Adam McFarland

We’re looking to grow and expand the presence of the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog and we need some help to get us there. We don’t just want the blog to supplement the e-commerce portion of the site, we want it to be one of the main reasons that people visit the site. In a way, we’re treating it as a separate business - grow the scope and readership of the blog and there will naturally be a trickle-down effect in terms of traffic and links to the e-commerce portion of the site

The goal of the blog is to present a vast array of lifestyle tips, tutorials, videos, articles, and more ranging from sports to technology to fashion…and everything in between. As long as it fits our demographic - men in their twenties and thirties - we consider it fair game for the blog. I wrote a post entitled What You’ve Been Missing on the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog about a month ago if you’re looking to get a flavor for some of my favorite posts.

Overall I think we’re putting up very good posts, but we’d like to post more frequently and with a broader array of topics (we only know so many things well). That’s where you come in: we’re looking for writers to post on the blog. We’d like to start with a post or two, but are willing to make it a more regular thing if both parties feel like they are getting value out of it. If you have an area of expertise like sports, fitness, video games, audio, movies, music, poker, fashion, etc we’d love to have you do a post or series of posts for us.

What do you get out of it? For every post you’ll get a by-line at the beginning of the post (i.e. “By Adam McFarland of Pure Adapt”) with a link to your site and a longer about the author section at the end where you can write a paragraph about your business and link to your sites. You also get a wholesale account to purchase anything we have for sale on Tastefully Driven at a large discount. The discounts vary by item, but you can usually expect 30%+ discounts to start. If this becomes a more long-term thing we’ll increase the discounts. Even if you don’t buy a lot of stuff for yourself, the discounts are great for buying gifts (see our Father’s Day suggestions). I know that most of my friends and family can expect TD gifts for the indefinite future

The best part - even if you only do one post with us the links stay and you can keep your wholesale account. Drop me an email at adam [at] pureadapt [dot] com if you’re interested.

It’s easy to become jaded and begin to dislike your customers for asking you the same questions over and over again. In a way, who can blame you: 99% of the interactions with customers that most businesses have are repetitive and don’t do much to make you a better business owner. Then - every once in a while - someone comes along and gives you a simple idea that’s so obvious you kick yourself and say “duh, why wasn’t that already on our to-do list?”

The other day in the comments field of a Tastefully Driven order someone said: “please include a card saying ‘Happy Birthday - Love Patty and John’”. My first thought was we don’t do that. Then we had a conversation and realized that not only should we do it, we should make it a policy to allow our customers to do it for free with any order.

See, Detailed Image’s holiday season is the summer, when people obsessively care for their cars. In the past it hasn’t really been a traditional holiday-driven e-commerce site like most. As volume has picked up we’ve become increasingly aware of holiday-specific marketing. We also quickly realized that many of the products on Tastefully Driven are great gifts and that TD needs to capitalize on holiday orders to be successful. We were planning on starting with Father’s Day next month but hadn’t really talked strategy yet.

This order sparked that discussion, and it became pretty obvious that allowing people to include a custom card at no charge was a no-brainer decision. We figure that as long as we do a good job making our customers aware of this service they will take advantage of it on holidays/birthdays. I think we’ll also probably give them the option of having it shipped without the receipt in case they don’t want the recipient to know the price.

Yesterday morning I ran to CVS and picked up 10 blank cards for ~$6. We decided that was too expensive to pay for a card if we were going to offer this for free. After looking around online at blank cards, we decided it would be far cheaper to use our wholesale printing account where we can get 1,000 custom tent cards (3.5″ X 4″ with a fold in the middle) for $54.99, or ~5 cents a card. Below are the designs that we’re having printed up. We will then hand-write the message on the inside of the card…check that, Mike will hand-write the message because the rest of us write like a five year old.

One of the more challenging aspects for us with Tastefully Driven so far has been managing the Lifestyle Blog.  Being that it’s a group blog it can take on a different life than individual blogs like this one or the one I run over on SportsLizard.  Both of those blogs have my personality infused into them and I think one of the reasons that they “work” is because there is a consistent voice.  With TD, in one sense it’s tougher because you have different writing styles each post…but that same potential downside is also a huge upside:  you get posts from all four of us (plus one guest writer right now) and each person has their own unique writing style that contributes differently to the community.

Anyway, we’re averaging about a post a day and overall I think we’ve covered a broad array of lifestyle topics in the past month and done a pretty good job of it.  If you haven’t been subscribed, here are a few of my favorite posts:

• The No Excuses Workout - a 20 minute exercise routine that requires only a few feet of space and uses your bodyweight for resistance (video of yours truly performing the exercises included in the post).
• Audio, the Quest for Individual Nirvana - a series of posts by our guest author (and speaker expert) Robert Wayne about the extensive process of choosing a home stereo system.
• 2008 NFL Mock Draft - Greg did a fantastic job of breaking down each teams needs and potential picks for this weekend’s upcoming NFL draft.
• Whey Protein vs. Casein Protein - a post breaking down the differences between the fast-digesting whey protein and slower-digesting casein protein.
• How to Clean and Maintain Your Laptop - a short post and video of how to keep your laptop in pristine condition.
• How to Read 72% Faster in 20 Minutes - the results of a little speed reading experiment I did.
• RSS Explained:  the free technology that will change your life - everything you need to know about RSS.

Enjoy!

Since the launch of Tastefully Driven I’ve been intending to do a post similar to the DI Features and Lessons Learned. But since this project had less “unknowns” there weren’t a lot of “lessons learned” from the programming side. We knew what we needed to do, and it was more about execution than figuring out a way to get stuff to work.

Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of cool stuff on TD that isn’t completely obvious if you just scan the site for a few minutes. So below are my Top 10 favorite things about the site:

10. One Account
When you have a forum on an e-commerce site, I think it’s utterly important to tie the two accounts together. Instead of just throwing up a copy of vBulletin and making the colors match, we took a bare bones copy of bbPress and hacked it apart until we were able to mesh it seamlessly with the shopping cart. Right now the only benefits of this are that you log in once (at the top of any page…another cool feature) and that you have the same username/password across the board. In the future - assuming the forum becomes somewhat popular - this opens itself up to all sorts of interesting social-networking-type opportunities: for example, imagine getting product suggestions (via PM, email, or displayed inline on the site) based upon your previous purchases and the threads you participate on the forum. In 2-3 years this could be how we make that jump from large e-commerce site to “social shopping” platform. It’s a ways away, but we laid the foundation now.

9. Integrated Affiliate Program
A lot of affiliate programs make it ridiculously difficult to sign up and create links. Using a 3rd party affiliate software is something we didn’t want to do for Detailed Image and we brought the same system over to TD. Our payout rates are posted for everyone to see, and signing up is really easy: in your My Account page there is a message enticing people to sign up:

If you click ‘Apply Now’ you only have to choose a payment type, click ‘Apply’ and you’re good to go. We also make it super-simple to create links. In addition to a tutorial page, we now display an affiliate link on every single product page for that specific product when you’re logged in:

8. Forum Product Recommendations
When you are viewing a forum topic we display a banner ad of up to five related products at the top of the page. So if you’re in a discussion about caffeine it will “recommend” the caffeine capsules for sale in our nutritional supplements section. Again, this has large potential to be highly customized in the future based upon more than just the forum topic.

7. Personalized RSS Feeds
This is one of the few features that came with bbPress that we kept in tact. Every user can mark their favorite forum threads and then subscribe to a custom RSS feed to track the progress of the conversations they’re interested in.

6. Blog-Forum Sync
One of the other things I saw as absolutely necessary was merging the blog comments with the forum. Each time we post in WordPress, a corresponding thread is opened in the forum. If you click to comment on the post, you are redirected to the forum. Blog posts also pull the conversation from the forum and display under the post just like normal comments.

5. Upsells
Inline upsells offering a 5% discount was one of the most fruitful moves we made with Detailed Image. Average order value went through the roof. With TD we changed the page structure around and moved the upsells up “above the fold”. This may or may not be better - we’ll see.

