Greaterscope

Self-doubt has struck again. I’ve spent more than two years building this “thing”. But please don’t tell anybody because it’s a little embarrassing. Why? read more »

Caterina Fake included a quote from a friend on her post about Hunch. It goes like this. “If you launch something you’re not at all embarrassed by, then you’ve waited too long.” Hunch is a free web app, not a commercial product, so that advice probably doesn’t apply to what I’m doing. And no doubt, the Business of Software forum advice-givers would advise against what I’m about to do, but I’m going to do it anyway. What am I about to do? I’m going to post a public demo of my shopping cart software…

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I’m stumped. Here’s what I want:

• I want people to be able to customize my product
• I want people to be able to make money selling their customizations
• I want people to make money off their customization services
• I want people that have purchased a license to be able to use the product as long as they want

Here’s what I don’t want: read more »

It’s almost the middle of March, thus only two more weeks until I’ve missed my “first quarter 2009″ target. Don’t worry, I’ve not been idle… read more »

His ass is poignant. But unless you’ve watched this, you won’t get the reference. Weak, I know. However, his analogies about the subtleties of running a software business are spot on. He explains how the things you half-thought might be a good idea, end up being just the opposite. For instance, it’s not a good idea to show your product to others for review if you have known bugs… read more »

Seth Godin says marketing should start before a product. This sounds strange when you take it literally. The Business of Software forum participants say you should focus on benefits, not features. These pieces of advice go together. When developing a product you must have the big picture in mind, which means an answer to the question “why are you making what you’re making?” The answer to that should, at the very least, center around meeting a customer’s needs. Ideally, your product should also make life better for your customers, and provide value and benefits not found elsewhere… read more »

This is a little late, but I’ve been busy moving to a new place (smaller, less to clean, cheaper rent). There hasn’t been much progress on much of anything. Once this month is over things should get back to normal.

Thanks for continuing to stop by.

Last week I made some changes that may seem small, but should go a long way in making it easier to understand the code and customize the product…

• Finalize the use of ISO codes as primary keys for country and language tables. This removes the need to follow integer foreign-keys back to these tables; the ISO code should make it easy to tell which language or country you’re dealing with.
• Create the concept of a country helper — a class that knows which address fields are necessary for specific country, and how to validate and format them.
• Make state model work with country helper.
• Work country helper into single page checkout. Add Canada as a proof of concept.
• Make databased sessions more robust by registering a shutdown function (register_shutdown_function()) and closing the session in there, rather than in the destructor of our controller class.
• Rename address fields to work better with international addressing.
• Simplify and comment flow of logic in single-page checkout code

What I’ve been working on (storefront software) suffers from exactly what Ian is talking about here. Essentially, how do you get noticed when all you’re doing is building a better mouse trap? It’s a battle between sexiness and utility. Boiled down further, it’s like function versus form. Function can keep you happy. Form just gets you riled up.

There are probably very few people excited about having another piece of shopping cart software to choose from. I imagine the most common thought is “aren’t there hundreds of open source shopping carts out there already?”. Yes, there are. But I’m trying to build something better, and I’m starting from a place of experience. Talk to anyone that has customized and deployed any of the existing solutions and you’ll hear a horror story or two. If I effectively serve a market previously overlooked — developers and designers — and the praises outweigh the criticisms, I’ve done my job and can die peacefully.

Holidays are a great time to make progress.

1. Add Registration and Sign-In functionality to single page checkout
2. Use ISO codes for language and country primary/foreign keys. Makes it much easier to get around when you’re mucking in the database.
3. Make dashboard statistics work
4. Use width in resized image filenames. Allows images for all stores to be pulled from the same location if needed (http://images.storedomain.com/images/), while allowing each store to have its own size for thumbnails/medium/large/etc images.
5. Populate the database with states, languages and a few countries
6. Make core controller more aware of databased sessions (must write and close the session before HTTP redirects)
7. Ability to throttle the number of active sessions in the database, for when I put up an official demo.

I’m happy with the progress, because it means both the storefront and admin areas are getting closer to full usability.

Delete functionality was big on my list, but I’ve not reached a solution I’m comfortable with yet. But that’s for another blog post where I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject.