New Site / Blog

My new homepage is online at http://www.mpdaugherty.com.  Please check it out!

You may have noticed that I’m not particularly dedicated to this blog.  Posts go up when they go up, and sometimes I go three months without writing anything new…  In addition, I realized that awesome blogs have a focus.  This blog doesn’t.

In my new blog, I’ll be focusing mostly on technology, python and javascript development, with some China and productivity influences.  Everything else will stay here.  That actually includes a lot, though, so I’ll try to update once a month or so – whenever I have time.

To conclude, here’s a picture of an awesome box of orange/mango Oreo cookies that I bought at 7/11 next week.  The orange side was ok, and the mango side was terrible.  Never again.

 

Orange Mango Oreos from 7/11

What I learned from being on LifeHacker 9 days after starting work on ShirtFitFinder.com

The biggest thing that happened last month was that my site-in-a-week experiment, Shirt Fit Finder, ended up on LifeHacker two days after it launched.  This was a far better reaction than I had ever hoped for, and much bigger than I knew how to handle.  In fact, the site went down for at least 6 hours while it was featured.  I was asleep in China, and my friend who submitted it couldn’t get a hold of me because I had my phone set up to ignore calls from the US in the middle of the night, precisely so that people don’t wake me up accidentally.  Unfortunately, this time was on purpose…

Regardless of the reason, I learned a lot from the experience of finally getting a lot of attention focused on something I had worked on.  Here’s the good and the bad of how I handled it, and also some financial results:

Results

• Upgrade of server to bigger plan on Linode: -$16
• Money from affiliate links on SFF: $0 (Really!  Experimenting to see if affiliate links would be a better way to make money was actually the original purpose of the site.)
• New customers for Bespoke Row: 5 (which was actually more orders, because some of them ordered a second time after getting their shirts)

Good

• Quickly responded to comments online – e.g. on Reddit where people thought I should make the connection to Bespoke Row more clear, so I changed the site in a few hours.
• Created a new channel to my main business – The visitors to Bespoke Row who came from SFF generally converted at a better rate than other visitors, which I think is because SF basically acts as a demonstration of why they need a custom shirt before they come over.  There are also now a lot more links to SFF than to Bespoke Row on the web, too, so I hope it will continue to work this way for a long time.
• Learned that affiliate links are also a hard way to make a living – The fact that I had thousands of people on my site and not a single affiliate sale pretty much answered my question about how many visitors would be needed to make money from affiliate links to clothing sites.

Bad

• No Analytics – I built the site so quickly that I didn’t even add in any analytics packages.  This is so easy to do, and I missed it.  Now I don’t even know how much traffic I actually got.
• No way for people to sign up for future news and updates – I have a feeling I lost a lot of potential sales here.  A lot of people visited the site, but I have no way to identify them or to follow up because I didn’t have a newsletter signup or a link to a Twitter account that people could follow, etc.  Even though part of the appeal of SFF was that you don’t need to sign up, you can just use it, some percentage of people would probably have wanted to leave feedback or hear about changes.  I will definitely remember this for any future projects.  I added a Twitter account pretty quickly, but all it could do was message people who had shared SFF or the LifeHacker link.  That’s a bit different than having a group of followers that would see any future tweets.
• No way for people to share – Traffic died off pretty quickly after about a week.  It was old news on LifeHacker, and people didn’t think to come back.  In combination with not having any way to remind them (see above), I also didn’t have any way for the current traffic to lead to more traffic.  In retrospect, SFF results would be great to share with family or friends right before people go shopping for Christmas gifts.  Even beyond that, just giving people the opportunity to tell their friends on Twitter and Facebook might have led to traffic that built over time instead of falling off.
• No way to grow the database – There are a lot of ways to get no results on Shirt Fit Finder – for example, if you’re taller than the tallest shirt we knew about, we don’t have anything to show you.  This happened to many people.  There were also a lot of people who didn’t own any of the shirts listed, so they couldn’t even search for something better.  A week later, I added a way for people to search with their own shirts and add different brands to the database, but it was a little too late.
• No way to know about the site going down during the day – I didn’t leave any way for people to wake me up during the night, and the notices from my host were all sent to my personal email so my partner in Boston didn’t even realize what was happening.  I fixed this by changing my linode account to be associated with a shared Bespoke Row email address instead.

