We went live last Monday! Well, sort of live. I didn't feel that the site was sufficiently tested so I hid the links for new users to sign up, and asked friends to test the site. They provided awesome feedback, both in terms of bugs and in terms of usability. Haven't really made it all the way on the usability stuff, but made big strides this week, to the point where I'm happy to report that we are now L-I-V-E. The training wheels are off. New users can sign up. Booya, as the Buddhists say.
I think the biggest lesson this week is: I really need to write a special technical blog post on Fedex integration. Much of my time this week was spent trying to get Fedex the company and Fedex the technology (mostly the company) to work with me. The folks at Fedex are great, but their processes are pretty typical for a big company, in that they don't quite work for the customer. Presumably those processes serve some other Sisyphean purpose. I felt like Napoleon invading Russia. At first I was all "hey, this isn't so bad", then I thought "ooh, that bit there was pretty hard, but I'm sure things will go well from here on out". Right now it's springtime after the Russian winter, and hopefully that analogy proves malapropos. Man, I am full of the big words today. Didn't get enough sleep last night.
Anyway, big week in other ways as well. Moved into the storage space (in pitch blackness ... power outage ... I can only assume that a murderer was hiding in the room and only didn't chainsaw me to death because I didn't turn on the lights). Bought approximately one carpload of supplies (boxes, bags, tape, bubble wrap, etc) and tools (custom-made stamp, product photography equipment, office furniture, scale, etc). Moved onto the next phase of design work for marketing and site refinement. Did a bunch of market research. Ahhhh! Starting to feel like a real company. It will more so when I get real revenue. ;)
For the checklist crowd, here's what went down:
- drove out to Lombard to pick up many hundreds of dollars worth of packaging materials from Go Packaging. Did so using a rented 16' Budget Rental truck. Great rates for businesses with those guys, if a smidge unreliable.
- Purchased a nice scale, tables, office chair, product photography equipment, stamps, and a sign for the processing location
- Got rejected by Fedex label certification. Worked with about half the web support team to try to fix it. Made little progress, but today things started looking up.
- Implemented better workflow for the sign-up process. That took surprisingly long, but I learned how to do things like this in rails better, and how to use the rails cache better.
- Finally got real insurance offers.
- Did a bunch of market research. Created lots of delicious spreadsheet data, with the help of Dan Kamerling.
- Fixed a bunch of bugs.
- Got a bunch of legal stuff resolved through my lawyer and through lawpivot.com.
- Submitted a post to crowdspring for some ad copy. So far little response. Anyone want to get paid a pile of money to develop an ad campaign for me for the El in Chicago?
- Implemented hoptoad.com for error alerts on the site. They are awesome.
- Now in the process of implementing a new pricing strategy for the site, and of finalizing improved fedex functionality. Next step: more marketing! And value-add functionality of course. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment