Adam McFarland

Earlier this week we launched a feature called the Detailed Image Daily Special. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds - each day one of our products is on sale for 24 hours. The Daily Special is featured on the homepage with a nifty little countdown clock:

A special message and countdown clock are also on the product page in case someone reaches the product from somewhere other than the home page:

Here’s how we do it: each night at midnight Eastern time our system automatically selects an item and places it on sale. The sale prices is determined from a formula that factors in our profit and cost of goods sold and reduces the price by a set percentage of profit. We did it this way - instead of a flat discount like 25% - because some products we make 200% on and others we make 10% on and we didn’t ever want to be selling an item for less than our cost. We have the option to exclude certain items from the formula. The formula also makes sure we have plenty in stock and that the item hasn’t been on sale recently before selecting it.

Once selected, all other discounts applying to that item are temporarily disabled. An email is then kicked out to anyone on our newsletter list who has opted in for these daily emails (by default current subscribers are opted out since we felt a daily email was too much unless you specifically asked for it). The script obviously also takes the previous days sale item off of sale.

I’ve stayed up the last two nights until after midnight to ensure everything works well and so far it’s worked flawlessly. The best part is that there’s no work involved, it’s 100% automated - my favorite type of feature.

How this feature came about is a really random story, and a testament to how flexible a small business owner can be. About a week ago George and I got into a discussion about updating the content on our home page a bit more frequently to try to get it indexed more often. Other pages on the site get crawled more frequently because they are updated more frequently. One thing led to another, and we remembered this idea George had about a year ago to run one item on special every day. The benefits are obvious (discussed below) so I said I’d program it. I figured it would take me a month or so to get it done around the rest of my work. Turns out I only needed about 10 hours in full to complete it, and here we are with it live a week later.

As I said, the benefits seem obvious but I’ll list them anyway. George wrote a great post yesterday that covered the main ones:

• Customers are more likely to visit the site daily.
• Getting daily emails keeps Detailed Image in your mind EVERY DAY - not just a few times a year when you make large detailing purchases.
• It gives George and Greg extra content to post about daily in the forums we sponsor. Initial feedback has been great - look at what some of the people over on E90Post had to say.
• It creates a gap between our competitors and us. They all run off-the-shelf shopping carts, so this feature that cost me 10 hours of work might cost a competitor thousands of dollars and take months to implement.
• For that day, we’ll get a ton of Google Product Search traffic/sales because we’ll have the lowest price…by far.
• It enables us to cycle through inventory faster.
• Customers initially attracted to the site to buy the Daily Special will be subjected to our upsells. We’ve already seen several orders that came from forum posts about the Daily Special but resulted in large sales.

Like everything else, this is one more micro-innovation that makes us just a little bit better as a company. I expect that at some point in the near future we will roll this out on Tastefully Driven as well. TD has been getting a good amount of sales considering it’s been getting almost no attention lately. The busy season (Spring/Summer) for DI has really locked up all four of us - we want to capitalize on it as best we can. I want to do more for TD, but I realize that come Fall and Winter we’ll flip our attention to TD marketing and spend the majority of our time growing the site. For now, it’s just good to have it up and slowly but surely growing. There’s no doubt in my mind that the best business move is to capitalize as much as possible on DI while we can.

A few months back I wrote a post entitled Micro-Innovating Every Day:

Ideas are a very, very small part of the majority of great innovations. Most great innovations come from a recognition of a recurring problem that a company encounters repeatedly and has the foresight to come up with a creative solution. It’s less about ideas and more about discovering opportunities that other people have failed to see or exploit. Most of the time, you only find those opportunities if you are working passionately at your craft each and every day for years.

I’ve talked a lot about how I feel like our shopping cart software for Detailed Image is one of our competitive advantages. As I was working on subtle features and additions for Tastefully Driven that will result in it blowing DI out of the water, I thought about how all of these daily micro-innovations will result in one big innovation. By 2010 maybe we’ll be featured in some magazine for our unique shopping cart community. Some kid will be reading it and think “man, I wish I could have an idea like that.” Not realizing that DI was in existence for 2+ years running osCommerce before we even attempted to build our own cart. And that DI was running the new cart for 6 months before developing the Tastefully Driven cart/community. And that the majority of features that make it great in 2010 hadn’t even entered our minds in 2008.

Want to be an innovator? Work hard. Pay attention to your customers. Analyze data. Learn like there’s no tomorrow. Open yourself to opportunities. Execute - every single day.

Today was the perfect example of this.  Ask any one of us what we accomplished today and we’d probably have to think for a second, look at our to-do list, and rattle off a few things that we did in addition to our day-to-day.  All relatively minor, but all subtle things that make us just a little more efficient, just a little more effective, and just a little bit better as a company.

