Life / Work / Business Balance

The large IT consulting company that I used to work for loved touting their “work / life balance” employee benefits program. This program sounded great on paper because it furnished all eligible employees with a company issued laptop and cell phone complete with voice & data plan. I was really excited when I first got my laptop, but later realized that this “benefit” was really just a thinly veiled way to encourage employees to work above and beyond the normal 40 hour week. Programs like this don’t equate to a true work / life balance. In fact, I think that achieving this balance is really difficult to do. I’ve found myself struggling with it even more since starting my business.

Crunch Time

As I’ve said before, I often feel like time and money are in a neck-and-neck race to be my scarcest resource with regard to my business. Of the two, however, scarce time is far harder to manage that scarce money. There are tons of books, blogs and podcasts out there offering productivity and time management advice. For the record, I think there are a lot of good resources out there for this, but it’s really easy to fall into the trap of consuming so much productivity advice that you never get anything done. To do my part, I’m trying to keep this post brief and focused on two very concrete things that I do to maintain a work For this post I’ll focus on a couple of things I do that help me keep my life, my business, and my job moving forward every day.

Getting Organized

I use Google Tasks with three task lists:

• Life: I use the original ‘Default’ task list for my “life” tasks. This could be anything from “changing the A/C filter” to “call the dentist to setup an appointment”.
• Work: I use this task list for my “day job” tasks. The company I work for makes use a work item tracking system internally, and I just use this task list to supplement this. I use it mostly for quick “remember to …..” tasks that I think of during the day but don’t necessarily have time to finish right then and there.
• Business: I use this list for the (ever-growing) list of things that I want/need to do for my business.

Obviously, I spend a lot of time in the “Work” task list. Beyond that, I try to tackle at least one thing from the "Life” and “Business” lists each day. I’m fortunate enough to work from home which has allowed me to try and use the time I might normally use commuting every morning to knock out a task or two from one of my lists. I try to do the same each evening either right after work or sometimes later in the evening after dinner. I also try to glance through the entire “Business” and “Life” lists every day to re-prioritize if needed.

Having a Life

Working from home (and running my business out of my home) affords some benefits, but also makes it easy to fall into the trap of constantly working. Here are two very effective (and easy) ways to keep work thoughts from creeping into your relaxation time:

• Don’t forward your work e-mail to your phone. I know that I won’t be able to ignore a buzzing phone in my pocket, so I remove the temptation by just not automatically downloading my work e-mail to my phone. If needed, I have the ability to manually browse to my work e-mail through the mobile web interface. It’s easy enough to do that I can do it when needed but enough of a nuisance to keep me from doing it constantly. If we’re doing something particularly important or time sensitive at work I might temporarily setup my phone to grab that e-mail automatically, but I’m always sure to turn it off as soon as I can.
• Shut down your computer after work. I’ve always believed in the notion that if you can’t control your behavior you should try to control your environment. By turning off my computer after work I’m reducing the temptation to pop-in to my home office to do something. I can accomplish most things that I want to do from my iPhone (e.g. check my bank balance) without having to turn on my work computer and get sucked into working for 30 minutes.

Guest Post: Keyword Research – The Easy Way

This is the second post in a series of guest posts by Tim Janssen. Tim runs an online business selling Japanese chef’s knives on Shopify.

In my last post  I talked about the “hard way” (e.g. no cost) to find good keywords to target for your online business. Today I’ll talk about an application that I discovered while doing my own keyword research. I now wish that I had found this tool a lot sooner, as it could have saved me a LOT of time.

The tool is called Market Samurai. The bad news here is that this is definitely not a free tool. There’s a one-time fee of $149, but in my opinion it’s worth every penny. If I calculated the hours I spent sifting through extensive lists of keywords at $10/hour (which is an extremely low-ball figure) this tool would pay for itself pretty quickly. That said, let me explain why I think this tool is so valuable before you rush out and sign up for it.

Attractive Keywords

This is where the Market Samurai tool really shines. You simply enter a few general keywords and Market Samurai will give you all kinds of related keywords. It’s not difficult from here to start seeing how much monthly traffic you can expect per month and what kind of competition you’ll face. You can then apply filters to help you focus in on the keywords where you’ll face lower competition with decent monthly traffic. For example, I did some quick searches around “car insurance” and was able to find that “car quote insurance” would give me around 8,000 search per month with 179K competitors. “Insurance for car” would yield 5.5K visits with 96K competitors and “young insurance” would yield 3K visitors with 34K competition. This could have taken hours doing things the “hard way” as I described in my previous post.

This information is extremely valuable, but you still need to decide whether or not certain keywords are worth the effort. You do this by investigating the strength of the competition you would face. Doing this the ‘hard way” means digging through the competitors backlinks, anchor text and so on. This is extremely painful to do manually. Thankfully Market Samurai can do a lot of this heavy lifting for you.

Evaluating The Competition

With one click of a button you will can get the domain age of a competitor’s site, how many backlinks it has, its page rank, and so on. Going back to my car insurance example, the initial stats I found concerning monthly searches and competition made this keywords look pretty attractive. After digging into the competition with Market Samurai, however, I quickly discovered that it would be extremely difficult to get ranked well for these keywords due to the relative strength of the competition. In this case, the competition has a lot of other sites that link to it (sometimes called backlinks). The number of these links are one of the main ways that Google determines how well a site ranks in search results. If your potential competitors have a lot of backlinks it will likely be very difficult to compete with them on those keywords.

So the competition looks pretty stiff for the standard “car insurance” keywords, but Market Samurai showed me that “young insurance” is a pretty good keyword with pretty weak competition. The top result on Google only has 56 backlinks for the anchor text “young insurance”. With a few high quality links it would be easy to get ranked well on Google. I’ll talk more about this process in a later article.

So by now I’ve spent about 10 minutes doing my car insurance keyword research with Market Samurai and have found a very juicy keyword that I can pursue. I’ll use this keyword as a jumping off point to find more keywords and related terms. To me, this makes Market Samurai worth the $149 price tag. That said, $150 is a lot if you’re bootstrapping a new business. If I had known about Market Samurai when I first started the keyword research process I probably would have sprung for it, especially if I knew then what I know now. We’ve really only started to scratch the surface of what Market Samurai can do. You can find a lot more information about this tool over at smartpassiveincome.com which is a great blog and resource for starting a business. There’s a great video on this blog that will show you far more about Market Samurai than I could tell you in this article, so go check it out!

I hope these articles have helped you understand more about keyword research. Both the “easy way” and the “hard way” can generate lots of keywords to work with. Start working on finding these keywords now and we’ll continue in my next post learning how to put those keywords to work.

Tim runs a Shopify store selling Japanese chef’s knives. Doing solid keyword research has revealed his best keywords are Santoku Messer and Damat Messer (a type of steel). He now builds his store around these keywords and gets highly targeted traffic without spending any cash on pay-per-click advertising.

Tech Issues: Establishing an Online Presence

In a previous post I talked a little bit about the ins and outs of getting an e-commerce website off the ground with Shopify. That post focused solely on developing the content and functionality of the site. In this post I’ll talk about some of the more superficial elements involved in starting an online business.

Domain Names

I honestly don’t have much to say about domain names other than to state the obvious: you need to have one. As for what the domain name should be, I have only two criteria: it needs to be simple and it needs to have a ‘.com’ extension. Keep it simple so that people will remember it. Make it have a ‘.com’ extension because every reputable e-commerce site has a .com domain name. As for choosing a registrar, there are tons of choices. If you’re particularly price-sensitive I would encourage you to shop around a bit. I’ve used a few different registrars for various web projects over the past few years and in my experience they’re all pretty much the same. Quite frankly I hate dealing with them and view them as a necessary evil of doing business online.Once you’ve registered a domain name getting it pointed at your online store is generally a pretty trivial matter. If you’re using Shopify they have loads of great documentation on how to accomplish this.

E-mail

I don’t know about you, but when I see an online business that uses a free e-mail service (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) to allow its customers to contact them it’s a bit of a turn off. It’s a given that an online business (particularly a small online business with no appreciable budget) will rely heavily on e-mail to communicate with its customers. I think a lot of smaller online businesses end up leveraging free e-mail services because they’re free and very easy to setup. In reality, it’s not that difficult or expensive to setup ‘@yourdomainname.com’ e-mail addresses. Many domain name registrars offer this service for a pretty reasonable price. That’s not a bad way to go, but with just a bit of effort you can get professional looking e-mail addresses for your business without paying anything extra.

I’ve used Google’s free e-mail service, GMail, for my personal e-mail address for years. They offer tons of storage and have a best-in-class web interface for dealing with your mail. If you don’t already have a free ‘@gmail.com’ e-mail address for your personal e-mail do yourself a favor and go get one now. It’s completely free and truly an awesome service. In addition to free ‘@gmail.com’ accounts, Google now offers the ability to have a full fledged GMail account for your own private domain with a service they call Google Apps. They really push the ‘Premier Edition’ of this service with is geared at large business and organizations. The premier edition costs money, but thankfully for bootstrappers like me they also offer a free Standard Edition. The Standard Edition is billed as being geared toward organizations and communities, but there’s nothing in the Terms Of Service stating that you can’t use it for a business. Getting Google Apps to work with your own domain name does take a bit of work, but Google offers pretty good documentation with step by step instructions for getting it setup with many of the popular domain name registrars.

Once you’ve got it all setup, you’ll be able to create as many e-mail addresses for your custom domain name as you want. Right now I have ‘support@pixeyewear.com’ and ‘jesse@pixeyewear.com’ in addition to a few other accounts for the folks that help me out with the business from time to time. All in all, I’m responsible for three ‘@pixeyewear.com’ e-mail addresses in addition to my personal ‘@gmail.com’ e-mail address. This might sound like a hassle, but with a few tricks it’s actually pretty manageable. First of all, I setup all of my business e-mail accounts to automatically forward to my personal GMail. I’ve also setup a filter on my personal GMail to apply a label to any message that arrives addressed to one my business e-mail addresses. This lets me quickly and easily identity these messages in my inbox. Finally, I utilize Gmail's ability to let you send e-mail from multiple addresses within the same account to let me tag any outgoing message I send as having come from the appropriate business e-mail address. In this way, I only ever have to login to my personal GMail and can manage all of my business e-mail directly from that single account.

