Adam McFarland

This morning bright and early the Pure Adapt team participated in the annual “Climb UAlbany” event for the American Lung Association. Each of us raised money in sponsorships to climb the 22 story Colonial Quad at the University of Albany. Our team was formed by our kickass lawyer David Green, and the ten of us that participated on the team were able to raise over $1,000 to benefit the ALA of New York State. According to the website, the total raised was $27,531!

We originally planned on walking the stairs, but the competitiveness in us kicked in and we decided to race them. Our exact times aren’t posted yet, but I think we all finished in under 5 minutes. I sprinted the first 15 flights and then hit a brick wall and walked the rest…I’m not a huge cardio guy - most of my time at the gym is spent lifting - so it showed in my conditioning. Mike, who is in fantastic all-around shape, walked a few laps with me and then sprinted the last few.

George took a great photo of all of us after the event, but he can’t seem to find it on his computer so you’ll have to take my word for it that we all participated. We were all given shirts and medals: Greg plans on rocking his medal for the next few weeks (we worked together after the event and ran a few errands, Greg had the medal hanging from his neck everywhere we went…you could tell people were wondering why some dude was walking around stores with a medal hanging from his neck…freaking hilarious).

A couple of random thoughts:

• You would be SHOCKED at how many people are in horrible shape. Seriously, if you walked at a normal speed you would do 22 flights in about 8 - 10 minutes and wouldn’t be very fatigued at all. By the time I was at about the 5th floor I saw tons of (mostly overweight) people pulled over on the side struggling and contemplating whether or not they could finish. I spend a lot of my time around people who place a high emphasis on health and fitness, so I’m always a bit taken back by how much some people neglect their own health. Not to get all political on you, but to a large degree I see a simple solution to our health care problems: eat right, exercise, and sleep. Cancer rates would go down, type II diabetes would go away, and our reliance on expensive drugs with horrible side-effects would be eliminated. I’ve always felt this way, but sometimes I forget how bad it is because I don’t see it.
• A few days ago it was almost 60 degrees outside and I went to the gym in just a shirt and shorts. Yesterday and today it snowed and was cold as shit. So is life in upstate NY. Unfortunately, whomever planned this event must have thought that at 8 AM it would be 75 degrees out and not 20 and windy/icy, because we spent about thirty minutes outside reviewing the rules and stretching as a group as we all froze our asses off. My bald head can’t take the blistering cold for that long.
• The event was horribly unorganized and inefficient. For example, it took Greg 30 seconds to register and the rest of us about 30 minutes. Why? His last name - Pautler - falls under the N - Z category. The rest of us, along with about 90% of the people there, had to wait in the ridiculously long A - M line.
• And yet we all were there for less than 2 hours and freaking $27k+ was raised for charity. How cool is that?
• This all led us to conclude that we would absolutely kick ass at organizing charitable events. We have some cool stuff going on with Tastefully Driven’s “Commerce with Conscience” program (more to come soon) and I think this will become and increasingly important focus for us as we grow.

As of today we are waiting for one last shipment and we will have all of our inventory for the Tastefully Driven launch. I spoke to my contact at the last remaining company today, and he assured us that our shipment will arrive by Friday. Kind of cutting it close, but it looks like we’ll make it. Whew.

However, if we didn’t (or don’t) make it, there’s only so much we could do about it. When our heat stopped working because the oil company screwed up, we really couldn’t control that. When a manufacturer runs out of an ingredient in a product and delays an order by a month, there’s not much we can do. When one of us gets the flu and we’re operating at 75% capacity, we can’t do much about that either.

For an entrepreneur who loves being in control, it can be frustrating as hell. It seems like nothing ever goes the way you plan it. What can you do? Ultimately you have two choices: whine and complain and be miserable, or try to make the best of every situation.

What I can control every day:

1. How hard I work.
2. How well I treat others.
3. How well I treat myself (eating well, sleeping enough, exercising, having some fun, and not beating myself up over minute mistakes I make).

The rest relies on forces outside of my control. So why worry? Besides, mastering those three things is hard enough

Let’s be clear about something: carpooling or using alternative transportation is absolutely great for the environment. That’s not what this post is about. This post is directed to everyone who says “I love carpooling, it saves me so much money.” See, most people I know carpool for just that reason: to save money. But do you really save money?

