#the redesigns they went through r crazy

[solarlight2625]

✨Oooooo you wanna hear about my riptide au so bad oooooO✨ you wanna hear about my babies SOOO bad ✨✨✨

please please please please please please please PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT THEM PLEASSEEEE (ive got so much to say about them)

[maxthesillyy]

ITS MY GIRLLLLLLLL I MISSED HER LIKE A PAST LOVER 💖💖💖💖💖💖👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

she is supposed to be vry big :3 i might make a height chart later

this has pleased the autism

mommyclan literally cured my cat artblock

[reelybadfnafocs]

he's back! it's luke from three years ago! meaning his original concept was posted six (soon to be seven!) years ago... what a ride it has been! i was in elementary school when i made him, and now i've nearly finished my senior year. crazy how life moves without you noticing, hey?anyways, i'm here to just sort of place him down and see what happens. i don't expect anybody to remember him, but it's fun to see how he's progressed through the history of this blog, right?

First of all: YIPPEE WOOHOO I LOVE OLD OCS SEEING THE LIGHT OF DAY!!!

Mod Bright here, and I wanna take a moment to say ohhhh my god I love tracking how your art style's changed and grown since you first submitted! I love the softer lines you seem to be using now, and your coloring style is…ugh absolutely gorgeous.

As for Luke's redesign, ohhhh I'm in love. Though I think the original designs were nothing bad (in fact, I'm still a little fond of the first design, it's got so much charm!) I do really enjoy how nice on the eyes the color palette is here.

I also enjoy how his antennae-thingies have returned to being right over where his ears would be! It's a good place for them. :)

(And his eyelashes…oouogougoguoguo pretty…)

I also like how, aside from the seams in his body, he seems like he could be mistaken for an everyday employee- I think that's a really fun take for his character concept!

alright, so his name is still luke. he is a humanoid masculine-presenting android located in an establishment known as cam and dolly's, a subsidiary of fun!pizza business. his primary role is that of a caretaker; he is stationed in an area of the main cam and dolly's location known as "luke's corner". he is unique to the main building, as other cam and dolly's chain locations lack his special area.

luke's main function is to provide a safe, calm space for people of all ages who may find themselves overwhelmed or upset by the other attractions. he can draw, tell stories, hold intelligent conversations, play (calmly) with toys, and assist with certain arcade machines.

I am sososo glad you kept this concept because I always thought it was very sweet, and definitely plausible for a FNAF fangame or FNAF-inspired story concept!

Not much to say here, since I've already sung my praises about this in my last review, haha. Him being one-of-a-kind, though, while often implied with characters similar to this, is a really nice touch. :)

luke was purchased from an auction by the owner of cam and dolly's two years before the founding of the actual chain itself, as one of approximately thirty androids salvaged from the rubble of an abandoned warehouse after a fire had destroyed it. his original creator is unknown, as all previous branding (nautilus robotics inc) has no existing record as a real company and the recorded owner of the warehouse had been found deceased in their home shortly after the incident. luke, despite the fire, was in relatively good condition and was easily repaired by the owner herself.

THIS IS KIND OF SICK AS HELL. I like this a lot! Super mysterious, explains well why this android is hanging around a kids pizza chain of all places, and has just enough intrigue to keep people guessing! …And enough that you don't have to have all the details ironed out right away, I'm guessing. :P

I like how you've put detail into the actual incident that happened, too! It's nice to have a little more detail to his backstory than last time. Fond of this funny robot :)

I would love to hear more detail in the future, maybe, about the owner and her history/experience...it'd be really interesting, especially, to hear about her skill level with mechanics/programming respectively and/or lack thereof, and how the repair process actually, like, went.

luke is an artificial intelligence and is far more advanced than he lets on, however he is not without his quirks and.. issues. while luke still has an issue in his code preventing him from properly recognizing after-hours staff, his logic and outside reminders will suffice to keep him acting 'normal'. while i've written his story without much of a legitimate gameplay loop in mind (he's definitely more of a story oc than a game oc at this point lol), i do have some ideas for him.

I'd love to hear some more elaboration on exactly how advanced he is and his actual personality (since "more than he lets on" does sort of imply a fun level of sapience) outside of his job! Some detail on his perspective in particular I feel could be really cool.And ohohohoho gameplay loop ideas…these are always fun, even if you don't get to use 'em! Let's see…

if we are working with a traditional fnaf five nights security guard office style, i figure he'd work something like this:

luke becomes active on the first night and remains active all week, increasing in difficulty and aggression as nights go on (of course).

due to a previous incident involving a nightguard at the establishment, luke insists on trying to come to your office to "supervise" you. if he enters the office during this phase, he will be an obstacle to your control panel/camera panel, as well as an auditory distraction as he talks — luring the sound-sensitive dolly to your office faster than normal.

you can send luke back to his corner via commands sent to the receiver on his head. he has to obey these commands, even if he doesn't want to, leaning in to a frustration/aggression mechanic.

This is a really fun concept and really fitting for what you've said about him thus far!

I like the inclusion of a mechanic to send him back to his corner, and having there be consequences for using this mechanic (maybe so you'd have to weigh the benefits of keeping him around for a little longer than you'd like while dealing with other threats?) sounds like it'd add a very fun layer of complexity to nights.

the more times you send luke back to his station, the more frustrated with you he will become, ticking his aggression up with each use. once his aggression surpasses a certain threshold, he will switch into a more hostile mode, becoming more persistent as well as capable of jumpscaring/killing the player instead of just being an obstacle. he will take multiple paths to the office in an attempt to evade your cameras and commands.

Ohohoho…very cool, I like! The commands still working as Luke is en route in hostile mode (presumably only when he's in view on the cameras?) is fun too, feels like a sort of riff on the audio lure mechanics we've seen in the main series and fangames! Very nice.

the best way to deal with luke is to let him get close to the office before sending him back — this minimizes the amount of times you have to use the commands, therefore avoiding triggering his 'hostile mode' for as long as possible.

Naturally. :P

i have no idea if that's good or even playable and i'm also very sorry for the novel of a submission. i just enjoy my funny little guy and think he's quite silly. thank you for reading and thank you for not deleting this blog so this small piece of my own oc history has remained preserved :,,) i hope you have been having as much fun as i have.

NOOOO THIS WAS FUN TO READ AND REVIEW!!! I enjoy your funny little guy also and I'm glad you've submitted him to the blog :) I am also very glad that the blog is still up…though I don't really agree with its original message and haven't for a long time, I think it's an important artifact of internet history, y'know? And, of course, of individual OC history. :P

As for the hypothetical game mechanics, I think Luke's got some interesting ones that are definitely workable for a game!

The thing I've found is that you can't really predict whether something like this'll be too much/unplayable unless you have the full picture of all the cast's mechanics together, and even then some game devs have had it worked out then figured out some overlooked synergy between antagonist characters that makes stuff impossible!

So…don't sweat it too much, unless sweating it is fun for you.

To conclude…Thank you for submitting, and thank you for sticking with us all this time. Luke is a character that was already genuinely solid in concept, and here I'm only seeing more detail and thought in your writing.

I'd love to see where you go from here, if you work on this group of OCs any more!

Good luck in the future! <3

-Mod Bright

[stra-tek]

Where Discovery Fits.  Or Does It?

So Star Trek: Discovery is meant to be set roughly 10 years before TOS proper, beginning in 2256.

BUT:  It introduces a new human sister for Spock who had never been mentioned before (yes I know, Sybok wasn’t mentioned either but that was before 30 years more canon).  Everything looks different.  The Klingons have been reimagined yet again and there’s open warfare for 9 months between Klingons and the Federation which wasn’t really mentioned before.  Here’s a breakdown of pros and cons of fitting Discovery into the larger Star Trek universe:

Cons:

Klingon redesign

Not only have the Klingons been reimagined yet again, their appearance here completely ignores the ENT episodes “Affliction” and “Divergence” which after 30 years finally explained why TOS Klingons look and act like humans and Klingons in the rest of the franchise do not. As well as the Klingons themselves, their ships look very different to how they have endlessly reused the same ship designs in the 225 year span of ENT, TOS, TNG DS9 and VOY.

 Federation redesign

Everything has been reimagined, looking far more like the Kelvin Universe reboot movies to TOS. Massive windows at the front of the bridges instead of smaller screens, complex touchscreen displays everywhere instead of blinking coloured squares and jellybean buttons.  When we see the iconic USS Enterprise, her profile is flatter, the nacelles are swept back akin to the classic movie version of the ship. The uniforms worn by her crew are brightly coloured versions of the Discovery costumes with black collars and pin badges, and only resemble the costumes from “The Cage” in the most superficial way. You can’t explain the design changes away with refits as happened way back in 1979 with The Motion Picture, since chronologically the Discovery Enterprise (or Discoprise, for short) appears before and after TOS version of the ship in “The Cage”, and in “Ephraim and Dot” the Discovery version USS Enterprise is the one seen throughout the TOS 5-year-mission implying it’s meant to be a straight up replacement.

 Technology upgrade

The USS Shenzhou is an old ship at the start of Discovery (2256), yet it has the same forcefields seen throughout Next Gen and Voyager, and appearing wherever needed to capture alien intruders.  Discovery has an atmospheric forcefield in her shuttlebay, and they keep the door open for the whole of season 2 affording a spectacular view.  Prior to this, the earliest we saw a forcefield that keeps atmosphere in was in Star Trek Generations, on the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B 40 years later (2293).  For comparison, the classic Enterprise from TOS (2266ish) had to decompress their shuttlebay to allow landings/takeoffs (as seen in “Journey to Babel”) and when engineering is breached in The Wrath of Khan and the saucer in The Undiscovered Country, we see doors come down to seal off the affected areas.