Telephone

Personally, I hate making and receiving telephone calls 99% of the time. I’m a firm believer that there’s a proper communication medium for every situation and in my opinion the telephone is not always the right one. Don’t get me wrong, I talk on the phone every day, but typically only because an indirect and/or non-verbal communication medium wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand. That said, the vast majority of communication that needs to take place between a small online business and its customers can take place via e-mail.

I do think, however, that having a publicly visible phone number on your e-commerce website lends your business some credibility instills a bit more confidence in your customers. I only have a single phone number (my cell phone) and certainly didn’t want to post that number on my website. Fortunately for me there is a free service from Google for accepting calls online called Google Voice.

You can setup a Google Voice account off any standard Google Account. Google recently started rolling out a number of new features, including Google Voice, for accounts that are associated with Google Apps, so if you took my advice above about using Google Apps for your store e-mail you can create a Google Voice account specifically for your business. When you create the account you get to choose a phone number. Google currently offers a huge number of phone numbers in a wide array of area codes. I opted to choose my local area code as I make it point to call out the fact that I run a “local business” whenever I advertise to people in my area.

After choosing a phone number you’ll be prompted to forward that number to another “real” phone number. I have my Google Voice number forwarded to my cell phone. This may sound like it defeats the purpose of having the Google Voice number, but Google Voice offers some great additional features. First of all, call screening is built in. That means that if someone calls your Google Voice number it will ring your phone. If you answer, Google Voice will announce who is calling and give you the option to send the caller to voice mail. If the caller opts to leave you a voice mail you’ll get an instant e-mail notification informing you. Also, if you’re not available to answer your “real” phone the Google Voice mail kicks in automatically. All in all I’d say that getting this all setup takes about an hour or so. That’s one hour of your time to have a real local phone number that you can publish on your business website for no cost. That’s not a bad deal at all.

Wrap Up

As I’ve said before, when you’re starting a business with little cash you have to fake it ‘til you make it sometimes. Of all the things that I’ve laid out above, the only one that costs any “real” money is the domain name. With a good domain name and a few hours to invest in setting up and learning a bit about Google Apps you can create a very professional online presence even if you’re a single person running a business out of your apartment.

Guest Post: Keyword Research – The Hard Way

This is a guest post by Tim Janssen. Tim runs a Shopify store selling Japanese chef’s knives. Time has taken a different approach to building an online business and I think offers a different perspective. Look for more guest posts from Tim in the future.

I want to talk a little bit about on-page and off-page optimization for an online store. When I sat down to write this post I began to realize just how big these topics are. So where do you start? How do you optimize something when you have no idea what to optimize for?

Before you can start optimizing your website you need to know what your potential customers are actually looking for. This is where keyword research comes into play. Keyword research is the art, yes the art, of finding out about your customers. To illustrate what I mean I will show you what keyword research means for my shop and how I do it.

When my two friends and I first started out we didn’t know a whole lot about Japanese kitchen knives. My friends are cooks and therefore were somewhat familiar with them, but none of us knew what made these knives special. I’m an Internet marketer and had even less of an idea. We came up with the idea at the gym one day. We wanted to “get rich quick” (spoiler: it hasn’t been quick so far ;-) ) and find a niche market that we could establish ourselves in. I said “why don’t we sell some special kitchen accessories” and so we eventually ended up researching all kinds of accessories.

At this point I should state that there are two ways to do keyword research: the hard way and the easy way. I opted for the hard way. Why? The hard way is free. You don’t have to spend any dime and since this blog is about bootstrapping I will of course show you that way since it’s a very good way to get started.

The best place to get started is the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. This is the best free keyword tool in my opinion as it is simple to use and comes from the big G itself, what more could you ask for? I started out by entering “knives” and got a pretty solid list back. I saw that Japanese knives was searched for quite often (9K searches/month as I write this) with MANY “longtail” keywords.

Let me take a minute to explain what “longtail” keywords are. Longtail keywords are related to very broad and general terms like “knives” or “insurance”. For example, “car insurance” could be considered a longtail keyword, though not a very specific one. Broad search terms get a lot of traffic per month (5 million searches). Your site would need a lot of “Google juice” to get ranked high in search results for those keywords. Furthermore, the competition is very tough for these broad keywords. Since we’re only starting out it is not advisable to compete with companies that have deep pockets for traffic. So instead of being a small fish in a big pond I prefer to be a big fish in a well defined pond. This is where longtail keywords help me. I can choose many longtail keywords, and obtain a high rank for those keywords without any serious optimization.

