Bootstrapper Notes

Dude, your the Sandwich Artist!

On Sunday I witnessed a fine of example of how NOT to run a Subway restaurant.

After church we decided to stop by Subway for lunch.  We had wanted to try one of their new toasted subs.

So I went up and ordered the "Chipotle Chicken with Bacon Two Cheese Melt".   The "Sandwich Artist" behind the counter then ask me what cheese I would like on it.  I asked, "What cheese comes on it?" (by looking at the picture on the wall, it looked like it was a "designed" sandwich).  He replied "I don't really know, I have only been here 4 days."

The other girl behind the counter overheard the entire exchange, but did not offer any help.  So I simply picked my cheese out, then had to remind them that it also comes with bacon.  Then they sloppily wrapped it up and billed me.

Then to top it off - they were out of "boy toys" for the kids meals!!  So I had to eat with a slightly disappointed 4 year old and 7 year old.  The least Subway could have done was to offer an extra cookie or something for the inconvenience.

I don't know about you, but I expect someone with a title on their uniform that says "Sandwich Artist" to be exactly that.  As it turns out, I am really the artist, they are simply the constructors.

Moral of the story - don't put an employee out alone until they know the ropes.  This one experience will impact my purchasing decisions for some time - and it does not look like my local Subway will be getting many of my hard earned dollars in the near future.

Friday Round-up

Well I got out of bed (more like stumbled) out of bed this morning at 6:30 am after a late night last night.  (see yesterdays post for more info)

I thought it would be good to start doing a weekly or monthly round-up on how the business is progressing.

Accomplishments:

• The "Project X" site went live on Wednesday!
• I had my first sale on Thursday morning for a "free" sample.  Hopefully this customer will convert into a subscriber 10 days from now.
• Got the ball rolling to get my affiliate program started.  The programmers are hired to do the integration of the affiliate program with my subscription module.
• Outsourced the design and production of the banners that will be used for my affiliate program.
• Shipped my first order!
• I built out a couple of "feeder" sites with quality content that will funnel visitors to my main site.  These "feeder" sites are highly search engine optimized, which my main site is not.  This will hopefully bring me some free search traffic, but it will take time for these sites to get spidered and ranked.

Concerns:

• I have spent way to much to acquire this single customer - I THINK!  There will be no way of knowing what the acceptable customer acquisition cost is until I see how long the typical user stays on as a subscriber - which could take hundreds of customers before I have a true percentage to work from.
• I dialed down my pay-per-click spending today at Overture to get me down to position number 4.  Not sure what impact this will have on the counts of visitors, but hopefully the ROI will improve.
• I need to figure out how to get more visitors for fewer dollars (doesn't everybody!)

I'm Tired!

Okay, its 1:00 am on Friday morning.  I have to get up in 6 hours.  I am tired, but I just wanted to check in to let you all know that I am still alive!  I have a bunch of stuff I want to share, but I simply don't have the energy tonight.

While we were cooking dinner tonight, my five year old son fell off the couch and hit his cheek, right in front of his ear on the corner of our coffee table.  Well, 4 hours and 3 stitches later we finally made it home from the Urgent Care.

Life is certainly fun!  I will definately post my progress with Project 'X' this weekend.  Until then stay safe and have fun!

Whooo Hooo! Launching Tomorrow!

Wow, the moment is finally here!  The label printer and shipping supplies were delivered today.  My initial order of product was delivered on Saturday.

I have everything I need to begin shipping!

Tonight I will put the finishing touches on the site and get the PPC keyword ads all uploaded to Google and Overture.

Tomorrow I will call my Merchant Account Gateway and let them know I am ready to run real transactions instead of just test transactions.

I figure sometime tomorrow I will start having real visitors coming to my site!  I will give a report on Friday on how things are going.

Thoughts on Inertia

Last night I had to take a quick trip - that amounted to about 3 hours of driving.  So I loaded up my iPod with a new audio book I downloaded from Audible called Survival is Not Enought by Seth Godin.

Really interesting book, but one of the areas I found fascinating was when he was discussing the concept of inertia. 

Inertia is the resistance of a body at rest to being set in motion or of a body in motion to any change of speed or change in direction of motion.  Reread that statement so that really understand the concept.

