Idea #3
When I first moved to Texas I thought it would be humorous to get a license plate holder/frame for my car that said “Don’t Mess with Texas.” I looked in several stores here in Houston and found the slogan inscribed on t-shirts, hats, shot glasses and just about everything except license plate holders. Searching online proved fruitless as well. About two years later my friend Alan told me about CafePress. CafePress allows you to create your own images, apply them to a range of products that they offer, and then sell them through their own storefront. And alas, they had license plate holders… except there was just one problem. Houston just banned license plate holders if they obstruct any portion of the license plate (and of course any license plate holder by nature will obstruct a small portion of the plate). So the “Don’t Mess with Texas” license plate holder was not to be for me. I did however play with the site and apply the slogan to several other items. About 5 months later I remembered the CafePress store I created and decided to login to see what was new. I discovered that I had made seven sales! Surprisingly most of the sales that I had made were “Don’t Mess with Texas” thongs. With this encouragement I decided to upgrade from the free account to a premium account so I could offer more products beyond the free account restriction of only having one of each type of item. In my next post I’ll go into what I’ve done with the premium account and where I plan on going with it.
- posted by Drew @ 8:35 AM  

 
That is not my bracket...
I know I've still got to get to describing ideas 3-8, but I've been really busy trying to fit in time to finish the web development for idea #6. Idea #6 is like the Apartment Site as it's a content driven information site. Advertising sales is the revenue model. As I haven't had a lot of luck in getting ad sales for the Apartment Site, I do have some concerns. Idea #6 was supposed to be simple to implement and quick to get started. Therefore I thought it was worth taking a gamble on. Well I've been spending my free time trying to get the site developed, and as it turns out, it's become much more of a beast. It's still not as complicated as what's going on behind the scenes on the Apartment Site, but it's not something I can churn out in a couple weekends. I started this site by putting together a few screen mock-ups to help me flesh out the idea. Then I went to work on putting together a text only version of the site that's fully functional (which I'm still doing). Once the site is fully functional I'll begin the design work and clean up the site. Once this is all done all of the technical work should be complete. Then it will be time to populate the information, sell advertising and market the site. I'll post the details on the site once it's fully functional, and I'll even post the address to solicit some feedback from all three of you readers out there.

As a side note, I'm having a helluva time avoiding some stupid mistakes in my PHP code. Forgetting a semi-colon at the line ends can be tough to find, but I swear my computer is adding extra brackets into my code just to piss me off.
- posted by Drew @ 1:24 PM  

 
A Big Step Forward
My wife, Erin, is going to defend her Thesis tomorrow today. This takes me a big step closer to working on my own stuff. Once she's done with her PhD, we'll soon be moving to another city (likely Seattle). This move means that I'll likely need to leave my current day job behind which will make it that much easier for me to take the leap into attempting to do my own thing full time. Without this move, there wouldn't be much of a chance that I would give up a fairly good paying job to take a risk in trying my own thing. This change is scary, but I'm excited.
- posted by Drew @ 10:41 PM