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.