This is what keyword research is good for. It helps you find these keywords that you should try to go after. For my business these terms were all different kinds of Japanese knives. Santoku, Deba, Fuguhiki, Yanagiba and so on are all types of Japanese knives that I did not know before. I’m optimizing my site for these keywords and reaping the benefits of these niche keywords with little competition and very good searches on a regular basis.

You can check out your competition by just entering your keyword(s) into Google. The number of approximate results returned is your competition. For me that’s around ~200K for my main keyword: that’s a small pond but very juicy.

Here’s a quick example of using longtail keywords to make your pond smaller:

Searching for “car insurance” yields ~174 million results. This can be narrowed by adding a few terms. Searching for “car insurance for young drivers” only returns ~520K results. This is still a lot, but definitely better than 174 million. This is why keyword research is so crucial in the beginning. Use these results to determine what will sell quickly in the short term to generate a profit. Less competition means more searches per month. You can make your pond smaller and smaller this way. Of course, you also need to take into account how much your products cost. If you sell your product for $1 you’d need a lot more hits per month than if you sell your product for $10,000. Simple.

I recommend exporting the results of your keyword research into Excel. You can also use spyfu.com to find the keywords of your competitor which can be quite interesting. You can find all of the keywords and their rank for if you pay for the service but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a good free tool but not worth paying for in my opinion.

Another useful tool is the Yahoo Site Explorer. There’s a text field at the top of this tool where you can enter something like: “site: somesite.com –link” which would give you any sites that link to “somesite.com”. Sometimes you can just go to these exact sites and get your own links. This is very helpful when you start building “backlinks” (a topic that I’ll cover in a future article). For now it’s important to know that the fewer links a competing site has the easier it will be for your to get your site ranked well for keyword terms that you share in common.

The process I’ve described above is good for finding a niche for your online business but it can be very time consuming. You enter a keyword, export the resulting related terms and search volumes, combine it all in Excel, filter out duplicates, check out which keywords must be juicy, check out the competition for those keywords, and repeat. This is why most people say that keyword research is the hardest part of starting an online business and I can tell you from personal experience that this is true. There are, however, tools out there to make this job easier. In my next post I’ll show one of these tools.

My last piece of advice for this article is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. You can submit your site, authorize yourself as the owner of that site (Another reason that Shopify is a great platform is that they make this a very easy process. See the Shopify Wiki for more information.) Once you’re setup you’ll be able to see exactly which keywords you rank for and how high in the rankings you are plus your monthly views for each keyword. These are great statistics that you’ll want to have when you start to optimize your website.

Tim runs a store on Shopify selling Japanese chef’s knives. Doing solid research he has found that his top search terms are words like Santoku, Deba, Fuguhiki or Yanagiba. These keywords are paying off with highly targeted traffic and minimal effort.

Lessons Learned: Why Google AdWords Failed Me

I’m still very much a “newbie” with regard to running an online business, but I think I’ve learned something over the past few months about online advertising. In this article I’ll talk about what I’ve learned and how my approach has developed over time.

Google AdWords

When I first got started with online advertising I did what most folks do: go to Google AdWords. In fact, I didn’t even consider any other advertising avenues at first (which turned out to be a mistake, but more on that later). Before going any further, here’s an extremely oversimplified description of how this all works:

Google already an enormous index of Internet content. They’ve developed very complicated algorithms to try and figure out what each piece of content is about. It uses the content and algorithms to show you web pages that are related to the search terms that you type in. It didn’t take long before they started using that same process to show advertisements to people based both on the search terms that they enter and on the websites that they visit. Through the AdWords advertising platform Google lets you create advertisements and associate them with keywords. They then use those keywords to show your ads to people who are searching for or viewing related content. Each time Google shows an ad to someone it’s called an ‘impression’. Each time someone clicks on an ad it’s simply called a ‘click’. As the creator of the ad you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Simple right?

Ok, not exactly simple. When you first get started with AdWords it can a bit… scary. AdWords is filled with seemingly endless metrics and options; quite honestly I don’t think I could tell you what even a fraction of them mean. People have built entire careers around running AdWords campaigns for businesses and after a few hours of using it it’s easy to see why. I’ve spent many hours and dollars using AdWords. How many? Well, far more than I’d care to admit. After all of that time, energy, and money, guess how many sales AdWords has generated for me? Zero.

So what gives? AdWords is the way to go right? It’s basically the only show in town for online advertising! I mean, just look at all those options! It’s so complicated it has to be good.

Sarcasm aside, AdWords is good. It’s hands down the most sophisticated advertising platform with the farthest global reach of any out there. Unfortunately for me it’s those same strengths that make it such a poor fit for my business. Since time and money are in a neck-and-neck race for being my scarcest resources, I simply don’t have time to figure out AdWords.

Another reason AdWords doesn’t work for my business: it’s all based on showing ads to people who are searching for products. I sell eyewear with interchangeable temple inserts. This is a completely new concept to most people. No one is going out and searching for my product. Meanwhile AdWords makes me compete with the likes of major brand names and “off-brand” warehouse websites with enormous marketing budgets for keywords related to eyewear. There’s no way I can compete in that arena.

