening service (although bit.ly is sort of official now), but it really made no sense to me why everyone used either bit.ly or tinyurl.com instead of creating their own. A URL shortener is uber simple to program and can offer you a ton of value.  So I picked up the domain “ips.me” with the intent of using it as my own URL shortener.

Then I realized that this simple script could be valuable to a lot of people and a lot of businesses.   After some thought, I decided to turn this into an open source project and release it for everyone to use.  Yesterday I finally got around to putting the site up at http://z.ips.me.  Although the first version isn’t available for download yet, I’ve begun testing it on my Twitter account.

Benefits

The benefits of my own URL shortener are pretty obvious to me:

• I can name the URL whatever I want.  I can get http://z.ips.me/Adam to point to this blog instead of http://tinyurl.com/den93j
• I control how long the redirect is in place.  If I want to change it or remove it, I can.  Or I can leave it up forever.
• I control whether it’s a permanent 301 redirect (search engine friendly) or a temporary 302 redirect.
• I get the data and they don’t.  I know when someone clicked a link, what site they clicked it on, what browser they’re using, and more.  I can aggregate all of this data and use it to my advantage.
• I’m branding MY site and not another third party.  If someone says “hey what’s z.ips.me” and visits it, I get the traffic.

Who Will Use it?

Personally, I think every business that’s on Twitter should be using their own URL shortener.  If their domain is too long, they can spend $10/year and buy a new one like I did.

The perfect example is a company like Dell.  On their Twitter page they use a combination of ow.ly and bit.ly.  They recently reported that they’ve generated over $3 million in revenue from their links on Twitter.  Imagine if those links came from t.dell.com.  They’d have all the data.  They’d control where a link goes when a sale ends.  They’d brand their own domain.

I also think that web marketing companies and SEO companies would all love to have this kind of control for their clients.

Feedback!!!

Right now the site currently says that we’re in a private Beta. You can sign up to receive an email once the service is available for download. My question to you is – how useful do you think this service is?  For site owners?  Businesses?  Web marketers/SEOs? I’m debating how long I should test it before developing it to the point that it can be released it to the public (there needs to be an install script and a better admin interface, along with instructions).

In terms of monetization, there is some revenue potential in domain/hosting referral commissions, and also the potential to charge for installs, but most likely this is more along the lines of Music-Alerts – a fun project that doesn’t really make any money.

This particular post was originally written on 12/2/2005 after a co-worker questioned whether I would really follow through with my plan to quit.  I’ve edited it down because the original post was overly verbose.

At work, I generally don’t talk about my business. I don’t want it to distract me from getting my job done. People always have a thousand questions for me so I’d rather not deal with it. Inevitably, it always feels like they are trying to prove to themselves that they shouldn’t take my business seriously because, after all, I am just a 23 year old, and I couldn’t possibly know more or be more driven or more successful than they are. My boss is aware of my plans. He understands them, respects them, and will ultimately support me in whatever I decide to do. That is all I really care about.

But people like to talk. And one of their favorite questions for young people is:

“Where do you see yourself in the future?”

It always is proceeded by the “You seem like you’re getting used to work, which is good, because you’ve got another 40 years of it.”

I always take it as “When I was your age, I had a dream job too – tell me what yours is, then I’ll tell you mine and why someone else caused me to fail, and inevitably I’ll make you feel that you will not end up doing whatever it is that you just said you wanted to do .”

I can’t tell you how many times I have had that conversation. I hate it, but it’s hard to avoid when people start prying into your professional aspirations. And today at work, someone started prying. So I answered the questions honestly.

And I get the “I’m rooting for you, but don’t you think you should also develop your engineering career here in case you change your mind?”

I say no, which is followed with “You say that now, but when you meet some honey and have a little kid and want to buy a house you are going to want a steady income.”

Another one of my favorites. Since I am single, they love to play the “when you meet a girl everything will change” card. Listen, every girlfriend I have ever had would support me in pursuing what I love in exchange for a little financial uncertainty. And I am pretty sure that any girl I meet in the future who truly loves me would also support me. I pretty much take that as an insult – an insult to my business and an insult to my ability to develop successful relationships.

