“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The word sacrifice is often associated with entrepreneurs. Young business owners like myself often get peppered with questions about making less money or living with their parents or spending less time at the bar [...]
Archive for April, 2008
Is it Really a Sacrifice?
How NOT to Fix Your Shipping Mistake
Like most companies we use our business credit cards quite a bit. In turn, we get quite a few rewards points which result in all sorts of gift certificates. A little over a month ago we got a $40 gift certificate to NFLShop.com. No one else really wanted it, and there was [...]
What You’ve Been Missing on the TD Lifestyle Blog
One of the more challenging aspects for us with Tastefully Driven so far has been managing the Lifestyle Blog. Being that it’s a group blog it can take on a different life than individual blogs like this one or the one I run over on SportsLizard. Both of those blogs have my personality infused into [...]
My Top 10 Favorite Tastefully Driven Features
Since the launch of Tastefully Driven I’ve been intending to do a post similar to the DI Features and Lessons Learned. But since this project had less “unknowns” there weren’t a lot of “lessons learned” from the programming side. We knew what we needed to do, and it was more about execution than [...]
The Difference Between Being 20 and 25
Every once in a while I have one of those moments where I say to myself “holy crap, I can’t believe this – I’m 25 years old and my partners and I run a company. We’ve built our own e-commerce platform and have our own warehouse, and we did it without giving up any stock [...]
Sell Products? Do This
I’ve said it before, but it amazes me how many online retailers don’t submit their products to Google Base. It’s free, they support a slew of formats (upload products one at a time, upload a spreadsheet, or auto-FTP from your database like we do), and it gets your products shown on Google Base, Google [...]
Pandora Knows Me Better Than I Do
Sometimes it takes me a while to do things I know I should do. Case in point: in October I read this fascinating feature in Inc. Magazine about Pandora entitled Pandora’s Long Strange Trip: Online radio that’s cool, addictive, free, and-just maybe-a lasting business.
Pandora has developed a proprietary method to analyze music–Westergren calls [...]
Thoughts on Pricing and Profitability
Last week for the first time we listed our products for sale on Amazon.com. I put up about half of the Tastefully Driven catalog because products must have a US UPC code to be on Amazon and some of our detailing products and supplements do not have UPC codes. The entire process was [...]
Downshifting Post-Launch
It’s a weird feeling that I always get around this time. Every single time I’ve launched a new site or project I’ve felt the same thing, best described by a post I wrote back in 2006 just after the launch of iPrioritize:
From my limited experience as an entrepreneur, I’ve come to the realization that [...]
The Focus of a Tiger
I’ve never been the world’s biggest Tiger Woods fan. I respect him, am in awe of his athletic ability, and admire his work ethic. However, I’ve always thought he came across a bit too ‘rehearsed’ and not ‘real’ enough…kind of like Michael Jordan. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, but in sports, [...]
