Great insights here. I think there is a common pattern - one that I've experienced as well. Growing a new piece of technology with no customers to an evolved product that scales and has a growing engineering team behind it introduces lots of new issues that have to be dealt with. I'm not necessarily a process freak, but from my experience, having a few solid processes really goes a long way and should be put in place early. Especially revolving around communication of issues and development priorities. When there's a major fire or conflict on teams, there's a big microscope that should be looked through in order to add improvements that will help a company get past future stages of growth more smoothly.
This news comes just hours after I finished installing Gitorious on my company's own server. I'm glad I went through that trouble because $5k is crazy for a startup to pay for a self-hosted git web interface.
Heck, I'll install your own Gitorious on Rackspace Cloud Server for $99 for anyone who requests. Host your own code.
I was literally unboxing my Arduino Uno when I refreshed the page and saw this link. Nice to read how the Arduino got started and where it comes from, because I really didn't expect to see a 'Made in Italy' sticker that holds the packaging together. Time to start building some robots....
Kudos for starting the path to self discovery, aka programming. However, it is tough to go from zero coding experience to being able to pick projects that are fulfilling and worth the money earned.
I would study the following day and night for 60 days straight if I were you:
- HTML (so you can come up with and create designs - even if very basic)
- PHP (it is widely available, has a large market, you can prototype other people's ideas easily with it, gives you a decent base to go to other languages with)
- CSS (so your designs are at least more efficient by separating presentation from content)
- JavaScript (read: jQuery)
Spend a solid two weeks of doing html/css/js, then add PHP into the mix. Add in MySQL after another couple of weeks and then iterate on the whole system for another month. That will give you the confidence to seek out the work that will be worth your time (after 2-3 months of really hard work).
Another point: Knowing how to program is a different job than getting side work/contracts and dealing with customers. Find someone to partner with you if you can - maybe give then 25% or 33% if they are dedicated to helping you manage customer relationships. Dealing with customers takes a lot of time away from actually programming and leads to burning out sooner if you are doing it all.
Lastly, network as much as you can. If you do so effectively, you will meet some people who want to hire you for your skills later down the line (from a few months to 6 months or more away) so its best to get them in the pipeline early and follow up every once in a while.
Sell them directly through a Facebook Fan page. I'm cofounder of http://infusedindustries.com - we launched a store for Jelly Belly, and you wouldn't believe the number of jellybeans we sold by discounting the store by 25% for several hours. Feelgoodz would get money directly - not us. Could potentially sell thousands of flip flops through that channel by August 18 by marking it down slightly. Email me brian at infusedindustries.com
You could definitely increase conversion rate by making the overall design better. Perhaps try out something like http://www.yola.com
In a startup like yours, its pretty easy to spend all your time working on the product and skimping on the marketing web page. While your layout/design isn't bad, it can certainly be improved by 120%. Save yourself some time and offload that to someone else who is a better designer. Just my friendly opinion.
If you are great at javascript and php and want to get in on the ground-level of http://infusedindustries.com, then send me an email. Email me brian (at) infusedindustries (dot) com. We're currently looking for someone like you (or who you say you are!)
Cool. Definitely promote your top-product on the front page so people can add to cart with one click instead of having to navigate over to the store page. If you do want to use a content management system for a storefront, perhaps check out Ubertcart and the fusion theme (is what I think I used). You can see a test site I created at http://c2c.infusedindustries.com - but if you haven't used Drupal before, it can be a timesink to learn.
its where you build something that can make you money after setting it up, with little or no extra work involved. if more work is involved, it can be done by hiring someone cheaply (in another country more-than-likely) so you can focus your time on things you would rather do, while having the muse continue to work for you.
Definitely agree that it doesn't look like a shop. Checkout my friends dropshipped-powered site http://seriouslyscuba.com - also inspired by Tim Ferriss' muse concept. If I were you I would quickly move away from wp-commerce into a real e-commerce solution (seriouslyscuba is on shopify by the way, so I guess you'd have to justify spending money on their high fees to go that route). The design looks good overall, I guess to me, its just that wordpress doesn't make for a good e-commerce solution. I'd hide the Categories block, RSS links, 'Comments are closed' text, i.e. anything that makes it looks like a blog-converted-to-store. Good luck nonetheless.
Right on. Glad to see this post because the nexus of e-commerce and ads is a smart place to be in. I have been working on that problem with a partner for 6 months straight. We are launching soon for our first customer who is very well-known, and we have customer number 2 signed on (and lots of warm leads, too).
We are doing exactly this: building and selling "a 'turnkey' monetization mechanism and selling into publishers".
The next few weeks should be exciting and I would like to give you updates as things happen if you are interested. Our product info is at: http://palermo.infusedindustries.com