All of these things probably added up to 3 hours of work total, but all will make an impact:

• Previously we each got one day a week off from the warehouse, with all of us going on Monday.  We agreed to all still go on Mondays, but now everyone will get a second day off.  Tuesday - Friday will only have two people in the warehouse, but those two people will obviously be doing a lot of warehouse work on those days.  This gives each of us a little more freedom and will save everyone on gas.
• To trim the time down that we all have to spend at the warehouse, Greg called and had our FedEx pickup time shifted from ~4 PM to now ~2 PM.  We get a lot of early deliveries, so the two people at the warehouse will now have to work approx 7:30 AM - 2:30 PM.  We can stay later if we want, but we won’t have to.  Again, more freedom for everyone involved.
• When using our custom built back-end shipping platform the only required input is box size (you look at the order and enter a box size for each order).  We had a drop down of our available boxes, but it was poorly organized and defaulted to 10 x 8 x 8″.  This worked OK when we only had a few orders a day, but causes a few issues when you’re shipping 20+ orders a day.  Greg uses the system the most and requested that I re-order the boxes by dimension and that we default the drop down to say “Choose a box size” so you can quickly scan the list and see the ones that still need to be inputted as opposed to wondering if they really are a 10 x 8 x 8 or if they just haven’t been entered.  Minor stuff that I never really noticed, but if it trims an 8 minute/day job to a 5 minute/day job it’s worth it in the long run.
• Greg also negotiated a 3.5% reduction in shipping rates with our FedEx rep.  With gas prices these days, a reduction in shipping costs is huge.

We’ve also recently reduced common Detailed Image inquiries with a new FAQ system, reduced my SportsLizard work down to almost nothing by automating customs submissions, reduced accounting work when George automated our accounting so that PayPal transactions can be imported to our QuickBooks, and probably a lot more that I didn’t mention..

Nothing major here, but the fact that every day we do a few of these things adds up to our company growing A LOT every week, month, and especially every year.   It seems obvious, but it’s easier than you’d think to get caught up in the day to day operations of a company and neglect anything that won’t pay immediate benefit.

As any college student will tell you, scheduling classes is an art form. My first semester I didn’t have much choice and had to take whatever was available. My second semester I loaded up on Monday and Thursday and had the rest of the week off. It sucked - Mondays and Thursdays wore me out and the rest of the week I had to spend 10 hours doing homework. My third semester I put large gaps between my classes so I’d have time to get work done during the day, but all I did was bone around on ESPN.com and AIM.

My fourth semester I finally got it right: 1 - 3 hour breaks between classes, equally spread out throughout the week. I got the same amount of work done in a 2 hour break that I’d get done in a 5 hour break the previous semester. I didn’t mess around and waste time because I was under a time crunch. A 2 hour break really means like 70 minutes of work when you factor travel time and setup time into the equation. You don’t have any time to mess around with 70 minutes: you’re always under a bit of pressure and that’s why you get so much done. You’re focused. This one lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Read the following excerpts and stop and think for a few minutes before continuing the post.

If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9 and 5, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available. It’s understandable.

Most entrepreneurs were once employees and come from the 9-5 culture. Thus they adopt the same schedule, whether or not they function at 9 AM or need 8 hours to generate their target income. This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.

Since we have 8 hours, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and suddenly need to leave work in 2 hours, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.

Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Workweek, pages 73-74

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

One of the misconceptions about ROWE is that it’s a work-from-home program. It’s not. If you want to work in a cube, that’s great. If you want to work from a coffee shop, then that’s great, too. The question in a ROWE is not “where is everybody?” but “is the work getting done?”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss

The United States leads the world in two categories: work and waste. American employees put in more hours and take fewer vacations than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and our individual ecological “footprints” are much larger.

Coincidence? I think not. The way we work drives our habits of consumption and waste. The more we work, the more we drive, the more energy we burn, the more styrofoam to-go containers we use. At the end of the day, we’re so tired, we devour more takeout and TV, often falling asleep in front of the latter. If we want to accelerate the recent trend of reducing waste, it may be time to consider the radical step of, well, relaxing more, consuming less, and living fuller lives. May the Wall Street Journal editorial board strike me down.

Naturally, most businesses blanch at the notion of giving up any competitive edge in a globalized economy. But it’s not as if moving to a four-day (or 32-hour) workweek would simply lop 20% off the economy. Cutting hours may actually raise per-hour productivity. France, home of the 35-hour week, creates more GDP per work hour than the United States ($37 versus $34, as of 2003). Norway spanks us too ($39), and Norwegians work 26% fewer hours a year than Americans. It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term. In a recent survey by Salary.com, workers copped to wasting about 20% of the average day Web surfing and gossiping. Sound familiar?

Companies can take the first step by reinventing the workweek. Then it’s up to us to devote our increased leisure hours to activities with low environmental impact — and not to driving around gas-guzzling cars or booting up power-hungry electronics. Then we could enjoy both continued wealth and improved planetary health.

David Roberts - Reinventing the Workweek, Green Business Practices - Fast Company: May 2008

OK, soak those in for a second…got it? Here’s what I think when I read excerpts like that:

The Logical Thought

So if I’m not an employee, and we’re in long term growth mode (past the start-up phase), and 9-5 is completely arbitrary, and it’s shown that less time working will make me more productive per hour spent, and if I’ll be healthier/happier by spending more time on things outside of work, and it’s better for the environment, why the f*ck am I working so many hours?

In the startup phase there’s a “cavalier” attitude that you have to have. Life = work and work = life, and that’s OK. But I’ve been doing that for two years and I don’t want to become that guy who works 24×7 for their entire life and misses out on everything else. I enjoy new experiences and new people. I enjoy experiencing life. A large part of that is being an entrepreneur, but there’s also a lot that has nothing to do with running a business.