Remember back in my very first post when I talked about how I went about starting an online business backwards? I didn’t do what you’re supposed to do and start by researching products that people are searching for online. Rather, I started with the product. As it turns out, already having a product to sell (especially one that people aren’t familiar with) makes using AdWords an uphill battle.

Enter Facebook

After a few weeks of futile AdWords campaigns I decided to give advertising on Facebook a try. At its core, Facebook’s advertising platform is very similar to AdWords: you set up campaigns, define budgets, and create ads. The key difference between these two platforms is how you define a target audience for your ads. Rather than defining keywords that describe the products you’re trying to sell, Facebook lets you target your ads using user profile data. You can target ads by any combination of age range, gender, geographic location, interests, and education level. If you stop and think about that for a minute you’ll realize that this is an insanely powerful advertising platform. That said, comparing AdWords to Facebook Advertising is definitely an apples-to-oranges comparison.

AdWords is a great tool if you have a product or service that you know people are looking for online. People are always searching Google for “cheap designer sunglasses”, so if you sell designer sunglasses at deep discounts AdWords is where you want to be. Facebook Advertising works better for things that might be considered an ‘impulse buy’. To illustrate what I mean by this let me tell you a little bit about my first foray into Facebook advertising.

My wife and I have dogs and like all crazy dog people we love them like family. One of our favorite designs that we sell depicts a Boston Terrier and is called “Stella Special” in honor of our dog Stella. I realized one day that other crazy dog people would probably like this design as much as we do, so I created a simple Facebook ad and targeted it at people who had “Boston Terriers” listed in the “Interests” section of their Facebook profile. Within 10 minutes of starting that ad we had our first order come in. That’s what I call results.

I don’t expect that people would ever go online and explicitly search for “Boston Terrier Sunglasses” because it’s not something that people would even know exists. If you can put some Boston Terrier Sunglasses in front of people who you know like Boston Terriers, however, you’ll generate some sales. So my current marketing strategy has two major components to it:

1. Create designs that people will love or be passionate about.
2. Put these designs in front of those people.

Because it’s so easy for us to create and produce new designs, this approach lets us constantly experiment. Some designs generate interest and some don’t, but it only costs us the time involved in doing the graphic design work and a meager Facebook advertising campaign to find out which ones are worth a larger investment.

The Lesson

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to put AdWords down in any way. As I said, I think it’s the most sophisticated and wide-reaching advertising platform available; it just doesn’t work for my particular business. That said, it’s not the only platform in town and I think that virtually any product or service could make use of the Facebook Advertising platform by targeting people who are likely to be passionate about what you’re selling.

Fake It Till You Make it

A friend of mine recently asked if I had some kind of marketing firm helping with our “online presence”. I laughed a bit when I first heard the question and thought, “Are you kidding me?”, until I started to think about it some more. Between the main store front website, the blog, the facebook page, and our twitter account PiX Eyewear actually has a pretty decent online presence; especially considering the company only consists of three employees; all of whom work on it part time. I won’t lie: it takes a bit of work to keep all of this up, but it’s not nearly as involved as it sounds.

Store Website

As I mentioned in my previous post, we use Shopify to create, maintain, and host our store website. They have loads of layout templates you can choose from and it really didn’t take much effort to have a professional looking and functional online store front.

PiX Eyewear Blog

While I don’t post to it as often as I should, I do maintain a blog on the PiX store website in addition to this blog. Shopify comes with the ability to easily add blogs to your store, so once again this was “point-and-click” simple to get started on. The blog functionality they offer is fairly rudimentary, but in my opinion it’s “good enough” for posting quick articles about the goings on of the company. These articles are great things to post about on the facebook and twitter page.

Facebook

If you had asked me several months ago what kind of role I thought facebook might play in the development of my online business I probably would have answered, “little to none”. As it turns out I would have been dead wrong. Facebook is playing an enormous role in the development of this business in a couple of different ways. I have plans for a future post about how we’re leveraging facebook advertising (and why I consider it better than Google Adwords in some ways), but for now I’ll focus on our PiX Eyewear facebook page.

I’m not entirely sure how facebook “fan pages” evolved over time, but in their current form they’re essentially a way to create a facebook profile for an organization as opposed to an individual. These profiles have a wall that you and others can post to, photo albums, a discussion board, and a number of other features designed to help you interact with other facebook users on behalf of the organization. Forbes.com recently posted a great article describing the process of creating a facebook page for your business that sums up the process far better than I ever could.

Twitter

More and more businesses are using twitter as a way to interact with current and potential customers. I don’t think I need to go into the “why” of having a twitter account for an online business. It’s free to setup, easy to use, and I think it’s a pretty decent medium for keeping in touch with customers.

Bringing It All Together

It would be a lot of work to keep a blog, facebook profile, and twitter account updated on a regular basis, which is why I cheat a bit. On any given week I’ll typically do something like this:

• Write a blog post on the store front blog. This post doesn’t necessarily have to be very long and is often quite short.
• Post to the PiX Eyewear facebook profile about the new blog post, inviting the people who follow us there to read it.
• An application automatically posts whatever I put on the PiX Eyewear facebook wall to the PiX Eyewear twitter account.
• Once or twice a week I’ll also add a picture to facebook of a new style that we’re just created. This also gets cross posted to twitter.

