Spencer Fry

Found a cool way to track what people might be saying about your website. Check out Google’s Blog Search. You can search by your company’s name and then click the RSS link on the left hand side to follow it through your RSS reader. I’ve been following Carbonmade for a while now and it allows me to respond and interact with our community.

WOW, getting something out feels so good. We released our first update to Carbonmade in well over a year. It was just a little something, but we all feel great that we got something new out to the world. We added PayPal support (a lot of our customers are overseas), overhauled our entire billing system, re-designed several forms (sign in screen, billing screen, and a few others), updated our Privacy Policy, and a few other things.

Most of the credit goes to Jason for learning the PayPal API from scratch and coding things: a big shoutout to the self-proclaimed eater of oranges! The majority of the changes were behind-the-scenes coding changes as mentioned above, but Dave and I contributed a lot too. What a huge sigh of relief to get something out. I really can’t put it in words how good it feels.

I’m such a huge advocate of rapid iteration for web applications, so this long tenure was killing me. You need to release early and release often to be competitive in this business. Dave often uses the idea of putting something in an “incubator” to allow it to grow and for us to study it. We can see how it’s being used and change things through customer feedback. To be able to do this, though, you need to be constantly iterating. Releasing often also gives you that sense of accomplishment that helps keep you sane. I think we were all going a little batty without a recent release. There’s certainly a lot more we can do, but even something as boring as an overhauled billing system feels satisfying.

I never want to have to go so long without an update again and I don’t think we will. We all agree that we’re going to focus on smaller chunks of work from here on out. Don’t try and perfect your website out of the gate, but let it grow through an incubation process. Find a feature or area you can improve on, spec it out, design it, code it, and release it. As Nike’s famous slogan says: Just do it!

I thought I’d just mention two small things. First, I added Carbonmade to Twitter about a week ago. Any Carbonmade fans out there that use Twitter should definitely start following (and we’ll follow you back). We won’t spam you or anything; it’s just great for us to be able to see what you’re up to and share things with you every now and again. The other thing is that I created a Facebook Page for Carbonmade last night. If you’ve got a Facebook account, we’d love to have you as a Fan. That’s all for now.