Consider the example of my three partners and I. Let’s say that all four of us carpool to our warehouse for four days each week.

It’s a ~9 mile drive to work for each of us, or an ~18 mile round trip. According to CommuteSolutions.org, the true cost of driving - including drivers expenses (like vehicle depreciation, maintenance, insurance, etc) and societal costs (like accidents, congestion cost, air pollution damage, CO2 reduction, etc) is $1.19/mile.

If I’m not driving: I wait roughly 10 minutes to be picked up, spend roughly 10 minutes in the car while other people are getting picked up, and wait another 10 minutes while everyone is being rounded up to leave. It could be less time than this, but it could also be more (we all know that person that keeps saying ‘just give me 5 more minutes to finish something’ and it ends up taking 30 minutes). Anyway, average time wasted = 30 minutes when not driving.

If I drive: I spend roughly 20 minutes picking people up, including calling them when I get there and waiting for them. I spend 15 minutes dropping them off. I still spend the 10 minutes waiting for everyone to be ready to leave. That’s also roughly 10 miles combined of additional driving. Average time wasted = 45 minutes, additional cost of mileage = 10 x $1.19/mile, or $14.28.

Also, there’s also at least 30 minutes of additional wasted time every four days when someone says “can we stop at XYZ for a few seconds because it’s on the way and I really need to blah blah blah”.

Since there’s four of us, let’s just do the math on a four day schedule.

In any four day period without carpooling, I would commute 72 miles (18 x 4), it would cost me $85.68 and have a time loss of 0 minutes.

In any four day period with carpooling, I would drive 28 miles (18 + 10), it would cost me $33.32 and have a time loss of 165 minutes ((30 x 3 )+ 45 + 30).

So here’s the million dollar question: is 165 minutes in lost time worth saving $52.36? I don’t know about you, but my time is worth a lot more than $19.04/hour. I also value the freedom to know that I can come and go whenever I want.

I’m not saying I won’t carpool on occasion if it’s convenient socially or if I’m in a particularly green mood and want to help the environment, just that on a day-to-day basis it is absolutely not a good financial move for me.

One of the things we were most looking forward to when moving to our warehouse was having FedEx come daily to pick up all of our shipments. Previously Greg and George were driving any customer orders over to the local FedEx from Greg’s house where the products were stored. It’s worked out great - FedEx comes around 3:30 every day, which in theory means everyone can leave by 4 if they want to.

However - the flip side of the issue is receiving shipments, which has been quite a pain since moving. Mail doesn’t get delivered to our industrial park, so for all USPS packages and mail we have to use a different address…our P.O. Box. FedEx, UPS, and other shipments arrive at all sorts of hours, as I suppose you’d expect.

We had generally all been going in from ~9 AM - ~4 PM. The gas savings from carpooling has been nice (although I am not really a carpooling fan in general, which is a whole other post), but it doesn’t provide for the best coverage, specifically in the early morning.

After missing two shipments Friday morning, George called me and we discussed the issue a bit. At first, I thought “let’s call all the shipping companies and tell them we don’t open until 9 AM”. Then I realized that it was unrealistic to expect FedEx, UPS, DHL and every other private shipping company to coordinate around our schedule. Shipments are going to come at all hours of the day, starting at 7 AM and ending at 5 or 6, whether we like it or not. FedEx in particular likes to come right around 8 AM I’ve noticed.

I thought about it some more, and since I am still in early riser mode, I offered to start going in at 7 AM. Instead of going to the gym at 6:30 and then being ready to go into work by 8:30, starting Monday I’m going to work from 7 AM - ~2 PM and then hit the gym mid-afternoon. After that I’ll probably grab some food and work for a few more hours before calling it a night.

While this isn’t really my ideal schedule, I’m curious to see how it works. I’ve always been a morning gym guy. I’m hoping it breaks up my day a little more and gives me a little more freedom because I won’t be doing much carpooling. 7-2 is also a nice little 7 hour shift, so even if that’s all the work I do for the day I’m still getting quite a bit done. Of course, it could go the other way and I could hate stopping work mid-day and have trouble waking up without my workout…we’ll see.

