For every dollar that a "Steve Jobs" type produces, 10 are produced by people "launch and iterate". Business is about making good decisions as often as possible, which the latter methodology seems to do better.
I am going to play devils advocate here, as I loved the book, "Trust Me, Im Lying", and a lot of what is written in there pertains to this "drama". The person controlling that twitter account is probably a little too emotionally invested, and probably a little immature. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, its passion, just misdirected (not everyone is passionate about their product, no matter what gets said on these types of forums). I would be curious about the internet habits of people who do not want their tests shared (a TOS/Disclaimer should have been listed on the site), but I would guess between gmail/facebook etc, betapunch is the least of their worries. I just assumed that a tech-savvy audience assumes that anything they put online is fair game...because...well, it is. On the other hand, its better to be emotionally invested in something you have built, but never reveal those emotions I would think.
tldr; if you can raise ANY doubt about who is in the right, and who is in the wrong, and get a shit load of hits, controversy may not be such a bad thing.
Be careful. Sound advice in any situation. But, most things I have found that are the right thing to do cause physical/emotional harm, at least in the short term.
You can do an "on demand" submission at any time, typically though, it is not cost effective. 99% of our work is done via screen printers, which is a time consuming process, some will bid a small number like that, some won't. Everything is guaranteed, if you are not happy with the print quality, we refund 100% of the purchase. Quality tees are a catch-22, in that on demand (1 or 2 at a time) is not cost effective, but how do you know the design will sell, etc, so there is risk involved. If you have an specific questions about selling your own designs (I assume that's why you were asking), let me know. Eventually I would like to have printers save screens, or keep a rotation that I can send out to allow small ecommerce sites to do 1-2 at a time, as orders come in, but Im not there just yet.
We haven't formalized "sign up" per se with the printers, we have relationships with with a bunch though, the site says 100s, its not quite there just yet, but hope to be in the next couple of weeks.
At this point, its all pretty personal. There are only two of us on the team, and the 888 number actually gets directed straight to my cell. I hear what you are saying though, the plan is to build it out, but I wanted to get in front of customers right away, and figured this was a good compromise. I thought about things as a "fancy" landing page.
This is a very basic MVP, tech-wise but the underlying business infrastructure runs deep. I have the relationships, and my grand picture is to build a portal etc, where independent printers can bid on jobs, get text alerts etc, but for now, I am doing things the old fashioned way, via email and phone calls. I also want to help brands launch, and let them "outsource" the printing process. I have a successful brand (recently had a fab.com sale etc), and one of the toughest parts, was getting ahold of the damn screen printers, along with a host of other ins and outs that I hope to help people with, so they can focus on sales and marketing.
I am a fan of chef, we use it at cloudpokerdb.com for all of our configuration management. The Ruby Scripts vs Config Files rings true (at least it did when I first compared the two a while back). Im sure you can do it with puppet, but chef allows us to auto-deploy and setup any type of server environment (using openstack) one could need, via a couple recipes, and databags.
http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1 (very early stages); it is essentially craigslist but allows anyone to accept credit cards using stripe (I charge 1$ per transaction, and stripe charges their usual fees). Every time you list, you will have the option to tweet/FB it; You can only login with FB or twitter to buy, sellers login with stripe/fb/twitter. You "make an offer" and the seller decides whether they want to accept or not, based on your FB friends etc, to eliminate scamming. Every seller has their own "merchant account" through stripe.
I started building this, then stopped due to a lot of negative feed back, anyone think this is worth pursuing? Anyone have any feedback?
"who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents."
I agree, also except for mine, who was for all intents an purposes an immigrant.
This was a really great post. Look to the people who grew up with nothing to learn that it really isn't that bad to have "nothing". (I wish I could make those quotes even more sarcastic).
Does anyone have any information on what their infrastructure looks like? What do they use to manage their servers? I guess a lot of this information would be "proprietary" but scaling something this large would be a great read. I manage about 1000 non-critical (think kiosks) servers, and deploy the code to them; and it is relatively painless, I would be curious to know how the big boys do things.