Movement on all fronts

This week was a successful week on many fronts. Here's what went down:

Design
As mentioned previously, I checked out themes from the likes of themeforest.com, and integrated one of them with the site. My goal was to do a full integration over last weekend, and I succeeded in that goal. When I reviewed the results with my chosen design firm they liked what they saw and understood my desire to shorten development time and reduce costs. They therefore trimmed site design from the budget, and are now focusing on logo design and the design of each individual page as it fits into the overall site design. Money saved: $2500. Booya. That's called lean development, folks.

The designers then turned around a series of logo designs. I was hoping that these would be spot on, but that was an unrealistic hope, and the plan next week is to work closely with the design team to narrow in on the design that will work best for the three principles I want to convey: secure, organized, accessible.

Development
When I started this week it was possible for people to sign up for the site and order boxes. As of today, when they order boxes the boxes immediately show up in their accounts (as "in transit" if the boxes are coming from us, and as "being prepared" if they are coming from the customer); administrators can see a list of all orders of any type; administrators can send boxes to customers and mark orders as complete; they can receive boxes from customers and update customer records; and -- and this is mosti important -- they can mass-upload images taken of items when boxes need to be inventoried. I cannot stress enough how much of a pain that last bit was -- it seems that when HTTP was designed, the idea of "mass file upload" was not included, and I know that operationally that is something I simply must have. The solution: Flash and Jquery, two things I know very little about! Fortunately, there are a lot of open source free solutions out there, and though they are complex and tricky to get working (and usually rely on versions of rails / whatever that I'm not using or which conflict with what I am doing), I managed to get a pretty sweet one fully integrated. That was a pain -- but it now works! Back end development is reaching the finish line! Beta testers, you will soon get an email from me asking to start testing!

Business
I have set up meetings with two potential partners next week -- an HR outsourcer (who can help me connect with people doing temporary moves for work) and a college-oriented storage company (for whom I can be a channel, and whose space I'd love to share).

The State of Illinois finally processed my "doing business in Illinois" paperwork. They haven't returned it yet, but the Secretary of State now shows the company as a bonafide business in Illinois. About time!

As a result of the above, I set up a corporate bank account and credit card, and lent the company a bunch of operating capital. Wrote my first business check this week!

While working at The Farley Incubator this week I met Ian, a founder of Big Red Shipping and Storage. Our conversation was most interesting, and I look forward to talking with him more in the future.

While doing all this work this week it really hit me that I need to start the search for a COO. Let it be known that I am looking for a business partner!

I also met with a former professor of mine, Kelly Goldsmith. She was immensely helpful in giving me ideas about potential other partners, ways of segmenting the market, and ways of collecting information about the market (long story short -- she doesn't think there's a ton of secondary information out there, and we agreed that a survey would be a good way of learning more about the market).

I checked out some potential warehouse space. It's not bad, but I need to talk to my insurance company about liability insurance in that place.

Speaking of which, I have asked several insurance brokers to get me quotes from several companies on both liability coverage and supplemental coverage for clients if they want it. Hopefully more on that soon!