Adam McFarland

Quick post here guys.  Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook.  It’s been over six months since the last update.  The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate.

The biggest update has to do with the Keyword Research section.  Google recently started displaying search volume on their AdWords Keyword Tool.   This is HUGE for anyone with a website and an interest in SEO.  Prior to this we were left to extrapolate data from Yahoo (Overture) or Wordtracker and “guess” how often something was searched on Google.  Since the latest studies seem to show that Google may have upwards of 70% of the search market, these data points are clearly the most important.  Also, I LOVE that you can type in multiple keywords at once - one per line - and do all of your keyword research in one well thought out search.  You can also download your results.  Basically, it’s the perfect keyword research tool.  Vastly different from tools like the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, based on Wordtracker data, which was what I was using prior and only allowed you to search one term at a time.

I also made minor updates to all of the other sections where I saw appropriate.  Download it for free over at Faceup-Sites.com.  Enjoy!

A few months back one of our friends - a former business owner who has now cashed out and is “living the good life” - turned us on to a distributor of high quality cables for low prices.  We take his word pretty highly since he’s hardcore into ultra high-end audio equipment. He told us that the quality of these cables are equal to the quality of Monster cables, but for 1/20th the price.  So we picked a few up, liked them, and decided we wanted to carry the line on Tastefully Driven.  With that, the Electronics Cables & Accessories store was born.

We carry things like iPod cables and headphones, HDMI cables ($15 for a 6 foot cable!), component video cables, USB cables, and Nintendo Wii component cables.  These items are also the types of things that we can easily sell on eBay - a place where we want to have a presence but nothing else we carry really fits (some of our products are prohibited by the manufacturer from being sold, others - like personal care products - just won’t sell much based on our research).

While we’re on the topic of Tastefully Driven, my guess is that at least half of you are saying to yourselves “where are they going with this?”  The direction of the site, of the business, is very defined in my mind but it definitely doesn’t look like it from the outside and I’ve probably done a bad job (or no job) of explaining it.  I think from the outside it just looks like they’re just picking up random product lines left and right of things that interest them.  While there’s some truth to that, here’s the overall big picture:

Our cart is very SEO friendly.  Each page has a dynamically generated unique title tag, all of the text is indexible, each page is URL rewritten, we use proper formatting, etc.  We know that on equal footing - most notably the number of links and the age of our domain - we can outrank the majority of the competition.  So the reasoning by putting all of these loosely tied stores on one domain is to get all of those links pointing to ONE domain and not to many domains so that each product benefits from the success of the others.  Think about how every page on Wikipedia ranks high.  Now apply that same strategy to e-commerce, a place where most sites aren’t very SEO friendly.

Which is then where the Lifestyle Blog and our quest to get a team of writers comes in.  Links directly to products are hard to come by.  Links to great information, on the other hand, are relatively easy to come by.  Create lots of great posts, get lots of links, help out every page on the entire domain.  So this post about polyphasic sleep really does help us sell more shit drops even though the connection isn’t obvious.

So far it’s already worked for a few products. In time, it should work for all of them.   Not saying this is a foolproof plan or that it couldn’t fail, but it’s the plan we’re going with.

If it works, we should end up with a pretty solid community on the forums/blog and then we can step everything up to the next level and become a “social shopping” site like we originally envisioned.  For example, displaying ads on the forum/blog for our products based upon your conversations and your purchase history.  If we ever get to this point, that’ll be where the fun really begins.

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.

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 Product Search, and - most importantly - normal Google searches.

Take the example below (click to view full size screenshot). When someone searches for Men-U Healthy Face Wash, a product we sell on Tastefully Driven, Google automatically recognizes the query as a product search and displays Google Product Search results above the natural results. Sure it’s below the high performing PPC ads, but those people are paying for those impressions/clicks. The natural results have been organically grown over the course of years with expensive and time consuming link building and on-site SEO. All I did was spend 15 minutes submitting a product feed last week. As an added bonus Google gives you impression/click-through data for products listed (imagine how cool it would be if they did this for organic results?). Seems unfair huh? Take advantage of it while it lasts…I know we are.

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 a complete pain in the ass (at least compared to Google Product Search and Yahoo Shopping) and the whole time I was saying to myself “this is a waste of time and money”. Amazon charges $39.99/month and 15% of the purchase price, which eats into profit quite a bit. On top of that, Amazon is a price-driven marketplace so you really need to have the lowest price if you want to get any sales. For that reason, let’s just say it’s $39.99/month and 20% of the purchase price.