Did I have to adjust my schedule? Of course not. But I think that as a four-person company we’re best staggering our shifts a bit so that we have as much coverage as possible. Right now it might not be a big deal if we miss a shipment or two a week, but we’ve vastly expanded inventory and plan on continuing to do so. Missing a few a week could become a few a day in six months. I’d rather just nip the problem in the bud right now. A minor schedule adjustment for me now could save us a bunch of headaches over the next year or two.

I’m starting to realize that this 4/1/2008 launch date for Tastefully Driven was a bit aggressive.  We didn’t realize how much time would be wrapped up in settling into the warehouse.  Nor did we consider how much extra work we’d need to put in as Detailed Image was expanding and reaching record levels in sales.  After all, there’s just four of us.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have pushed for 5/1.

That’s what makes it all the more amazing when I can honestly say that I’m 99% sure we’ll make our targeted launch date.   It’s a testament to the focus and determination of our team.  Every single person is maxing themselves out right now.  No one is complaining though - just dead set on what needs to be done to achieve the task at hand.  We all see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow so we don’t spend any time at all ‘worrying’ if we’re making bad decisions.

The pre-launch marketing has gone OK.  If anything, that’s what’s suffered the most from the time crunch.  We don’t have a ton of names signed up on the splash page, but we do have a lot of links to the site and a lot of blog posts on the pre-launch blog indexed.  In the end, knowing that the site will be indexed by search engines immediately is more important than an extra thousand names on an email list.   This is our most important domain moving forward and having it be “perfect” from a SEO standpoint is important.

So what’s left to do:

• Receive the remainder of the products.  A few companies are taking extremely long to fulfill orders, but I’m pretty certain it’ll all be here by early next week.
• Finish writing all of the product descriptions.  This is the one I’m most worried about because it takes so much damn time.  I guarantee we make it…but these are being written right up until the second we launch.
• Photograph all of the products.  George has a digital SLR and he takes amazing photos (see the pics on DI for examples).
• Weigh all the products (for shipping calculations).
• Do our quality testing of the entire site.  I think this can be done in about two or three full days, but I like to allow for more time just in case something major needs fixing.  We’ll start over the weekend - around Easter commitments of course - and hopefully be done by Tuesday.
• Write an initial newsletter to send to people on our splash page.  Mike is quickly becoming a master of designing for emails.
• Write initial blog posts and have initial forum conversations so the entire system isn’t bare ass when the first visitors arrive.

Not a ton of stuff to do, but also not an insignificant amount of stuff to do.  Everyday we still are processing DI orders, handling customer service for DI, SL, and other sites, and doing all types of misc warehouse stuff.  On top of that, we’ve got Easter this weekend and next weekend we’re spending our Saturday at a charity event for the American Lung Association.  Don’t get me wrong - I’m very much looking forward to both things and would rather push launch back by a day than miss either one - I’m just saying that those inhibit us from working and we really have more like 10 days to work with instead of 12.

By far, this is my least favorite time in developing a site.  The time just before launch is by far the most stressful and worrisome:  there’s always that fear in the back of your mind that what you’re doing could be a total bomb and until that fear is relieved I’m a bit on edge.

Then again, I’ve never been more confident in my life about something than I am about TD.  So that fear is masked a bit by an extreme excitement.  I’m like that ten year old on December 15th who really wants an Xbox 360.  It seems like Christmas will never come.

I dare you to read this story and not shed a tear.

A few weeks back I wrote a post about learning resilience from being an entrepreneur. In reality, my adversity has been self-manufactured and will ultimately be somewhat self-serving. While there’s certainly something to be said for self-induced sacrifice now for a better future, it’s not the same as facing true adversity caused by elements out of your control. This is a story of overcoming true adversity.

When I was growing up there was a boy named Dave who lived a few streets away. Dave and I were never great friends, but were always friendly towards each other. We played Little League together, were in the same elementary school class, and played pickup basketball together at the local park. Towards the end of middle school/beginning of high school Dave was diagnosed with a brain tumor and slowly lost his sight. He still came by the park while we played basketball, but he just sat on the bench and listened to us play.

