Except one thread that did work.

My partners and I are all fans of the sports show Around the Horn. One of the best parts of ATH is that the eccentric panelist Woody Paige always has a blackboard behind him with a random quote on it (see below). My favorite is probably “Stable relationships are for horses”, although they are almost all great. He changes it every segment (2-3 times per show depending on when he is “eliminated”). He’s been a regular on the show since it began in 2002 and has had more than 500 appearances. That’s a lot of quotes!

So we started a thread to track them back in early 2008. We stopped contributing a while back, but other people kept it going. Not every day, but here and there people would contribute new quotes.

Fast forward to last Tuesday. Tastefully Driven had a 20% off sale that did pretty good during the holidays because it made it’s way across a few forums. I decided to check the stats. Which was when I realized just how popular our thread was. It was the most viewed page on the site in December, 2x more than the home page. We ranked top 5 in Google for many Woody Paige related terms, including #1 for “Woody Paige Blackboard Quotes” – ahead of Wikipedia, Woody’s official site, and IMDB:

Given that interesting bit of information, we decided to create a site dedicated to Woody Paige’s blackboard quotes. We don’t expect too much to come of it, but we figured that it would be way better than an old thread on an inactive forum.  My guess was that many people browsed the forum thread, read all of the quotes (average time on page is just over 3 minutes), and then never came back because it wasn’t updated and we require you to be a TD registered user to post on the forum.

The benefits of a dedicated site:

• Better design and organization of the content.
• An easy form for people to submit quotes.  The show is on every weekday so we hope that submissions will be pretty regular.
• Easy for people to subscribe to updates via email, Twitter, and RSS.
• Each quote will get indexed and hopefully suck in some more traffic.
• Maybe we’ll make a few bucks with AdSense (I’m talking like $100/month at most).

And if we get lucky it could be one of those viral blog sites that catches on, sort of like Autocompleteme or People of Walmart.

So on Tuesday Mike and I came up with a list of what we needed to do to get the site launched.  Over the past few days we split up the work and spent a few hours here and there to get the site launched. 

Here’s our to-do list for this mini-project:

• Pick out a domain
• Set up hosting on our server
• Install WordPress
• Install plugin to allow users to submit posts (pending our approval)
• Design template
• Write site copy
• SEO
  • Enable rewritten URLs
  • Put canonical redirect in place
  • Install sitemaps plugin and submit to Google Sitemaps
• Configure AdSense
• Set up Google Analytics
• Create Twitter account
• Feedburner
  • Burn Feed
  • Enable email subscriptions
  • Auto-post to Twitter
• Copy all posts from thread into system
• Test on all browsers
• 301 redirect old thread on Tastefully Driven (both pages)
• Adam & Mike – blog posts, Twitter, Facebook
• Add to Pure Adapt site
• Submit to StumbleUpon
• Test Analytics and AdSense to ensure tracking correctly

Friday night while I was watching college football WoodyPaigeQuotes.com was born:

All in all, a pretty quick, fun project that will be fun to keep going (I certainly plan on adding new quotes whenever I watch).

My business partner Mike just released a nifty little web app called My Wish List.

I think most people have used “wish lists” in some capacity on an e-commerce site.  I know I use the Amazon wish list to help me keep track of books I want to read.   There are also these large super wishlist sites like WishList.com where you can organize anything you shop for.  But nothing (that I know of) where you can just create a simple list, get a permanent URL for your wish, and share it with people.

So that’s what Mike created.  It’s dead simple to use.  No registration or anything like that.  Just create a list, get a link, and share it.  Below is a screenshot of my first list with the option to share the list via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

You’ll notice that the eBay ads are related to the items on the list.  The eBay and Amazon links are also affiliate links so there’s some potential to make a little money.

The most interesting thing about this site is that it’s the type of thing that could get caught in a “viral loop”.  That is, it grows itself by nature because the primary function is to share the site with other people, who will then (in theory) create a list themselves and share it with more people. Rinse and repeat.

We have a simple marketing plan to do a few quick things to try to get the word out.  This is a great little side project because if it does make us even a little money there is a lot of room for expansion.

Great work Mike!

