Pickle of the Month blog

Hello pickle fans. This will be a short post, I just want to point everyone that followed this blog because they were interested in startup adventures to Nance’s Kitchen, my new blog about the random startup sites that I build. The first real blog post is a recipe used for my latest site, www.SaleTrap.com, where I mix Heroku, SendGrid, and GoDaddy, to bake up a solution to accept incoming emails into rails apps hosted on Heroku. If you’re geeky enough to understand that last sentence, enjoy. If not, feel free to ignore me.

I used to work at Orbitz.com. Orbitz taught me much, good and bad. One of the more interesting lessons I gleaned from my time there was that Hotels and Airlines give secret, “unpublished” rates to travel agencies like Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity, with the agreement that the travel agencies cannot show those rates to the end consumer. They do this by bundling these rates with other products into vacation packages (think booking your flight + hotel together) Shady? Probably not. Good business for them? Absolutely, it lets them get rid of excess inventory without exposing lower rates to the public.

I got a call at work the other day from someone who had run across the Pickle of the Month blog (of course she thought it was a great idea), and told me about FROZEN PICKLE POPS, made from pickle juice. Seriously. Here’s the link to the website – Bob’s Pickle Pops. What a fantastic idea! I hope Bob does well with his frozen pickle pops. Maybe if these had been around when we started Pickle of the Month, we’d have made the big time.

In other random news, I am helping the company I work for develop a generic domain we own – www.MovingTruck.com. We’ll be initially focusing on helping people find a moving truck, figure out which moving truck rental is the best, evaluate moving companies, and find cheap moving boxes. We’ve also thought about having reviews on moving trucks and companies, and having people post their funny/horrendous moving stories. Stay tuned! Right now it’s just a placeholder site, but big things are on the way.

Orbitz is giving away 100 free first class tickets in October, for users who send in updates and tips to their new Traveler Update service. Check it out at http://updates.orbitz.com/promotions. Currently there’s only 30 or so people entered, and they’re giving away the tickets to the top 100. Could be a great way to score some free first class tickets.

This is a very random post, but I started a new blog, after watching a random MTV Real Live – I’m Flat Broke episode. Check it out – http://helpdemarlon.wordpress.com/

When I tell people we’re shutting POTM down, people usually respond with, “it’s about time, what a stupid idea anyway, I told you guys you were morons!” Ok, they’re not that harsh, but they do ask how many orders we got. Poking through the database, I’ve tallied the final numbers, here they are:

Total Orders: 81
Total Customers: 64
Percentage of customers we knew: about 50%
Total Revenue: $2700.58

I haven’t run the final numbers on profitability, but we probably came up just short. If we would have sustained our November/December pace, we would have been quite profitable, but the pickle pace slackened in the beginning of the year, and we lost motivation.

Now, on to bigger and better things!

Tears are falling here in Pickle of the Month land. As of 6:07 pm central standard time, Pickle of the Month ceases to exist. That’s right, we shut ‘er down.

In the end, postage killed us. It turns out $9 pickles are just too much to stomach, even if they do tickle the tastbuds, and arrive in delightful green packaging. The $20 price for the 4-month subscription seemed to appeal to a wide range of pickle lovers, but the additional $16 in postage usually killed the purchase in its tracks.

Lesson learned – don’t ignore the obvious.

Looking back, a lack of motivation played a part as well. We started off wonderfully, but as the month dragged on and orders did not take off, we lost our vigor. Not that that’s bad, it’s just a fact of life.

Lesson #2 learned – things become tedious when there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

I don’t mean to sound too down, the lessons and fun earned from POTM far outweigh the sadness of shutting it down. It’s been the source of bushels of laughs, smiles, lessons, strange looks, and countless other moments of joy over the last year. In fact, it even played a part in me getting my last job, and has opened up a number of doors since. Who would have thought?

Well, that’s enough rambling for this Sunday afternoon. May you always have wonderful, tasty pickles.

Pickliest Regards,
Doug

I am ecstatic to announce our newest foray into ridiculousness – www.CelebrityWakeUpCall.com. That’s right, we want to bring the voice of your favorite celebrity to a wake up call near you.

Until we flesh out a bit more of the site, we’re keeping things on the DL (that’s the down-low, for our older readers). We just have an email sign up right now, which we’ll keep up until launch. What are you wating for go sign up now!

Stayed tuned for updates, including screenshots and general tomfoolery.

Thanks for your patience, loyal blog readers (all two of you). I am happy to report we’re super close to the inital launch of our next set of stupid websites. Check back tonight for more details!

Just wanted to throw a quick post out there letting everyone know we’re still alive. We haven’t posted in a while, because we’ve been working on some top secret pickle projects.

More to come next week.