Share and Share Alike

Share and Share Alike

So I am finding out there’s a lot more to starting an ecommerce company then just throwing up a website. Take corporate structure for example. Neither Mike nor I want to expose ourselves if someone gets a bad pickle and sues us. Get your mind out of the gutter, we don’t mean expose ourselves as in, “weird guys in trench coats”, we mean expose ourselves as in, “if somebody sues us they can take our personal assets as well as our company assets”. Being reasonable people, we also wish to share in the pickle spoils in a fair way. What does this mean for little old Pickle of the Month? It means we need to incorporate!

Incorporating solves both of these issues.

1. Incorporating creates a legal entity that will protect our personal assets. Not that we have a whole lot, but it’s comforting to know that if we get sued, I won’t lose my collection of rare beer shirts, and Mike’s signed Arrested Development DVD set remains safe. Johnny Law will view Pickle of the Month, Inc. as a separate legal person, complete with his own bank account and collection of stuff.
2. We plan to incorporate Pickle of the Month as an S-Corporation, which dictates that any money we distribute as dividends gets paid out according to how many shares a person owns. To make sure we do this fairly, Mike and I will get shares based on the amount of time and money we put into Pickle of the Month. We will allocate a certain percentage upon creation (let’s say 20%), and then allocate the rest of the shares over the next two years (let’s say 40% each year). That way whoever puts in the most time will reap the most rewards.
   

I’ve found this book invaluable:

It's a plainly-written guide on how to start a corporation for small business people like ourselves.

In other news, a fine gentleman in Colorado wants to buy our www.getpickled.com domain. He's starting up an, "everything pickled" store in Ft. Collins Colorado. Should we sell it? And who knew that pickles were so popular?

It's hot, and people need pickles

Thermometer is hitting 90 here in Chicago, and you know what that means. People beat the heat with a cool, crisp pickle and a form-fitting tshirt. Along those lines, we're finalizing the "Available in 2005" functionality for the site, holding power lunches with our attorney Noah (fully assuming his successful passing of the bar in July), and frankly, things are getting downright exciting. Doug thinks he has mad tshirt design skillz, so we've decided on a contest approach to tshirt sales. Maybe similar to the pickle meter, we'll have a shirt meter, whereby we track the number of Doug-designed shirts sold vs. Mike-designed. He may win the Wisconsin market, but anything remotely resembling a Packer shirt is doomed anywhere else. Let the games begin!

Writing and Money

Writing
I saw two great examples of how we want the writing on Pickle of the Month to zing this morning. Check out http://www.spazzstick.com/ - I love the attitude and writing on this site, especially the FAQs. It's exactly the personality I want Pickle of the Month to have. Who knew trolls actually existed?

The folks at Future Now highlight some fantastic writing on Flickr's site in this blog post - http://persuasion.typepad.com/architect/2005/06/sport_a_persona.html. The writing speaks directly to you and makes you chuckle, much more interesting than some corporate gobbly-gook writing style.


Money
Two huge announcements came out this week about ecommerce payment systems.

1. PayPal announced their Website Payments Pro program - effectively putting all other merchant account providers on notice. One can have a merchant account through PayPal for the extremely low price of $20 a month, plus 2.2% - 2.9% + $.30 a transaction.
2. Google then stunned the folks at PayPal by announcing their plans for a online payment system - http://news.com.com/Google+CEO+confirms+online+payment+system/2100-1024_3-5756571.html. This should get interesting.

Runaway Pickles

One of my most vivid memories from age four has to be seeing my mom and aunt scooping pickles out a lake with fishing nets. Seriously. And you wonder how I got to be strange enough to start a Pickle of the Month club.

We lived at a cottage in the summers with my grandparents and cousins. My grandma, aunt, and mom would make pickles as one of their favorite summer activities. They would load the four of us youngsters into the car and take us to the cucumber patch where we would scramble to pick out the best looking pickles-to-be. After assembling an impressive pickle pile, we would retire to the cottage where the ladies would perform some sort of voodoo magic on the cucumbers to turn them into pickles (everything seems like voodoo magic to a four year old).