He didn’t finish high school and I never heard of him again. Truth is, between college and living in Connecticut for a while, he kind of just slipped my mind. I always thought of his story as a tragedy.

Then this appeared in the Albany Times Union this morning:

DJ’s soul had hip-hop
David “DJ Wits” D’Agostino known for love of music and overcoming blindness

By PAUL GRONDAHL, Staff writer

COLONIE — His crew will set up a DJ booth at the funeral home today and spin old-school hip-hop tunes for the wake of David “DJ Wits” D’Agostino.

He was a blind, white suburban kid who let none of those things define him.

“It didn’t matter that he didn’t come from the ‘hood. He had hip-hop in his soul. We called him the Ray Charles of hip-hop,” said Big Ray, a DJ at Jamz 96.3 FM, an urban music station.

Friends drew comparisons with how far the 25-year-old D’Agostino pushed the envelope for blind people and Monday’s swearing-in of David Paterson as New York’s first legally blind governor.

D’Agostino was a golfer, international solo traveler, skydiver and stock car racer (with a sighted professional giving commands).

“David was an inspiration, one of our stars,” said Christina Kendall, a vision rehabilitation therapist at the Northeastern Association of the Blind.

“I had sighted boyfriends before, but nobody showed me the world the way David did,” said his girlfriend, Rose Vincent, a University at Albany senior. They started dating about 1 years ago after she saw him DJ at a local club. She had never traveled before, but David took her to England, Ireland, California and Florida.

“He never judged people and he had a way of seeing the inside of people,” she said.

D’Agostino, a 2006 graduate of Union College, recently purchased a house in Colonie and died there alone in his sleep sometime early Friday. He had recently been suffering seizures, which may have contributed to his death. There was no sign of foul play, his father said, and an autopsy is under way.

D’Agostino began losing his sight at 15 to a tumor crushing his optic nerve. Surgery was unsuccessful. He was totally blind by 16, which pushed him into a pit of anger and depression.

“He couldn’t handle the situation, but he came to learn to live with his blindness,” said his dad, Frank D’Agostino, a retired postal carrier. David was his only child.

D’Agostino developed an extraordinary memory as he earned his GED, an associate’s degree from Schenectady County Community College and a double major in psychology and history at Union.

“He was very impressive and wrote great papers in difficult courses,” said Shelly Shinebarger, director of student support services. She and volunteers read articles and assignments for his classes into a tape recorder.

D’Agostino took a bus from Colonie and walked the last few blocks to the Union campus. He only asked for help if the sidewalks were icy or he got turned around.

He had a sense of humor about his blindness and DJ Wits stood for “walks into (expletive).”

At Union, D’Agostino completed a term abroad in York, England, where he received a prize as the outstanding study-abroad student. Some of his British friends plan to attend today’s wake and his funeral Thursday.

For more than three years, D’Agostino worked at Red Lobster restaurant on Wolf Road in Colonie. He rolled white paper napkins around a knife, fork and spoon, sealing them with a sticky band.

“He was the fastest roller I ever had,” said Crystal Franchi, a Red Lobster manager.

“He had a great personality and everyone loved him,” said Franchi, who talked with David about football and his beloved Packers. He brought in mix tapes of hip-hop and rap music for co-workers.

On his MySpace page, which had 11,298 friends listed Tuesday, dozens of condolence messages and a few rap and hip-hop performance tributes were posted.

“RIP, DJ Wits,” read one. “I miss you homie. Heaven needed a new DJ.”

Thoughts and prayers are with you my friend.

I don’t much mention SportsLizard or the Price Guide anymore, but it is still alive and kicking.  I’ve got it down to a science where I probably only spend less than 5 hours a week to maintain the site.  The Price Guide is at about 30,000 users but - because of our inline help and FAQ - requires very little customer service.  Premium accounts are only a small fraction of that, but we still make over $1k/month on them for doing essentially nothing.

However, this morning my biggest SL nightmare became reality - the Price Guide software mysteriously stopped working.  A bunch of cancellations followed, as did an email from a loyal user who has priced 11,238 items using our Price Guide (yup - he’s run 11,238 searches!).