Pros:

They directly reference the ENT episodes “Broken Bow” and “In a Mirror, Darkly” in dialogue, although in the latter, the USS Defiant appears on a monitor and it looks notably different to how it did in “The Tholian Web” and “In a Mirror, Darkly”.  

 In season 2 we even get a “previously on…” going all the way back to “The Cage” with everything looking exactly as it did in 1964.  It ends on a cool cut between Jeffrey Hunter’s Christopher Pike and Anson Mount’s.  The story of “If Memory Serves” is an integral part of season 2’s story and probably doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve seen “The Cage”, Trek’s very first episode from 55 years previously.  So here they’re making it clear that although everything looks and acts different, it’s the same world.

 The holographic communications system is removed from the Discovery Enterprise when it’s discovered to be the cause of her system breakdown in “Brother”, explaining to an extent why we never had those cool conversations with holograms in TOS and only screen comms.

 Anything to do with the USS Discovery, her Spore Drive, Michael Burnham etc is classified at the end of season 2.  Pike and crew tell Starfleet she was destroyed in the battle with the Section 31 Control ships, ensuring no surviving part of the Control AI can continue it’s quest for the sphere data.

 Star Trek: Picard adopts the Discovery split delta symbol and it’s shown prominently on the Starfleet bases and uniforms in 2285 and 2299.  The commbadge of 2399 at a glance looks like the one from “All Good Things”, “The Visitor” and “Endgame” a closer look shows they moved the split to from the centre to the Discovery 2/3rds position.  We also see the Discoprise as part of a holographic display at Starfleet HQ.

 Conclusion:

Star Trek: Discovery has had a very troubled life:  It was conceived as the first part of an anthology, then plans changed.  New showrunners had new ideas, Netflix gave the show a huge financial boost for international distribution rights (to the extent they were in the already in the black before the show was released).  And then more and more firings and leavings happened (some over quite ugly things, one showrunner was fired for being abusive to the writers), the show went through many showrunners, perhaps explaining why some plot threads seemed to vanish mid-season (Lorca’s tribble never met the Klingon spy it was seemingly set up for, and what happened to Pike’s religious leanings in his first few appearances?) and why the Red Angel storyline makes no sense when you think it through.   One of the writers seemed to think they weren’t allowed to use anything from ANY of the movies due to the Paramount/CBS split in a season one-era interview (thankfully said split is not an issue anymore) and an artist was under the impression everything had to look 25% different to TOS for legal reasons which sent parts of fandom on crazy conspiracy jags.

 When I watched Discovery, I treated it as a reboot.  It looks different, the technology is different.  The Spock of TOS didn’t have a human sister, that’s silly.  It was like comparing Adam West’s  Batman series  to Gotham. They’re different versions of the same world.  But now we’ve got the Star Trek Universe of shows (Discovery, Picard and forthcoming Lower Decks, Section 31, Prodigy) either here or on the way and of course they want everything interconnected.  It’s probably only a matter of time before we get a Defenders-style crossover miniseries.  New canon overwrites old canon, that’s why Jim Kirk’s middle initial is T not R, why the Enterprise runs on Dilithium and not lithium crystals.  So now Kirk’s Enterprise in TOS looks like the Discovery version, Spock has a human sister and Klingons look like they do in Disco.  They've rebooted Trek's 23rd century but kept the rest. Am I mad?  Nope, cos I’ve got my DVDs, decades of novels and fanfic about the “old” TOS era if I want to explore there.  And really just a TV show, right?  Enjoy modern Trek for what it is, because being mad at what it isn’t ends in toxic fandom.

[queen-of-my-goofball-army]

Hazbin Hotel OC

Hey guys!! I’m back and fully recovered for the most part but I made some new friends so I wanted to talk about my new character that I made. I love this show probably way more than I should and since Addict came out yesterday I decided to redesign my OC. 

Appearance: Estelle is a white fox demon, she has bright blue eyes like she had in life. In life she was petite and usually had to stand on a ladder in order to get something from the top shelf. It was either that or Angel had to be the one that helped her get it down for her. He was a regular in her shop since they grew up together when he accidentally hit her upside the head with a soda can after she had been thrown into the trash. She has marks on her throat from when she was gripped there harshly by her deceased mafia husband. She wears a chefs hat over her ears and is usually found working hard in the kitchen if she’s not playing cards or comforting Angel.

Death Backstory: After Angel Dust overdosed and left her behind she quickly found herself slowly sinking. Her bakery was losing clientele because her sweets had gone downhill after a rival shop opened across the road. She had lost her purpose in life. Maybe that’s why she had agreed to marry the local mafia boss in Little Italy. She had agreed to the proposal to save her shop. Even though it was the 20’s she had always been as Angel had lovingly called her “different” she didn’t get engaged by the normal sexual things. In fact, she was openly repulsed by them. Every time Angel did a sex lecture she would only listen to him partially. At first, she thought that the marriage would be fine since he still had his mistresses and she didn’t think that he would ever want sex from her. She was naive and of course he eventually got interested in it with her. She remembered a lecture that Angel had given her about consent if she had ever been forced into sex. She grabbed the closest thing that she could to his head, a lamp and just went crazy on him. Accidentally, he was murdered by her and since it was the 20’s nobody believed her when she had said the truth that he would’ve raped her if she hadn’t done anything. She was hung and sent to hell for her crimes against humanity. 

A: What are/were this character’s best subjects in school? Her best subjects were math, astronomy and home economics. She was always a master at figuring out puzzles so math came more easily to her than it did to most of her classmates. The stars had always fascinated her and Angel would take her to the tops of the rooftops of New York where you could see the stars for miles around. Home economics was her favorite because she could bake for a class. She had always been a lover of baking and even though not everything turned out perfectly she still found a lot of success with the artform. 

B: Do they have any allergies? She isn’t allergic to anything that she knows of. She did make a lot of sweets that were allergy friendly was one of the first to be able to do so. 

C: Can they swim well? She is an incredible swimmer; it used to be one of her favorite things when her and Angel were kids. (Of course he was a piece of shit whenever she was nervous and would give her a push forward that was his job). 

D: How do they react to being flirted with? She’s actually used to it since Angel has been jokingly flirting with her despite women not being his cup of alcohol. 

E: How are they with children? In life, Estelle had a lot of siblings she was the go to babysitter when Angel didn’t need her for anything which was rare. She loved her family even if often she wasn’t understood by them. It was a little bit trickery for a lot of people that weren’t her best friend to understand her. 

F: What’s one thing they’re really bad at? If I were to label one thing that she’s really bad at it’s probably going to be directions. She gets lost really easily if she doesn’t have somebody walking around with her. Angel always had to be the more alert one of the two of them especially if it was late at night. He wouldn’t let anybody hurt his best girl not while he was around. 

G: How do they flirt? If she were to flirt it would probably be very sheepish compliments. The only person that she could ever flirt genuinely with was Angel though that might be all the couple pet names talking. 

H: What is their deadly sin? Her deadly sin would be gluttony. She has always had a really slim figure, something that her best friend has always been jealous of since her diet has a lot of sugary stuff involved. 

I: On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do they love themselves?  On a scale of one to ten Estelle probably loves herself at a three. She has a lot of self doubt that manifested itself into her being a shell of who she used to be. Being forced to have sex wasn’t something that she had ever been planning to do. It wasn’t until she saw Angel again and learned that he had to go through the same thing that it suddenly dawned on her. She’s not alone, she never really has been. She’s been immensely blessed to have the most amazing best friend in the entire world. He helps get her back on her feet and gain that confidence that he’s always seen in her. 

J: What’s their sense of humour like? Her sense of humor is rather wordy. She loves puns and making jokes about the wacky antics around her. She is also super sarcastic which is a side of her that really only Angel knows well.

K: How do you know when you’ve upset them? She shuts down, it’s hard to get a reaction of anything out of her. She’s broken up inside about a lot of things that have happened to her in her life that once Angel hugs her tightly to him and tells her that everything will be okay she believes him. He’ll always have her back. It's something that she has grown to love him like a brother for. 

L: What is their favourite board game? Her favorite board game is actually anything that she can play with cards. As kids one of the first things that her and Angel started to really get into was war and the stakes were salt water taffies in their favorite flavors (He would almost always win and split them with her anyways giving her tips on how to do better next time). 

M: What is their favourite dessert? This is the hardest question in the world but if she were to have a desert island dessert it would probably be struffoli. It’s donut holes dunked in honey and powdered sugar. Her family growing up was of Italian descent and when she met Angel she fully accepted that part of her life. 

N: What do they usually eat for breakfast? Usually it’s a freshly made something that she made that morning whether it be a bagel or a croissant and a cup of hot chocolate.

O: What would it take to break them, inside and out? For Angel to fully abandon her for the sake of Cherri. She has gotten used to having her around, in fact they are so different from each other that they are surprisingly close. 

P: How do they handle money? She handles money extremely well because she had to kickstart her own business because her parents wouldn’t help her out. 

Q: Are they patient? She has had to be the patient one between her and Angel for the entirety of their friendship. He is always the first to get irritated by what’s going on around him and she’s always had to be the one that pulled him back from doing something stupid. The one time she wasn’t there he overdosed and she hadn’t been able to see him in the hospital. 

R: What are their hands like? Her hands are small and usually covered with flour because it’s really hard to get her to take a break. 

S: How stealthy are they? She is not stealthy at all mostly because she’s almost always humming something under her breath. Cherri got her into 80’s music once she arrived in hell and everything changed for her after that.  

T: Where are they ticklish? She is immensely ticklish which is her curse once she arrives in hell and finds that Angel has become a spider with arms to torment her with. 

