In music you can be just a singer, you can be an instrumentalist, or you can be a combination of both, usually referred to as the singer/songwriter. Often times the singer/songwriter is neither an amazing singer nor a particularly virtuosic instrumentalist but when it comes to writing a catchy song no one does it better than a singer/songwriter.
On the web I believe there’s a similar relationship between designer/developer. There are plenty of rockstar designers and plenty of rockstar developers who in their own right are amazing. However, I think the most interesting (and possibly most successful) is the designer/developer combo. They can take an idea, make it work well (and look good) and then take that and code it, making it completely functional, and immediately adjusting the design along the way if any roadblocks occur translating the design into a functional application/website/etc.
Of course, I say this as someone who does both so I might be a little bias. A person who is a designer/developer (I think) has a better ability to make decisions for themselves, streamline processes and simplify things.
This entry was written by , posted on March 19, 2010 at 2:38 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The short version? Awesome.
The longer version…
I’ve been a part of creating many things online over the last 12-15 years-brochureware sites, social-based sites, web-based applications, banner ads, email marketing, flash-based sites, even an internet hoax years ago that claimed the National Capital Commission here in Ottawa was going to turn the Rideau Canal (the self-proclaimed world’s longest skating rink) into the the world’s longest water slide. That said, what happened this past week I had never fully experienced.
When we launched Manpacks we got, what we thought was, a fair bit of attention considering we were starting from out of nowhere. There were maybe 2-300 tweets, some good Facebook referral traffic and a handful of unsolicited blog posts – we were incredibly excited and thought “wow, people are really digging this concept” (or in some cases really hating – but that’s an other, entertaining, story).
We’ve only really spent time on our marketing budget, not money. We’re just starting to experiment with banner advertising. All of the posts, tweets, comments, mentions, etc have been completely unsolicited. Now, that’s not to say we didn’t have a strategy or plan, just that the response was completely uncontrolled by us.
The week started on Sunday with a small write-up on Springwise, a site dedicated to emtrepreneurial ideas. There were some tweets as a result, a whole bunch of feedback and some orders. Monday was more of the same until sometime in the early evening when we discovered we were on Reddit, ending up at #4 in the funny section and as high as #31 on the main list. From there things just exploded, we’ve been mentioned on multiple morning radio shows in the US and Canada, on NPR (1:18 in the “Lightning Fill in the Blank” section), on ESPN Radio as well as interviewed by a major publication. There have now been 1000+ tweets about Manpacks on Twitter, our traffic is through the roof and orders are coming faster than we can fill them. There’s more still to this story but I can’t yet actually talk about everything-it’s been incredible.
Now, I’m not naive, I know it’s not going to last, but while it does I’m really enjoying having created something that solicits a response in people, whether it’s good or bad, funny or otherwise, and that some have believed enough in it to purchase subscriptions – at a rate much faster than we’d initially predicted would occur so early on.
So, to everyone that’s been part of making this an unreal, amazing, exhausting and incredible week (& my wife for putting up with me being maybe a little over-excited all week) – Thank You! I hope Manpacks lives up to your expectations, and if not call us on it, we want to know if we’re not!
Update: I also just did an interview with Rick (who is also now a Manpacks customer) at Hit Radio 100 in Guam!
This entry was written by , posted on March 14, 2010 at 4:52 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
We went out for Sushi last night (Ken, my wife Cheryl and I) and had a very interesting conversation. Conversation between us tends to veer towards problems and solutions (at their essence potential business ideas), this one was about creating a town based on current web-based app/small business thinking, in the process revitalizing the concept of community and what would makes a town interesting to live in (not bad for a dinner conversation!).
First we detailed the various things that are necessary for a town to remain interesting over time (in no particular order):
1. a grocery store & farmers market
2. a sushi restaurant
3. a dive bar (e.g. a run down corner bar that doesn’t necessarily serve your fav. beer, but it’s a still a great place to hang out)
4. a club-like bar (e.g. where you can buy cocktails)
5. at least 2 coffee shops
6. 2-3 different sized live venues (to stay entertained of course!)