That’s it. I spend a few hours a week on this and maintain what I consider a pretty impressive looking online presence for the business that I run in my spare time.

Tech Issues: Website

Obviously, technology plays a big part in starting an online business. This will be the first in a series of posts about the technology I’m using for my online business. I’m a software developer by trade and sometimes want to “geek out” a bit on this blog. That said, I want this blog to be useful to a wide an audience and will make every effort to keep these posts intelligible to the masses.

Step One: You Need A Website

You need a website to have an online business. I’ll cover a lot of topics in this series, but none so fundamental as the website. I started working on the website for my business before I had chosen a domain name, setup company e-mail, or determined a payment solution. Given that I have a background in software development, I had to decide whether I wanted to try and build my website “from scratch” or try to find an off-the-shelf solution. It may surprise you to hear that I really only considered the “from scratch” option for about 30 seconds before deciding against it.

I’m Not The IT Guy

I’m a software developer with plenty of web development experience and could certainly have rolled up my sleeves and started coding an e-commerce website for myself. There are even a number of existing software libraries I could have used to making things easier. I could have built and tested the entire website on my computer at home and then found a company that would rent me space on of their servers to make the site available to the masses. So why didn’t I do this? I’m not the IT guy. I love my job as a software developer and feel really fortunate to be able to make a living doing something that I enjoy, but I didn’t start this business to build a website. I started this business to develop a product and a marketing strategy to generate profits. Rather than building my site from scratch, I wanted a platform that would give me the basic elements of an e-commerce site right “out of the box”.

 

 

A Solid Core

I ultimately opted to go with an e-commerce platform called Shopify. I had heard a lot of good things about the service and signed up for their 30 day free trial. Within a few hours of playing around with my account I was convinced that this was the way to go. In my opinion there are a few key things that an e-commerce site absolutely needs:

• A clean layout with search-engine friendly elements.
• A database for easily creating, managing, and organizing your store’s products.
• A shopping cart that will remember the items a customer had even if they close the browser and return to the store several days later.
• Integration with a payment gateway so that you can accept payments from your customers electronically.

With Shopify, all of these elements are baked right in to the product. I don’t intend for this post to become an advertisement for Shopify (and I can assure you I’m not being compensated by them in any way), but I definitely strongly recommend them as an e-commerce provider. I could go on and on about all of the useful features they offer, but it all can be summed in pretty easily: They take care of the mundane details of running a website and let you focus on developing and marketing your products.

But What If I Want My Site To…

I feel confident saying that anyone with basic computer competency (i.e. knows their way around a web browser, can upload pictures to a website, is proficient with e-mail, etc.) can get an e-commerce site up and running without having to hire any professional help. That said, Shopify is an e-commerce platform for the masses and might not be built to do exactly what you want in all cases. Fortunately they expose a number of extension points that let you dig into the inner workings of your site and tweak it to your liking. Unfortunately, without at least some background in computer programming and/or web development you will probably get lost pretty quickly. Shopify does maintain a “Job Board Forum” where you can post the custom tasks that you want to accomplish and have developers experienced with the Shopify platform bid on them.

And The Cost?

This is a blog about bootstrapping, so I’d be missing the mark if I didn’t talk about what all of this costs. To be clear, the costs I’m talking about here are solely for the creation and ongoing hosting of your website. This doesn’t include domain names, e-mail, advertising, or any of the other expenses involved with starting an online business.

If I had opted to build my own website from scratch the only real tangible cost I would have would be in the form of some basic shared hosting with a website hosting provider. Price ranges for this kind of service range from very cheap to very expensive, but I estimate that I’d probably have needed something in the neighborhood of $15 - $20 per month to get started.

With Shopify, they have a multi-tiered pricing scheme. The entry level plan costs about $25 per month. In addition, they charge a 2% transaction fee for each sale that takes place on the site. The $25 per month plan is a good one to get started with, but you’ll probably want to upgrade to the next level up before too long. The entry level plan doesn’t offer discount code functionality and limits the products you can sell to 100. The second level plan costs about $60 per month with a 1% transaction fee. Obviously, this is more money than the $15 - $20 that I estimated for the “from scratch” approach, but this doesn’t take into account the hours I would have had to spend building my own site. It’s difficult to estimate and quantity how many more hours I would have had to invest into the “from scratch” approach, but I have no doubt that it would have been a much larger effort overall.

Remember, your time is worth something. In my opinion, a service like Shopify is well worth the expense given the time you save.

Design Evolution

This is another guest post from my father about the origins of the product. It’s not necessarily related to the process of starting this online business, but I think that these stories are interesting. I hope you agree.