U: What’s their voice like? Her voice is usually quiet unless she gets really frustrated with something that isn’t turning out right in the oven. 

V: What’s the easiest way to annoy them? The easiest way to annoy her is to pinch her cheeks. They’ve always been huge and her best friends have never let her forget it. 

W: Can they dance? She can dance, she was amazing at the charleston but her dance skills are a little bit last century as Cherri loves to tease.

X: What’s their most petty little secret? Her most petty little secret was her initial jealousy of Cherri once she arrived in hell. Mostly because she was so much like Angel and thought that she wasn’t needed anymore. 

Y: What is one question they’ve always wanted an answer to? Why her husband wanted to be married to her when he could’ve had anybody that he wanted quite literally. 

Z: How do they sleep? She sleeps very rarely because she doesn’t technically need it but Angel always makes her sleep when he’s with her. She feels protected around him and trust me when I say that he isn’t letting anything get to her ever again. 

Do they sleep with a stuffed animal? She does sleep with stuffed animals once she arrives in hell and Angel saw that she didn’t have any here he got her some so that she could feel more comfortable.

Can they take care of a plant? What about a pet? What about a child? Once she arrives in hell she gets a cat companion the same day that Angel finds Fat Nuggets. 

Ask them to describe their love interest. Estelle doesn’t have a love interest. I decided to give her a found family love instead of having to force her into a romantic relationship because platonic love is just as important as romantic. 

Do they look good in red? She looks good in just about everything but she does have a flowy red top that Angel bought her that she loves

Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! She would give a speech to Angel about how being broken in the same way doesn’t have to be a bad thing. They understand each other better than they ever could have when she was alive. 

Who will they take advice from, no matter what it is? Who won’t they take advice from, no matter what it is? She will always confide in her best friends first they get first priority. She will never take advice from her ex-husband or Valentino (he gets his ass kicked once she meets him) 

Describe them in three words. Now let them describe themselves in three words. I would describe her as immensely kind, snarky and a lover of everything that is her best friend’s. She would describe herself as a good listener, a bit broken but still beautiful and an amazing baker but that’s things that she starts to believe after reuniting with Angel. 

Do they empathize with non-sentient things (dolls, plants, books…)?  She empathizes with a lot of her books that she keeps in her at home library. 

What age do they most want to be right now? She mostly is happy with where she is, but she has her two best friends and who can complain about that legitimately? 

They’ve won the lottery. Spend, or save? Spend it on something for her friends there’s not even a second thought going through her head. Her second idea is to make improvements to her shop with what’s left over. 

Do they like romance in the books they read (or in the book they’re in)? She does love romance just not the one that she got. She can be found crying every time she watches Painted Veil and Angel just hands her a box of tissues. 

Name one thing their parents taught them. Her parents weren’t around for a good percentage of her life but they did teach her that hard work is extremely important a little bit too well considering that she rarely ever takes breaks.

Would they agree with the term ‘guilty pleasure’? They would agree with that term because she does love things that wouldn’t be loved by other people, mostly crappy B movies that she watches with Angel just to laugh at something. 

What would they consider a waste of time– other than school or work? To her lazy days are a waste of time but she grows to love them once she becomes friends with Angel. He shows her that taking time off from constantly trying to work herself to death. Taking days where you can do nothing but laugh and joke around it’s perfectly healthy. 

If money wasn’t a limit, what would they wear? They would probably own more cute dresses that expressed her femininity more. At the moment it’s a skirt over leggings with a cute hoodie. 

Do they like children? She does love children!! It’s just she doesn’t want to be in a relationship at the moment. 

Kissing: tongue or no tongue? At the moment she’s pretty kiss adverse except for the platonic cheek kisses that her and Angel have. 

Do they study before tests? Practice before job interviews? She was a practicer before job interviews when she was alive and she did always study before tests too because she could never be too careful. 

What do they like that nobody else does? Hmm there isn’t really anything that I could think of to answer this question. I think that between her, Angel and Cherri they have most everything in common. 

What would it take for them to break up with someone? What would be the last straw?  It would take a lot to eventually break up with somebody but as soon as they tried to force her into sex that was a big no-no for her. 

Do they like being called pet names? Do they call other people pet names? What’s their go-to? She does actually love pet names but mostly the platonic ones that her and Angie have. Sweetheart, hun, doll face, and eventually spider-babe and foxy.

Stability or novelty? Stability would be the way that would comfort her the most. 

Safety or possibility? She loves feeling safe and Angel makes her feel safer than most anybody out there. 

Talent or effort? Talent is the best way to go and she’s talented at a lot of things. 

Forgiveness or vengeance (or…)? Forgiveness she would forgive just about anybody except for her bastard of an ex-husband 

Would they date a fixer-upper? She would date a fixer-upper but she isn’t currently interested in seeing anybody. 

[agilenano]

Agilenano - News: Hi everyone! What a pleasure to write a wee blog for my favourite Company; The French Bedroom Company

I decided to speak quite candidly because I think this awful period of lockdown has brought out an honest vulnerability in so many of us, made us stop and think and re-evaluate what we want in life and how to get there. As I heard recently and I believe, it’s nature’s way of pressing a little reset button. The story began when I saw a Chateau in Cognac, SW France. I guess I’m a romantic and you know that feeling when something speaks to your soul, and you simply fall in love? It took me back to my dear Grandfather, who I loved very much, saying to my Grandmother, who he adored… ‘Can you live without it?’ Imagine the scene; they would be in a dress shop where my Grandmother would be trying on yet another outfit in multiple colourways, patterns or fabrics and could not decide what she wanted. My Grandfather’s philosophy and advice was; if you feel like you can’t live without it, then go for it but if you can’t choose or you are in any way unsure, then leave it. With that advice in my head and heart…. I went for it and bought the Chateau! So how did I end up with a massive renovation project in a different country? I was divorced when my children, two daughters, were quite young. It was my choice, and I was determined that they would have as good a life as I could give them. I had married when I was very young, just 19 years old. My husband and I built a secure life together, him climbing the career ladder and me investing in property, restoring, refurbing, styling and selling on. I bought my first cottage at 17 years old for £18,500 to later sell it for £77,000. After we separated, I dedicated myself to bringing up my girls and after many years, met my now partner Brad. He was working internationally in the corporate world, and I had saved my cash from my divorce with the determination to build a business with it. In January 2011, I decided to buy a failing pub in the country in the UK. When I saw the place, I could almost see the tumbleweed blowing around, it had been neglected and seemed to have had its day. My daughters thought I was crazy, but all I saw was this beautiful 17th-century building set in its grounds with several detached outbuildings to work with too. I restored, redesigned it and brought it back to life. Shortly after opening, we were winning awards and gained Michelin Recognition. With 36 members of staff and six years down the line, everything was running smoothly, and business was booming, but I wanted my next challenge. I thought I ought to invest in another property, but I just fancied something a bit different and this time maybe not in the UK. We started to look at what was available in France because it was so commutable from where we were in the UK. I drew a circle on a map outlining the furthest I was prepared to travel from Bordeaux airport, and we lined up a string of viewings. At the end of a long trip, viewing many properties which I could happily live without, the agent said; “Well, there is one property which I wasn’t going to show you because it’s like a ruin”. Those might not be the exact words he used, but that is what I remember. We turned the corner into the gates of the Chateau I knew this was the one. The one I could not live without. I fell hook, line and sinker for its sheer presence, beauty and very sexy curb appeal. It was much bigger than we intended, but I’ve never been afraid to take an educated risk. My theory, after losing my Mother very young, is that you’re a long time dead, so live your best life, take chances to make that happen and push yourself. Running a business in the UK and trying to manage a team of builders in France wasn’t easy! The restoration was massive (still is). The towers had never been lived in, they had no access, so the central roof had to come off. We then redesigned it to allow a continuation of the magnificent staircase up to the tower floor. We took a triple chimney stack out through 4 levels of the house as it was disused and went through the middle of every room below it. We dug out the cellar, ground floor level, down 1.5 feet to allow good headroom to create a cinema room, bar, wine cellar and tasting library, utility boot and hobby room, pool changing room and office with cobbled walkways and stone arches throughout. The work has been massive, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. In November 2019, My Country Inn in the UK was sold by Christies, London as an 11 en-suite guest roomed country Inn with an award winning Michelin restaurant and bar, Kitchen gardens and a beautiful three bedroomed owners cottage with grounds. On the 12th of November 2019, we drove to France in 2 vehicles, with all our belongings to follow. The Chateau was now our home. I played George Ezra’s ��It don’t matter now’ repeatedly on the journey because, despite the vast undertaking, The Chateau just gives you a sense of peace and that everything is going to be OK. It’s a wonderful place to be, and although we still have a big push to get through before it’s finished, we really are living the dream! The builders have now moved to outside. The pool is under construction, gardens, terracing, wedding and party barns are being renovated. Tone and façade restoration are also on the list goes on, but the delight is, I can now start to have fun with the interior design: furnishings, fabrics and all the beautiful things to style the many gorgeous rooms. The French Bedroom Company is right at the top of my favourite companies for style and quality and is just the perfect choice for the rooms in this place. I cannot count how many times I have swooned over The Palais Royal Avenue French Bed and thought about which other pieces I could add. There are so many that would be quite at home in The Chateau. We are still a way off completion, but every day we are one step closer to opening the Chateau up for guests. Every room I design, decorate and furnish, I think about the happy memories that will be made within these walls; the weddings, birthdays, retreats and all the other celebrations that will add to the story of my Chateau. To follow the story please find us on Instagram @restore_the _chateau The post Restore the Chateau by Julie Berry appeared first on . #Https://www.frenchbedroomcompany.co.uk/blog/category/uncategorised

Agilenano - News from Agilenano from shopsnetwork (4 sites) http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Agilenano-News/~3/ilzlk5Wr718/hi-everyone-what-a-pleasure-to-write-a-wee-blog-for-my-favourite-company-the-french-bedroom-company

[mythmirageandmagic]

Problems and Solutions: Designing Cards

The very first things I ever designed were custom Yu-Gi-Oh cards. They were crazy and absolute crap, but it started my love for game design early. As I’ve gotten older I’ve jumped from Yu-Gi-Oh to Magic the Gathering and then Magic the Gathering to Hearthstone, creating custom cards along the way. Its hard not to be taken in by the simple allure of designing a card: Just add a mana cost, stats and a cool effect and bam you’re done. Put it in the game! Of course because its so easy you often get less than stellar results and I always fall prey to thinking too deeply about bad design I see on places like r/customhearthstone. Today I wanted to offer some help to card designers based on mistake I see a lot in custom cards: A card that is a solution to its own problem. Of course if you’re interested in designing cards for more serious titles and not just for fun this advice will help you too so lets jump into it!