7. wifi throughout (didn’t think we’d forget that did you?)
I’m sure there were a few more details, but you get the idea. Now the interesting part…how to populate the place (and keep the jerks out).
Stealing a little from Eric Ries‘ Minimum Viable Product strategy and a little from Google’s Gmail invitation rollout we decided that the best thing to do would be to only build the absolute necessities first. We’d seed the initial population by sending out beta invites to let’s say 1000 people. These first people would need to be self-starters, not necessarily entrepreneurs, but people that aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty even if “it’s not their job”. In my opinion they’d probably mostly be small business type people as these people would need to be very understanding of the need to adapt as necessary.
As these first people “signed-up” to move to town it would then be determined which of the necessary features (listed above or suggested by resident feedback) would be next on the list to be completed.
Based on use of this new community, and established trust) each of these people would 5-20 invites that they could use to invite more people to move to town (exact criteria would need to be worked out to base the # of invites on).
A few questions do remain though…would BetaTown be self-policing? What about a hospital? Can we unfriend citizens?
We’ll probably need some funding for this one (something I’ve never had before) and probably need to compile a list of ideal town candidates…ok, maybe we need to see a few other ideas through first before tackling this one!
This entry was written by , posted on February 15, 2010 at 10:03 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
To the 3 people that regularly read this…sorry, but it’s another post about my experiences launching and learning with Manpacks!
It’s been a whirlwind 2-3 weeks since launching manpacks.com, it managed to exceed my expections for a ‘launch’ and it’s also managed to reinforce a number of things that I’ve always believed and have long stated but didn’t have my own data to back it up until now.
The short version – I’m not retiring any time soon, nor will I be stopping work for my Hashbrown clients. Sales have been brisk, and topped our expectations for the first month for sure, but that doesn’t mean instant money or immediate returns, there’s a lot of hard work still to be done and I can’t wait to get to it (both Manpacks and Hashbrown and other stuff too!). Also, like anything worth doing there’s been a lot to learn, a lot of surprises, and best of all it’s been an incredibly fun ride so far and I don’t want to get off of it.
So, what were some of the things that have been reinforced to me?
Clean, simple and refined design along with clearly stated copy is an absolute must (I think we almost nailed this one out of the gates, but ended up making some changes and I’m really happy with what we’ve established and where we’re headed).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Outdated, doesn’t matter, and don’t waste your time (or money) on it except (and these are a must to ensure good search engine results) to write clear, concise copy that states exactly how you want the product/service to be understood and ensure your code is accessible and standard compliant – see? No black magic here. To share a statistic, in the first 2 weeks of launch our total traffic from search engines has hovered around 2%. Rather than spend time on SEO make sure you make your product/service interesting, and tell a story that makes others want to share (and a little humour doesn’t hurt either, but I don’t think it’s required).
One lesson we’re addressing is ensuring a good amount of detail about what you’re selling – prove to the people visiting your site that what you’re selling is worth their time and money. When we launched I created, what I thought were some fun, simple illustrations of each of our products that really fit the feel we were trying to establish. This simply wasn’t enough, yes we got sales that exceeded my expectations, but based on literally 100’s of bits of feedback we should’ve had more. We’re working on that and it’s at the top of our list now to be our next major addition to the service.
Another bit of information I kind of always knew but didn’t entirely have any proof to back it up was that just because you manage to get 10’s of thousands of eyeballs to look at your site doesn’t mean they’re going to buy. I would much prefer 100 unique visitors that are targeted and likely to buy than 10,000+ visitors that are un-targeted and “just curious”. That said, by generating that kind of traffic there is a trickle-down effect that results in a number of sales, but don’t expect to see any great conversion percentages! Also, for the most part people’s first visit seems to be curiosity and/or “research” and then they return to buy, so don’t get hung up on your bounce rate initially (do make changes if it is persistently high over time though!).
Also, remember, a website is not a printed page, nor is it a static screen – it can be, and should be, changed, adjusted, edited, etc. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve made some buttons bigger, changed their colors, changed the text on them, edited some call to actions all of which have almost immediately seen a change in conversion rates – time will tell if these were related or not, but at the amount that these changes cost (especially at launch when you’ve really got nothing to lose), experiment! You can always change back, for the most part people aren’t watching or 100% paying attention to you yet. Just make sure you learn something from any mistake you make!
I think that’s it for now, but I’m sure as this experiment continues I’ll learn a whole lot more and be surprised by what the data ends up telling us – and I can’t wait!
This entry was written by , posted on February 8, 2010 at 7:59 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
One of the most common “comments” about manpacks I’ve seen is that it seems like it’s awfully lazy. Which makes me wonder about these people as they clearly haven’t thought this statement through.
What about that remote control in your hands while you’re watching tv? You can’t walk 5ft to the tv to switch channels?
How about the software you’re reading this on? Why didn’t you just write our own program instead of using someone else’s?
How about something as simple as matches? What was wrong with banging two rocks together to get a spark and start a fire?
Now, I’m not trying to say that Manpacks ranks up there with the invention of the lighter, or toaster or even the remote control for that matter, but humans have a long history of making things that allow us to be a little lazier – I would go so far as to say it’s the very essence and mark of a successful invention.
To be fair, I’m not saying being lazy means not working your ass off, rather I’m saying you need to know when to be lazy so you can increase your efficiency with something else, there are plenty of books and blog posts that back this up (especially in the software development arena) – for me being lazy usually means i can complete more work (work isn’t a dirty word to me, I enjoy what I do – you should too…but that’s another blog post).
The very essence of processes like Getting Things Done (GTD) is to remove items from your brain so you can focus on the things that really require thought – one of those (to us) is to not have to think about buying certain things that we know we always need, are always wearing out, etc. Automating the little stuff to focus on the bigger stuff is a matter of efficiency (ya that’s probably another blog post too).
Manpacks is about being lazy, however, it’s about being lazy in one area so you can focus and be more efficient in another.
This entry was written by , posted on February 6, 2010 at 10:21 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
After an incredibly exciting weekend of watching manpacks.com go viral to a degree I thought I’d outline how we got to this point, and talk about our experience with one service in particular – chargify.com.
First, a bit of back story… Manpacks started out as a casual conversation via IM, talking over some problems/solutions that might make good business ideas — a common theme for us. I off-handedly said “We should sell underwear on a subscription the way web apps are.” After about 15 minutes of discussing the idea further (with the odd chuckle thrown in for good measure), Manpacks (and the concept of PaaS) was born. Neither of us had started up an e-commerce business on the web before (although with 12+ years of business-to-business experience we’re certainly not newcomers), and we still don’t know whether the idea is good from a business standpoint, but our mission was to build the best possible test for our hypothesis.
Fast forward a little bit, and Ken and I find ourselves at LessConf in Jacksonville, FL. One of the speakers was David Hauser from Grasshopper (Chargify’s parent company). Neither of us knew much about him, but at the end of the day we both agreed his presentation was the biggest surprise and the most inspiring. The next morning while on Twitter I noticed David was looking for a ride to the airport, so I sent him a tweet offering a ride. On the way, I asked him about getting a beta invite to Chargify, which he’d mentioned in his presentation.
Through various other commitments (e.g. projects that were currently paying the mortgage and car payment!) it took us a little longer than we intended to fine-tune and relaunch, but we finally did it on Jan 15th. One of the least time-consuming aspects of the relaunch was tying in recurring billing with Chargify. Having worked with a few APIs in the past, it was quick and straight-forward, and while dealing with a couple of hiccups I had I have to say the customer service was top-notch!
I can’t say enough good things about Chargify as a product or the people behind it—Lance (CEO of Chargify) is even a Manpacks customer, how great is that!? I’ve spoke with him on the phone a couple of times and exchanged many tweets and a few emails and I’d say he’s already on my list of favorite people to do business with! Lance, if you need anything do not hesitate to ask, I’ll be happy to help, whether it’s beta-testing, customer support for your Manpacks order, or anything else (except maybe washing your car)!