On the back side of our office there’s this little storage area.  I started experimenting with shooting pucks towards the goal from behind the storage area.  With all of the stuff in the way of the goal it’s become quite a challenge.  We shoot from the red x in the picture below:

Here’s the view from behind:

It looks easier than it is.  We don’t allow lame little lob shots over the top – you’ve got to drill it through.  We’ve only been playing for a week or two, but no one has hit the target from back here.  We can get it in the goal pretty routinely (1 in 5 shots maybe) but the target is real hard to hit.  You need to keep the puck low enough to hit the target, but high enough to clear the boxes and wide enough to miss the bins. Even if you get that part right, there’s the paper towels, the push cart, the vacuum, and the oil stick that get in the way:

We’ve each hit the screws just above the target a few times, but never low enough to hit it directly.  When we do get it in the goal low enough, it’s generally to the left by a few inches.  Very frustrating, but very fun.   This is so much fun that over the past few weeks I’ve found myself staying late on Friday afternoons to shoot pucks with Greg.

Here’s the thing:  we’re not afraid to create our own culture.  We like to work hard and focus, but we also like to play around and act like we’re 12 sometimes.  That’s why we play hockey, listen to 90′s rap music while packing orders, and fly around on razor scooters that aren’t supposed to hold more than 143 lbs:

I’ve heard of companies that provide free alcoholic drinks for their employees.  It’s not a big deal for them to have a few beers while on the job.  Or there’s Zappos, who holds interviews over vodka shots.  It’s great if that works for them, but we’d never ever allow that.  It’s not us.

Our company culture has become a reflection of our personalities.  If you allow that to naturally happen it will shine through in everything you do – from your relationships with vendors, to customer service, to your relationships with your employees.  People will see through you if you aren’t genuine.  You’ll also probably be less happy.  It would be really easy for a company that’s growing as fast as we are to start changing.  To start becoming “too good” for certain things.  We can justify not doing just about anything in the name of “it’s not worth my time”.  But we genuinely like what we do, and we genuinely care so we keep working hard, we keep valuing every customer, we keep going out to dinners on the company’s dime to celebrate, and we’ll continue to shoot pucks at our shipping dock.

Yet those things are easily lost when all you can think about is next months sales or that new feature. After a not so good January, I really needed to trim my life back a bit and focus on getting our new e-commerce platform done. I did, we got it up on 5/1, and it’s since paid off more than we imagined it would. We’ve had a few huge months where we’re hitting revenue and profitability numbers that I could only dream of in January. Remember that huge Black Friday we had? That’s now a normal weekend. It’s nuts. We’ve turned a corner in the sense that we’ve become very self-sustainable. If things keep up like this we shouldn’t have any troubles meeting our financial goals for the rest of the year: have a profitable year, pay ourselves a bit more, expand to a few new product lines, and hire a few part-time warehouse workers (we have our first starting on Monday).

For the Biz

So what’s next? For every person and every company, the answer would be different. For us it starts with our personal goals, which pretty much all align, and then trickles down to the business. We don’t want to have 100 employees. We don’t want outside investors. We don’t want a 500,000 sq-ft warehouse, nor do we want to run fifty e-commerce sites. Other people would probably take our company in that direction. I think it could be done. But it isn’t the type of company we want.

We like not having set hours. We like emphasizing productivity over hours put in. We like going to the warehouse 2-3 days/week from 9 -3. We like working from home on the other days. We like having the flexibility to work more or less if we want to or need to. We like being able to do whatever we think is “right” for our customers. We like not having to deal with the HR issues that inevitably come along with having a lot of employees. Basically, we like owning all of our company so that we can make all of the decisions. To me, that’s what makes running a business fun. We can do whatever WE want. If we had a bunch of investors to answer to, it would be like a job to me.

We’ve decided that for the time being our main focus needs to stay with Detailed Image…probably through 2010. We went through our list of planned projects the other day. There is easily 1 year+ worth of work there, but each task is easily identifiable as something that will make us more money, save us more time, or eliminate common problems/mistakes.  In addition, with a few part time employees, we should be able to knock each of us down to 2 warehouse days/week and get rid of most of the grunt work that is tiring and eats up time. We’re able to make those improvement claims with relative certainty because we’ve been in business for a few years now.  We have data, we know our customers, and we (think) we know the direction that the web is going.  DI is becoming a much more mature business.  I’d imagine that by the end of 2011 we’ll be close to being the largest US based site in our niche, which in and of itself is a nice business, but not something that we’ll be satisfied with.

