That all-important concern of turning a profit
“I think venture capital money is not only unneeded for most Web startups, but is actually harmful, because it removes you from that all-important concern of turning a profit.”
Jury Duty
This morning I went to jury duty. I filled out a survey and sat in a room for 5 hours. I mostly worked on my laptop.
I am still working on tweaking the application. Although there are other features I want to add, getting the “welcoming” of our first-time users right is my top priority. I originally built HighNoon for my friend’s custom t-shirt business, so we weren’t concerned about other people using it. But now I won’t be there to sit over the shoulder and help every new user get started.
Thinking about welcoming your users reminds me of Eames’s guest/host theory. It is our responsibility as product makers to host our users and make them feel welcome.
Charles and Ray argued that the guest/host relationship existed everywhere: in the tent of a nomadic herdsman, in the layout of a railroad station, in the way you are greeted by the circus. It also exists in design: how you make a chair or begin a film, and in all the subtle equations and gestures of welcoming in every day human existence. …it was the responsibility of the host to make sure the guest had as rich an experience as possible.
The Plan
I’ve got a rough plan for the first month of my experiment.
Week 1
Focus on polishing the app. There are some basic features I’ve wanted to implement but just haven’t had the time. (Like billing our customers, yowzah!)
Week 2, 3 & 4
All about visiting printers. I want to visit 10 screen printers a week.
Week 5
Evaluate what just happened. I will have visited 30 printers and started some online marketing. How did it go?
I intentionally didn’t set any sales goals, because I really have no idea what I’m doing. I think that visiting potential customers and really understanding their day-to-day will be great for the product, and spread the news that our product exists.
New project: The All-time Startup Experiement
For the past couple years I’ve been working as a web developer at a variety of startup companies, meanwhile I’ve been toiling away my own project part-time; a web application for screen printers. I’ve finally decided that in order for my business to go anywhere, it will require my full attention. So I’ve quit my job and started the experiment.
Inspiration:
Redesign Jail | Dream Project
I want to design the experience of a citizen being arrested and held in jail.
I will update as ideas and research flows.
Interface Tip # 1
If you have to put arrows and explanations in your interface because people keep doing it “wrong”; it’s probably not intuitive.
From FreshBooks. (Love the free account, but the UI needs some spring cleaning.)
The Painter of Paint
I was reading the Wikipedia article on Thomas Kinkade a couple days ago and it had an excerpt from a curator talking about the possibility that Kinkade’s self-promotion is actually his conceptual performance art.
Kinkade’s genius is in his capacity to identify and fulfill the needs and desires of his target audience — he cites his mother as a key influence and archetypal audience — and to couple this with savvy marketing… If Kinkade’s art is principally about ideas, and I think it is, it could be suggested that he is a Conceptual artist. All he would have to do to solidify this position would be to make an announcement that the beliefs he has expounded are just Duchampian posturing to achieve his successes. But this will never happen. Kinkade earnestly believes in his faith in God and his personal agenda as an artist.
If it is true, then I would have to say that daytona500print.com would be his Mona Lisa.
(Be sure to watch the video of Thom’s thoughts behind NASCAR® THUNDER, The 50th Running of the DAYTONA 500® on daytona500print.com)
Give a good idea to a mediocre team
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.
Busy Week
Anthillz
This week we rolled out a new feature, Trusted Colleagues and Testimonials. Basically it allows you to connect to other pros inside and outside the site and give a short mini-review of that person.
HighNoon
I whipped up a new interface and implemented it into our beta site. We also setup our teaser site where people can Join the Posse to learn about our updates and releases.
Backdrop Pro
I’ve been retooling and trimming the feature set down to the bare bones, focusing on what we do well. This is really going to help us simplify our marketing and messaging.
We Made Money
Daniel and I officially have a paying customer of Backdrop Pro.
This is very exciting and invigorating and more of a psychological win than a financial one (we’re giving them the super alpha discount).
Look for more updates, tweaks, and promotional stuff from us in the coming months.