The one minor problem currently—they’re working on fixing this and all signs point to it not being a problem very soon—is that as a Canadian company I can’t use Chargify. Manpacks is a partnership between me and a US citizen (Ken) so we manage to get around this problem on that one. Authorize.net, the payment gateway you must use with Chargify, only supports US merchant accounts at this time. I’m taking another app into beta that I want to put through Chargify (bugtrapp.com) so with a little luck it’ll be worked out by then.
Alright…I’ve probably gushed enough, but if you have a business that deals with recurring revenues, definitely check out Chargify and don’t hesitate to ask questions—they’ll not only answer but truly try to help you through any problems!
This entry was written by , posted on January 18, 2010 at 2:54 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I know what you’re thinking – You’ve heard a ton of stuff about SaaS (Software as a Service), but WTF is PaaS? Well…in short it’s Products as a Service (we toyed with referring to it as pPaaS too, physical Products as a Service but it didn’t feel as straight-forward as PaaS). In short it’s selling real-world products on a subscription service using the exact same methods that web-based services and applications are using.
Sure, there’s been other examples of this in the past, but none (to my knowledge) have simplified and marketed their service as specifically as we are.
We’ve been playing with this idea since October, but with the relaunch of manpacks.com we’ve simplified, optimized and streamlined the site to bring it into it’s own and we’re about to make an pr/advertising/marketing push to make this work as a whole new movement in ecommerce (why think small?).
A big part of this was being able to integrate with Chargify, a service that greatly simplifies setting up and managing recurring billing. This allowed us to keep our customer on the site, control the entire experience and also simply and easily manage the recurring subscription-nature of our service (not to mention the ease and speed that using Chargify made completing the billing portion of the process).
Talking it over with Ken (the “other guy” involved in this opportunity with me) we decided that outside of Manpacks, this model also allows small business the opportunity to offer better value through acheiving an economy of scale usually reserved for the big players, both by engaging customers over a longer timeline, and being able to anticipate their needs to avoid buying mistakes (aka overstocking). Because every merchant knows that buying mistakes must be absorbed by higher margins.
Although this does means we can be competitive with our prices, lowest price has never been our goal. What makes this concept unique is that we offer our customer a simplified lifestyle, by eliminating one more total waste of time from their schedule—And people that really love shopping for socks aren’t our demographic.”
I’m also hoping to take all of the conversations Ken and I have had over the last while that detail how we’ve approached this, how we’ve learnt, how we’ve screwed up, how we’ve kept ourselves going on this idea and create a blog to document the whole thing…but first we must focus on sales!
So…to get a real-world feel for what PaaS is you can check out our first foray into it at www.manpacks.com
This entry was written by , posted on January 15, 2010 at 12:15 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
What do I call myself? What do i do all day?
These are questions I find myself asking all the time. And to be honest, applied to a ‘real’ job, I don’t know. I wear many hats throughout the day and have learnt a great many skills over the last 8 years of working on my own (and the years before that working for others were also indispensible!). I think I might mostly either be a web designer or web developer, but that doesn’t seem to quite cover everything as I’m also a business owner (which has it’s own list of roles that go with it!).
I started my “professional career” (if you could call it that, i was also playing/touring in a punk rock band at the time which made things sometimes rather unprofessional) as a print/web designers, although I took Graphic Communications in college (which was largely print design-based except for the final semester where we were introduced to the something called “the internet”) I have never been solely a print designer – maybe this is where things started to become schizophrenic? I was always hired because of my knowledge of the internet but no one at the time could afford just a web designer/developer so the fact that I could do both ended up being an asset.
Fast forward a few years and I was working for myself, a sort of trial-by-fire due a layoff or two after the dot-com bubble burst. I had to figured out an awful lot awfully fast – bookkeeping, invoicing, estimating as well as keep on new development and design things – Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that I get to do so many different types of tasks throughout the day/week, and think that anyone who truly wants to understand how a business works needs to deal with each of these to some degree. That said, this past year i’ve been doing a lot of contracting out of various tasks, it was certainly time and it’s done a lot for me to be able to tackle a multitude of things I may not have been able to otherwise.
