Jason Toff

In 9th grade, a girl named Lacey Kleckner offered to make me a hemp necklace. I happily accepted her offer but didn’t understand why she wasn’t selling them. They took about an hour each and she had WAY more people requesting them than she had time to make.

So I asked if she wanted to start a business. I’d set up the website, she’d make the jewelry. And so, on May 9, 2001, “Cool Strings” was born.

Thanks to Archive.org, I can show you snapshots of the development of the website. Version 1 had an online ordering form that went to some other URL that I’d manually check. I’d write down the orders, come into school the next day, and tell Lacey who it was that ordered and what they ordered. Payments by checks made the process a slow one…

By December 2001, I was able to integrate a PayPal shopping cart and a “Product of the Month” feature. To enable the shopping cart, I painstakingly added hundreds of “add to cart” buttons throughout the different ~30 design pages, for each type (necklace, bracelet, or anklet) — and allowing for choice of size.

By May 2002, I overhauled the website and added an FAQ, a Representative program, and Testimonials.

In September 2002, after attending an Ithaca Summer College Business program, I came home with a new idea: to sell the supplies needed to make the jewelry in addition to the necklaces, bracelets, and anklets. So I added a large Supplies section of the website that would automatically show items based on my inventory (that I would manually adjust). I also added a survey on the front page, re-designed the website once again (this time, with dragons as the company logo), and categorized the jewelry into categories (instead of Gallery 1, 2, 3, etc.). I was really proud of the product code system I used, which helped me identify what was ordered and where it was located in my inventory just from this code (which would be sent to me in an email from PayPal once payment was received). To give you an idea of how the product codes worked, the code for a 100 pack of 5mm black wooden beads was WB5A20, where WB = Wooden Bead, 5 = 5 mm, A = container A, and 20 = column 2, top row of my supplies cabinet.

All the while, Lacey continued to make more and more jewelry. While this was happening, the supplies business grew very quickly. To give you an idea of our revenue, in our very first month of operation, Cool Strings made $100 gross income. In month two, we made $200. We made $400 in month three, $800 in month four, and broke $1,000 in month five (and remained around the $1200-$1300/mo mark for a while). Our profit margins were roughly 50% (very low website fees and Lacey accepted a bulk payment at the end of the month instead of a per-necklace payment). Getting checks for a few hundred dollars each month seemed outstanding at the time.

In October of 2003, I found a guy on eLance.com who was willing to redesign the website for $150. He did it for so little because he wanted to learn how to integrate PayPal into a website and he wanted practice using PHP. The new website design was significantly nicer than my previous attempts. He also integrated some cool new features: an easier-to-use backend that allowed me to keep track of my stock of supplies and a rotating specials list that would automatically discount selected items by 10%.

The site remained the same for the next ~12 months. At this point, I decided to let the inventory run out and shut down the site. For the last year while we were in business, Google AdWords and Overture rates cut so deeply into our profits that Lacey was making a ton of jewelry for very little money (I’m sorry, Lacey!). The good thing about this business in the early days was that Overture initially didn’t have a minimum bid on its search results– and there were very few hemp/beaded jewelry companies out there– so we snagged the 1st or 2nd spot on most terms. As time passed, they introduced a 5 cent minimum bid…then a 10 cent minimum bid… and then other competitors started competing for the top spots, making it much more expensive to drive traffic to our website.

Cool Strings didn’t make Lacey nor I millionaires, but it was certainly a fun project. Thank you, Archive.org, for capturing the progress of Cool Strings. And thank you, Lacey, for working countless hours, putting hemp jewelry in the hands of thousands of people across the world, and for always having a smile on your face!

More and more sites appear to be utilizing pretty little animated graphs to display data in a very manageable and easy-to-read way. Facebook’s Polls, Feedburner, and Google Analytics are just a few examples.

A big problem with the Internet is that there is TOO much information. Before the Internet, gathering information (i.e. distributing surveys, aggregating the data, etc.) was the hard part. Now, there is more data than anyone knows what to do with! Even on the most simple website visitor tracker, you are bound to see hundreds of statistics. On my tracker, I see daily/weekly/monthly/yearly visitors/hits/site visits, averages of these figures, the top inbound links, outbound links, etc. etc…

Finding the most important data and presenting it in an easy-to-view way is key. I think we’re going to see a lot more simplistic (but visually sexy) graphs coming out of all sorts of websites in 2008: be it trends in election polls on CNN.com, trends in site traffic to your blog, trends in yours and your friends’ behavior on Facebook, etc., etc.

Now if I only knew enough programming to start a company to make the creation of such graphs easier for other companies…

Camp Pals

Camp was awesome — watch for pictures and [eventually] a documentary. For all past participants, start thinking about next year!

Meredith Vieira blogged about us here.

iPhone

Yes, I’ll be in line 4 hours before it is released today.

Yes, I think YOU are silly if you are “waiting for the next generation of iPhone.” I think a lot of people will be kicking themselves in a few months when the iPhone is still just the iPhone (minus software updates) and when it is still hard to get a hold of. It’s unfair to hold the iPhone to such a higher standard than any other device; every one of my past cell phones fell apart in one way or another (and they sucked before they fell apart), so I really hope people don’t start blaming Apple when their iPhone doesn’t endure an accidental swim in the toilet…

Anyone who knows me knows I love to talk about future technologies. Something gets me really excited at the thought that we are witnessing a technological revolution and that the way the world works will be dramatically different in what will seem like no time.