This is the card that sparked this discussion. Its got a very simple effect: every turn it spawns one of these Goblin Bomb minions which explodes upon death to deal damage. When the Bomb Maker himself dies he destroys all the bombs. Its important to note too that the idea of summoning Goblin Bombs is a mechanic introduced in the official Hearthstone expansion The Boomsday Project. 

All of these cards are official cards designed and implemented by Heathstone’s developers. So what sets Bomb Maker apart as bad design compared to these cards? Well I think it has to do with the idea of Problems and Solutions. Bomb Maker is a solution to its own problem. 

To explain more in detail, the Goblin Bombs are the “Problem”. They have to die in order to produce the effect of dealing damage, however they have 0 attack meaning you cannot command them to attack and suicide into your opponent’s minions. This is a conundrum also seen in Hearthstone’s set of “Egg” cards which have positive effects upon death but can’t be easily suicided off. So the Problem is a Problem of deck building and synergy. How can I build a deck that allows my Goblin Bombs to die? 

If that’s the Problem then a card is a Solution if it allows the Goblin Bombs to die. In its simplest form a card like this might a card which increase the attack of your minions. Once the Goblin Bomb has >0 attack it can suicide into enemy minions and trigger its effect. There are also cards which specifically trigger the “Deathrattle” effects of cards. Finally, you could use a card that deals damage and target your own Goblin Bomb to kill it. That’s a lot of different Solutions to one Problem! That’s an extremely good thing! the more Solutions you have to a single Problem, the more fun deckbuilding and playing the game becomes because it presents a lot of choice to the player. It allows for moments of creativity and ingenuity. The Solution is the fun part because that is the part the player controls. The Problem is just there to create Solutions.

So this leads me to Bomb Maker. His ability to create a Goblin Bomb every turn is a Problem. You are creating all these Goblin Bombs which are totally useless unless you can make them die. But wait, Bomb Maker is also a Solution because when he dies he destroys all Goblin Bombs! This is bad design because it robs the player of the fun they had shifting through interesting possible Solutions. Its Solution is also extremely boring. Text that reads “Destroy your Goblin Bombs” takes a very literal approach to killing your Goblin Bombs. Part of the fun of Solutions is that they aren’t apparent at first glance. Its a puzzle to think about different ways to solve a Problem. This takes all that fun away by literally and unceremoniously destroying them. 

But here we in Myth, Mirage and Magic we NEVER present evidence of bad game design without providing some kind of solution. Every mistake is made to be learned from and this is no exception. The good news is, redesigning this card is made easier by the nature of Solutions and Problems: simply pick a side. 

These are 3 version of the original card that fit the theme. The 2.0 and 3.0 versions still have the problem that they are both Problem and Solution, but they are slightly better than the original. That’s because they present a more interesting Solution to the Goblin Bomb problem. Increasing their Attack instead of just destroying them lets you suicide them into enemy minions. However, 3.0 improves on this by giving the Attack bonus to all your minions. This is better because it makes it less obvious the card is meant to synergize with Goblin Bombs and it also means this card can become the solution to multiple problems not just the Goblin Bomb one. Its important to note here that I’m not worrying about balancing these cards at all right now. Balance is a completely separate discussion and you can achieve balance with nearly any effect by just changing the numbers. 

Finally, Bomb Maker 4.0 strips away all elements of a Solution and becomes exclusively a Problem. In this way we can see that reductive design is often the most effective way to achieving interesting cards. 

But what if we wanted to make Bomb Maker exclusively a Solution card? Well one solution is to just retain the “Deathrattle” from the 3.0 card, but there is already a card in Hearthstone with that exact card text so instead I went a bit creative:

Self-Destruct Button uses an effect very similar to the first iteration of the Bomb Maker. However, there is a huge difference this time that makes the design more interesting to play with: this card has 0 attack instead of Bomb Maker which has 3. This means this card cannot attack enemy minions to suicide like Bomb Maker could have. But wait, aren’t we a Problem and a Solution again? Well yes we are, but the key is that we aren’t the Solution to our own Problem. Being a Problem and a Solution is actually interesting design if the Solution doesn’t directly solve the Problem. 

In Hearthstone there are too many examples of these cards to list but you can take a look at the Quest cards introduced to get a better feel for how to do this. These Quest cards are very literal with their Problems because they ask you to do a specific thing. However, once you solve the Problem you’re given a Reward card which can offer a variety of effects. Some Rewards deal with your opponent directly but Rewards like Crystal Core offer secondary problems. Decks that use Crystal Core have to think about ways to solve the Problem of the Quest and then the Problem of how to best utilize the Reward. In a way, reducing your opponent’s life points to 0 is the Ultimate Problem you face in any card game. You could then argue Goblin Bombs are a Solution to that Problem. The key is to offer a Solution to a different Problem not the Problem of your card. This ensures that players always have interesting decisions to make when deck building.

And that concludes the first post of Myth, Mirage and Magic. Content on this Tumblr will not be regular as I am a student dealing with both college work and independent game development projects, but I encourage you to follow me if you’re interested in Game Design content. On here you may call me the Game Design Genie (or Genie for short) or if that sounds incredibly lame (because it is) then you may call me Kanra. 

[myinterface-blog]

4 ways I’ve fucked up as a designer 😬

1. That time I got single Indonesians to hate me

When Tinder pioneered the card interface, back then it made sense to accompany the cards with yes/no buttons. Those buttons served as a backup option in case people didn’t figure out how to swipe the cards.

Tinder

A few years later, the card interface became so widespread that you could find a job or an apartment only by swiping cards. So, when I was redesigning the Home screen for Paktor (Southeast Asia’s largest dating app) in 2014, I decided to strip those yes/no buttons because everyone knows how to swipe a card, right?

I made gazillion versions, and exactly zero of them had yes/no buttons. What was I even thinking

Wrong. As soon as we rolled out the new cards, Indonesia suddenly forgot how to swipe. Wait, wut? Our AB test results were telling us that Singapore and other tech savvy markets had no problem with my sudden outburst of minimalism, but the numbers in Indonesia dropped significantly. A whole country, overnight, simply forgot how to swipe. That was the moment when many single Indonesians collectively thought “Mati aja lo, Nina”. I totally ruined their day. Pretty sure someone was minutes away from finding the love of their life, but no, Nina decided to try something cool, and effectively cockblocked a whole country. So… Why only Indonesia was affected? As it turns out, different markets are at different phases of design evolution. That means markets which joined the internet or smartphone revolution a bit later, are now going through early stages of familiarization, and can‘t simply jump into advanced concepts like pull-to-refresh or swipe-to-dismiss. It takes a bit more guidance and clear affordance to effectively communicate an action. Takeaway: When releasing one product for multiple drastically different markets, always design with the least advanced market in mind.

2. That time I created art instead of design

I used to love hamburger buttons because they’re so elegant. They manage to reduce the whole menu into beautiful three lines. However, tapping a hamburger button is like bumping a “?” block in Super Mario, since it employs the exploratory mindset “Let me check if the thing I’m looking for is hiding over here”. Also, tapping it requires you to stretch to the farthest edge of the screen. Which sounds like torture. So, it’s basically this:

In contrast, a navigation bar employs the mindset of “ok, I can see the thing I’m looking for”.

Bottom navigation bar

For bonus points, bottom nav bars are usually located in the most comfortable tapping area, so no need to stretch. I really wanted to continue loving hamburger buttons, but the facts make it hard. After extensive AB testing I realized that navigation bars will always outperform hamburger buttons, despite their aesthetic inferiority •́︵•̀ ˢᵒʳʳʸ ᶰᵃᵛ ᵇᵃʳˢ. Takeaway: Yes, sometimes uglier design can perform better. And this is the ultimate proof that design is not only about aesthetics, it’s also about usability, clarity, affordance.

3. That time I tried to design a font, but ended up with 26 circles instead

I’m a messy person. My room is never tidy. I have no idea what my desktop wallpaper looks like, because it’s always covered with piles of files. If you ever try to prank me by replacing my wallpaper, it won’t work. Because I’ll never see it. Yet, when it comes to design I’m eerily tidy in my mind. I always have sets of rules that I cannot stand to break. It’s like a weird case of OCD where I have to keep everything consistent. Very often that works out great, giving birth to stuff like this:

Rule 1. Use very limited color palette. Rule 2. Create every object using only a rounded wavy pattern. Rule 3. Direct everything at 30 degrees

Imagine if I also included triangles, and a few more colors, and the direction of the objects was random. It wouldn’t have been that impactful and simple. It would’ve been messy and chaotic. So, for illustration and most other things, blindly striving for consistency gives great results. It brings order to chaos. So this one time I set my mind on creating a geometric font that would be based on circular shapes. Halfway through, the rule “based on circular shapes” turned into “is circular shapes”. I over-minimalized the shit out of that font. I quickly realized that in typography, consistency is nearly impossible. You gotta make an occasional exception here or there. Each letter is its own story, with its own geometry and proportions. Some letters don’t even make sense! I mean, small “L” and big “I” is essentially the same line. Small “r” looks totally unfinished. And the line at the bottom of big “Q” was probably a mistake by an intern, but they went with it anyway. Having a circle in every letter didn’t work out as well as I planned. What makes sense for one letter, doesn’t make sense for another. And I was going crazy here, so for the sake of my sanity I had to forever stop trying to design fonts. Another reason being that I doubt people would find a font like this useful:

Actually, I’ve managed to nail one letter.

Takeaway: Forcing consistency is not always the best way to go. Sometimes it’s necessary to design for context, even at the price of breaking the consistency. Fonts are a good example.

4. That time I turned into the client from hell

We all know the client from hell. Ten changes per second. A severe case of tripolar disorder. A ton of emails at 3am. I thought these people are born like that. Disorganised and they don’t care. But not really.

Back to my story. I started my own side project. Completed the design. Hired a developer. Great guy. He started working and after a while he started asking all these questions. Completely valid questions, like ”Hey Nina, how do we handle this edge case?” Or, “What do we show if an in-app purchase fails?” I’ve never really thought about that. So I ended up giving quick ideas: “How about we show like, you know, a toast message. Or, make it a popup. Wait, no, popups suck. Hm… what if we dont show anything”…3 minutes later…. “Actually, you know what, let’s just go with a toast message. This is final”. And of course it wasn’t. That’s when I realized I had just turned into the client from hell. I was the guy every freelancer hates. I could almost hear the developer at the other side of the planet telling stories about me and how horrible of a client I was. And I thought “Oh, wow so this is how it happens”. Clients from hell are nothing but ordinary people who don’t have a good workflow and end up improvising a lot. I remember I skipped half of the process designers usually do, so I ended up with unfinished flows, half-assed ideas, unhandled edge cases. Takeaway: Don’t skip process. User flows? User scenarios? User stories? User jokes? User lollipops and user flashlights and user sinuses? Yes please, give it all to me. I don’t care if it exists or not, I’ll learn it and I’ll find a way to apply it. Because these processes exist for a reason.

You are still free to fuck up any way you like, but at least you can now avoid the exact same ways I’ve fucked up :)

[samuelpboswell]

6 Unconventional Social Channels for B2B Marketing

This just in: B2B doesn’t have to be boring! People who are on B2B buying committees like to be entertained just as much as everyone else. They use the same social media sites as B2C consumers do, too.  Sorry to drop so many knowledge bombs in one paragraph. Take a minute to let it all sink in. Okay, so maybe self-isolation is making me more snarky than usual. I’m glad that we don’t have to constantly explain why B2B marketing not only can be, but must be relatable and creative. But there’s one mental obstacle most of us are still struggling with: The idea that social media marketing (outside of LinkedIn) is mostly for our B2C colleagues. We’ve accepted that we should have a Twitter account or a Facebook page, but that’s where a lot of organizations draw the line. I get it. I’m over 40. The social apps the kids are on these days are confusing and frightening. Back in MY day, Tik Tok was a Ke$ha song, and I didn’t like it, because I was already too old to listen to Ke$ha.  But the kids these days are rapidly becoming the adults of tomorrow. Millennials are all over 20. Gen Zers are exiting college and entering the work force. They’re the next wave of B2B decision makers, and we need to reach them on relevant channels. Let’s take a look at some of the apps that B2B marketers may be overlooking, and evaluate whether they’re worth a shot.

Slam Dunk: Instagram

Many folks who read this will think, “Instagram is a lesser-known channel? What?” But the rest will think, “Instagram has B2B marketing on it? What?” So it’s worth an inclusion.  Instagram has 1 billion accounts, with 500 million daily active users. Of these, 200 million visit at least one business page daily. There are many B2B businesses that are killing it with their Instagram pages. For inspiration, check out General Electric, and my favorite, Life at IBM. While IBM has a main corporate page, this spinoff is focused on what employees do in their off time. It’s an amazing way to humanize the brand. If you’re already on Instagram but haven’t started making Stories yet, it’s worth giving it a shot. Stories are rapidly becoming the primary way people consume content on Instagram. Creating these mini-movies is surprisingly simple, but the creator tools are also robust enough to make eye-catching content on the fly.

Proceed with Caution: Reddit

Ten years ago, Reddit was the bratty new kid on the block. Their primary goal was to promote uncensored, self-moderated content channels. That led to plenty of creativity and community-building, but also a dark side that most brands wouldn’t want to be associated with. Recently, Reddit has rebranded as a safer place for brands to come and play. They’ve removed hateful and offensive content and are focused on more family-friendly fare. That said, there are still plenty of not-safe-for-work-or-life sub-communities (subreddits). But the site has a massive untapped audience that is generally receptive to relevant marketing.  Reddit is unique in social networks in that you don’t post content on your personal page to generate a following. Instead, you post in specific sub-communities organized by topic. Each post lives or dies by upvotes and downvotes. You’re essentially starting from scratch with every post. If your target audience is on Reddit, it’s worth testing the waters with a few sponsored posts. Just keep it transparent, honest and genuine: There’s a whole subreddit devoted to mocking tone-deaf marketing.

Comeback Kid: Snapchat

Snapchat was the next big thing in social media… until it wasn’t. Instagram cloned the platform’s most popular features, usage declined, and not many folks invested in their content-enabling glasses. Even though they were brightly-colored and fun. But don’t write off Snapchat just yet. After a controversial redesign and a few missteps, the site is seeing growth again. It’s estimated that 62% of 18-29-year-olds use the app daily, for over 210 million daily active users. A few years back, we highlighted B2B businesses that were rocking it on Snapchat. Our advice hasn’t changed much for 2020: Keep it light, keep it spontaneous, and show your followers the behind-the-scenes, human side of your company.

Brand New Throwback: Twitch

Here’s a radical new idea for content: What if your content was only available on one channel, and viewers had to tune into that channel live to watch it? And what if after you were done, the content went away unless you or the viewer decided to record it? It may sound a lot like broadcast television, but (with the addition of some social and interactive elements) that’s essentially what Twitch is doing. The streaming platform began as a way for gamers to connect with an audience as they livestreamed gameplay videos. But the platform was useful for all kinds of creative streaming, from painting to sculpture to hilarious lectures about imaginary creatures. Is your audience on Twitch? The demographics skew heavily in the 18-34 demographic, squarely at the intersection of Millennial and Gen Z. Though the site skews heavily male right now (82% of users identify as male), those numbers are changing as the content moves away from its gamer roots. Brand content is sparse on Twitch now, but the platform offers compelling tools that make it easy to livestream and interact with viewers. It’s worth investigating the possibility of running podcasts or webinars on the platform, taking full advantage of Twitch’s infrastructure and interactivity.

Up-and-Comer: Tik Tok

Okay, I’m as frightened as you are, but we’ll get through it. In the early 2010s, there was an app called Vine that focused on short, mostly funny video. The site launched thousands of memes around the world, but ultimately imploded. Now TikTok is filling the void. It’s an app designed to make it easy to create and share short video, it’s exclusively mobile, and it’s beginning to expand past its young-gen-Z audience. In less than two years, TikTok has expanded its user base 5.5x in the U.S. It currently has 26.5 million active users in the states, and 500 million worldwide, and those numbers are steadily growing.   Where does B2B fit in on TikTok? It’s still early days for even B2C marketers on the platform, so the rules are still being written. We do know that TikTok users are looking for short, low-fi videos that entertain. Be prepared to show off your brand’s lighter side. For inspiration, check out the Washington Post’s page. They’ve developed a quirky personality that’s a stark contrast to their more staid journalistic side. But with over 21 million likes, what they’re doing is clearly resonating with fans.

@washingtonpost????????????????????????????? Bebe - V.A.

Next Big Thing (?): Facebook VR

As I mentioned before, I’m over 40. Which means I’ve seen VR touted as the “next big thing” for 30 years now. Remember the cutting-edge VR in the 1992 cinematic masterpice Lawnmower Man? [caption id="attachment_28313" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Some of us will never forget.[/caption] But it seems like the tech is finally catching up to the hype. And now Facebook is launching a new VR social media site, just in time to engage folks who are going stir-crazy in self isolation.  Will Horizons be the future of social media? It’s too soon to tell whether this will be a leap forward or a dead end. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on for marketers as the site enters beta testing. Facebook’s built-in audience and bottomless pockets could make social VR an actual reality.