The other limiting factors are cash flow and warehouse space – we can’t just grow in e-commerce with reckless abandon because we don’t have the credit available or space available to risk stocking $30k worth or products that don’t move.  Not to mention the other time and work involved in another e-commerce venture.  At this point, I’d imagine that non-DI e-commerce expansion isn’t going to happen anytime soon (unless it’s done with a dropshipping model, which we *may* do on Tastefully Driven because of how much organic search traffic it pulls in).

Then the next logical question is:  is Pure Adapt just Detailed Image?  And if so, what happens when you do hit that wall in 2010 or 2011 or 2012?  On the e-commerce side, we’ll have to start up again on the fitness and poker sites that we had planned, both of which have had success on TD and Amazon for us.  But as I mentioned above, e-commerce expansion is tough and it might still be in a year or two.

To me, the key is SportsLizard.  Not SportsLizard per se, but the SportsLizard model. I spend about 1 hour per month answering emails and maintaining the site.  We spend $0 marketing it.  We make money from eBay ads and Price Guide subscriptions (a web app I developed).  It’s not enough to live off of, but it would be if you had a few SportsLizard’s.  That’s exactly what I want to do – between Mike and I, develop a few more SportsLizard’s in the next year.  Z.ips.ME doesn’t really count, but it might surprise me and make us a few dollars here and there.  First things first, we want to expand Hotteeez, which despite not being updated in a year makes us pretty decent money.  With a few new well-planned shirts each month, it could easily become a SportsLizard by the end of the year.  Beyond that, we have two other planned projects that I think could do the same.  Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but over time some of them will hit.  And hopefully one or two is even bigger than SL. If not, there’s really no loss for us and we can just try some more until something works. How fun is that?

For Myself

On a more personal level, I couldn’t be happier with the first half of ’09.  However, since I spent every waking hour through May working on getting the site up, I lost a little of the work/life “balance” that I had achieved prior.  I followed the site up by moving, so I’m only just now getting the opportunity to get back to a spot like I outlined in my productive output post.  I’m only checking email twice per day on weekdays, at 7 AM and 5 PM, and then once per day on the weekends.  Since I’ve got everything filtered pretty well, my inbox is usually near empty when I open it.

I’m not really setting a time constraint on my working “hours”, but I just want to make sure that I spend a little more time with my friends, family, and girlfriend.  In particular, there are a handful of people that I just haven’t had time for the past six months that I want to make sure I get back in touch with.  An hour phone call or a night of drinks needs to be OK now, whereas in March it wasn’t unfortunately. It sucks, but there’s always a trade off. If you want to go balls out on a project something is going to suffer.

I LOVE the fact that with a few part-time workers I can get my warehouse days down to 2/week and eliminate things like stocking shelves and breaking down boxes. At this point, all of our time is much more valuable than that. The more freedom I have, the more driven I am, the more productive I am, and the happier I am. I feel like we’re really really close to hitting that point where my job is almost “perfect”, which is exciting. Instead of focusing on getting to that point, I can focus on achieving some higher level business and personal goals.

Hobbies are a different story.  I realized something these past few months – my favorite hobbies are running my blog (and all of the emails and meetups that result from it) and working on web-apps. Which is great, because both are beneficial to our business.  I just don’t really have the desire right now to watch movies or play video games or read fiction books or make a custom.  I see so much opportunity out there and I want to “throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks”.  Having the steadiness of DI allows me to just do whatever I want when it comes to the side projects without much financial risk.  The only real non work related hobby (if you call it that) I still have is working out.  I still am on my regular gym schedule and I enjoy going for regular hikes with my girlfriend.  That won’t change.  I’m constantly challenging myself to be in better shape and to eat better.  But the other stuff really does nothing for me anymore.

For Everyone

I realize that for a lot of people the lifestyle that I’m creating for myself and that we’re creating for our business would not be desired. Or maybe more appropriately, not ideal. That’s OK, as long as you recognize what is important to you. I value time and freedom over money. I didn’t leave my job to make more money. I was making more than enough at age 23. I could have made that salary with a 3% bonus each year and been monetarily satisfied. It was everything else that I wasn’t happy with – the purpose behind the work I was doing, the lack of freedom at a traditional 9 -5, and the bureaucracy of a system that prevented people from doing their best. For you, the goals might be different. If you want to solve the energy crisis or buy the New York Yankees, you probably won’t be satisfied with a business as small as ours.

