Digitalworkbox

There Are Customers Left Behind

2013-01-23T00:00:00-05:00

It's easy to look at the existing web tech startup community and think it's completely over saturated. Everything has already been done before and now you're stuck either playing catch-up, making incremental improvements, or struggling to find underserved markets. The consumer web space has become increasingly competitive as more groups of people begin to come online (think local businesses, service businesses, old guard businesses).

Our experiment

We've been working on a new project through Digitalworkbox called We Snap Love. After experiencing the problem ourselves, we wanted to build an easy way for parents to share photos of their children privately with family. Brian had researched, looked for solutions, and ended up with a hacked in way for him to share photos with his family of his new daughter.

But the more research we did into this app's space, the more we realized that a huge segment of customers is getting left behind. As a new generation of young people are about to become parents, the web tools are surprisingly dated. They reflect what our parents would have wanted (if there was a real consumer internet back then).

The more we looked the more we realized that while something like Snapfish might work alright for our parents, we grew up with the internet. We're too discerning to deal with the crummy user experience and the crummy (and sometimes predatory) checkout flows. These customers have been deserted: they're stuck in web apps that aren't getting any better. I won't stand for it because, as a user, I'd rather hobble something together than use some piece of crap.

The trap

It's certainly not as simple as the Apple method of "making the user experience great" and charging a bunch of money. You have to reject the way things have always been built and address the problem with your personal experience. When we started the design of We Snap Love, we ended up designing what we thought parents would like. The result? We designed a site that our parents would like but we still hated. It didn't work the way we expected it to, the branding didn't really resonate with us, and so we stopped.

I think our second try will be much more successful. We had to remember that in order to capture these deserted customers, you need to fix their problems in a modern and foreward thinking way. When you're working to capture some of the "left-behinders", you can't come out bunting. You have to swing for the fences. You might whiff, but you can try again. You can't make meaningful change by following the same path as everyone else.

We'll keep posting more as we continue on our journey with We Snap Love. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to learn more.

Lean Startup Isn't Enough: Use Your Personal Manifesto

2012-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

I have an idea problem.

It usually starts like this: I sit down and do some normal activity. During that activity, I realize I have a problem, and go "why doesn't this work like that?" I'll stop, spend the next three hours investigating that problem, and if I can't find a fix... I throw myself at building the solution. I'll ask friends, colleagues, strangers, "would you use something that..." and use their feedback. A week later, I have my MVP. I put it online. Boom, I can now test if this idea is worthwhile.

When, inevitably, about 3 people sign up... I feel defeated. People will say, "good thing you did it the Lean Startup way" or "customer acquisition is the hardest part" but I think that misses the point entirely now.

Passion vs. Grit

Since the branding of Lean Startup and it's heavy use of MVP (minimum viable product), there seems to be this mindset (that I admit I've fallen into) that you must do the smallest part of your idea, get it out into the world, and see if people flock to it.

The opposite side of that approach is the passion approach. You don't care what people think initially, you know your idea is good, and you're going to go at it headstrong until you end up at the other end broke, sad, and depressed (most likely).

There really has got to be a better balance between the two.

Building an MVP is a great tool to prove your idea is solving a worthwhile problem. But at the end of the day, you may find yourself solving a problem that doesn't really even resonate with you. This is the trap I found myself in. I would waste a ton of time building something that is valuable but that I'm not really passionate about solving (and continuing to innovate on) over the next few years.

Measure Against Your Manifesto

I've decided a very simple way to keep myself on track is to use my personal manifesto as step 1 of my "Lean Startup"-esque approach. Everything gets measured against my manifesto before I dedicate my time and resources to it.

I like to create and help others create in meaningful ways.
I like experiences: when I go somewhere, buy something, eat something, I do it for the experience.
I'll use whatever tools are necessary to create something I think will end up being a good experience for someone else.

Your manifesto (as mine is) will always be in a constant state of flux. You'll find yourself paring it down slightly, rewording things to be clearer and more powerful, or you might decide something you thought was important to you wasn't. The first step is writing it down.

Right now, I think my manifesto is still too vague. I don't yet have the information I need to make it more specific, though, so I'm going to let it stew a bit. As my experiences help me change it, I'll go back to my notebook and update my manifesto.

But if I took even this nascent manifesto and measured it against the projects and products that I've helped create, none of them have really passed the test. They all fail on one (or all) of the points above. That should be the first smell that failure is incoming. If you work on something figuring it'll be an easy win, the money will come in, or 'I just have to stick with this for now' you'll find you're cutting yourself short and you're not doing your best work. That leads me to my final point.