Clothing For Your Sunglasses

If you read my previous post about how the idea for this product came about you may recall I used the term “temple arm clothing” to describe my idea. I wanted to create a direct link between the fashion world and eyewear frames. Since clothing is such a fashion industry mainstay it seemed natural to liken this idea to clothing. This idea lead me to make the first prototypes using things like fabric and gem stones. These initial prototypes actually worked pretty well and one of our early customers from Germany still orders these inserts made from fabric. For this initial design the temple inserts weren’t completely flat like most of them are today. Instead they had a slightly raised edge so that the fabric could sit within the edges. The edges helped protect the fabric from wear and tear as the inserts went in and out of the frames. These raised-edge temple inserts are still used today for things like our “mother of pearl” inserts where some exotic material has to be applied to the plastic insert.

Scaling Issues

While these fabric based inserts looked great, we couldn’t always rely on a continuous supply of the needed fabric material without buying it in very large quantities. This lead us to come up with a digital process where we could take any image and transfer it onto the face of a blank plastic insert. The transfer process caused us to start using a completely flat temple insert rather than the raised edge design. Adding a simple clear coat on top gives these digital transfers a shiny gloss finish and protects them from flaking or fading due to exposure to UV light or moisture. This process now lets us quickly and easily create digital designs that can be applied to any of our sunglasses or reading glasses and make the digital prints on-demand. The sky is the limit on the number of designs that we can create and sell. We’ll be leveraging this flexibility over the coming months to push out new designs on a weekly basis and even invite graphic artists and designers to submit their own designs.

Patience and Persistence

I’ve found that there are many challenges to getting a new online business venture off the ground. I had anticipated a lot of these challenges but have encountered a few that I simply didn’t plan on. By far the biggest challenge I hadn’t anticipated is the waiting. You can spend countless hours tweaking your website layout, crafting witty product descriptions, and developing advertising campaigns, but you can’t speed up time. You won’t know if any of your efforts were worthwhile until you let enough time pass to evaluate your results. My current thinking is that any long term success this business might attain will boil down to two things: patience and persistence.

Patience

I’m not by nature a very patient person. I suppose I can partially blame a technology laden lifestyle that has gotten me accustomed to instant gratification. It might only take me an hour to upload new products to my storefront, but I always have to wait a few days before I can see whether or not anyone likes them. I really struggle with this delay, but have to learn to live with it. In a way I’m fortunate that this business is a “side project” for me and that I have a challenging full time job that keeps me occupied for a good chunk of the day. If PiX were a full time venture I’m fairly certain I’d drive myself insane sitting around and waiting for things to happen. I also sometimes fear that my impatience causes a lot of churn because I don’t let my ideas take root for long enough to be proven good or bad.

Persistence

Tim Ferris has an interesting post on his blog titled, “Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work For You” in which guest author Cameron Herold describes the manic-depression that a lot of entrepreneurs experience through the course of getting a new business venture off the ground. This article rings true to me in a lot of ways. I can’t even begin to describe how awesome it feels to see order notification emails roll in; it’s truly a bit euphoric. The high of that feeling is only matched by the low I feel when a week or two goes by with no orders. To put it bluntly: it sucks. Cameron’s article has a lot of good suggestions for dealing with this roller coaster that I’ve found very helpful over the past few weeks. I also need to constantly remind myself that I need to plow through the down times. I really and truly believe that this product is good, but I’ll only succeed if I keep trying.

Keep It Going

“Patience and Persistence” has become a mantra for me lately. There will be plenty of small defeats and victories along the way, but in the end I will only have failed when I give up.

Origins

This is a post that was originally written by my dad about how he came up with the idea for the interchangeable temple inserts.

Downtime

Back in 2006 I was in Wenzhou, China on business. I was already a seasoned China traveller by then, but even the best of us succumb to the intestinal distress that the cuisine and local water supply can induce. The two days I spent in bed staring at the ceiling gave me a lot of time to think. With that much downtime I felt compelled to reinvent the wheel and other equally great feats of mental gymnastics. (Editors note: As a seasoned China traveler myself I can attest to this. I once spent several days in bed having a recurring fever dream about moving large amounts of sand around a desert with my mind. The cause? A bowl of noodles with some water that obviously hadn't been quite boiled all the way through)

Bored

During the latter half of this illness I started thinking about reason I was in China in the first place: scouting out new styles of sunglasses and reading glasses for my customers. I was having a real tough time with eyewear in general because it was so boring to me. The styles never seemed to change; they only got recycled. I also noticed that there seemed to be a total disconnect between eyewear and fashion even though eyewear is considered an important fashion accessory. Most of the stuff I was seeing just didn't seem to have any concrete link to "fashion".