This was at about 8:30 AM while I was sitting in a Starbucks.  I had planned to do some relaxing work and then meet my cousin for lunch…but all of a sudden I was in panic mode.  The application relies on a lot of things to be working right, most notably our syncing with Google Base, and I had no clue where to start.

I thought Google might have disabled our API keys…nope.

I thought someone might have hacked the SL database and screwed with the integration of SL and Base results….nope.

I thought that eBay, NAXCOM, and Beckett could have all stopped listing items on Google Base (essentially killing the service)….nope.

Then I tried a pre-launch beta version that I made that spits out results as a text file without any graphs or a fancy UI.  Amazingly that worked.  So I went line-by-line through my code and compared the beta version  to the live version.  After about an hour I figured out that a filter I had put in to weed out items returned with a $0 price was no longer supported (correctly at least) by Google Base and was throwing the results off.  The same search would go from 30 legit results to 500 with the filter removed.  Very rarely are items listed at $0 anyway - I just put that in there as a redundancy - so I removed it and everything began to work fine again.

The last time I successfully used the Price Guide was a week ago, so it looks like it was in bad shape anywhere from 36 hours to 1 week.

Now the hard part - damage control:

• At 8:30 I had immediately placed a notification in red on the Price Guide page saying something to the effect of “We’re experiencing technical difficulties, we’re working to resolve them ASAP, we apologize for the inconvenience”.   I took that down once I was certain I had solved the problem.
• I emailed that uber-loyal user back who initially alerted me of the error. I refunded his most recent payment and offered him a free premium account for life.
• I emailed everyone who had canceled in the past week apologizing for the inaccurate results and offering them the same free premium account for life.
• I wrote a post on the SL blog (which is auto-emailed to newsletter subscribers as well) notifying everyone that the issue had been resolved and extending the same free premium account for life offer to anyone who I did not email that also experienced troubles with the Price Guide during the past week.

Whew.  That was a stressful morning.

As much as it sucked, it allowed me to re-familiarize myself with the app I built almost a year ago.  More importantly, it created an opportunity for me to show my customers how much I care about them and their experience with the Price Guide.   It also gave me a chance to show that we address our issues rapidly - within hours of being notified of them…even on a Saturday - and with a candid, honest, and genuinely remorseful attitude.

No one wants to have technical snafu’s like this, but when presented with one you’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.

I got this email the other day from a loyal reader named George. About half-way through my response I thought to myself “this might make a good post” so I asked George and he was kind enough to let me post our conversation.

———————————

Adam-

Your blog is an inspiration and I think what you put up really helps out budding entrepreneurs as well as those wanting to become one.

I had a few questions as I am interested in starting up an ecommerce site.

First of all it seems as if you and your buddies do all the technical work yourselves which I think is great. However for someone like me who is knowledgeable about technology but not a programmer what do you think is the best way to get a site built?

Is it better to hire developers abroad to save money or just get someone here to do the work?

Or am I just SOL because that would be a bad idea? I have experience in User Interfaces from my old job as well as experience working with developers in Brazil but none of those were for e-commerce.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

George

———————————
George,

Thanks for the kind words - I’m glad that you are enjoying the blog.

You are definitely not SOL. The fact that you are very knowledgeable about technology, understand user interfaces, and have experience working with developers gives you a great shot of being able to make it work. I really think anyone that has significant experience buying products online has enough e-commerce experience to make a site work. The people that really struggle are the “mom and pop” stores that try to take their business to the web. While they have a great understanding of their product, they aren’t familiar enough with the online world to really formulate a plan and be able to guide a developer. For those people, I’d honestly start by telling them to buy more online.

When you buy a lot of products online, you become familiar with:

• The registration process (including what to say in confirmation emails)
• How sites organize their products
• How you add items to your cart
• The check-out process, including how payment is accepted
• The confirmation process
• The delivery - how long it takes to process the order, how long shipping takes, how long
• The follow-up (if any) emails or mailings

I’m assuming you’ve already noticed these things hundreds of times without realizing it, so you’re probably a lot further ahead than you think. Now, specifically how you should attack the problem. I think eBay Stores are a great place to get your feet wet, but I’m assuming you want to make a legitimate go at it and for that I think you need your own store (side note: eBay stores is a great way to supplement e-commerce sales and draw people to your site…if your items are sold frequently on eBay and you can make some sort of profit, even if it’s less than on your site).