Is it worth it? My first thought was hell no. George convinced me to try it for a month or two and then go from there. Before I even finished uploading all of the products, we had our first sale. Since then we’ve had steady sales via Amazon and have even run out of a few products due to volume from Amazon.

But what about our profits? Well, here’s the thing: you don’t have any marketing cost associated with putting your stuff on Amazon. The products literally sell themselves just because of the shear mass of people buying stuff everyday. There’s no sales process or customer service questions to deal with. The sale just comes through and we ship it with an Amazon invoice in it (and of course some coupons to entice them to shop on TD). I’d say our average product is $30 - 20% of which is $6, meaning we end up selling a $30 product for $24. Most of the time, I’d say we spend more than $6 of marketing expenses (including sales related customer service) on that same product when we sell it through the site. When I look at it that way, I feel a lot better about it.

The more intriguing question to ask - how important is profitability? Consider two online web businesses who both sell blue widgets…nah, blue widgets is played out, let’s say they sell the same high-demand DVD player, which is the only product they sell. Their cost on the DVD player is $50. Suggested retail price is $100. Company 1 sells it for $99, while Company 2 sells it for $80…becoming the low-cost leader for the product.

Assuming all else is equal, Company 1 will profit more (24% more) per unit. I know a lot of people who would rather be Company 1. They want to profit as much as they can per unit. But if the product is in high demand, it’s already being sought out thousands of times each day via product searches like on Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and a slew of other ones. Those searchers are likely solely buying based upon price - if your site doesn’t totally suck you’ll probably get the sale every time if you are Company 2.

Now - for funsies - let’s say that each company profits $100k for the year. Company 1 sells 2,041 units (x $49 profit/unit) and Company 2 sells 3,333 units (x $30 profit/unit). Again, I think that a lot of people would rather be Company 1.

I disagree. Here’s why: Company 1 has the advantage of less customer service and less work packing/shipping, but has the disadvantage of having to work a lot harder for each sale. In reality, a lot of that $19 difference goes away when you factor in the time/expense of marketing a product when selling it at the same price everyone else is. Company 2 spends more resources on packing/shipping and servicing customers, but minimal time marketing because the sales just come to them. Company 2 also gets purchasing discounts and shipping discounts because of their extra volume. In addition, they cycle through inventory faster…meaning they don’t tie up money/space with inventory that isn’t going to move fast. Over time the advantages of Company 2 are more valuable to me: it’s easy to find warehouse workers and customer service reps relative to how easy it is to generate sales. Generating sales is the hardest thing to do in the world of business. If I find a hands-off way to drive sales AND can turn over inventory faster by doing it, I’ll gladly sacrifice some profitability.

Think about it from the outside as a venture capitalist or someone trying to acquire your company. Taking the example to the extreme, would you rather have a company that ends the year with $100k in revenue, $10k in expenses, and profits $90k (a web design company could look like this) OR would you rather have a company with $10 mil in revenue, $9.91 mil in expenses, and also profits $90k? They both profit the same at the end of the year. But the second company has far more cash passing through their hands and because of that revenue they will be able to secure outside financing (bank loans, private investments, venture capital, etc) easier because their cash flow will allow them to manage their debt. The company is simply more valuable because they generate a lot more revenue.

I’m not sure if this is intuitive or counterintuitive to people or what. All I know is that it’s been on my mind a lot lately, and profitability is becoming less and less important to me.

*side note: salaries are being factored into our expenses whenever I discuss expenses, so breaking even is just fine with me for now. In addition, this does not mean that we aren’t constantly trying to improve our processes and systems so that we can maximize our profitability. I’m solely referring to pricing and how it impacts the bottom line…not all of the other factors that contribute to the bottom line of a business.

So we’ve just spent nearly six-months and thousands of dollars to make Tastefully Driven a reality. Sweet…but then comes the realization that every business owner has: “oh crap, now we actually need to start making money”. It’s a daunting task, but we went into this knowing that we know what to do (or thinking that we know what to do, I suppose).