Vacant Real Estate

Wide temples for sunglasses were back in vogue at the time and that wide-templed look had even migrated over to reading / prescription glasses. Then it hit me, all of that "vacant real estate" on the wide temple arms could be used to make the frames more fashionable. My first thought was, "We could make 'clothing' for temple arms to dress them up a bit." The rest of the idea followed almost immediately. I knew that this "temple arm clothing" would have to be easily removable. People changed their clothes every day, so why wouldn't they want to change their temples as well? This initial idea and my early sketches of this concept would later become a patented eyewear design in August of 2008. You can check out the patent for yourself on Google Patents: US Patent #7261409

“Dogfooding”: You’re Doing It Wrong

Background

The term “dogfooding” is a slang term of sorts for the phrase “eating your own dog food”. In general terms, this means putting yourself in your customers’ shoes by using the products or services that you sell. According to this Wikipedia article, the term originated in an ad campaign for Alpo Dog Food where Lorne Green made a point to say that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another origin story has the founder of Kal Kan Pet Food eating a can of their product every year at the annual shareholders’ meeting.

Value

“Dogfooding” seems to have caught on especially well in the software industry, so as a software developer I’ve participated in “dogfooding” before. It really is a valuable exercise and can illuminate shortcomings in your product. Depending on what your company sells, dogfooding might not always be easy, but I recommend it whenever possible. I wear the sunglasses that we sell on a daily basis not only because I really like them, but also to evaluate them like a customer would. It also never hurts to have people ask me where I got them; I’m always happy to point them in the right direction!

How Can You Screw This Up?

The point of this post doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with bootstrapping a business, but I’ve never understood how the most obvious dogfooding scenario in the world often seems to fall flat. I worked in a lot of restaurants when I was broke college student. Every place I ever worked would charge the employees to eat the restaurant food. Some places offered a discount, but none of them would encourage the employees to eat the food by doing the obvious: make it free. What better way to improve the quality of the product than to have the people who prepare it also eat it from time to time? Admittedly, I didn’t always work in gourmet establishments so I suppose some of my former bosses didn’t really care much about improving the product. Perhaps they were focused more on keeping costs down to maximize profits. I’m always in favor of keeping expenses low, but I never want to be involved with a company that isn’t committed to having a great product and constantly trying to improve it.

If you’re starting a business, I think you’ll find it a lot more rewarding to put in the countless hours necessary if you believe in the product and are committed to making it the best it can be.

Introduction

I created this blog to help organize my thoughts regarding a business venture that my wife and I launched into a couple of months ago. Starting a business ended up being far more work than I ever imagined. I’ve started this blog to talk about my experiences starting this business. Success or failure, I plan to write about it all here.

What is Bootstrapping?

I don’t know the origin of the term ‘bootstrapping’ for certain, but as it pertains to starting a business it’s come to mean that the business is being started without external assistance. This basically means no start up loans from a bank, no investors, and no big up front expenditures. Being a software developer by trade I’ve read many stories about software start ups that got going both with and without external help. 

Like everything, there are pros and cons to bootstrapping a new business. Since software can often be created using (mostly) free tools, software startups often lend themselves to getting started without external help.

Even though I’m a software developer, the business I’ve started has nothing to do with building software. Instead, I’ve started an online store selling eyewear.

 

About the Business

My business is called PiX Eyewear. We design and sell sunglasses and reading glasses featuring a channel on the temple that accepts inserts that can feature different designs. The idea is that the inserts are sort of like “clothes” for the frames that can be easily swapped out. We can make new insert designs very quickly and easily. We have dozens of existing designs, but we also solicit designs from our customers who might want to create some inserts that match a particular article of clothing that they have. The design of the temple channels and corresponding inserts is patented and currently can only be manufactured and sourced by a single factory.

A lot of “start your own online business” programs have you start out by doing market research to find products that will sell. I don’t listen very well and skipped that step entirely. I knew what product I wanted to sell before I even started the business. In fact, if I hadn’t known about this product I probably would have never started the business in the first place. Why did I do it this way? Because it let me cheat.

We’re Cheating

The reason I picked this product is because the patent holder happens to be my father. I also used to work for the guy who handles the manufacturing. A lot of retail businesses need to make a very sizable up front investment to get their hands on inventory, while I was able to use these existing relationships to establish a “pay as you go” inventory acquisition program. This lets me start selling inventory without having to shell out a bunch of money up front. That said, there are other ways to get into the online retailing game without having to buy a bunch of inventory up front. For example, sites like Zazzle.com let you design products to sell for free. They even source and drop ship them for you, giving a you a royalty percentage of each item sold. In this way you get to focus on designing, marketing, and promoting your products. I’m a big fan of this model and endorse this kind of cheating as a way to avoid huge cost outlays.

What’s Next?

I maintain another “customer facing” blog on my storefront site. I’ll probably end up putting some posts up in both places, but I think certain posts will probably only end up on this blog. I have a goal of posting ~3 posts a week between the two blogs but we’ll see how that goes. You can find my storefront blog here: http://www.pixeyewear.com/blog

If you have any feedback, questions, or hate mail for me you can leave a comment here or e-mail me: jesse@pixeyewear.com

While I don’t know exactly what will end up on this blog, I have some rough ideas for future posts including:

• What start up costs could I not avoid?
• “Dogfooding” products
• Wearing a lot of hats makes your head tired
• Work/work balance (and trying to have a life)
• Online Advertising: Lessons Learned
• What is SEO and why do I not care about it?
• Evolving the product