Before even worrying about the development, I would at a minimum:

• Figure out exactly what you will be selling. Consider space restraints, shipping costs, and any other factor that might sway your decision.
• Choose a name (do a few Google searches and a trademark search at USPTO.gov to make sure no one else is using it)
• Buy a domain name (I use GoDaddy, but any registrar will do).

You also might want to:

• Set up a splash page on your own. If you’re good with Photoshop, you can probably whip up a quick logo and put it up there yourself using GoDaddy’s free landing page. This will probably take a few hours to learn super-basic HTML and just get the logo and “coming soon” up. Tizag has great tutorials. Alternatively, you could find someone you know who is graphical and have them do the design…or hire a graphic designer to do it for you.
• Make a list of potential vendors or drop shippers and start contacting them. The splash page will at least show them that you are serious about the business. As I’ve learned recently, this can take several months because many vendors take weeks to reply to emails/calls, and many have wacky restrictions for online retailers so you need to have a lot of different options on your list.

Now, as you’re getting ready to delve in to the development, I’d take a few days to map out your site. Choose the different categories, a basic color scheme, and a layout. Essentially design the UI and the information flow throughout the site - it will force you to work through a lot of issues that can save you a ton of money/time with a developer. I usually just grab a big piece of poster board and do some hand sketches.

I see three options for you when you get to the development:

#1 - Yahoo Stores

The Pros:

• Quick set up time
• Great customer service (from people I’ve spoken with)
• A huge community to ask questions to
• Secure and proven credit card processing. It’s also a familiar interface for people - a lot of sites are Yahoo Stores and you probably don’t realize it.
• If you are relatively tech savvy and are good with graphics, you can probably learn to do it yourself. They have fantastic documentation and a great developer community. There’s a lot said for immersing yourself in the task and learning how something works. Every developer I know started with something simple and gradually learned more and more. This is a great place to get started.
• If you don’t want to do the graphics, you can hire a designer to template the site.
• If you want to outsource the whole thing, they have a list of approved developers http://developernetwork.store.yahoo.com/ that have experience with Yahoo Stores. Their experience will save you time and money, and - if they’re a good company - they will be able to warn you about and help you overcome the little nuances of the software that only experienced users understand.

The Cons:

• A lack of ability to customize. You’re at the mercy of their system, which is pretty robust, but I’m not sure how easy it is to add a blog or a forum to your site. Content really really helps build user trust and pull in traffic via search engines, so this is something I’d research and ask them about before taking the plunge.
• Tiered pricing. As you grow, you’ll have to pay more for a higher package.
• Monthly fee is higher than other alternatives…although the simplicity of paying one place and not a different domain company, hosting company, merchant account, etc is nice

#2 - osCommerce (open source shopping cart)

The Pros:

• Quick set up time (although not as fast as Yahoo)
• It’s free
• Proven platform, and again a familiar interface for people.
• It’s on your own hosting, so it’s easy to add a forum or blog or whatever else you want.
• Can be templated on your own if you have a basic HTML/CSS/Photoshop background. If you want to give the install a go (not too hard), you can probably do the whole thing yourself.
• A massive developer community
• Extensions to add-on almost any functionality you can think of
• You have access to the source code, so you can learn a bit more about programming if you want. Even if it’s following the instructions to install it, you’ll learn a lot.
• Lot’s of developers who solely focus on osC customization if you decide you want to outsource it.
• Less expensive on a monthly or per-sale basis than Yahoo.

The Cons:

• Requires quite a few SEO plugins to be search friendly
• You need to set up your own merchant account for credit card processing (although osC integrates easily with many popular merchant accounts).
• If something goes wrong, there’s no one to call. You’re on your own. The best thing you can do is become an active member of the community so you know where to post and who to contact when something goes wrong.
• You really do need to learn SOME coding over time to be able to manage and maintain an osC store in my opinion.