There are five stores on Tastefully Driven. Each one is it’s own niche that could be a business in and of itself. If you do the keyword research (we did) you’ll learn that each of those niches are very popular. Therefore, before doing anything else it’s important for us to make sure all of our products are listed where people are already looking for them: essentially, the people who are already ’sold’ and are just looking to pull the trigger. Where are these people? Well, if I know what I want I usually do a Google search or check Amazon. Most people do the same or something similar. That said, our first priorities are:

• Getting all of the products listed in Google Base/Google Product search. I wrote a script to auto-generate a product feed daily and FTP it over to Google. We’re still waiting for approval for our feed (takes 24 hours), but from my experiences this usually brings in sales via Google pretty quickly…assuming your products are competitively priced.
• Researching and creating a complete Pay-Per-Click campaign. I spent almost a full week earlier this month researching keywords and writing several unique ads for every product. The campaign went live yesterday on AdWords, Y! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter.
• Getting all products listed on Amazon. I have yet to start this, but it’s at the top of my list.
• Get products listed on Y! Products Submit (the Y! equivalent of Google Product search, but you pay-per-click). Again, haven’t started this but I will in the next few days.

Now, this doesn’t encompass EVERYTHING, but it gives us access to a good number of the people looking for the products we are selling.

A lot of companies stop the marketing there. Long-term is where the entire Tastefully Driven site comes into play. The blog is going to be a “men’s lifestyle blog” where we will post reviews, videos, and experiments related to our products and other relevant products. Videos like the one below that George and Mike made about our plastic poker cards vs. regular cards shows the potential:

Each blog post is auto-created as a forum thread, where people can comment as opposed to commenting directly on the blog. The forum is the long-long-term investment, but consider where all of this could be 1-2 years from now:

• Every link to every article, forum post, and product in every store will be pointing to the TastefullyDriven.com domain. From a SEO standpoint, the domain becomes a mini-Wikipedia for our demographic: we have thousands of links and a ton of quality blog/forum content, meaning ANYTHING we add immediately gets ranked well.
• Now that Google has begun integrating YouTube results into searches, properly optimizing a YouTube video is a great way for people searching for information to find your video (and in turn, learn about your site). We recently purchased a high-def video camera so we have big plans for our video section.
• The community that we build will begin to influence the products we carry. More importantly, the community will begin to TRUST us when they see how great the products are (I tried the personal care stuff last night for the first time and every product was 1000 times better than anything I’ve ever picked up at the mall or the grocery store). When we get new products in, our newsletter and our forum community will help drive sales.

In theory, this is the best long term strategy. Sites that only do the first stuff are the types of businesses that hit a wall after a year or two and wonder where the rest of the sales are. Well, it’s in educating the consumer and providing high quality information. You go from getting just the people who are sold and ready to buy immediately, to now getting the sales from the people who are at the researching phase and decide to eventually buy. Since those people now trust you (they learned about a product from you, bought it, and loved it), you can now influence their future purchasing decisions…which is where you have potential for serious, serious growth and can begin to turn your community into a quasi social network.

Detailed Image / Detail University is at this point now. We know we can get there - we know all of these industries as well as detailing - it’s just a matter of time.

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

A few weeks back Mike ordered a bunch of Tastefully Driven promo cards, which essentially say “Tastefully Driven: 4.1.08″.  We’ve sent batches to friends around the country, handed them out to our friends and family around here, and even just (like 20 minutes ago) slipped one into our bill at TGI Fridays.  However, despite our best efforts we still have a crapload of these things sitting around.

After becoming frustrated with my master plan of building a huge card tower, Mike and I decided to turn one of the walls in the warehouse into a big “TD” with the cards….pretty cool huh?

I also got off what I thought was a solid pre-launch post about the most and least Tastefully Driven athletes.  George and Mike are working on several more similar posts for the next few days.  My gut (and experience) tells me that if we do 20 similar posts that one of them will get “the digg effect” and bring in a wave of traffic.  If it does, we’ll be a step ahead of the game.  If it doesn’t, we’ll still be getting the site indexed and getting some attention prior to launch.

I’ll post a little more in the coming days about our overall launch strategy.  It is most definitely a challenge balancing programming, content development, quality control testing,  pre-launch marketing, prep for regular marketing, placing initial inventory orders, etc.  As of now we’re a little more tight on time than I’d like, but overall we’re in pretty good shape for everything to come together on time.