I take it as “you live in fantasy land, young man, and when you get out of fantasy land and look at reality you will realize that your dreams aren’t meant to become reality.”

As this conversation continued, I was then thrown the “Listen to your elders, I am twice your age, and you will regret not listening to me” line.

I am all for respecting your elders, but when your elders are wrong I would be stupid to listen. Would Bill Gates have started Microsoft if he listened to his elders? Michael Dell wouldn’t have dropped out of school to run Dell Computers if his elders had their way. Sometimes you need to pursue you passions despite what others say.

I started to realize after that conversation at work that those conversations are part of what fires me up so much, part of what keeps me going. I almost NEED people to constantly misunderstand me and insinuate that I will fail. It drives me. So, in a way, working my job for a little longer will actually be good for me. Seeing what I don’t want will help me stay focused on what I do want. I think that is the best mentality for me to approach my job with for the next year or so while I work towards getting out of it.

For some companies, this might be acceptable.  For us, it isn’t.  We’ve managed to grow without hiring because we’ve always offset our growth with new efficiencies. In this case, the solution was rather simple:

1. Space out products so that they have adequate room for growth as we expand.
2. Put the most frequently sold brands closest to our pulling table (this post from last year has a good overview of how we pull/pack orders)
3. Put the most frequently sold products on the middle three shelves, with less frequent sellers like gallon sizes on the bottom and top shelves.  We have reports in our admin system that tally all of this data for us.
4. Number each shelving unit as a “zone”.
5. Record the “zones” for each unique product and size in our database
6. Display products on invoices according to their “zone” (previously they were just in alphabetical order)

Here’s the chart that we used to number the different shelving units.  The red shelf is TD only, the grayed out shelves are future units, and the row of boxes are for items like buffers that do not fit on shelving units and are left in boxes.

Now when the order is printed out on the invoice it prints in ascending numerical zone order, with products in zone 1 on the top and products in zone 85 on the bottom.  As you can tell, we snaked the zones.  So if you need products in zones 2, 6, 9, and 11 you’ll take less steps by snaking down to the next row as opposed to walking back to the start of the rows each time.  Shipping boxes are located in a row before Row 1, so in theory you can pick up your pre-made box for the order (as determined by our box size system and printed on the invoice) and then just plop all of the items into it as you snake through the warehouse.

You can also see how many more steps you’d take previously if, for example, you had an order with items in zones 4, 18, 22, 33, and 80.  You could easily travel the length of the warehouse several times if they were ordered 10, 33, 22, 4, 80 on the packing slip.  Or you could miss an item if you tried to re-arrange them in your head according to location.  Now you can get the items all in one pass.

Here’s a picture of the first row of products:

Since we’ve put the system in place we’ve been able to pull and pack orders much faster, despite the fact that we’re not familiar with the new layout.  Once a few months go by I can’t even imagine how many steps will be saved.  This also gives us a much more refined process to teach others.  We want to put systems in place that not only help us thrive, but will help our future employees thrive.

**Side note:  if I was doing this project as a Six Sigma initiative at my prior job (or any large corporate job for that matter), I would have had to have spent a lot of time collecting data before and after the project to measure the improvement.  I would have spent a ton of time tracking steps, timing packing time, and then organizing all of the data.  Then I would have had to relate those time savings back into dollars saved for our company – in terms of saved labor costs and reduced mistakes.  However, in our case, it’s totally fucking obvious to anyone with half a brain that this saves a ton of time and cuts down on mistakes.  Since I’m an owner, I don’t have to spend time on “proving” the project value to justify my value to the company.  One of my favorite parts of running my own business.

This particular post was originally written on 11/29/2005, just after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and about two months before I decided to quit my job.  It pretty much sums up why a corporate environment was not for me.  I’m glad days like this are in my past.