Apparently one step in this process involved soaking the pickles in a bucket in the lake. Don’t ask me why. Well, on this certain day, the wind decided to be extra strong and frothed up the lake with impressive waves. These waves liked the pickles so much that they snatched them out of the bucket and strung them across the lake in one long, winding pickle trail.

One of us wee ones noticed this and yelled, “the pickles are getting away!”

Ok, I made that last part up, but someone noticed and alerted the pickle police.

Much like a firehouse in action when the fire bell rings, our yard turned into a boiling cauldron of frenzied women. My mom jumped in the boat and fired up the motor. My grandma grabbed a basket and jumped in. My aunt armed the trio with fishing nets to scoop up the wayward pickles. Off they went to save the day, catching their game in the nets and depositing the pickles into the basket.

What in the world does this have to do with Pickle of the Month? Not much, but it’s a good intro to the story of my ecommerce software selection. Just as the terrific trio of my mom, grandma, and aunt put pickles in a basket, we will be asking our visitors to put pickles in a basket. Not any old basket, but a shopping cart to be exact.

I am happy to report, we’ve decided on the guts behind Pickle of the Month. Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to introduce AspDotNetStorefront. We will be using the AspDotNetStorefront software to power our product catalog, shopping cart, ecommerce integration, and store administration. The best part is, we get all of the source code, so we can improve the customer experience where we see fit.

I looked at Yahoo Merchant Services, StoreSense, .NetCart, Microsoft’s ASP.NET Commerce Starter Kit, and a host of other ecommerce options as well. AspDotNetStorefront came out far ahead of the other solutions. Here’s why:

1. it rivaled Yahoo Merchant Services for having the most functionality
2. we get all of the source code, so we don’t have to sacrifice the customer experience
3. they charge a one-time fee, instead of a monthly subscription
4. the ecommerce integration ends up being much cheaper than the other options
5. their support team responded very quickly to my requests
6. they have a ton of customer sites profiled
7. reviews, customer reviews, polls, inventory levels, polls, and other cool features come standard
8. customers can ship to multiple addresses
9. they support “kits” and “bundles” – very important for a monthly pickle service
10. we can get up and running quickly
    

AspDotNetStorefront offers a ton of functionality for a fair price, and we'll be able to change things our customers don't like. I look forward to playing with the software and getting it up and running. Hopefully you will see it soon on the site!

Pickle Obstacles

As I walked to my fiancée’s (did you know the girl fiancée has two “e”s?) house tonight, I thought about why Mike and I haven’t gotten Pickle of the Month up and running yet. Our original optimistic thinking had us going live by June. I’m not sure about Mike, but I have run into three big obstacles:

1. Pain. I have flirted with carpal tunnel syndrome over the last two years, and it’s back worse than ever. Right now my right index finger feels like a short gremlin is sticking needles into it, and my left pinky and elbow burn like I just slammed my funny bone with a hammer. Good times. I’ve been trying to keep typing to a minimum, hence the delay on shipping you wonderful people some delicious pickles.
2. Engagement. That’s right, my girlfriend actually said yes when I asked her to marry me a couple weeks ago! Needless to say, my fiancée casts a dim look on pickle time vs. wedding planning time. Here’s a cool picture of the big day.
   
   
3. Selling my condo. Now that I am engaged to be hitched, I actually need to finish my condo so I can sell it. Being the silly type of person who likes to bite off huge challenges, I decided to completely destroy and rebuild my place two years ago. Also being the type of person that sometimes meanders at completing things, I have a few things to finish. Stripping 10 coats of paint off woodwork and re-varnishing really burns the hours.
   

Ok, ok, enough excuses already! Mike and I vow to keep cranking away in our delirious quest to bring you monthly pickle service!

Prepared for Anything

Between Dunkin Donuts and the train station the other morning, I heard a story on NPR that made me wish aloud "Why not us?". Only this was about wallets, not pickles. It was about successful (though unexpected) marketing and being ill-prepared for the results. Here's the actual story, you can listen to it yourself - it's about 4 minutes long. What it did tell me, and what I then told Doug, is that on the off chance this thing does take off, we need a plan in place to handle all those delicious pickles. In our case, that's more likely to be Plan D, Plan E, or possibly even a distant Plan F... But however remote, wild success is most certainly deserving of a lettered plan.