I spent a lot of my engineering days in college, on internships, and in the work force working on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing projects and always thought to myself “why can’t these principles be applied to areas in business outside of manufacturing?” What 4HWW did for me was validate that increasing effectiveness and efficiency not only can be applied to all areas of a business, but in all areas of life too. Like everyone else I have become conditioned to 9 -5 and needed a little push to realize that I didn’t have to stay a part of it.

What I Want us to Become

I badly want us to become a model of efficiency and effectiveness. I want it because it makes us a more valuable company. I want it because removing the mundane and repetitive improves the quality of our lives.

In my head, all of this starts with our business processes. Unless you’ve got a ton of money (we don’t) you need to do the equivalent of hiring people by automating anything that is repetitive and can be done without human input. It started with our shopping cart software that automates inventory and shipping (side note: we had the owners of a large e-commerce store that’s been running for twelve years come visit us recently. The founder turned to George and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside). It continued by moving all of our data to the web and automating backups and with George automating his accounting. In the future we’ll automate more of our marketing - while things like Google Base submission are automatic, niche newsletters based on customer behavior aren’t quite there yet…but they will be.

Once the business processes are set we can move on to us. We all want to work less hours. Some tasks - like packing and shipping - cannot reasonably be automated with technology so the way you “automate” them is to hire employees. I feel that by the end of ‘09 we’ll have the 2-3 people in place that we need to allow us to work 20 hour workweeks. That’s my personal goal for each of us - the other guys might be thinking less or more, but that’s what I’m pushing for.

How did I come up with 20 hours? In 4HWW Tim Ferriss asks the question “If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?” He asks the question to challenge you to think about what you really need to do to successfully complete your job. However, he bases this on the premise that you don’t like your job and want to work as little as possible. That’s not me/us. I love this stuff. One of the things I really want to do a lot this summer is white water rafting - I’ve been twice and it was fun as hell so I want to officially make it one of my hobbies. I’m pumped. But I equally want to expand upon an email marketing system that we recently launched (right now we send follow-up emails to everyone who makes a purchase asking them to review their products on the DI blog or TD forum, but there’s a ton of growth potential there). I also equally want to hike every state park in the Albany area. Of course I also equally want to bulk up my AJAX skills and improve the user experience on our cart.

Clearly I love our company as much as I love non-work related things. It’s a good place to be in life. 20 hours limits you just enough so that you get excited to work. If I can only work 20 hours the intensity in which I work will be multiplied many times over. I’ll also really look forward to those few hours a day instead of letting my mind drift to things that I might rather be doing.

What I’m Doing About it

I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.

What counts as “work” you ask? Good question. I’m counting everything that is related to running Pure Adapt with the exception of:

• Commuting time
• Blog posts on this blog
• Time spent reading business books or business magazines
• Time spent learning (for example, I have a few AJAX books that will take a lot of time to work through…those don’t count)

Everything else is fair game. I purposely waited until the end of Thursday to do this post because I wanted to test my limitation this week. This week is the perfect test week - if I can do it this week I can do it 95%+ of the time. Being that I got NOTHING done last week with our server mess, my to-do list was backed up a ton. On Sunday night I took all 20 action items and split them up equally among the days of the week. In my head I said to myself “you’re only going to have 6 or 7 hours to do all of this, so you better be focused”. It has worked. Every day I knocked each item off. I am getting at least as much work done in far less time. Some days I worked right up to the last second and others - like today - I was done early. Thus far here are the hours I’ve worked:

• Monday - 7 AM - 2:30 PM (7.5 hrs)
• Tuesday - 7:30 AM - 4 PM (8.5 hrs)
• Wednesday - 7:30 AM - 1:30 PM (6 hrs)
• Thursday - 7:30 AM - 1 PM (5.5 hrs)

That puts me at 27.5 hrs through Thursday. We each have four days at the warehouse and one “off”. My off day is Friday, so I generally do the most work Monday - Thursday. 7.5 hours for Friday - Sunday sounds just about right. I’ll probably work about 4 hours tomorrow, 3 hours on Saturday, and just check email on Sunday (Indy 500 baby….anyone else pumped!?!?!).

This past four days has been the best of my life in terms of work-life balance. There’s nothing outside of work that I wanted to do that I didn’t. That’s huge for me. I’ve also stopped doing work at home - I do most of my work at the warehouse and the rest at Starbucks/other local coffee shops, which helps me mentally unwind when I walk through the door of my apartment. Continuing this schedule will go a long way to ensuring I get the fulfillment I’m looking for out of both work AND life.

I’ll definitely continue to post updates as this unfolds…should be interesting.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how fast technology changes. In December I wrote an article about our company embracing the open source software alternatives:

So we came up with a plan. We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative). Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year. We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal. The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

In the comments Anthony from Xonatek and I had a great back-and-forth about taking our mentality a step further utilizing Google Apps and free web based software.  Ultimately, we didn’t change our plan at the time but the conversation left the thought in the back of my mind.

Just before we moved into the warehouse George’s computer died and we lost all of his data.  I personally was doing an OK job of backing up my files, but we didn’t yet have a company backup plan (something I planned on doing once we settled in).  The more I thought of it, the harder the idea of a backup plan became because we’re always on the move.  You can’t set your laptop to auto-backup at midnight if it’s in a different location each night at midnight.  What happens if it’s suspended or shut down?  If it backs up as soon as you boot up that could bother you and prevent you from performing a time-critical task.  If it skips the backup that defeats the purpose.