Now, on top of bookkeeping, invoicing and estimating, I’m not only doing a bit of marketing/strategy for a couple of new ventures I’ve undertaken but also brainstorming, designing and developing too – I can’t really think of a job where you get to do/try so many different things, it certainly keeps things from being too boring most of the time!
Maybe I’ll add some initials to the end of my name, “Andrew Draper, MPDP” (Multiple Personality Disorder Professional)
This entry was written by , posted on January 4, 2010 at 8:56 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
In general I dislike reality tv (although I’ll begrudgingly admit I have a soft spot for Ice Road Truckers (no idea why) and currently BBQ Pitmasters). However, I was thinking this morning something that I would absolutely watch (provided my Apple TV’s streaming/download speeds cooperated – they haven’t been lately) is a video podcast that chronicles a web startup.
Here’s my pitch for the Ultimate Web Startup Reality Show…
You put together a 3 person team (designer, developer and maybe someone with marketing savvy or that can design and develop), they are given a 6-month time frame and $100,000 – they can build whatever web-based application they want (but it must have a way to generate revenue once the 6 months/$100k are gone).
Of course, there’s the show part…they must also produce a 30-60 minute video podcast every week chronicling their adventures (with short video, twitter, blog updates thrown in as well of course!).
Of course, ideally I’d love to be part of one of the teams, but more importantly I think this would be a great vehicle to showcase what goes into an internet startup and the daily ups/downs of trying to make something fly.
Any takers?
This entry was written by , posted on December 21, 2009 at 9:27 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Why would we want to build a web app to track bugs/issues? It doesn’t sound very sexy does it? And aren’t there a number of web-based bug tracking applications already? Some even free?
To answer these questions I think I first have to explain how we’ve been tracking bugs on Hashbrown projects for the last while.
For each project we create a Google Spreadsheet and share it with the given client. Each sheet contains 8 columns: Item Number, Date, Bug Location, Assigned to, Status, Priority, Task and Notes. As bugs/issues are found we add a new row, as bugs are closed those rows are marked as “Closed” in the Status column and we make the background grey. Once someone has gone in and review the closed items we remove them from the main sheet and move them to a closed sheet to keep a record of all bugs.
This has worked fairly well for us, however we constantly had a nagging feeling that there was a better way. We looked at multiple open source solutions, none quite fitting what we needed or their user interfaces were just so terrible it made them unusable. We looked at a couple of paid solutions, however none felt really tailored to our specific needs and most were rather expensive and out of our price range.
So we decided we could probably create our own web-based bug tracking application, keep it simple and focussed on the needs of companies building web-based applications and solutions and we’d end up with a great internal application that would be more efficient than our spreadsheet method – that thought didn’t last long before we decided it’s probably worth the extra effort to open it up to others to use too. So, that’s what we’re doing. We’re targeting a January beta, and based on a single tweet I sent a week or two ago we have a pretty good beta group of users (we thank all of you, and hope we don’t disappoint!) – even a software company that doesn’t build web-based applications, which should make things even more interesting as it seems, unbeknownst to us, that there is a desire in other areas for an easier-to-use system of tracking bugs.
We’re quite excited at the prospects of what Bugtrapp can bring to the table in the fight against tracking bugs/issues and can’t wait to get early beta feedback and then open up to the world!
And, to answer those questions from the beginning of this post, why would we want to build such an application? Because we’re passionate about ensuring we do the best we can in creating amazing web-based experiences! Is it very sexy? I guess that depends, we get off on web apps and processes to make them better…so to us, it is sexy. Aren’t there a number of other tracking solutions? Yes, however they didn’t match our needs – they might (and most certainly do) meet other’s needs but we’re willing to bet there are others like us too.
You can sign-up to be informed of our launch or to be part of our beta at: bugtrapp.com
This entry was written by , posted on December 19, 2009 at 12:42 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.