Patience is one of my weaknesses. I want my goals to be accomplished and I want them done yesterday. Some say that it’s an inherent trait of any entrepreneur – that it helps drive them. Well I certainly hope so because today my impatience is driving me insane.

Today I returned to work after the long holiday and all I could think about was getting to the point where I don’t have to come to work everyday – the point where I can run my business and devote the rest of my time to other things in life that I want to accomplish. Right now it feels like I am wasting 9 hours a day at work. 9 hours that could be spent growing my business and instead just frustrate me.

I always feel like this after a long break. Anything longer than the standard two day weekend and I feel like I am getting a small taste of the life I want to live, only to get thrown back into a life where I waste over 1/3 of my day. It’s a tease that drives me absolutely nuts!

I previously had set a hard date in my head of when I am going to leave my job, so that I don’t just end up staying because of the comfort of a regular paycheck and good benefits. And that time isn’t all that far away. I have a lot to do to get myself and my business to the point where I am ready to leave and I should be focused on that.

Nonetheless, I find myself daydreaming all day long about what I could be doing with the time I am spending at work AND with the time that I work on my business now. I want that life now! I want to spend my time running my business, working with a friend on starting a non-profit organization (more to come on this in the future), and enjoying friends, family, and hobbies (like video games, it eats away at me that I don’t get to play enough Madden ‘06).

But I need to find a way to be patient. The company is still paying me to get a job done and for the meantime I need the money. But honestly, money is the only thing that motivates me to go there everyday and for me that is not enough motivation. I see the things that I could be achieving in my life and I see my job as the main barrier to those achievements. The only problem is that my job is the thing right now that is enabling me to pay my rent, pay off my college loans, and buy groceries. Damn money.

It drives me nuts. I just want to be able to spend my time here on earth doing something I love. Part of me says screw the money and just quit today. The rest of me rationalizes that if I quit today I need to pay back my signing bonus (I have to stay at least a year to avoid that and it will be a year at the end of January) and would not be set up at all with health insurance, living arrangements, etc. So I know it’s best to stay the course – I know I’ll be there soon enough. But it still drives me nuts.

OK, that’s the end of my rant. So far my posts had been rather calm, this is one of those days when I am totally frustrated with the fact that things aren’t moving faster. Everyone is going to have days like this, I just need to relax and get back on track. I think I am going to take some time out tonight to watch some college bball to take my mind off of everything. Hopefully I’ll come back fresh tomorrow. Have a good night everyone.

The Process & The Time Frame

We didn’t really plan it this way, but from the time we launched the previous cart in 2007 we were planning for this one.  We kept track of every potential feature that we’d want, both on the front end and the back end, we collected data in any instances where we weren’t sure about something, and we kept tabs of the e-commerce industry in general and noted any features that really enhanced shopping for the customer.

I think a great example of this is how when you add an item to your cart, you remain on the current category or item page to continue shopping.  As I outlined in Part 1, instead of taking the customer away to a cart page and then back to continue shopping, we simply show a drop down in the upper-right hand corner of the page.  This feature came from our own shopping experiences on Altrec and Old Navy.

Because we didn’t have any money to spend on this project, because we gave ourselves a limited time frame of less than six months, and because the project essentially involved one programmer (myself) and one designer (Mike), we had to think very hard about what was important and what could be left out.  Having those restrictions is almost always a blessing in disguise.  It essentially prevented “feature creep” and allowed us to focus on only the most important aspects of the shopping experience.

Design / User Interface

In my opinion, Mike did an A+ job with the design and user interface.  The design is tighter, simpler, and more modern than the previous site, however when you land on the site it still “feels” like an e-commerce site.  The products are on the familiar left nav, and the search box is across the top.  Only when you start browsing and see the AJAX drill through, or start searching and see the autosuggest, do you start to realize that the site is a little different than the average e-commerce site.  We tried not to over-use AJAX, to only use it in the instances when a page refresh would slow the shopping experience or when immediate feedback would improve it.