More and more I decided the route to go was not to back anything up, but to have everything stored on the web.  Aside from not needing to schedule and perform backups, you can also work from any internet-ready device at close to full capacity.  The downside of course is that if you have a slow internet connection many of the apps straight up suck.  We combat this by having the open source alternative installed on the hard drives on all of our computers.  We also still purchase software when necessary:  for example, Mike has a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that isn’t really replaceable  with an open source alternative for the graphics work he does.  We also sort of killed the idea of a super duper master $5,000 PC - what’s the point when almost everything is online anyway?

Here’s how we have it set up:

• We use Google Apps for:
  • Email hosting through Gmail.  This is for our @pureadapt.com emails.  For the rest of the emails (sportslizard, iprioritize, tastefullydriven, etc) I use the mail fetcher to take a copy of each incoming email off of the server and put it in an appropriate folder.  It leaves the message on the server for me to download in Thunderbird (still my email client of choice), acting as a great auto-backup.  I also set it up so I can reply from any of those email accounts via Gmail if I’m on the road and don’t have access to my Thunderbird on my laptop.
  • Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations for our office suite.  We’ve already had quite a bit of great collaboration on some docs and spreadsheets that otherwise would have been emailed back and forth a bunch of times.  Far more useful than I anticipated.
  • Google Sites to replace our Wiki’s.  We have one wiki for just the owners that has critical info in it and a second wiki that employees will have access to that has all of the important processes (like how to pack and ship an order).
  • Google Calendar to manage our schedules.  We don’t use it much, but it’s an easy way to set up a meeting with everyone without having a big chain of emails back and forth.
  • The company start page where you can access all of these things.  I can’t over-emphasize how nice it is to have one login for everything.
  • The Remember the Milk plugin for the company start page as a shared task manager (ironically, I had someone email me the other day ripping Remember the Milk and saying iPrioritize was far better…maybe so, but iP doesn’t have a plugin like this…suppose that’s my fault…)
• Xdrive for storing other files like our Quickbooks backup, database backups, PDF files, PSD files, etc.

So far it’s going great.  The coolest part for me has been that it has opened up a whole new world of devices away from my laptop where I can work.  I went from working solely on my one powerhouse laptop (dual core processor, 2 gb ram, etc) to now sometimes using my desktop for its 22″ monitor when I need more space.  I even pulled the trigger on an ultra portable Eee PC for when I’m on the go.  For $399 I figured I could reduce the wear and tear on my current laptop (especially the hard drive - the Eee has a solid-state hard drive which is much better for traveling) and reduce the amount of stuff I need to carry on a regular basis while still remaining almost as productive as I would be on my lapper.  Linux took some time getting used to, but with the help of EeeUser.com I’ve become addicted to hacking up this little device.  I’d say at this point I could work solely from the Eee PC for a few weeks with very little productivity loss.  I wrote a full review over on the Tastefully Driven blog, but take a look at how much smaller it is compared to my current lapper:

Random happenings not worthy of a full post…

• This weekend I’ll be moving to a new apartment so the posts might be slow for the next few weeks.
• Check out this little analysis I did over on TD:  Gas Prices Got You Down?  Buy Online…Really
• Thanks to the NBA and NHL playoffs my sleep schedule is all f*cked up again. I’m still getting up at 6, but going to bed really late means I need to take a nap in the afternoon….which kind of sucks.

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.

I’m going to take a step back from our pre-launch marketing for Tastefully Driven to go over our overall launch plan - from conception to where we are now to what we have left to do. I’m not saying that there aren’t different or even better ways to deploy a site, just that this process is how we do things, in large part based upon prior failures, successes, and other professional experiences (I’d be lying if I said my engineering background didn’t play a large role in the way I structure a project).

None the less, I’ve never in my life missed a due date on a project and a large part of that is my meticulous planning so hopefully this post will help other young entrepreneurs better formulate their business plan.

Conceptualization

You have that “ah ha” moment where your entire perspective on the world changes and you think to yourself  “I’ve got to do that“. This is the start of what I call the conceptualization stage. For us, after the Detailed Image shopping cart far exceeded our expectations, we naturally asked ourselves how we could repeat the DI model in another industry. That led to us considering several similar high-end niches, and eventually the light bulb moment where we could combine those stores and a community into one large site - hence Tastefully Driven.

When I’m at this stage with a project, I’m so excited that I put a self-imposed waiting period on myself before acting (similar to my 24 hour rule). During this stage you’re likely to be so certain that you have just come up with the next big thing that you’ll ignore reality and down play very real road blocks. There’s no set time period, but I’d say wait at least a week before taking any action beyond registering a domain name.

In the case of Tastefully Driven, we conceived of the idea sometime around Thanksgiving of ‘07. For the next month we discussed the pros and cons - the features we’d want and those we wouldn’t, how we would market it, how it would impact the rest of the company, and how much of our resources could be devoted to it.

Aside from preventing you from doing anything stupid, it allows you (and your team, if you have one) to refine your vision. By the end of this period for us, everyone usually shares the same vision and knows what’s going through everyone else’s head. When you finally do start the project, you start it on the same page with the same vision for success.

Making it an Official Project

By late December we had decided Tastefully Driven would be our future. At that point I consider the project an official project. During this phase we started to get more serious: would we keep client work (ultimately, no)? how would this impact Detailed Image (we would finish all DI development work for 2008 before starting TD)? when could we realistically launch with several product lines (initially, we said 8/1/2008 at the earliest).