Always Do Your Best Work

I think Robert Scoble hit the nail on the head with his post about MVPs missing the mark and how the bar has been raised. I agree with him completely. Should you choose a problem you're passionate about, build the entire thing in isolation, and then launch it to the world (6 months or a year later)? Absolutely not. Should you choose one tiny subset of your problem, release it to the world, and then wait and see if people use it? I don't think so.

You have to strike a balance between three very important points with your product:

Passion for whatever problem you're trying to solve (can you work on this project every day in a meaningful way?)
Execution of the product from an experience standpoint (can you solve the problem you say you're solving with an amazing experience?)
Iteration of your idea from the beginning to the end (can you release a meaningful product that isn't a shell?)

I've worked with new companies, existing companies, my own projects, and my own products. If I go through them and measure against those three points, the most successful totally knock my manifesto out of the park. Don't lie to yourself though: it's easy to say, "I can totally get passionate about this for the right price/the right team/the right whatever". But at some point, you'll come up feeling like you shorted yourself and that doesn't help anybody.

I think Eric Reis has a lot of good ideas within Lean Startup and the community around it. But I always feel like the hoopla around the "Lean Startup" brand is doing more damage than it's worth. You can read a lot about the principes and agree with them. I don't think they're wrong. I just think it makes the startup process far too scientific: if you do X, then Y, you get Z. Test yourself first against your manifesto then fall in with making some of your best work.

What We Learned About Shipping With USPS

2012-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

When we opened the Digitalworkbox Shop, we set off into an area we weren't entirely familiar with: fulfillment. We have designed prints before, had them printed, and even shipped them. But not on the scale we were anticipating for the Shop. We had to figure out how to package and ship our first line of limited-edition Classic Literature prints.

Shipping with USPS is the cheapest option if under 1 pound

We really wanted to ship with UPS or FedEx for a few reasons:

UPS/FedEx have far better tracking than USPS.
UPS/FedEx generally deliver to your actual house instead of making you pick up your bigger-than-your-mailbox packages.
By most accounts, USPS is a pain to deal with as a shipper.

But when the price of shipping a tube-rolled print is more than double with UPS/FedEx, we couldn't justify the cost to our potential customers. We sucked it up and decided to make the best of our USPS experience.

Primer: First Class vs. Priority Mail

For most of your shipping needs (ignoring Media Mail mainly because it has a very strict set of guidelines), there are two ways to ship most packages: First Class or Priority Mail. The breakdown is basically as follows:

First Class

The package needs to weigh less than 13 ounces
You cannot actually purchase a First Class shipping label from USPS online
It is the USPS equivalent of "ground" shipping
This is the cheapest type of shipping
No free carrier pickup

Priority Mail

The package can weigh more than 13 ounces
You can very easily purchase this label directly from USPS online
It typically delivers between 2 - 7 days guaranteed by the USPS
This is middle-of-the-road from a price perspective
Free carrier pickup (of this package and any other package you have)

So, when you break down all these variables, we are planning to ship the majority of our prints via First Class Mail. The big downside here is that you can't actually print the labels through USPS online.

I'll let that sink in.

It makes absolutely no sense to us at all.

Late To The Party: Choose Your USPS Third-Party Provider

You have to use a third-party provider to ship via First Class and print it yourself. There are a few choices (and we tried all of them): PayPal, Stamps.com, Endicia, and a few Shopify apps that aren't really worth it (we tried OrderCup and EasyShipping and had major problems with both).

We ended up settling with Stamps.com using their PC program. We have an extra PC lying around that we can use to run the PC program. The online version of their system isn't too good either. I think the shipping label printing business is just waiting for a startup to disrupt the hell out of it. What I'm saying is: we use Stamps.com because it's the best of a bad field. The $15 a month that they charge is worth it only because it's less painful than the other options, but it is certainly not pain free.

Side note: when affixing a label to something not flat (like a tube), make sure the barcode has a flat plane to be scanned. If you wrap it around the long way, the barcode goes around the circumference of the tube and the postman will be mad and yell at you. You don't want that.

Use a SCAN Form

A scan form is a tool provided by USPS to make dropping off your packages a lot easier. We do ours through Stamps.com but PayPal and USPS also provide scan forms.

Normally, when you bring (even pre-paid) packages to USPS, they take your package, scan the tag, weigh it, make sure the tag and weight match up, and then throw your package into a bin.