Overall, though, Shirt Fit Finder was a huge success.  I will definitely be doing more side projects in the future to see what other ideas can gain traction.  They may or may not be related to Bespoke Row, but because I’m thinking quite a lot about the problems of choice and knowledge when making fashion decisions these days, they probably will be.

Ubuntu’s shell != bash, and how to fix your scripts

I just found out that on Ubuntu, /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, not to /bin/bash.  Apparently this was changed to make booting up a little bit faster.

In any case, it might mean that many of your scripts won’t work because they are starting with ‘#!/bin/sh’.  Instead, you should have them point directly to /bin/bash.  Here’s a one line script that will update all the scripts in a directory:

find . -type f | xargs sed -i ‘s_#!/bin/sh_!/bin/bash_’

Upcoming Beijing Startup Events

This month, there are two interesting startup events happening…  On the same weekend.

iWeekend Beijing bills itself as “a unique experience that brings together technology entrepreneurs and professionals with diverse talents to select an idea, develop the product, and launch a technology-based startup in just one weekend!”  It’s organized by a few of my friends from coworking, with help from the larger iWeekend organization.  iWeekend events have typically been held in Europe before, so they have a history with organizing an international group.  I’m going to be attending this one because it was announced first and my friends are organizing it.

Startup Weekend Beijing is essentially the same thing, actually.  I believe their roots are based more in the US, however.  If I weren’t going to iWeekend on the same weekend, I would definitely check it out.

Building a site in a week

I just put up the ‘final’ version of a new site that I built last week.  I had an idea that people might be interested in better fitting shirts, but too worried to order from a custom shirt site.  I’ve also wanted to try out Ruby on Rails for a while, so this was a good opportunity.

With those two requirements, I built ShirtFitFinder.com, which lets you search for brand name dress shirts that will fit you well based on what you don’t like about shirts that you already own.  We’ll see if people use it, and if so, I’ll give it some more attention.  At the very least, it was great practice for iWeekend this month.

For now, though, I’m done with the project; I only had a week, so now I’m back to my regularly scheduled Bespoke Row stuff – we’re launching custom pants soon!

Cellephant

Sometimes you have to laugh at journalists’ aspirations to literary greatness. Check out the second-to-last sentence from a New York Times article explaining the Line2 iPhone app.

Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the Internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model.

Copywriting connundrums

Xavi and I just released a new feature on Bespoke Row that helps people design their shirts by asking them a few questions about themselves and then generating recommendations based on their answers of shirts that we can make.  It’s called the ‘Style Advisor’.

Surprisingly, this simple name has already given me a bunch of trouble.  Why?  Because advisor can also be spelled as ‘adviser’, and sometimes it gets underlined as being misspelled in certain text editors.  I didn’t know which to pick.

Eventually, I went with advisor because there are 70 million Google results for ‘advisor’ and only 26 million for ‘adviser’.  So, was it the right choice?  Who knows?  We’ll see if I get any comments about it being misspelled from customers.

My first National Day in China

I just spent the last week traveling through China with my parents.  I’d planned on spending a few hours every day doing work, but I didn’t actually get anything done at all…  I’d forgotten how busy it can be to travel, particularly when you’re the host and need to show someone around.

First, we went to Xi’an for three days.  It’s a great city.  The city wall is the largest intact ancient city wall in the world, and I highly recommend a walk on top of it.  We also visited the Terracotta warriors (of course!), the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, and Beilin (a garden with collections of calligraphy and sculptures that was started in the 900s).  We stayed at the Shangri-la hotel, and had drinks in the downstairs bar almost every night after our crazy taxi rides home.  All the tourist sites are just way too packed during the National Day Holiday.  The funniest part of visiting Xi’an was that everyone thought Judy was a tour guide, so they kept asking if they could get pictures with her clients or trying to get her to tell us to buy stuff.