Programming Framework

This stressed me out a lot.  I thought long and hard about developing on a framework like CakePHP, something that countless programmers recommend.  If we truly were starting from scratch and I had more time, we probably would have.  But a lot of the pre-existing code was well written and stable, so the goal here was really to just make it more organized, secure, and scalable…as fast as possible.  For the forseeable future I’m going to be the one managing our sites, so after much back and forth I made the decision to essentially build my own framework.

My style is, well, my style, and I thought that for the most part I’d do a better job if I knew everything about every single line of code.  All of the common functions and classes are stored on our server in a location that they can be accessed by all of our sites, which will prevent me from rewriting code on future projects.

We did use the fantastic script.aculo.us effects framework and also Lightbox 2 for images, both of which saved me a lot of javascript work so I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due.  But all of the server side PHP I wrote from scratch myself, specifically for this projects and for future projects of ours.  Starting a new e-commerce site could probably be done in less than a day if there weren’t any fancy features being added.  We want a platform that can evolve into many shopping sites while still being easily maintained.

SEO / W3C Compliance

We pretty much nailed the on-site SEO for DI:

• Every page that isn’t behind a login is W3C compliant. With all of the complexities of a site like this, it wasn’t easy.  But the payoff is huge – our site will be easier to index, easier for browsers to display correctly, and easier for screen readers to decipher for the disabled.  It also helped us from making sloppy coding mistakes, such as using the same element id in two spots on the same page or forgetting to close a tag.
• Every page has a relevant Title Tag and META Description.
• All pages use proper HTML for headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. We also took it a step further and became one of the first sites of this scale to use CSS tables in our design (explained in my post about IE8 from back in March).
• Every size of every product has it’s own re-written URL.  This was actually pretty tricky because on each item page you can switch sizes using AJAX.  We considered only having one URL per product and then always defaulting to the small size (as we did on the old site).  Ultimately though, we needed to be able to link to a specific size, both on-site on our browsing pages and also to send to customers.   So if a product has multiple sizes, there’s an extra directory for the size, such as http://www.detailedimage.com/Dodo-Juice-M35/Rainforest-Rub-Soft-Wax-P234/250-ml-S1/
• 301 Redirects for every old page, including pages dating way back to the original Miva and osCommerce carts.  Many links from back then still get clicked and indexed.  I spent a lot of time developing an intelligent 301 redirect system to keep everything search engine friendly without losing the links we’ve already built.
• More Pages. Each manufacturer has it’s own page with information and the products we sell, the detailing guide has pages for each step in the process, and each product has it’s own review page in addition to the product page.   The review pages all use the title tag “{PRODUCT NAME} Product Reviews”, which hopefully will pull in some search traffic.
• Sitemap, XML Sitemap, and auto-generated/auto-uploaded Google Base file.

The Back End

Much like the previous system, our back-end allows us to process orders in a matter of minutes.  If someone places two orders, they’re merged together to save us (and them) on shipping.  When we click to process each morning, a massive PDF is generated with all of the invoices for the day.  A text file is also generated to import into FedEx Ship Manager.  We print the invoices, import the text file to print the shipping labels, and export the tracking numbers back into our system.  The tracking numbers are now in the My Account section for the customer.  At 7 PM that night – after the packages have been picked up and are in FedEx’s system – the customer is emailed a link to their tracking information.  The invoices and shipping labels are printed in the same order so they match perfectly for whomever is pulling the order.  FedEx gave us a free printer for their labels so we are able to print both concurrently.

So while many companies manually do those steps, we have it automated down to a science.  Which is why just the four of us have been able to process all these orders in just a few short hours each day.

The Immediate Results

Business is a very bottom line type of thing.  Stuff either works and makes you money, or it doesn’t.  So far, this site has worked.  The feedback has been fantastic, much better than any project I’ve ever done before.  Conversion rate for the month of May (through the 26th) is up 0.5% over the rest of 2009.  And we reached our largest month to date in revenue by about the 23rd.  So bottom line, this launch of this project was a success in my book.

Time to take a step back and celebrate.  Then time to get back to work.  We’ve got a lot more awesome stuff in the works.