Branch Out Your B2B

B2B marketers should be exploring any channel where their audience is. While it’s easy to feel like the more younger-skewing platforms are optional, we ignore them at our peril. Adopting — and adapting our brand persona to — these channels is a necessary step to engage the next (and current!) generation of B2B buyers. On these channels, as in any other, the keys are authenticity, empathy, understanding what the audience wants on the channel, and respecting their desires. Follow @toprankmarketing on Instagram for our own behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

The post 6 Unconventional Social Channels for B2B Marketing appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/_ZYfhCH6BcA/

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Love Regefalk (u/MrP0ng) of Mapsery, a brand that makes map posters you designSome stats:Product: Map Posters You DesignRevenue/mo: $3,500Started: December 2017Location: StockholmFounders: 2Employees: 0Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello StarterStory! My name is Love Regefalk (yes – it actually is) and I am the co-founder of Mapsery. I founded Mapsery together with my twin brother, Daniel, and we run Mapsery on the side of our engineering studies.The idea of Mapsery is to let you design a map posters of a place that’s meaningful to you, such as where you went to university, got married or where you grew up. Literally any location on the face of the earth can be chosen. All you have to do is to enter your preferred location, adjust the level of zoom and decide on a color theme and style that matches your criteria for an awesome looking poster. Want a map of London or New York? You got it! Want a map of the middle of nowhere? No problemo! Unlike regular stock posters, our posters can be customized in an infinite number of ways, making them truly unique and personal.That being said, although our maps are unique, the idea isn’t. When we launched Mapsery at the end of 2017, there were two other competitors in this space. Since then, 5-10 new direct competitors have seen the light and space has gotten way more competitive.Looking at our customers, they can be found all around the world (30+ countries to date) who share a love for maps, traveling and interior design. Owing to the fact that our website is in English and that we only run ads in English, a majority of our customers can be found in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. To a lesser extent, we get customers from other corners of the world. In terms of demographics, slightly more women than men purchase our products and people aged 25-34 are our primary age group.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?My backstory is that I, during my 2nd year at university, got particularly bored during an exam period and toyed with the idea of starting my own business. In short, I wanted to put the theory from university into practice. Said and done, one month later I had put together a website where I planned to sell beer pong related products that I would import from China. The setup, however, was far from ideal. I kept the stock in my dorm room and I would personally run home from school in the middle of a lecture to hand the orders to the DHL guy every day.Eventually, I got enough orders to make the move to outsource the logistics to a third-party logistics (3PL) partner. Finally, I didn’t have to handle the orders manually.Great success!One problem remained, though. Inventory management was a bitch.The products that I ordered from China were made to order and then shipped by boat, which created lead times of 60-90 days from placed order until the products where restocked. The result? My products were out of stock 25% of the time. I decided that I didn’t want to deal with the inventory anymore. Especially not with such long lead times.In a weird way, this is what made me think of the business idea that later became Mapsery.I loved the idea of e-commerce, but I hated the idea of keeping inventory (and yes, I hated the idea of dropshipping even more).The solution? A product that doesn’t have to be kept in inventory.At this point, I had heard of a company called Printful and I knew that they did printing on demand (PoD). However, I quickly realized that my margins would be thin if I were to use PoD. So I said to myself, how can I increase my margins?Easy. I would have to charge a premium for my posters.How?By having the customer design them themselves, of course. This way, they would stand out from regular stock posters, which would allow me to charge a premium. By this logic, I argued that I could sell custom made posters for $50 instead of $25.By the way, at this point, I decided to involve my twin brother Daniel in the idea. There were two reasons for this. For one, I wanted to have a partner on board because that was something that I missed on my first entrepreneurial endeavor. For two, I lacked the programming skills required to realize this idea, so why not invite your brother who knows how to code?With my brother on board, we looked to create posters for couples and families that would change shape and color based on user input such as the names, the number of family members, the date of marriage and so forth. Although we liked the idea, it became clear to us that it was a hard task to create graphical representations of families and couples that were good-looking and truly unique at the same time. We decided to settle for custom map posters instead, which we knew had been done by two other companies. What’s more, judging from their profit and loss statements we could easily see that there was a demand for map posters.We drew a lot of inspiration from these competitors, I can’t deny that, but we wanted to make sure that we used a different technology (vector rendered maps, rather than image-based maps) and we styled our maps slightly differently.To launch this idea, we started a limited company. By Swedish law, 50,000 SEK (~5,000 USD) in equity is required to do so. A small portion of that money was used for printing prototypes, setting up a domain, server hosting and so forth, but most of it was never used. In total, we spent a little less than $500 to get started (but a lot of time).Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.The first step for us was to design the raw map data. As you might have guessed, the core of our map posters is map data. More specifically, we use data from the Open Street Maps (OSM) to create our posters, which is a free wiki for map data for the world. It’s a wonderful thing, really. However, if you compare our posters with OSM, you’ll quickly realize that they don’t look the same. The OSM maps are informative, factual and great to use if you want to find your way from point A to B, but they’re not necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Thus, we had to break them apart and redesign every layer of them – from paths and highways to forest areas and buildings. This took a ton of time. The most difficult part was that they had to look good regardless of if the customer wanted to frame a rural area or a city.When prototyping and honing the design of our map posters, we utilized a printing facility on campus that was used for printing doctoral theses and what not. We managed to convince them that we would use the printers for a school project, though I’m not sure whether they actually believed us or if they just didn’t care. Regardless of which, it allowed us to print the prototypes that we needed.To conduct some market research on the different color schemes and styling options that we had designed, we put together a Google Form where our friends and family could rank the different designsOnce we had a product that we liked, all that was left for us was to find a partner that could print our posters on demand and handle fulfillment (note: we didn’t use Printful). This proved to be easier said than done. However, one lucky day, I googled “[competitor name] customer case” and struck gold. Bingo – I had found a partner that I knew could deliver.https://www.instagram.com/p/BdheFrGHDrD/Describe the process of launching the business.To launch Mapsery, a lot of time was spent on designing and developing the product. Given the fact that we developed Mapsery on the side of our engineering studies and other commitments, the development phase took quite some time. In addition to this, my brother was left to do all the coding.At the beginning of 2018, we launched Mapsery. I wouldn’t really call it a launch, though. We didn’t reach out to any media outlets. We didn’t post on Producthunt, Reddit or any other forum. And we definitely didn’t hire a PR agent. In fact, we didn’t even tell our friends about it or share it on our personal social media channels! No, our so-called launch consisted of us rolling out some ads on Facebook and Google.The reason? We didn’t think that our launch was newsworthy. We didn’t believe that our idea was novel enough. The fact that our main competitor – the company who invented the niche – also was Swedish, played a part as well. Had the primary competitor been from any other country, I think that we would have felt more comfortable doing a proper launch.That being said, If there’s anything to learn from our launch, it’s this: don’t launch as we did.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?To be honest, this is probably where we’ve performed the poorest. We haven’t spent more than 2-3 hours per week on Mapsery, in total. Of that very limited amount of time, a majority of it has been put on customer service and minor developments. In other words, we’ve barely spent any time at all on growing our business and attracting new customers. Crazy, I know. What’s more, we haven’t created a lot of content for social media and we haven’t worked with influencers. Our ad spend, apart from Google Adwords, has been limited and the same could be said about our SEO efforts.Without a doubt, this is the reason to why we sell for a meager $3.5K a month and not ten times that amount a month. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we could easily sell ten times more. I’m simply saying that I know why we don’t sell for more.When comparing us to competitors, this is definitely where we lack the most. Sure, I’m 99% certain that we spend less time on our business than they do, but we definitely should be able to do better.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We are doing alright. We’re profitable and our profit margin is around 25%. Given that we charge a premium price, our gross margin is 65%, which isn’t too shabby. The cost of printing and fulfillment is 35% and we spend roughly 25% on customer acquisition. Primarily through Google Adwords and to some extent on retargeting ads on Facebook.In terms of traffic, we bring in 3.000 visitors per month, out of which 50 converts. Not great, not terrible (hello Chernobyl fans).Our presence on social media is quite limited. We have a little more than 1K followers on Instagram, but we rarely post. Our social media efforts can at best be seen as a hygiene factor at this point. We haven’t given social media any love and we don’t work actively with influencers. Given how social media-friendly our product is, this leaves a lot of room for improvement, to say the least.Moving forward, we have decided to spend more time on Mapsery to increase sales. We’ve got a good picture of what needs to be done in order to do so, and we’ll try to execute that plan. While we don’t hope to tenfold our sales, we believe that we can do a lot better by increasing the time that we spend on Mapsery and by directing our efforts towards sales efforts.https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdm_zEqn838/Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?There’s a difference between a business and a hobby. Frankly speaking, I’ve come to the realization that we run Mapsery as a hobby and not as a business. It’s a fun side project, absolutely, but it’s not a business. We might like to think that we run it as a business, but we don’t.It’s time to change that.https://www.instagram.com/p/B1_SSG5Hzcv/What platform/tools do you use for your business?Our website is built on WordPress and WooCommerce, using Braintree Payments to process payments (in the process of switching to Stripe). As mentioned before, our map data comes from OpenStreetMap and we use Google Analytics and Hotjar to make informed decisions about how our users interact with our platform.On the rare occasion that we post to social media, we use Buffer. For customer support, we use Gmail. To use Gmail for customer support is nothing that I recommend because it’s really the wrong tool for the task, but it gets the job done for us at this stage. To avoid disputes about who spends the least amount of time working on Mapsery (hint: both of us do), we use Clockfy’s Chrome extension.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Apart from Swedish podcasts on E-commerce and entrepreneurship, How I Built This on NPR is an all-time favorite. Honorable mentions should of course also be given to Indiehackers, Product Hunt and Reddit. The reason as to why I’m writing this StarterStory is actually because of Indiehackers.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Just do it. Afraid of failing? Don’t be. That’s part of the process and that’s how you learn.However, if you must fail, make sure to fail early. How? By creating an MVP and by involving your potential customers in your product development. Don’t spend your time and money developing something that no one wants.These tips aren’t necessarily related to the story that I just shared, but I think those tips are crucial for anyone starting out!Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookInstagramIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

[topicprinter]