With the scan form, you show them the scan form, they scan it, and then take all of the packages that are stated on the form. One single scan. This also allows the customer tracking the scan to see that you dropped the packages off at the post office. Win win!

You can also use scan forms with carrier pickup if you choose to take advantage of that feature. We just go to the actual post office.

Next steps

We'll likely continue using Stamps.com for our USPS shipping needs until a competitor comes and blows them out of the water. (If you know of something better, please drop us a line.) If you are shipping something under 1 pound, your best choice really is USPS. You just have to know how to deal with their system.

If you're shipping items over 1 pound, please go use UPS or FedEx. As quickly as you can.

Please note: the Shopify links in this article contain our referral code. We are happy to promote Shopify as they are an amazing product we use every day. Read our responsible referrals code of conduct on referral links.

How to Launch an Online Store

2012-03-31T00:00:00-04:00

The word "wantrepreneur" always makes me laugh. But we were those guys. We decided to create products that were products we wanted to buy. We could create them and sell them at Digitalworkbox Shop. We researched a ton of online store platforms including Shopify, BigCartel, and Spree but decided that our goal here was to sell products not to revolutionize how to sell products.

So we decided to open our first Shopify store. We're going to share some lessons on our choices and how to just shut up and see if people actually want what you're selling.

Opening up shop

The original idea for Digitalworkbox Shop was really a thought experiment. We wanted to hone our customer acquisition skills without having the variable of creating a web app in the mix. Both Brian and I have gone through design training back in college and always loved products in the "real world" and not just the digital creations that we've always had.

So, we landed on a very specific idea: sell a collection of limited-edition designs that are based around classic literature that is in the public domain. (You can see the results of that at our Classic Literature Collection). Having such a very strong focus definitely helped us out a lot. I'd recommend it when starting your store: choose one product that you know you can execute and launch with that. Don't try to make a kingdom before you have subjects.

How do I look now?

For most stores, step one is making the store a bit more personalized. We went pretty heavily back and forth on this one. We wrestled with the fact that we are a design company and we should custom design our online store. But we also wanted to take into account the fact that this is a side venture for us that might flop. We were willing to take the risk on flopping so putting in 50 - 100 hours getting the design just right didn't feel good to us.

Let's just launch it with a theme that reflects us and see if the items sell. If no one likes your products, there is no sense is creating a pixel-perfect online store where no one wants the products you are selling.

We chose a theme from Shopify's Theme Store (which is pretty surprisingly extensive). We went through, found a theme that fit with our brand pretty well, and lightly customized it before launch. This allowed us to make sure the site didn't look too far from who we were but we could still see if the products would actually sell. The theme cost us about $200 which may shy some people away but think about your time as well: if it's going to take you 20 hours to design a custom theme that is just bare-bones... should you?

Just launch and take people's money

I've been reading more and more about "lean": LeanCanvas, LeanStartup, you name it. But one of the things that I really enjoyed from most of them (and up until now I scoffed at) is to just "shut up and launch". Until you make your first dollar, you're not a business. Once you make money for several people, you know you have a least some audience.

Now, it's important to clarify here that you shouldn't just create a bare-bones store that has your products, take people's money, and be done with it. Then you're just an ass. The idea here is:

Be true to the voice of your brand
Try to limit scope as much as you can to just what you need to do to understand how & what to buy
Make sure the customer's clearly know what they are buying

We spent most of our time taking photographs of our prints. That is important. Creating a beautiful background image to use on the main site is, at this point, totally un-important. Don't even bother.

There is a definite balancing act. We started making a list of all the little things we "had to do" before we could launch the store. But, one night, we just decided: let's get people into the store instead of just standing in line. The sooner you make your first dollar the sooner you know if you have a business or a flop on your hands.

The sooner you know that, the less money you spend making mistakes.

Next steps

We're going to continue use Shopify for our online store. It is by far the best out of the several tools we've tried ourselves or that we have installed for clients. The app store market is really well done on Shopify as well. There are some great apps out there that are worth checking out (honestly though, there are also a bunch of dudds so your mileage may vary).

After we sell of our first round of prints, we'll likely continue to make improvements to the store and make the design something we are independently proud of like we are proud of our prints. But, the most important piece at this stage is selling the prints and getting our name out there. Not using some fancy CSS3 shadow technique with a great jQuery carousel.

Launch your store with Shopify. Sell your products. Re-group. Execute awesome.