This is where I really shine. We have a MONSTER project and we need to figure out how to start tackling it. This is also where I think a lot of people get paralysis by simply being overwhelmed with what to do next. As Theodore Roosevelt once said: “In a moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” In this case, the right thing to do is come up with a plan.

Up to this point, we had literally written nothing down and neither should you. Don’t get caught up in the minutia when you’re conceptualizing. However, once it’s an official project there has to be extreme attention to every single detail.

We tend to convene around our company wiki, so I like to write my project plans on the wiki. Since we had agreed to finish Detailed Image development before touching TD, I focused on that first. There were around 10 additions to the cart that needed to be completed (mostly stuff for me to do). I gave each an approximate completion time and I figured it would take until the end of February or early March to complete. Somehow I caught fire and wrapped it up on 1/12, which gave us an early indication that our 8/1 launch date for TD might have been too much of a time cushion.

Once complete with that I started an in depth plan for Tastefully Driven. The site will launch with 5 or 6 e-commerce stores, a community, a blog, and full integration of accounts between the three - by far the largest project we have tackled, and therefore the most daunting to plan. I started by breaking it up in to several key categories:

• Design (mostly Mike)
• Development, which essentially involved improving and scaling the DI cart (mostly me)
• Quality testing, which could fall under Development, but I like a whole section of tests to run prior to launch
• Product selection (mostly George)
• Content creation, including writing product descriptions
• Marketing ideas

Each category had a simple bulleted list, and each task that needed to be done to launch got an approximate completion time. The latter stuff - like marketing ideas - was more of a brain dump than anything else. Even though we create a marketing plan later on, it’s important that we have a place on the wiki to jot down an idea as we come across it in the development of the site.

Setting a Launch Date

Some people like to use Microsoft Project (or similar project manager tool) to plan out due dates and choose a launch date. I was forced into using these tools in college, and to be honest I just see them as complicating the matter. I like the freeness of one large blank wiki page. I am smart enough to know that keyword research needs to be done before launching a pay-per-click campaign, so I won’t assign a due date to the PPC campaign that doesn’t allot for that. With the entire project in front of me it became pretty obvious that we could finish it by 3/1 (a far cry from 8/1). We figured with the warehouse move and a little cushion time, that 4/1 would be perfect. Any later in the year is prime Detailed Image season so if we didn’t do April we’d probably have to wait until Fall…or launch with limited contribution from George and Greg.

As I touched on a bit in previous posts, the one key thing I grossly miscalculated was how long it takes to contact vendors. I figured a month would be sufficient time to contact a vendor, get samples, place our first order, and receive it. More realistically, that stuff takes several months and I’d like at least a 3 month cushion for that alone next time. Our final order just shipped, so miraculously we will have all of our products in the warehouse for weighing and photoing by 3/14, but we cut it waaaay too close in my book.

Developing the Site

The development portion is different for everyone. Some people use open source software like WordPress or osCommerce with very little customization and this portion isn’t much more than design work to get the aesthetics right. Others hire an outside developer….which I’ve never really done so I have no clue how to integrate that into a project plan. We develop everything ourselves, so we were able to relatively accurately estimate our ~2 months of development work.

*side note - if you or your developer don’t develop with SEO in mind, this is the time to start building and structuring things properly. Do your homework - it will pay off.

When I do development work I do it with the understanding that we’re spending a few weeks solely on quality control testing at the end of the project. That means that while I’m developing I test every scenario and interaction I can think of, and once it works I move on.  I usually miss some stuff, but that’s OK. In most cases there will be other interactions created later on, some of which we won’t appropriately test - which is why having a QC testing phase is so important. I also encouraged Mike to think the same way with his design. Essentially - lay it all out and get it working most of the way and fix the nitty gritty shit at the end.

I always map out the entire site - every feature and function I can think of - before touching anything. Once that’s done, I create the database that should encapsulate every single possible scenario. This is pretty obvious: you need to be able to enter test data to see if what you’re trying is working.

All of this resulted in a more detailed list of features to develop, how long they’re going to take, and what order to do them in. By far the most challenging part of Tastefully Driven was to get our login and user information to work seamlessly between our forum (built upon bbPress), our blog (WordPress), and our custom built cart. Every project I’ve ever been a part of has those “if we can just get this to work, we’ll be fine” features and this was the one thing we were really uncertain of the difficulty going in. It’s important to identify these types of issues at the start and try to tackle them as soon as possible so you know where you stand. These are the things that will throw off a time line and screw a launch date.

Announcing the Launch Date

For the reason in the last sentence, we have an unwritten policy of not announcing a launch date until the development work is nearing completion. While internally we set 4.1.08 as the date, we always knew it could be delayed if need be. Once I announced the launch on my blog, I considered it set in stone and - short of an extreme emergency - will make sure it happens.

Every company has different pressures and a lot of times those pressures dictate premature launch dates, but if you can help it I encourage you to set a date and stick to it. A launch date really forces you to buckle down and focus on the task at hand. It forces the BS stuff out of your project plan and dictates that you work on only what is necessary. We’re in this phase now, and I’ve been knocking things off of our wiki list like crazy. Some get moved to “post launch” and others get canned because they just don’t matter.