4. Image Upload System
One of the most time consuming aspects of Detailed Image was uploading pictures. Each picture needed to be re-sized several times, watermarked, and then linked to in the database. For TD, I built an image upload system to automate all of this. After we’ve entered the product info in the database, we can log in to our admin section and upload a 500 x 500 png file and the script automatically re-sizes it, saves it, watermarks the images, and creates the appropriate database relationship. Big, big time saver.

3. Shipping System
Sure, this is basically the same as DI, but it’s the backbone of our company. This system is the single most efficient process we’ve put into place. If we didn’t have it we would have a full time employee processing and shipping orders right now. Each morning we click “Process Orders” in our admin section: the PDF receipts pop up to print and save, along with a text file to import to FedEx Ship Manager, which prints the shipping labels and gives us a text file back with tracking numbers, which we upload to auto-email each customer their tracking info. It’s a 2 minute process whether there are 5 orders or 25 orders (or 250 orders down the road).

2. Design
The design of the logo and the site was all Mike. I think he did an A+ job aesthetically conveying exactly the image that we want our customers to see….especially by differentiating each store with it’s own unique color scheme. The Games store, for example, has an orange color scheme but you still know that you are part of TD:

1. Commerce with Conscience
The icing on the cake for me: we’re donating 5% of our pre-tax profit from the site to local charities with our Commerce with Conscience program. Sure, 5% isn’t much now, but it will be as we grow. We’re choosing new charities quarterly, and the first charity - The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern NY - has been very supportive (I got an email back from the Executive Director, which is pretty cool). Along with participating in events like the Climbing UAlbany Event, we hope this program is how we funnel some of the money we pull in online from all over the country/world back to our community. I anticipate that as we grow we will spend more time personally working with each of our charities so that we give back more than our money - our time and expertise can do equal amounts of good. My favorite part about this program is that it ensures that no matter how big we grow we are giving a corresponding amount back to the community. Target does the exact same program and you see the immense social impact they are able to have because of it. If we can even have a fraction of the impact locally that they do nationally, it will be a huge success.

We’re also all rocking Commerce with Conscience wrist bands:

The bands are included with any order over $100 for free, or can be ordered for $4.99 on the site (with all of the profit from the wrist band being donated).

———

What’s next? I’m a firm believer in letting things settle for a bit before diving back into more development. Aside from a necessary focus on marketing, I’ve learned (the hard way) that you need to provide ample time for data/feedback to accrue before jumping to any conclusions about what you do and don’t need. By the end of 2009 I hope to have expanded the forum functionality with the aforementioned social-shopping stuff and to also integrate some AJAX into the cart in places it can really help (coupon codes and add/update cart come to mind), but other than that changes will be dictated by our users and the data.

All in all, we couldn’t be happier with the site we put out. We’re a small team and we did it on an extremely tight time schedule. I’m ridiculously excited to see where this cart takes us over the coming years.

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.

Nah, just kidding. We’re live. Check it out on TastefullyDriven.com.

If you signed up for the pre-launch email list, we’ll be sending you a coupon code by the end of the week. We’re just waiting for a few final products to trickle in and are holding off on our big marketing efforts until everything is in and photoed.

We launched with five “stores” and approximately 200 products (store #6 didn’t make the final cut and will be postponed for a few months, which is why the home page is imbalanced) .

I’ll talk more about what did and didn’t make the cut for launch, some of the features we added to the cart and why we focused on them, and how we’ll be marketing the site.

It’s been a hell of a team effort to get this bad boy live. Now that we’re in the warehouse every day I got to see all of my partners and how hard they’ve all busted ass and sold out to get this site to the point where we can launch it. I’ve never been part of a team like this where each individual is giving 100% effort and pulling for the exact same goal. Tastefully Driven has been one hell of an experience already, which only makes me more thrilled for what’s to come in the next few weeks, months, and years.

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

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

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

So what’s left to do:

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

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

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

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

I’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.