OK, so it’s happening about 2 weeks later than I had hoped, but I’m finally at the point where I can spend an hour or two a day on some pre-launch hype for Tastefully Driven - the goal obviously being to collect as many email addresses as possible on our splash page.  I don’t have a set goal (yet), but having a list of 10,000 to start with can jumpstart a site a lot quicker than a list of  100 so it behooves us to get as many as we freaking can.

Today we did two things to get us off to a good start:  we started a pre-launch blog and we put banners/announcements on the array of Pure Adapt sites.

Both are for fairly obvious reasons:

A pre-launch blog will give us a head start on getting the site indexed, getting some links, and getting people subscribed to the RSS feed (which will be transfered to the “real” blog upon launch).  The blog is located at AreYou.TastefullyDriven.com.  Today I posted our definition of what it means to be “Tastefully Driven”, and we’ll spend the next few weeks profiling people, places, and products that are (and aren’t) “Tastefully Driven”.  Hopefully one of the posts will catch the social bookmarking wave and bring in an influx of traffic and sign-ups.

As far as the ads and announcements on our existing sites - well, it just seems obvious to use our free ad space before purchasing any other ads.  We also have communities built in to each site that trust us, and therefore are somewhat interested in any new site we launch.  Plus TD will include portions of sports, music, business, etc so it’s not like each site doesn’t have some tie in to it.  Each site is different, but for most we just put banners up.  On SportsLizard I made a blog announcement, and on Music-Alerts I put a text-link in the RSS feed:

Should be interesting to see how much all of this helps.  I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes…and on all of the other semi-creative marketing we have planned

Now that I’ve got all of the client stuff out of my system, I want to “officially” announce our upcoming site Tastefully Driven.  Here’s how it came about:

• Towards the end of 2007 we realized that our Detailed Image shopping cart was outperforming our expectations and started brainstorming other types of sites where we could ‘copy’ the cart and get similar results, the most obvious being a re-branding of many of the cleaning supplies on DI as home electronics care products.
• Then we had a handful of other site ideas before that one ‘ah ha’ moment:  all of our ideas all focused around high quality products that appeal to upper-middle class males in the 25-40 age group.  Why not start a whole site around premium male products - be it health and fitness, electronics care, cologne, or just about anything else you could think of.  The site would have several different “stores” within it, but would all be seamlessly tied together into the same shopping cart.
• In addition to the obvious SEO benefit of keeping everything in one place, we’d only be maintaining one site instead of many.  We’d also - and this is the big kicker - be able to build a community around the shopping cart because of the commonality among product lines.  If you’re into nice cars, you’re probably into good wine and nice clothes, for example.
• We had previously purchased the domain TastefullyDriven.com to use for a future car forum, but fell in love with it because in our minds it signifies someone who is “intrinsically driven by tasteful products”.

So sometime around the beginning of December we made the decision that Tastefully Driven would be our future.  Since incorporating Pure Adapt Inc in December of 2006, we’ve really only focused on growing existing sites like DI and SportsLizard and have yet to do one project from scratch as a team.  This is finally that project, and above all else we need the camaraderie that comes with doing something all together.

From a programming standpoint, Mike and I have been working ridiculous hours the past few months to turn this cart into something that’s measurably superior to DI…or any shopping cart short of Amazon or Buy.com that I’ve experienced.  We’re probably 90% done with the design and development of the site, which is cool because we’re not launching until 4/1 and we’ll actually have time to pre-market the splash page and acquire email addresses (something I’ve never had the luxury of doing before).

At the earliest we’ll be moving into our warehouse next weekend, which leaves about a month and a half to contact vendors, get approved for accounts with them, receive our first orders, input the items into the database, photo them, and put up content around them on the site.  So while programatically we’re waaaay ahead, this side of it is going to be tight.  George is up to his neck in warehouse-related stuff right now, so hopefully once that’s settled he’ll be able to dig in and take care of this before it becomes a real issue.  And I suppose that this is not too big of a problem to have considering all of the other potential issues out there.

So if you get a chance, head over to TastefullyDriven.com and sign up on the splash page.  We’ll be giving out $100 gift certificates randomly to people who sign up (the number is not yet determined….if we get 1,000 emails we’ll do a few, but if we get 10,000 we might do 10 or 20).

Also, special thanks to Scott Middleton who emailed me a correction to the layout on the splash page that he saw in his browser.  Clearly we threw that up quickly and didn’t give it the QC attention we normally give a page.  It’s all fixed now