This past week has been the most fun I’ve ever had running a business.  Part of it is seeing the positive results of what we’ve done.  We’ve accomplished everything as a team, and accomplishments are always better when you have people to share them with…especially when you all went through the ups and downs together.  Even more so though, I think it’s the infinite potential that I see now, both for DI and other upcoming projects.  It’s just so much fun waking up every day.  I find myself still working long hours, even though I could dial it down a bit.  Not sure how long it’ll last, but for now all I really feel like doing all day long is growing our company.  It doesn’t seem like work at all, which is a good feeling to have.  I think it’s common for the first few months, but to feel like this a few years into it is awesome.

I’ve already been able to add a bunch of minor features to DI (mostly on the back end), I’m starting to start doing some non-programming (i.e. marketing) projects, I’m working on redesigning and revamping my blog, and I’m starting to work on some side projects.  And I see the light at the end of the tunnel to start using our e-commerce platform on other sites, which is when it will really shine.   In particular, the poker and fitness sections of Tastefully Driven have really done well.  We have solid customer bases already in both, and we have relationships with A+ vendors, so in the next year or two we’re really going to try to establish ourselves in those industries.  The idea of building a web app in conjunction with an e-commerce store really intrigues me as a potentially great business idea  – bring users in with the web app, and have the store along side of it instead of ads or premium accounts.  Both fitness and poker have huge unmet needs when it comes to web apps.   All of these sites will tie back into one product management/inventory system, and all will show on Tastefully Driven and be sold on Amazon under the TD name (as we do with all of our products now), which is when TD could really explode.  There’s a much bigger vision here than just detailing, and the massive potential that comes with that just excites the hell out of me.

Last night we went to dinner at a “trendy” wine bar in Albany.  It was possibly the best meal I’ve ever had in my life.  The whole thing took almost four hours.  It wasn’t just dinner, it was an experience, and for us it was a celebration.  The wine was great and the food was great.  The place knew just how long to wait between the first bottle of wine and the appetizers, the appetizers and the entree, and the entree and dessert.  We never felt rushed.  We just sat back and had a great time.  Other than a toast in the beginning, business wasn’t even a topic of conversation.

For me, it’s rare that I’ll spend that long doing anything.  It’s all about being efficient and squeezing the most out of every day, and most of the time that’s a good thing.  But man, I sure do love kicking back from time to time and just appreciating the hard work and success that’s come our way.

One of the things I always notice entrepreneurs mention in retrospect is that they wish they took more time to enjoy the ride.  I think there’s an underlying assumption that everything will be better/easier for the business owner as times goes on.  To some extent that’s true, but mostly you just have a new set of problems as you start to hire employees and expand.  Unless you sell off for millions, there’s never that one moment where everything is “perfect”.  If you don’t celebrate along the way, there’s a chance that you never will.

I’m glad that we have nights like last night where we do take a step back and admire where we’re at.  Furthermore, I’m glad that the company picks up the tab.  It shows that we view these nights as good investments of company time and money.  What fun is anything in life if you can’t enjoy what you’ve accomplished?

After my subsequent post about how we saved $1k in FedEx charges with the Plum, AMEX contacted us and asked if they could feature the content of the post in their new online marketing campaign.  We didn’t know exactly what to expect, but per Mike’s post earlier today it appears as if they used a quote from that first post on their Plum card website:

Pretty cool.  Thanks AMEX!

Now, if we could just be featured in a commercial…

• We did it in a month that wasn’t during the holidays or the peak auto detailing season.
• We were able to keep up with inventory management and warehouse work, which bodes well for growth without the need for a ton of employees.
• We did it without our new shopping cart.  The programming is basically done, but with testing and text revisions and whatnot we’re looking like May 1 for the launch.  It definitely meets my goal of being a ten-fold improvement of what we currently have up there.  Everything is built to improve the user experience and make shopping easier, which should increase conversion rates and average order value, giving us another boost.
• We did it in the first month after taking on several new forum sponsorships.  While those certainly account for some of the growth, George and Greg are very adamant that it takes 3-6 months to establish a presence and good track record to begin seeing the full impact.
• In short, we’re far from reaching our potential, which is where I always want to be during periods of huge growth.

