Printalytics
Order monitoring & analytics for print-on-demand shops
I must have been too bummed out to update this back in 2021. Long story short - I built it but they didn't come. Turns out my marketing "plan" was more of a vague notion - and my timing was terrible. I was so focused on deploying the app that I didn't realize I was launching it just before Q4 - which is the busy season for my bread-and-butter business, Patent Earth.
For a while I thought "well, I'll worry about marketing in January". But by the time January rolled around, the technical debt was already piling up. I had not really appreciated the demands of keeping up with the various changes being rolled out several times a year by every service that Printalytics was designed to work with. I found myself having to choose between playing catchup on a zero revenue project, and keeping up with my already established and bill-paying business, and made the obvious choice of focusing on what was already making me money.
It's probably for the best. Over the years it has become evident that the various services that Printalytics was trying to bring together ultimately want to build walled gardens to silo & lock in their users as much as possible, and my app was going against that. In retrospect, I don't think a sustainable future for this project was in the cards.
Still, I learned a lot along the way and can honestly say that I have built and deployed a full blows SaaS from the ground up. So I'm not completely mad about the outcome :)
Our integration with Shopify has finally been approved, which is a huge milestone for us!
Of all the platforms and services that Printalytics connects with, Shopify is probably the single most important one. Since Shopify is so app-centric and most Print on Demand services depend on app integrations to fill orders, a huge share of our target audience are running their stores on Shopify.
The approval process took longer than anticipated. I expected one week, maybe two... it ended up taking a full month. During that time I've held off on marketing efforts.
Now that our Shopify integration is live, the starting gun for marketing has officially been fired!
I wrote previously that I expected to get my first users quickly. I've tempered my expectations a bit since then, and am now looking forward to a slow-and-steady ramp up. I have some good content marketing ideas, but they will take some time and effort to execute.
Next update will probably be more about marketing. Until then - time to get back to work!
Late Friday night, I pushed a final round of tweaks and bug fixes before unceremoniously opening up new account registration to the public.
Printalytics is now officially open for business! But I still wouldn't say it's "launched". More like "now I can start the countdown."
I have not follow the conventional wisdom of building an audience. This has nothing to do with the quality of that wisdom - it just doesn't work for me.
Fortunately, there's more than 1 way to reach an audience. I expect to get my first users next week, and have plans to ramp up quickly from there.
This is gonna be fun :)
This time, I took my sweet time with Printalytics. I was still running Patent Earth after all, which over the course of 2020 was something of a boom-and-bust roller coaster that managed to keep me pretty busy. But I kept chipping away at the code, and by May of 2021 I finally had something close to a finished product.
On June 1st I made the website live with a pre-launch signup form. I got exactly as many signups as I expected: zero.
While it was still a big step in my eyes - making not just our landing page live, but our documentation as well - this wasn't really a launch. I only bothered to mention it publicly in a couple of places. My main goal at this point was to get the search engines to start indexing the new site, and see what breaks when the app is running in production.
As the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, I was cleaning out my rented office/warehouse and moving Patent Earth back into my house. My e-commerce expansion had been thoroughly derailed a few months prior, thanks to a Google search algo update that crippled my sales growth overnight.
By April of 2020, my e-commerce business was once again home based. This was very convenient since the pandemic had ground society to a halt. But I was staring down a very uncertain future. I had just lost thousands of dollars on my failed expansion, and now my sales were tanking even further in the face of widespread economic uncertainty.
With nothing much to do besides sit around the house, I decided it was the perfect time to dust off my old Printalytics project and finally finish what I had started. It worked out wonderfully - not only did I have something to keep me busy during quarantine, I also knew I had something great to look forward too. It helped me stay positive during a very difficult time.
When I started working on Printalytics, I figured I could knock out an MVP in 3-4 months and get it live before the holiday season. But reality asserted itself, and it turns out that what I wanted to build was a bit too complex to finish in my spare time in just a couple of months.
Meanwhile, I was still working full time on expanding my e-commerce business Patent Earth. In October 2018, I rented an office/warehouse unit and by the time it was set up, the holiday shopping season was in full swing.
I told myself that I would get back to Printalytics as soon as we got past the holiday shopping season, but it didn't work out like that. Patent Earth continued to occupy my focus, and Printalytics sat untouched for over a year.
In the course of building up my print-on-demand based e-commerce business Patent Earth, I hacked together several internal tools to help me deal with the complexities of multi-channel order management & fulfillment tracking across several different print providers.
Sometime around May of 2018, it occurred to me that these tools are pretty awesome and other POD shop owners would probably love to have access to them. I bought the printalytics.com domain and started organizing my mishmash of homemade tools into a singular web based application.
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