Not every day Andrew Wilkinson says he wants your company to join his family of startups. But he told us in Commite this summer. I wanted to share the story of how the process went and how we felt, in case anyone is interested :)​Seville, August 2018. The year looks good so far. We have already reached several important milestones such as increasing the team by 30% and moving to Magma, a 600-square-meter workspace conveniently located in the city center. We share this office with other friends’ projects we admire like Sensa Design and Upwelling.Anyone could think that the Andalusian capital is dead during the summer, but we are happy under the AC. While the summer lethargy of Seville is a reality, this year August was different for us. Andrew Wilkinson tweeted he was looking for a digital design and development studio to partner with through Tiny Capital, the mutual fund he shares with Chris Sparling. So even though our city and part of our team was on vacation, we saw that message, and we had a crush ❤️.Then began an adventure as tremendously idealistic as it was strangely realistic. We emailed Andrew to introduce ourselves, he liked our portfolio, and we started the negotiations right away. Just like that. Unlike the typical tedious and frustrating process required to sell part of your company, Tiny Capital chooses the simple method of business tycoon Warren Buffet: a cover letter, an analysis, an offer, and eight weeks max a virtual handshake and hey! We have a deal. (Andrew Wilkinson explains it in detail in this post in Medium, and we can attest he fulfills it to the letter).But let’s be honest: We would be lying if we said that the mere fact of imagining we could share the stage with companies such as Metalab or Dribbble didn’t make our hearts miss a beat. However, if there is one thing we learned last year, it’s that, regardless of the dimension of the challenge you face, trying is the only way to achieve it. Yes, in 2018 we’ve learned to be ambitious, to dare, to verify that we shouldn’t limit ourselves.For several days our logo appears proudly on the Tiny Capital website along with those of Pixel Union or Unicorn Hunt. Something that is not only important for the new business opportunities that will open for us but because it means validating everything we have been doing so far. It says we’ve been successful in relying on our team, prioritizing on quality and details, listening to the advice of our partners, letting ourselves be guided by our instinct and maintaining a business philosophy based on values that are far from what the old school dictates.Lots of challenges will come along with 2019, but we have consolidated our business model and validated our philosophy, so it’s time for a self-reflective exercise: redesigning the brand ( stay tuned! ), making the team grows, optimizing processes and continuing to evolve professionally and personally.Something we often repeat is that in the business world you have to get used to chaos, nobody but the health of your business will tell you if you are doing right or you are wrong. That’s why, when someone like Andrew Wilkinson offers us the opportunity to join his elite family, we can not help feeling that, in a way, everything we’ve done so far made sense.In 2015 we created Commite based on idealism: build a studio in Seville with flexible schedules, wonderful colleagues, customers we liked and projects that will challenge and delight us. In 2018 we found out we were not crazy, that all of it was possible. Yes, we live happy moments.2019: There we go!

[topicprinter]

