Wow, have the last couple of years been incredible. It has had its ups and downs, but I thought I’d take a minute to reflect on some things from the past, and talk about moving forward, as we approach 2012, I want to make everything clear.
First off, I’d like to make myself accesible to anyone who wants to reach out, if you have a question or just want to say Hi, the best way to reach me is by email, here. I’d just like to say, I love reading the emails I do get, however, I get a lot, so give me time if it takes a while to respond.
I started in on this incredible journey, in about 2007 and what an awesome journey it’s been so far, I’ve met people I never thought I would meet, I’ve solved problems I never thought I would solve and I’ve accomplished more personally, than I ever thought I would. — Of course this isn’t a fairy tale, it hasn’t been without its problems. I made some mistakes in the past, and I’ll go into that right now.
When this all started, I was young, hell, I still am young. I still have a lot of learning and a lot of growing to do. Over the last few years, I’ve on occasion, been poor at communicating with the people who have attributed most to my success — independant software developers. If you don’t know what an independant software developer is, grab your iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, PC or Windows Phone, check out all those incredible apps. The majority of those are made by these indie devs. I know, those guys are awesome.
On a large promotion in the past (called Vote Bundle) we had some serious issues with PayPal, we had an incredibly successful sale, and sold a lot of software in partnership with these developers. It was awesome. However, we had a problem, PayPal decided to limit our account, and hold the funds, we negotiated and negotiated with PayPal, yet nothing no budge no sympathy we were stuck. For the most part, the involved developers were understanding but after repeated attempts (and months passed) at trying to get PayPal to pay the money that was ours, all we were hit with were more delays. Understandably, the developers started to get angry.
This lead to a few of them blaming me entirely, I’m not saying I wasn’t partly to blame, we should have done more pre-planning with PayPal to ensure this wouldn’t happen. Although in my defence, I didn’t even know this could happen, let alone it actually happening to me. — Some of these developers were pretty vocal about what happened, and I completely understood their frustration, I was as frustrated as they were, but there was nothing that could have been done.
Fast forward a few weeks, and after repeated phone calls and several attempts to get higher up the PayPal food chain, we managed to get most of the money released. We were finally able to pay the developers everything they were owed, and the situation was resolved. Although, some of those post still remain online, I’m glad, regardless of what the developers said at the time, that this was resolved.
After that came the mistakes that were my fault. I do try my very hardest at what I do, to keep everyone happy and to still have great deals for everyone involved. Myself, the developers and the consumers. Unfortunately, during one promotion earlier this year, I let personal issues get in the way of business, and this caused me to neglect my corporate duties and we were 2 weeks late paying some developers for a promotion we’d ran. That one, is completely my fault, all I can do is apologize for that, and assure you all that it’ll never happen again.
We’ve made mistakes before, but we’re trying not to again, here’s what we’ve implemented to make sure everything is clear, and everyone is paid on time.
I’ve also had the following things implemented to protect our customers, and to make sure they’re completely happy with everything our daily deals services are offering.
So thats my mistakes and how we’re trying to fix them, but we’ve done a lot of great things over the past few years too.
Mac Bundle Box donated 10% of its profit to various charities on most of the promotions it ran, and we’re working with a top charity now to get this implemented for all purchases on Get Dealy.
We transitioned Mac Bundle Box into Get Dealy and started offering not only incredible deals on Mac software but deals on Creative resources and now deals on materials for Learning and Education. We grew it from about 8,000 to over 65,000 active users in just 6 months.
Every day I learn how to do my job better, and I thank everyone for their feedback along the journey. I’ve made mistakes, everyone does, but I’ve rectified every mistake I’ve made, and continues to try and build something incredible, and it could never have been done without the support of our amazing team, Andrew, Harrison, Matt, Mike and Rachel. Thanks for your support over the last few years (or months, depending on how long you’ve been working with us) and for your dedication to not only Get Dealy, but to the enterprise as a whole.
I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing, I’ll probably make more mistakes, but I’ll learn from them, and grow as a person, becoming better at what I do with everything I do. Each mistake, error or correction I have to make means this organization becomes stronger as a whole.
I hope anyone who decides to read this will support it in growing. Remember, don’t always believe what you read, because there’s always more to every story. If you read something about me, it could be true or it could be false. I’m going to make the rest of 2011, and the rest of my life, about being the best me I can be. Got a question, want me to clarify something, email me, or grab me in person. I’ll be attending a bunch more events over 2012, so I’ll be in various cities around the world. Drop me an email, and send me a tweet, if you want to grab coffee.
Sidenote: It’s late, and this is a one-draft post, so please excuse any spelling errors and/or gramatical mistakes.
The biggest sale in internet history starts soon.
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What could this be? ;) (Taken with instagram)
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Unfillable.
(via willw)
As some of you may know, I recently started my first endeavor into a business orientated around physical products. I didn’t exactly pick the easiest of products, I picked a consumable product, coffee.
In addition to being consumable, adding another degree of difficulty, it’s also the worlds second most traded commodity, meaning the price of the raw materials differs drastically not only from week to week, but from minute to minute.
Regardless, I decided to start this company back in December of last year, and it’s been six months of pure planning and then at the very end of August we hit that all important milestone and launched our first two blends of coffee into the world. Around one month on and we’ve made some exciting developments.
We’ve completely revamped our packaging, and we’ve been selling a considerable number of bags of coffee each week, and we’ve even done our first event, having a booth at the renowned Oxford Food & Wine festival, all thanks to a very helpful organizer who was kind enough to invite us.
In the month, we’ve also launched our wholesale department, selling coffee in bulk to restaurants, cafés, hotels and other establishments and we’ve got some awesome locations on board, and some exciting developments to announce in the coming weeks.
All in all, it has been an amazing experience thus far, selling an incredible product to some incredible people. Hopefully this is the birth of a brand, and I can go along for the ride and watch it flourish into one of the cornerstone brands of the next decade. We shall see, but as always, I’m hopeful.
Peace, love and coffee.
Christian
sade:
LOL, you know I sat here doing this shit for like, five minutes, right?
Reminds me of this brilliance:
this is everything