I see so many people that want to make money online, but inertia is keeping them from doing anything - they are resisting being set in motion.

Once you get started on a project the concept of inertia actually is a good thing because once in motion you tend to stay in motion.  For instance on my Project 'X' web venture - it has been nothing but inertia that has kept me going thru all the delays and waiting I have endured to get to this point.  Now I just need to keep the inertia up as the business grows.  At shop-quik.com, my little test project, inertia keeps me posting everyday - sure the inertia might slow as time goes on or the project fails, evolves, or succeeds.

So if inertia is keeping you at a standstill, take a step.  Once that first step has been taken the concept of inertia will help to keep you moving.

Shop-Quik.com Update

Just a quick update - Shop-Quik.com now has the index page listed on Google.  Google has been by each day for the last 3 days - at least judging by the cache copy date.

Now I just have to wait for G to do a full crawl to start getting all my pages indexed.  As of right now I have 15 entries of content.  I will probably spend a bit over my 20 minute limit tomorrow (Friday) and create content that will post automatically on Saturday and Sunday - just to keep the flow of new content going.

So far no visitors from search engines, but that does not surprise me with just the one page listed so far. 

Next update on this site at the end of the month.

I have been shopping!

Last night I ordered:

• Dymo 330 Thermal label printer
• Padded envelopes and packing supplies
• Product!

I should have everything in hand by the end of next week.  I really need to start making some sales!  So far I have only spent cash-on-hand, in true bootstrapper style - but I do need to get some cash flow going.

I still have some cash for the initial PPC advertising campaigns - which will be required!  Once orders start coming in so will the cash, and I can begin to cash flow this baby for growth.

Testing has begun!

Testing on Project 'X' has officially begun!  The developer that integrated the subscription module into OsCommerce has uploaded the completed site to my server.  It is a very slick system, and works exactly the way I want it to.

I will be testing it over the next 5 to 7 days just to be sure there are no bugs.  I also have a few graphical tweaks to make on the site before I am ready to try selling anything from it.

Tomorrow I am going to get shipping supplies ordered, product ordered, and an account at Stamps.com.

Lots to do....better get busy!

Can 15 minutes a day make money?

I decided to try a little experiment.  Along with this major project I have been writing about, I also have several pure affiliate type sites.  An affiliate type site is really a site that advertises other companies products.  When a user clicks from my site to the merchants site and makes a purchase, I get a commission.

I have been toying with how I could use a blog format to build out a pure affiliate site.  Many merchants offer datafeeds of all their products with links, images, and product descriptions.  However, if you use these to build out a big site, your site is sure to get penalized by the search engines for duplicate content, since there could potentially be thousands of other affiliates all using the same content.

One of the things I have learned from my Bootstrapper Notes site, is that Google seems to index the content very fast - probably because there is new content added frequently, and it is original.

So what I am going to do is start a new blog and add content to it almost everyday that is purely affiliate products.  Each day I will post 2 or 4 new products that I can get from datafeeds.  I will rewrite the product descriptions so that they are unique.  Each post will have a link to that product at the merchants site where the user can make a purchase.

I will spend no more than 15 minutes per weekday on the site.  This will allow me to make 2 to 4 posts a day.  Over time the content will really add up, the question is will the search engines be interested enough to rank the content high enough to get visitors to the site.

I have already started this new site, if you want to check it out here is the URL: http://www.shop-quik.com

I plan on doing monthly reports on this site so that you can all keep track of how it is coming along.  Please let me know if you have any questions about affiliate marketing and I will be happy to answer them as best I can. 

Development almost complete

Things were happening over the weekend at our world headquarters! :)  I received an email this morning from our developer in California that is doing the subscription package.  He is almost complete and just had some operational questions for me to answer.  It sounds like we may be doing some testing this week!

I have held off on ordering product until my development is complete.  I just want to be sure all the programming is working exactly right before I bite the bullet and order stock.  If all goes well I will be ordering some product by the end of this week.

I also received some great graphics from my supplier which I will be incorporating into my web site this week.  They are truely a unique company that really look at this as a partnership - so far so good!