I normally work a lot more hours prior to a launch. The past few days George and I have been doing a double shift (8 AM to 8 PM type of stuff) to ensure that we get everything done on time.

Creating a Marketing Plan

Up until this morning we just had our marketing list on the wiki. We created the splash page, the pre-launch blog, and the teaser business cards, but the plan wasn’t really formulated. Today I finally created our marketing plan. Some people like to do this sooner than now (a month before launch), but I encourage you to wait to create a marketing plan because so much changes in development that much of an earlier marketing plan would be rendered useless.

I’m not going to rehash all of my favorite web marketing tactics - my free e-book does that - but I will say that for an e-commerce site we’ve pretty much got a formula down pat that we are sticking to. The majority of our marketing will consist of:

• Content creation. Articles, forum posts, podcasts, and videos where we do product comparison, tests, and case studies. Since our site is perfectly SEO friendly and we will produce quality content, over time this will suck in a ton of targeted traffic. It will also become viral and hopefully spread through social bookmarking and social networking sites (we have a “share this” button on every product page, blog post, and forum post).
• Pay per click marketing. PPC is such a simple formula if executed properly: pay $x per click, y% of clicks turn in to purchases. As long as the number of clicks/sale is greater than your margin, you win. Split testing and refining ads can push your cost per click down and conversion rate up.
• Google product search. So many sellers don’t take advantage of this. It’s free, and in about 2 hours I automated the process so that we automatically create and submit an updated product feed daily to Google via FTP. DI gets a lot of sales this way.
• Email and RSS marketing. This is really just maximizing the sales we can get out of our existing members. I’d also include great customer service in this category - every customer service email is an opportunity to positively influence someone who could become an evangelist of your site. When you’re starting with zero members, email marketing can take a while to have an influence. We see it now with DI though: every newsletter results in a wave of sales. This is one of the reasons why the pre-launch splash page is important: the faster we can build an email list, the better.

There’s other stuff too, but these are what will drive sales. Obviously PPC and Google product search will help immediately, while the other two will take time to develop. We’ve launched so many sites that we understand that you don’t truly see the impact of great content for months and even years. With this project, we know that what we’re doing works and we’ll be as patient as we need to be to make it work correctly.

Quality Testing

Maybe it’s because I spent my engineering days as a QC engineer, but quality testing is a big deal to me.  Test every single page and every single possible function of your site.  Do it in every browser, every operating system, and under every condition you can think of.  Test your emails in every email program available.  Do REAL transactions and make sure they work.  Recruit a handful of BETA testers (i.e. friends and family) to try everything out.

You’ll never catch 100% of the errors, but the difference between 80% and 97% is huge.  I allot a minimum of one week for QC testing and it’s usually the week prior to launch.  That means that everything else should be done at least a week before launch day.

Launching

I always create a launch day checklist.  While you should pause to celebrate (for like five seconds), once you pull the trigger there’s a lot to do:  announce it on your blog (if you have one), submit your product feed to Google, submit a sitemap to Google/Yahoo/MSN,  activate your PPC campaign, email friends and family, etc.

You’ll likely start discovering some of those errors you missed in the QC testing phase as real people do stupid things to inadvertently challenge your software like it never was before.   The better job you did in QC, the more you can focus on your first order coming through and the less you have to worry about your first users getting pissed off and leaving.  When it comes to Tastefully Driven the platform is built upon Detailed Image, which we know is stable, so I’m more worried about minor integration issues than I am about all-out systems failure (which was definitely a concern of mine when we went live with DI….even if I never let my partners see it).

Bottom line:  it’s a fun day when you launch, but in reality it’s just the beginning.  Take a day to catch up on sleep and then get to the “real work” - getting people to actually pay you money.

Ongoing Development

I have a rule: other than fixing errors, don’t make any major development changes or additions for at least a month…three to be safe.  Why?  Because on the second day you’ll get an email from Aunt Betty telling you that she thinks the site would be better if it had feature xyz and you’ll think “if she thinks that, other people must be too” and then you’ll begin to hack up your code and try to rush xyz to market.  Not only could this make your site worse, it’s also a poor use of your time.  You’ll get emails like this all the time, and if you concede to all of them you won’t make much money and your site will suck.

If you have confidence in your project (and you should if you got this far), there’s a good chance that you launched with a pretty solid site.  That’s good enough for now.  Take in your customer feedback, study your analytics, and focus on sales right now:  in the grand scheme of things you’ll look back at the launch version of your site as a piece of shit but you need to let those things play out so that you’ll know what you should and shouldn’t do to improve upon it.

For Detailed Image, we waited from September to January before I started on the laundry list of features for 2008.  The result, however, was a million times better than if I kept programming in September.  Some features were deemed unimportant and scratched from the list, some were re-affirmed by our data….justifying our time expenditure, and some became simpler to program because of everyones more intricate knowledge of the cart.

One thing I think most developers look past:  just because you made the software, doesn’t mean you know it.  Often times, customers will use things vastly differently than you intended.  By letting those things play out naturally you save yourself a ton of headaches and ensure that the changes you do make are worthwhile.

Conclusion

Phew.  Can you say longest post ever?  I think I’ll get back to work now….after all, I’ve got a lot to get done to launch this site

One thing we learned quickly when we started adding up the costs of a warehouse was that everything is more expensive when you’re a business. It’s as if every service provider hears “business” and immediately jacks up the price 50%.