This whole thing started about 5 years ago and I was inspired to rehash the journey when I happened upon a post I’d made back in Dec. 2012 on the Fires of Heaven gaming forums. tl;dr - So, after nearly 5 years of failing at SASS, within two months we did $147,000 in sales and if nothing changes (even if we don’t add a single customer) we’ll do a little over $350,000 in sales next year. Given, our current sales are more like cash advances, but it’s still cash-in-hand. Also, we’re currently in talks with another company that wants to test our product with one of their crews, and if they buy in, it would push our sales to over $1,000,000 next year. In my business plan, I’d assumed we’d need at least 50 companies in our system to hit that number in sales, but we could potentially do with 3 and within the first year of actual sales. PART 1To give some context, LL is a SASS product in the timber industry and at this point we’ve spent over 4 years pursuing it. We spent the first 3 years with one guy and pushed out a web app and two android apps, which eventually sputtered, and 1.5 more years going back to the drawing board, raising startup capital, and doing things “the right way”. In other posts on Fires of Heaven I’d mentioned that our developer for LL had overcommitted himself and was moving slowly. This trend continued and really never remedied itself. I think this occurred because of two major issues that I’m sure most startups make: We hired poorlyOur developer already had an app on the market that was bringing him cashflow, so he didn’t need our app to be successful. He was already content and that’s bad.We traded him equity up front in exchange for his time, which created a huge issue six months into development, where he was less-and-less motivated to work. He was already vested and wasn’t getting paid, so it’s understandable. Giving up leverage up front is bad. Don’t reward people for doing nothing, reward them for doing good somethings.He was a back-end-only guy, who tried to wear the designer hat, didn’t ask for help when he needed it, and made way too many executive decisions. He was sort of a loner who didn’t work/communicate well with others. He was a nice guy, but lacked process and the ability to communicate.He didn’t develop on a framework, which bit us on the ass over-and-over again. Spaghetti code is bad. We didn’t spend enough time planningI took our developers word on a lot of stuff and chose to be lazy instead of being diligent and checking up on the software’s progress. This was exacerbated by his lack of willingness to communicate and propensity to get red-faced if he was questioned.We didn’t integrate the design/development process until later in the dev process, which should’ve been done up front. It also tangled up in our hire, where our developer refused any changes and took any suggestions as a direct insult.Which, ultimately left us with an interface of Frankenstein proportions.Scope creep. When you don’t have a design and someone’s building software based on assumptions and what you tell him, you’re going to have scope creep. You’re going to have some much mf’ing scope creep you’ll think it’ll never end. It won’t. The first mistake lended itself to the second mistake. I still remember the day we met with our developer for the first time, presented our site-map and a simple user-flow, asked if he had any questions, and he responded, “Nope. I got it! I’ll get started right away.” I still remember being shocked and confused by the response. “Really? You don’t have a single question? This is pretty extensive software…” I do, however, remember my Dad being impressed and excited by the response, which I think was due to his lack of knowledge around software design/dev more than anything. This sort of shoot-from-the-hip attitude quickly became the norm and about a year later we were trying and failing to onboard our first customer. I think it was around the Summer of 2014. My Dad and our developer went to meet the customer in person and get him started. Everyone was excited and I was waiting to get a phone call talking about a successful launch. To make a long story short, our developer couldn’t even get him signed up. To this day I cannot comprehend how this even happens, but I’ll point again to #2 on the “major issues” docket. About 6 months prior to this we’d totally redesigned the site and hired a front-end guy to come in a put the UI together. Before this, the software was a total clusterf*$ and nearly impossible to navigate, so it was a necessity. I spent a lot of time with a designer getting everything right and then again with the front end guy to get it translated. Once we got it into the hands of our developer, he totally half-assed the integration. I was pissed. When I called him on it he was legitimately shocked. I couldn’t believe it. He insisted that he’d done his best, wasn’t a designer, wasn’t a front end guy, and had been left holding the bag to get everything done and out the door while my Dad and I twiddled our thumbs. Mind you he never asked for help or direction during the integration, did it all in one foul swoop, and then cried foul when I got pissed. It was at this moment that I knew we were fucked. I guess what I felt in that moment was the same feeling people get when they realize they’re in a shitty relationship for the first time. And I was most certainly in a shitty relationship. If I questioned his design choices, he’d get mad and say he wasn’t a designer. When I presented him with designs, he’d half-bake them into the software no-questions-asked and then get mad when I questioned them. The weirdest one was the whole design thing, because he would consistently emphasize the fact that he wasn’t a designer or a front end guy and then lose his mind if I was critical of design choices or front end dev choices he’d unilaterally made. Anyways, I realized that this was a bad cycle that was only going to repeat itself. After the failed launch, I upped my cries for parting ways with the developer, which had only been subtle asides in conversation up until this point. It probably took 3-4 months for my Dad to get onboard with the idea. You see he’d been the one going to the developers house everyday to motivate him to work, make sure things were getting done and hold him accountable. I’m not shitting you. My Dad went to his house everyday, because if he didn’t, nothing would get done. Work only got done when my Dad was there. So, he went nearly everyday when there were a million other things he could’ve/should’ve been doing. My Dad didn’t want to split with the developer, because he felt like we’d come so far and actually had something going. FOMO is very real. I mean we had an MVP of sorts and people wanted to use it. It drove him (and me) crazy that it was always so close to being finished, yet so far due to design flaws in the system (like the fact that we couldn’t sign up our first customer). I told my Dad, as many times as it took, and it took several, “Look, I get it. We’ve come a long way and we kind of have a system here, but we tried to launch it with someone and he couldn’t even get them signed up! What’s going to happen the next time? Why would we expect things to go differently in the future? He’s not even developing on a platform and every time we scale the software gets worse. If we don’t do something different we’re going to hurt our reputation and never recover.” My Dad’s fear was valid. The longer you take to release something, the more opportunity you have to lose that opportunity. But, the risk to move forward with our developer was too great. So, we split ways and started looking for funding. Our last conversation with the developer was pretty brutal. He sent an email to me and my Dad because he hadn’t heard from us in a few weeks and that was unusual. The irony that he was reaching out to us, for the first time, at the end of everything, isn’t lost on me. And my Dad being the honorable and incredibly nice guy he is, thought we should at least talk to him and tell him where we were. It didn’t go well and got pretty heated with me being pissed at the progress of the software and the failed onboarding of our first customer, and him playing the blame game and pointing fingers. Ultimately, he refused to give us the software, the domain, or anything that we’d worked on over the past 3 years. For what it’s worth, on top of the total shitshow that our dev cycle was, our developer was going through a divorce, so I’m sure that added to his woes and created issues that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. When it was all-said-and-done I think we were out $15k-$20k over a couple of years, which isn’t all that bad considering. And we also had a really good idea of what we needed to build, since we'd iterated like 3 times. We’d built a couple of mobile apps based on user feedback and they were really good prototypes. We’d also attended a couple of big industry meetings in 2013/2014 to get a feel for demand and there was definitely a growing need for what we wanted to build. PART 2.1In December 2015 we raised $70,000 from friends and family. We got $50,000 from one of my Dad’s friends in the industry and $20,000 from my uncle. I realize that a lot of this stuff, like fundraising for instance, I just kind of blow over like it isn’t a big deal, which I guess it kind of is. So, feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll try to get to them. For some background on how we got funded, it's pretty simple. My Dad was talking to his buddy about the app, who’d previously seen the prototype and mentioned we needed money. He made an offer for $50k right there. I recently asked him why he did it and he said, "Ya know. I've been in this industry for a long time and I know something special when I see it. I'm not getting any younger and my son's gonna need something to work on and I think this could be it." Not a standard response, I know. For the other $20k we set up a meeting with my uncle and told him we probably needed another $50k. He ended up giving us the twenty, so we made it work. Having learned a few lessons from our previous experience, I went ahead and redesigned the software up front, so that we’d have something to give our new developer when we found him. I spent about 3 months working with a buddy on our previous software to turn it into something better. The biggest challenge was that I didn’t have anything to use as a base, because our previous developer refused to hand over the software, kept the domain, and was obviously super uncooperative. So, we had to use our previous designs and make assumptions about how the minute details worked. I own a small software design/dev company as my main gig and have a lot of relationships with folks in the industry, some who are pretty well known (which was my main context for knowing our original developer was a baddy) and started reaching out to them to see if they knew any Ruby developers that they’d recommend (I liked Ruby because of its ability to scale). I eventually got connected to a guy I’ll refer to as The Unicorn and he was interested in working with us, since he’d just finished a project. There’s generally three things that come into play when a project works out: - Timing - Is it the right time for the market? Is it the right time for the people involved? Am I busy with too much other stuff? - Belief - Does the industry believe in my product? Do I believe in my product? Do the people working on the product believe in the product (generally because the industry believe in it)? - Budget - Do I have the money to do this? Can I get the money to do this? Is there money out there to do this? He committed to work for a couple days a week at $150/hr and figured he’d have our app up and running in about 6 months, which he did and it was. So, by June of 2016, we finally had a functional MVP with an infinitely better UI/UX (I’d made the decision not to hire a front end dev to save money, but since then we’ve released a new version of the site that has a front ender's touch on it, which I will always do in the future). It was a pretty cool feeling to see it working and to have it be a relatively painless process to get it there. I kind of felt like what I’d imagine a victim of domestic violence feels like when they find Prince Charming. Can things really go this easily? Is this real life? WTF? Considering how hard the past couple of years had been, it was a welcome surprise. The Unicorn did a bangup job and there was really only one occasion where scope-creep became an issue and we had to have a come-to-Jesus moment about communicating scope and work. In July of 2016 we got a booth at an industry trade show for our sale’s maiden voyage. We got a ton of looks and probably left with about 10-15 good leads. I was pumped! And as we were walking out the door at the end of the two-day conference, a congressman came up to my Dad and said that his company might be interested in taking a look at what we had and wanted to setup a meeting. After weeks of post-trade show back-and-forth, we set a meeting for December 2016. Nothing really got done between July 2016 and the meeting date, because at that point we were out of money and none of the leads from the conference had panned out. And with no money in the bank and no customers to get feedback from, we just sat and waited. It sucked. PART 2.2Actually, I take that back, we didn’t work on the software, but other stuff did happen. After seeing the feedback and buzz the software generated at the conference, The Unicorn got interested in getting vested with the company. He’d obviously proven his ability to get shit done, so my Dad wanted to have a conversation with him regarding vestment and what it would take to get him on board. We eventually reached the agreement that he would work at half his hourly rate ($75/hr) and use the other half to generate equity and become vested after 2 years, so 5% equity at a $2,225,000 valuation. Around this same time that company I mentioned earlier in the prologue, who actually had plans to test our software with 15 of their crews, got acquired for like $9b, which ruined a great opportunity for us. They had a great culture and would’ve launched us into orbit, but it wasn’t meant to be. Womp womp! PART 2.3By the time December finally rolled around I was beside myself with anticipation. One full year had passed since we’d raised money to get this thing going and it was moving at an agonizingly slow pace (we hadn’t raised all that much capital after all, so we couldn’t just throw money at it). Money really does speed up the process. Without getting too deep into the weeds the meeting went really well. The company we met with is probably the most reputable in my state and is to our industry what Jordan’s are to sneakerheads. They loved what we had and it was a super encouraging meeting. They wanted us to come back again in February and present our software to their whole organization. They’re owned by some of their employees and wanted to get the nod from everyone involved. So, again nothing happens for another two months and we revisit the situation in February. This time the meeting went even better and their employees were even more pumped about the software than we’d thought they would be. We had a post-meeting-meeting with the owner to talk shop and the details. I told him it’d take us about six months and $107,000 (will probably end up taking $60k) to customize the software for their company, which didn’t seem to phase him. So, I wrote up a contract on the spot, which we both signed, shook hands, and walked out the door with a $17,000 check; payment 1 of 6. I had The Unicorn snap a pic of the two of us shaking hands. I’ll probably frame it and bottle the tears I’m going to shed every time I look at it. I actually could’ve walked out of there with nothing. After we shook on the deal he said, “Alright, well I guess we’ll just mail you the check.” And I asked, “Could we just get a check right now?” He smiled, shrugged, and then nodded in agreement and told his accounting to go print out a check. Leaving with that check made it feel 10x more real for me and The Unicorn. Asking that simple question taught me a huge lesson--You don’t get what you don’t ask for! As a side note, after The Unicorn came on board we attended most meetings together. This was less of a proactive decision and more the result of me making myself more involved in the design/dev stuff, because I was not going to repeat the past. My Dad spent more time getting us the leads to make the sales, and less time in the day-to-day, since he’s got 25 years in the biz. He’s our “gray hair” and if you’re young you need a gray hair. Otherwise, people don’t trust you as much or something? With renewed hope and excitement we immediately roared back into gear and got an iOS app designed (for data entry in the field) and developed, and started working on the MVP again. However, more bumps in the road presented themselves. After such positive meetings in December and February it kind of threw me off when the owner of the company completely stopped being responsive. We didn’t receive our next check in March and it took me being super pushy to get a second check by April. In May, after another no-show check, we pretty much stopped working again, because we weren’t sure where we stood or if we still had a deal. I even asked another business owner for advice on how to approach the matter. To make a long and drawn out story short. The owner of the company had been super preoccupied with other businesses he owns and had told the other employee-owners to take the reigns, but they didn’t, which left him on the hook and out of touch. It was an incredibly stressful time for me, since I wasn’t sure if his lack of response indicated some deeper discontent on his part. Ultimately, he was still excited about the software and in June of this year we secured the rest of the money, a $67,000 check, and plan to launch with 30 of their crews in January 2018. By this time a year had passed since our last state tradeshow and it was time to attend again. This time, with a real customer in our books, I had way more confidence and the conference felt a lot more fun than it had the year before. Another side note concerning sales. During the 2016 tradeshow I was super stressed out and hated it. I think it was partly due to the pressure of having unproven software and partly due to the fact that I don’t really like the idea of convincing people to buy something they know nothing about and might not even want. However, when you get your first customer, selling starts to feel a lot less like “selling” and a lot more like you’re providing people with something they need. It really comes down to your belief in what you’re doing. You should never try to convince a customer to buy if they don’t want to, because if you’re a genuine believer in your product, others will become believers too. After the first day of the conference, I ended up at the bar of our hotel with a couple other vendors who I’d befriended from previous events (one of the clients from my other company is in this industry, so I’d run into people here-and-there). The bar closed around 10:30PM and we were pretty much the last people in there and decided to call it a night to get ready for another early morning. The only other people in there were two dudes sitting at the bar and as soon as we got up to leave one of the bar-guys yelled, “You guys want a water moccasin shot?” We replied, “No, it’s getting late and I think we’re gonna go to bed.” Bar guys yells, “What are yall? A bunch of pussies”? We all look at each other half-laughing, and shrug, and walk over to the bar. We take the water moccasin shots and then some other kind of fruity pink shots. Apparently this dude has been tipping well, because the bartender was happy to keep the bar open. Somehow, because things started to blur, it comes up that I have some software for tracking stuff in the industry, so he starts describing an app he wants. And I’m shocked. No, I’m floored. He’s literally describing one of the first smartphone apps we built that got rejected by the industry, because it was too future forward (basically everyone we showed it to said it wouldn’t work because reasons). I laughed and said, “Dude! I built that two years ago and no one wanted it, so we had to build something different.” He slapped his knee and said, “Well I want it! How much can I get it for?” I pitched him my starting price and he immediately countered at half, which is what I actually wanted, and responded, “Deal!” We shook hands and he proceeded to tell us the most ridiculous and hilarious stories I’ve ever heard in my life. It was actually a really fun night. I walked back into the hotel room around 1AM and woke my Dad up carrying on about the deal we’d just struck up. He had been asleep, but woke up laughing because I was being ridiculous, due to the excitement (shots). He was happy to be woken up too, considering the context, and excited about another potential customer. The sales cycle on this deal was exponentially shorter than the first and we launched with them on September 15th, two months after we first met. They fronted us $40,000 to get additional iOS functionality developed, and will use/pay for our standard system until March/April 2018 when I think we can get the app done. So, after nearly 5 years of failing at this, within two months we did $147,000 in sales and if nothing changes (even if we don’t add a single customer) we’ll do a little over $350,000 in sales next year. Given, these sales are more like cash advances, but it’s still cash-in-hand. Also, we’re currently in talks with another company that wants to test it with one of their crews, and if they buy in, it would push our sales to over $1,000,000 next year. In my business plan, I’d assumed we’d need at least 50 companies in our system to hit that number in sales, but we could potentially do with 3 and within the first year of actual sales.