It was so crowded at the market that when we finally found a ride in this falling-apart ‘taxi,’ we took it. Needless to say, we had a drink in the hotel bar before bed…

Next, we visited Shanghai for another four days.  There, my parents met Judy’s parents, and we spent a few days with them.  We also visited Suzhou one day while Judy stayed back in Shanghai with her parents.  It’s only 30 minutes by train to Suzhou, which is really nice.  Again, everything was too crowded, but it was still nice to visit.  As usual, the best part about visiting Shanghai was eating the dumplings.

Some of the people who visited the peaceful Yuyuan Gardens with us

Finally, I’m back in Beijing, and really trying to get started on work again.  It’s tough enough to get back on track when you come back to a big company job after a vacation, but at least you have emails and other people to remind you what you need to get done.  When you’re coming back to your own project, it’s a little tougher.  Thankfully, I use Pivotal Tracker and keep lists of everything.

How Bespoke Row is running a new-product survey

We’ve talked for a long time about adding new products at Bespoke Row, so yesterday I started that process with a survey about custom pants.  We’re conducting an experiment using our Startup Mastermind spreadsheet – if we can get 5 positive responses with less than $100 of advertising, we’ll start selling pants.

To begin with, we thought about what the most important piece of information someone can share with us is.  Perhaps obviously, we realized that it’s their email address.  With just that, they’ve shown that they’re a potential customer by letting us know how to contact them when we’re ready to sell.

Therefore, we decided to make our initial survey one question long.  We start out on a page that tells people what we’re doing and asks for their email address.  If they submit it, we add them to our custom pants mailing list on MailChimp.

Initial Survey Page - just email address

Then, we take them to a second page that has all our secondary questions – what materials/options are they looking for, whether they think the benefit will be better fit or better style, etc.  None of these are required, but if the user answers them, they’d help us make a better product.  The answers from these questions are collected in a Google Spreadsheet Form that gives us the ability to analyze the answers easily using Google’s tools.

Details Survey Second

I think the best part of this survey is that we randomly choose an amount of money in our potential price range and ask them “Would you be willing to pay $X for a pair of custom pants?”  This is far better than the last survey I tried, when I asked this as a multiple choice question and every person naturally chose the lowest listed price.

Finally, we take the user to a thank-you page and encourage them to try a custom shirt while they’re waiting.

All together, this was pretty easy to set up (about 5 hours) and uses MailChimp and Google Docs, which are both great free tools that do their job better than we could in-house.

Crazy Chinese Holiday/Work Day Schedule

A few posts ago, I tried an experiment and asked what people would like my next blog post to be about.  Only three people responded, but I actually thought it was a good start.  Two people voted for a post on coworking, which I wrote on Sunday.  One person voted for a post on life in Beijing, so here’s a short example of something that’s different here.

Mid-Autumn Festival is this Thursday so, naturally, people get a day off work.  This is all well and good, except that in China, one single day off work is not sufficient for any holiday, so the government gave everyone Wednesday and Friday off work, too.  However, they don’t want to sacrifice the extra working days, so now everyone has to work the Sunday before and the Saturday after.  In fact, every holiday in China is like this, and every year they come up with a brand new schedule of working days.  Sometimes, they end up with 7 or more working days in a row, just to get the odd Wednesday off.  This confuses everyone and none of my friends ever seems sure until a day or two ahead of time whether they have to go to work.

The full complexity of this fall’s holiday schedule is explained in this WSJ article.

Of course, as a foreigner who is basically working independently here, I’d be tempted to just ignore the declared work days and continue working Monday-Friday.  I do love my weekends.  On the other hand, Judy wants the time off; she has to work on the weekends, and she needs to rest.  So, overall, it’s tough.  I ended up working on Sunday for 3/4 of the day, and today I’m watching TV with Judy at home while working on and off.  It’s not really productive, but I think I’d feel guilty if I completely relaxed.