As of Monday we had everything squared away except our internet access, which has always been a bitch every time I’ve ever moved. That’s why we got out in front of it and about two weeks ago George put a call in to Time Warner Cable to inquire about getting Road Runner in our warehouse. They told him they needed to send out a technician to see if the building was already wired, and that they would get back to us in a few days. Well, after harassing them several times they finally called George on Monday afternoon:

They wanted $4,000 to run cat5 cable into our warehouse! To be fair, they either wanted $4k OR a contract of any combination of phone, internet, and TV exceeding $300/month for the next five years. Never mind we don’t want phone or TV from them. Oh, and I failed to mention that the same Road Runner that we all have in our houses and pay $50/month for costs ~$200/month for “business class” at comparable upload/download speeds.

Suffice to say, our answer was a resounding NO. Unfortunately we looked at other local internet providers and they were all in the $200-$300/month range, which is still freaking ridiculous for a biz of our size.

So we started to get creative. I’ve always been fascinated with mobile broadband cards so we started looking into the alternative of purchasing an unlimited data transfer card for each of us for $60/month. Then we got the idea: what if we could buy one card and somehow get it to work with our router? I took a quick look on Sprint.com, and in 3G areas like our warehouse the connection speeds were comparable to Road Runner.

Then Mike found this Linksys Router that actually has a PCMCIA slot in it and is designed to work with Sprint Mobile Broadband Cards!

Freaking awesome right! We’re all pretty in tune with the tech world and none of us knew anything like this existed (at least legally anyway).

George and I went to the Sprint Store in the mall on Monday night and got a 3G mobile broadband card for free with a rebate. Then we took our unopened router to Best Buy and returned it for this one, which was actually cheaper than the original router we purchased. Let’s sum up: we’re getting similar service for $0 down and $60/month when Time Warner wanted $4,000 down and $200/month. Ha - take that bitches.

On January 1 I wrote about how I hate New Years Resolutions and then proceeded to make one myself:  to improve my sleep schedule.  Throughout college and my early professional life I’ve always been an erratic sleeper to say the least, and I became envious of those who were able to wake up early and start the day “ahead” of me.  I decided on 6 AM as my new wakeup time because it’s early, but not so early that you have to be asleep at a ridiculous hour every night to get your 8 hours.

So how has this past month been?  Amazing and life-changing are probably the two best adjectives to describe the feeling.  I have been:

• Going to bed by 10 PM most nights.  The latest I have fallen asleep is probably 10:45.  If a good sports game or show is on, I’ll record it to watch in the AM.
• Waking up every single day at 6 AM.  I use my iPod to wake me up, and I have a backup alarm set for 6:10 in case music doesn’t do the trick.  The latest I have risen from my bed has probably been 6:12 AM.
• I generally eat, check email, and watch Sports Center (or a recording of a game/show from the previous night) from 6-7, and then leave for the gym around 7.
• By 9 I am showered, dressed, have eaten my post-workout meal, and am back at work (having already cleared my inbox earlier in the morning).
• Stop working by 7 PM at the latest so I have a few hours to myself.  If I have dinner plans or other plans with friends, I can stop working at 4 PM and still have accomplished a ton.

Here have been the benefits:

• Far less stress.  Instead of waking up and thinking “crap, I need to get to the gym and rush my workout and get back and get to my emails” I’m now way ahead of the game.  Clearing my inbox from 6-7 lets me relax at the gym knowing I don’t have anything major waiting for me when I get back.  By 9 AM I’m at the point where I used to be at noon, and that is huge.
• Much higher productivity.  Obviously if I’m 3-4 hours ahead of my old daily pace I’m getting a lot more done.
• Less tired - I’m only really tired for the last 15 minutes before I fall asleep and the first 15 minutes when I wake up.  Never think about it otherwise, which is a huge change for me.
• Better workouts at the gym.  Now that I’m not rushed, I feel 100% satisfied with my efforts instead of the usual ‘I wish I could spend more time working out’.
• More consistent eating habits.  I have always been a wanna-be-nutritionist, but with a regular sleep schedule I’ve been able to really hone in and eat my 6 or 7 meals at the exact same times each day.  And by having more time, I can prepare what I really should eat instead of settling for faster-but-unhealthier alternatives.  Much like never feeling tired, I never really feel hungry except right before I am scheduled to eat.
• More time to hang out with friends.  I’ve seen my friends more in the last month than I did all last year…seriously.
• More time to play read, watch sports, and play video games.
• Just overall more happy and fulfilled.  I’ve always been a pretty happy guy, but if I could quantify my happiness increase it would be around a 25% increase…solely from waking up early!

Amazing as this has been, I probably couldn’t have done it even a year ago.  Your social situation dictates when you can and can’t sleep and wake up.  At 25, the whole “going out to the bar every night” thing has worn off and I don’t really have the desire to be out until 4 AM anymore.  When I do go out, I can stay out until 12 or 1 and still get a decent amount of sleep by 6.  And of course, I can always sleep in on a rare occasion.

The big question is:  can I stick to it and make it a true lifestyle change like I have with diet and exercise?  I vote yes.  Partially because I made it 30 days and I have no desire to ever sleep in again, and partially because it just fits perfectly in my entrepreneurial life.  Obviously I won’t know for a year or two if it sticks, but I’m going to be extra serious about sticking with it for the next few months and hopefully by mid-year it’s just automatic.  I’ll try to post updates every few months to force myself to stick to it or admit that I suck if I don’t.