A lot of people are of the mindset that you can’t predict the future: “Who would have ever thought that the television or Internet would be invented?” While this notion might have been true for the past 130,000 years, I don’t think that it is necessarily true anymore. I think we’ve reached a point where ideas are moving so fast, that it takes longer to execute ideas than it takes to think of them.

Having taken an OPIM class called Enabling Technologies, I saw a brief overview of the development of modern day technology over the past century. From looking at the past 100 years, I think we can predict the future.

So what does the future hold? I have some guesses that would seem pretty obvious to many…but for some reason, don’t exist today:

1. No more data storage devices (aka CDs, DVDs, USB drives, etc.)!

Once high-speed wireless Internet is everywhere (there aren’t any technological roadblocks stopping this… just cost limitations), you will be able to easily access your home computer, TV, movie player, etc. from anywhere. From your [i]phone, you could play songs or videos right off of your home computer. Better yet, you don’t even need a physical computer. Instead, your monitor could be wifi-equipped and could access your dedicated space on a massive data storage system elsewhere (in the process, making your data more secure, cheaper, and more accessible: more secure because there’d be backups of everyone’s data; cheaper because you’d be sharing space with others (so that instead of having a 100 GB hard drive and using 50 GB, you could share a ~800 GB hard drive with 10 other people, for instance); more accessible because these massive data centers could be running the fastest processors and connecting to the Internet through optical fibers. Think about it: we’ve gone from big floppy disks to smaller floppy disks to CDs to USB keys… why have anything at all if it isn’t necessary?

2. Enormous, lightweight monitors

I strongly believe (and it has been shown to be true) that one of the best ways to increase someone’s productivity is to increase the size of their computer monitor. The 17″ monitor I am currently looking at takes up less than a third of my range of sight. Admittedly pseudo-science, the eye has been determined to have an equivalent resolution of 81 megapixels. To couple that with another bit of pseudoscience, I was once told by one of my OPIM professors that the human brain’s memory could be measured in gigabytes. When comparing the ratio of our visual ability to the output of the monitors we regularly look at to the ratio of our memory capacity to the amount of storage space/information we have available, it is clear that we have an excess amount of information available and a limited amount of viewing “capacity.” Hence, there is a lot of room for progress to be made in enhancing the way we view information a computer.

Related to this point, consider the success of Google and the rise of search engine, tagging sites, etc.: they all exist to try to dumb down the massive amount of information we have to something that is digestible. Now consider monitors: have you ever felt like you were being engulfed/lost/overwhelmed by a monitor? I certainly haven’t. The closest I’ve come was staring at a 30″ Apple Cinema Display from 2 feet away in an Apple store (and to be honest, I felt freed more than lost by the experience).

Getting back to my point: the reason the above mentioned ratios are out of whack is because of the costs of these things. Storage space is getting cheaper and cheaper on orders of magnitude, whereas monitors aren’t developing quite as fast.

My guess: extremely lightweight, 60+” monitors as a standard of the future. I envision a desk without a back; instead, an enormous monitor will be attached to the wall behind the desk about 1-2 feet away. Perhaps something similar to this photo I came across on Digg recently:

3. Projectors on your [i]phone/PDA

Why carry an iPod AND a cell phone? You won’t have to starting on June 29. But take that one [admittedly giant] step forward: why have an [i]Phone/PDA AND a computer? I’m sure you’ll agree that eventually you’ll be able to fit more computing power in the palm of your hand than is available on the computer you are reading this off of.

So why not install 2 projectors on your PDA/[i]Phone? One will shine a keyboard that you can type on and one will project a screen onto a table/wall in front of you. Once again, the technology needed for this sort of thing already exists. Cost prohibitiveness will not survive in the long run… eventually this will be affordable and once it is affordable, why not have your computer and PDA all in one?

Bring this all-in-one device close to your monitor (#2 above) and the image will automatically show up there. While you’re at it, why not throw a Mastercard PayPass sort-of device in there? An improved version would connect to the checkout counter at your local grocery store so once the cashier rings you up, your PDA would flash a “Approve $25.10 charge? Press finger down to approve.” In fact, forget that. How about throw RFID compatibility in so you don’t even have to interact with a cashier. Everyone is talking about the convergence of your computer and your TV, but I don’t see that happening too soon– as that doesn’t seem useful (except for a possible cost savings). The above mentioned device does, on the other hand, seem useful– so why not go down that route of convergence?

Obviously I’m getting carried away, as I usually do when talking about these sorts of things. Those are just some of my thoughts. I’m sure everything above was thought of by lots of other people, but for some reason existing technologies have not been put to good use to make the above mentioned items mainstream. I can’t wait to look back at this blog in 25 years. I’d be happy to say “man, I called that!” but I’d also be quite happy with, “Wow, I couldn’t have predicted what actually happened.”

…that the sales of clothing online have overtaken those of computer hardware and software?

Marc Andreesen (founder of Netscape) just started blogging again (so I’ve been informed), and he describes how venture capitalism works quite nicely in his most recent post– as follows:

The whole structure of how the technology industry gets funded — by venture capitalists, angel investors, and Wall Street — is predicated on the baseball model.

Out of ten swings at the bat, you get maybe seven strikeouts, two base hits, and if you are lucky, one home run.

The base hits and the home runs pay for all the strikeouts.

I’m blogging, once again… but this time, I’ll be sharing more about what I’m learning than what I’m doing (or maybe I won’t… time will tell). Enjoy.