PG - This is great to hear. Was in the middle of watching it with my wife (and co-founder). It's one of the most passionate and important conferences I have ever seen.
Adobe is migrating everyone to the new cloud services, so it makes sense. Fireworks > Edge Reflow / Dreamweaver, Flash > Edge Animate. Only problem is that they're experimenting so much with new apps that I don't know what to invest my time in learning (I'm looking at you Proto).
We had a similar experience when we created our first designer toy. We were looking for exceptional quality as our designers were incredibly talented and we waned their work showcased in the best possible way.
First rule: stay away from Alibaba.
We went this route initially, found someone who looked like they could do it, and even found other small toy manufacturers who had supposedly heard of the factory and recommended it. This was important since many of the factories tend to steal and re-post product photos from eachother.
We went with this factory, and production started fairly smooth. We let the factory complete the sculpt (a rookie mistake on our part) and we began the tweaking process. Their sculpt was “ok”, not on model really, and it didn’t “feel” like our product. After a few months of sending photos back and fourth, we asked to have a sample shipped to us so we could see it in person. When we got them in the mail, we knew we were in trouble. Not only were the samples “way” off model (downright ugly, actually), but they didn’t even stand! The factory had, for some reason, rounded the bottom of the feet…
Decision time- we were already in the hole a few thousand $- it’s a lot for us, as our entire operation at the time included myself and my fiancee. We’re bootstrapped and pay everything out of pocket. We decided to move forward, picking the best of the worst of the samples, and again attaching notes for fixes (“can we get the toy to stand, please?”). That’s when everything went really south. We never saw any fixes, never got to see the colors printed, or the designs in final form from this factory. What we got were weekly emails for 6 months that basically read, “so sorry for the delay, it’s almost ready- should have them for approval next week.”
Second Rule: China is the wild west, do it the right way.
We started going to trade shows like Toy Fair and others, and began asking people with real product in the market for leads. While most kept their factories a secret, we made progress. We discovered the HKTDC, a more legitimate group, and then caught our break- someone who had connections and personal relationships and connected us to a truly great, legitimate factory.
I saw this at the MOMA in NYC a few years ago. As a former Cartoon Network animator, let me tell you, it's the most incredible experience to see it in person. Completely hypnotizing in the best of ways.
I can only talk from personal experience- I've never seen a founder that's been completely happy with outsourced UX/ UI. In the end, it's really tied to the type of site that you're developing. If the design is integral to the experience (like a music or design site for example), then don't outsource. If the design is purely tied to the data and the way the data is arranged for consumption, then maybe.
Your join button is pretty muted- it's gray, it's small, it's in the corner and it's surrounded by the same blue color that sits in the background. Try A/B testing by moving the join button to the center of your top banner, making it big and green.
Wow, incredibly timely- this is EXACTLY what we've been going through for the last two weeks. EXACTLY.
The problem with PayPal is that there is absolutely "0" real customer support. We were labeled as a "money transfer service"- even though that's not our business- and had our acct suspended. Our site isn't public yet, we were just testing live payments as opposed to the already completed sandbox tests. We thought we'd be ok since we modeled our pay structure similar to a few others we had seen.
When you call PayPal, you get a nice enough customer service rep- friendly but really doesn't know anything. They put a "note" on our acct to have someone higher up call us back...and that's when the real fun begins.
If you're lucky enough to have the rep call you (we're like 2/7), you can get some limited info. If you miss the call, or have an additional question after the fact, you have to go through the first level of general cust. service and hope that someone will call you back. No left messages, no other phone number you can call, definitely no dedicated rep. it's taking weeks out of our production dev time.
What makes this mockery of service so severe is that our business depends on buyers paying sellers. We got a form email letting us know of our general "violation", but no specifics. It's up to us to interpret what exactly violates their policies. Thanks to this article, and everyone's comments, I do understand some areas where we possibly made an error- which I take responsibility for- but without a definite response we won't know if we accidentally violate it again when we spend more to retool our system.
Always an interesting debate on whether you should try and fail quickly in a project etc. The faster you fail, the more m&m's you can attempt to catch in your mouth?
How did you determine the pricing for sponsorships? Is there a good guide out there?
We're looking at possibly adding sponsorships to the https://rubythursday.com/ newsletter next year.