I recently went back and visited with one of my old engineering professors.  He seemed happy that I had started my own business, but the whole time we were talking I could sense a bit of skepticism.  Then I said “I went into industry for a while after college but didn’t like it”.  He looked at me with sort of a puzzled look and bluntly said “why?”

Here’s the thing - product development and web development are very similar.  At their core, each is just a challenge in problem solving and that’s why I love both.  Hell, gun to my head I’d probably say that product development is more interesting than web development:  there is more freedom and the problems you can solve are more diverse.

But - and this is a big but - the barrier to entry is far more difficult in product development.  The project I was working on developing in late 2005 as an engineer still hasn’t hit the market yet…and it’s not a complex product (it’s the equivalent complexity of a web mashup that you’d build in a week).  A simple product, but we needed to do several rounds of prototypes, scout out manufacturing facilities, do consumer safety tests and other QC testing that takes months, negotiate deals with our customers like Walmart and Target to stock the product, etc.

In the entrepreneurial world, it can take five or ten years to get a product to market compared to five to ten weeks to get a website to market.  The barrier to entry costs less and takes less time, and that is why I prefer web development.  I’ve been able to get every single “great” idea I’ve ever had to market in the web world - I was able to get Music Alerts online in a weekend.   Some of the stuff has been a success, some of it hasn’t been - but I’ve been able to find out in a matter of a few years what would’ve taken fifteen years in the product development world.

Imagine spending years patenting a device, finding a capable vendor, getting a contract to sell it in Target…and then finding out consumers like your competitors brand better.  It happens all the time, and it would suck to waste $500k and 5 years to find that out.  Now, spending $2k and 2 months isn’t so bad.  I crave the ability to throw a lot of shit against the wall and see what sticks, and the web world makes that possible.

I’m not a huge fan of “New Years Resolutions”. To me, NOW is the best time to start something new and waiting until New Years is stupid (side note: I’ve most likely developed my hatred for New Years resolutions due to the fact that I’ve had trouble getting a good workout in January or February at any packed gym I’ve been a member at for the last 10 years because everyone and their mother decides to get in shape on 1/1 and quits by Valentines day….quite frankly, it drives me nuts and I’m dreading my trip to the gym tomorrow morning).

Of course, this is the part where I become a hypocrite and go against everything I just said. Yesterday I saw a post on Lifehacker about the How to Wake Up Early site, which got me thinking about my sleep habits. Hard core blog readers will remember a time when I wrote a lot about my crappy sleeping habits (see Does it matter when I get my 8 hours of sleep, Making a bold move, Here we go again, and Sleep - my productivity killer). I stopped not because the problem was solved, but because I figured I’d piss people off if I made sleep the main topic of a young entrepreneur blog.

For my physical (and to some extent mental) health, there are three key components I’ve always focused on: eating healthy, working out, and getting plenty of sleep. The crazy thing is, I’ve got #1 and #2 down to the point where they are habits that I don’t need to worry about anymore. I’ve been lifting and working out continuously since high school, and for about the past five years I’ve eaten an extremely healthy and balanced diet. That stuff is easy for me. It’s probably not for some, but it is for me.

However, I can never get the sleep thing down. I don’t really have trouble sleeping, I just don’t have a set schedule so I tend to just do whatever I feel like whenever I want. Every time I get into a good groove for a week or two, I let it get out of hand and I convince myself I should just sleep when I’m tired and stop worrying about getting up early. However, a recurring theme in my head is always “I could be so much more efficient if I got on a better sleep schedule”. When your weekly number of hours of sleep looks something like 5-7-10-5-8-6-9 and you sleep and wake at all sorts of crazy hours it puts an added stress on you mentally and physically, and also impacts your diet and exercise.

I’ve come to the conclusion that on 95% of nights I’m not out past 10 PM, so I really don’t need to be up late. Thanks to digital cable, I can record any show or sporting event I’d normally watch and watch it the next morning. That was my largest hurdle. The next hurdle in my head was WHY? I’ve come to the conclusion that almost every successful person I know wakes up early. Don’t know why for sure, but I’m guessing because it’s a lot easier to waste time away at night than it is in the early morning.

Even more important, I feel like I’m starting my day in a productivity deficit and I’m always trying to catch up. I’d say I average waking up at 8 AM. Not bad…but after grabbing some food, going to the gym, eating again, and showering, I don’t get my start until around 10 or 10:30 on a lot of days. After sifting through emails, many days I look up and see lunch time without accomplishing any work. That stresses the shit out of me, and it’s time to change. I want to jump out ahead on my day and feel like I’m on top of things. By instituting a routine I’ll be healthier and I’ll worry less about sleep, which will make me happier and more efficient. All at the cost of….well, I suppose at the cost of my prior laziness and inability to commit.

So, starting this morning - armed with some good tips from the site - I got up at 6 (side note #2: did anyone else know you can use your iPod as an alarm? Me neither…what a great way to aid my new waking up process….). I’m going to try to stay on a ~10PM - 6AM schedule. I made a note to do a follow-up post on 2/1, although if this works I’m guessing I’ll comment on it more frequently because it’s kind of a big deal for me.