#3 - Outsource a completely custom solution (I’d advise against this).

I really think that either Yahoo Stores or osC are the perfect solution for any scenario to get started. We ran Detailed Image on osC for a few years before attempting our own cart. We needed to learn our customers and understand what was lacking from the site before attempting it on our own. Even if you want no involvement in the development, the developer communities are so strong for Y! and osC, that they’ll be able to be much more efficient than a developer starting from scratch. It could also take several months to a year to get up and running, and no business has that kind of time in my mind. The other options allow you to be up and running within days…a month at most. The months you save alone are worth it. That could equal out to be a $50k head start in sales, plus a $5k savings on a developer. If and when you reach a point when one of those solutions aren’t good enough, you can approach a developer to build your “perfect” cart with the knowledge and understanding of exactly what you want. You’ll also likely be doing well with your existing site - well enough to cover the development costs and be patient…even if it takes 9 months to develop you are still bringing in sales.

As far as initial marketing: keep it simple: post some items on eBay, start a blog (a must in my mind), do pay-per-click through Google and Yahoo and become a master of it, and submit a product feed to Google Base. Combine those with a monthly newsletter to existing customers and fantastic customer service, and you’ll be on your way to a great start.

Also - do you mind if I post this question/answer on the blog? I think a lot of people would find it helpful.

Thanks again for reading. Good luck with your site. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.

Adam

Our heating adventure continues. When we moved we knew we had ~1,000 gallon oil tank, but when the oil company came and told us it was just short of full, we were happy to only put in 27 gallons. Then our heat went out after a few days in the warehouse.

Four days later, the oil company came and essentially said “our bad, the tank was really empty last time we came” and put in 850 gallons. The bill for that fill up ran us just over $3k, but we figured it would last a while.

Apparently not. We checked the tank today - which consists of sticking a large stick down a pipe - and roughly 1/5th of the 850 gallons was gone. Ummm ~$2,500/month on heat during the winter is not going to fly.

So we lowered the thermostat on the warehouse floor from 60 degrees to 50 degrees. We have a little 200 sq-ft office that Mike and Greg spent a weekend renovating (pics on Mike’s site) and we keep that at 70 degrees and right now are pretty much doing all computer work in there.

We’ll check the stick again a week from now and see how it goes. If not, I think we’ll need to get an energy expert to come in and analyze the situation and recommend things we can do beyond the obvious ones like energy efficient thermostats and adding a bit of insulation.

Today I was planning on writing a post about the startup life and the mentality required to live it, but Adam Gilbert stole my thunder…by using the EXACT same quote I had written on my index card this morning. Adam basically summed up my thoughts in his conclusion:

If I’m going to do something then I might as well be doing something remarkable/great/worth doing/worth talking about. Otherwise, why bother?

So let’s say you’re like Adam and my partners and I, and you have the privilege to be part of a company that embodies your passion.  As much as you love every second of it, and don’t consider it “work”, if that’s literally the only thing you do your life will fall apart - physically, mentally, and socially.  Friends, family, significant others, and other hobbies/passions still need some attention or you’ll go crazy and everyone will resent you.

How on earth can you handle balancing it all??? 

I have a simple rule:  aside from going to the gym (which is ingrained into my schedule regardless), every day, no matter how insanely busy it is, I try to have one non-business related goal. It could be calling a friend, reading a book for an hour, watching a game on TV, having beers with my friends, having dinner with my parents, etc - but no matter how chaotic or crazy the day goes I try as hard as I can to still achieve that goal.  And 99% of the time I do.

I also find that this helps productivity because I don’t really feel like I’m sacrificing.  If I watch a few bball games a week and catch highlights of the rest on ESPN, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a sport I love.  If I grab beers with my friends two nights each week, I’m not neglecting them or missing out on what’s going on in their lives.

Sure, entrepreneurs will never achieve the same work-life balance as someone who works a 9-5…in large part because we don’t want that balance.  Bottom line:  I tend to like to spend my time doing things I enjoy (crazy me).  When I’m working, I’m loving it.  When I’m spending time doing those other things - even if it’s only an hour or two a day - I’m also loving it.  What more balance can you ask for?