A few random thoughts that come to mind from all of this:

• I don’t really know what “success” is as a business, but I think we’re getting close to how I define success…if we’re not already there.  We’re able to make a good living running a profitable and exciting business.  Can’t really ask for more than that.
• There’s definitely less pressure when you become more cash-flow stable like we are.  Sure, there are different pressures, but there’s nothing worse than waking up every day and wondering if your company is ever going to make any money or if you just totally suck at business and were a total idiot for quitting your job.  Planning how to scale is way less stressful than worrying about how to pay the bills.
• I like how we’ve been on the offensive with everything.  From the outside looking in, it seems like our competitors are getting defensive. With the new e-commerce platform and subsequent features on the horizon, I think we can keep them reeling.
• I like how we’ve almost solely focused on our biggest money-maker, Detailed Image, although I’m looking forward to getting back to more of the 70/20/10 schedule at some point this year.  SportsLizard, Tastefully Driven, and Hotteeez (and Music-Alerts a little bit) all make us some nice revenue without doing any marketing at all.  It’ll be nice to work on those a bit and also launch some new sites.  I’m so much better at this development stuff than I was a few years ago, Mike is so much better at design, and we’re so much better at web business in general, that I think we have a few kickass web-apps up our sleeve.  In particular, some web-apps molded together with e-commerce sites, something I’ve really been wanting to experiment with for a while.  Plus a few other types of revenue models that will either work or totally not work. We’ll see.
• I’ve had a pestering cold all week, which has sort of been a blessing in disguise.  No one wants to be around me, so I haven’t had anything to do but work.  I’ve been able to get a lot more done than I probably would have otherwise.  Will be nice to get out of my apartment over the weekend though

We’ve set up a culture of constant improvement, and because of that we expect a lot out of ourselves.  Like any business owner, we see all sorts of opportunities that we’re leaving on the table because we haven’t had the time or money to get to them yet.  Everyone is trying to do their jobs to the absolute best of their ability and squeeze the absolute most out of every part of the business that they have their hands in.

In doing so, we’ve set a standard of fast growth that we do not want to slow.  However, it all sort of came to a head this week.  We had a really really good February, one of our best months ever.  When you factor in that it’s a short month and that it is most definitely not our peak season (not a lot of people washing their cars in a large part of the US in February), it may have been our overall best month as a company.

We have no reason to think that this Spring and Summer will not continue to be our best months as a company.  But with that comes a lot more day to day work for everyone.  Customer service, packing/shipping, and inventory all become very time consuming.  Which is fine, except for that we also have a huge ’09 goal to get our new site up and Greg and George have identified some more great forum marketing opportunities.  Oh, and added marketing expenses and inventory costs require some more capital to work with than what we have…at least to do it comfortably.

We made a few key decisions this week to alleviate the stress and focus on what’s going to set us up for the best ’09:

1. We decided to launch the new site ASAP, probably within 3-4 weeks.  This was something I pushed for.  What we already have completed is infinitely better than what is currently up, so why not just roll that out and add the rest of the features throughout the year?  It’s probably a better approach anyway, and this way we free up Greg and George to hammer their new and existing forums in the Spring, the time of the year when the forums bring us in all of Detailed Image’s new customers that (hopefully) become lifers.
2. We received our personal and corporate tax returns on Thursday, and on that same day we applied to extend our line of credit with our bank.  They estimate that we can get an extra $50k on our line based upon our ’08 growth.  That cushion really helps George with the accounting.  Increased sales mean that Greg needs to place larger and larger orders with our vendors, so we really need the ability to spend $10k – $20k on any given order without having to move money around to do it. Obviously we turn all of that inventory around at a profit, but we still need a cushion to do so.
3. We decided to pick up 7 new forum sponsorships for DI. The ROI is just too high not too.  Getting the new site up is key so that we can switch focus to establishing our presence on those forums prior to the big buying time for detailers.
4. We changed our warehouse schedule around.  For the next few weeks, I will not go in very much so that I have plenty of programming time.  After that, I’ll go in almost every day to pack orders so that Greg and George can adequately handle all of the increased forum marketing and customer service during our busy time.

This was one of those weeks where I really enjoy being part of a team.  Stressful situations are a lot harder to deal with alone.  Suddenly we change a few things and shift a few responsibilities and everything becomes crystal clear.  If we have a few good months, we turn a corner where we can get some employees in and start tackling the projects (both on DI and on TD and other sites) that we think are the real big money makers for us long term.

It makes you feel really good to see everyone willing to drop everything and meet when we have a potential concern.  It makes you feel even better when you see everyone sacrificing so that the team can succeed.   The past few days I’ve noticed a real energy with everyone while they are working together.  We sense that we have a chance to do something awesome these next few months, and we’re willing to do anything to get there.  That excitement and energy just motivates me more and makes me happy that I’m not going through all of this alone.