In September of 2008, after Jack and I had spent months working with different full-time and contract developers, ‘Glue’ (aka Flavors.me) had made zero progress.
To be kind, we had ‘explored’ a handful of proprietary and open-source frameworks. It was time to call in the heavy artillery. After failing to persuade him to accept a whacky deferred compensation offer to build Superkix earlier in the year, I asked John Wehr to step in and save the project. The idea behind Flavors.me is that simple systems can produce complex patterns (A New Kind of Science, Wolfram). After a couple weeks of blunt conversation, it was clear that only John could build the type of system we were still envisioning.
I have found that adhering to the operational frameworks provided by Jim Collins and Sun Tzu removes a good deal of confusion that arises during the company building process. And I have encountered few others as capable as John of filling the archetypal technical leadership role that Collins or Sun Tzu would surely require were they pursuing an Internet-related endeavor. So it is with great excitement that I announce HiiDef Inc. has hired John Wehr as its Chief Technology Officer!
John will be manning a booth at PyCon Atlanta in a couple weeks. We are actively looking for Python/Django experts to join the HiiDef team. So if you fit the bill, please find a way to introduce yourself either at PyCon in Atlanta, or digitally via the Internet.
Sometime in 2002 after 7’6 Yao Ming was drafted by the Houston Rockets, a couple of friends and I silk-screened about 1,000 t-shirts with funny riffs on Yao’s identity like Who’s Yao Mama?, Deez Nutz in Yao Mouth! and Who’s Yao Daddy?
I used a hosted e-commerce platform from Network Solutions to hack together a “Yaowear” site with only .jpg images; it was one of the more frustrating, semi-technical experiences of my life, and I swore to never do business with Network Solutions again.
Fast forward to 2008. Shortly after launching Superkix, we needed a very simple storefront to sell our wonderfully comfortable American Apparel 50/50 blend Superkix t-shirts. I had read about Shopify a couple years prior and was very eager to try out their service. My standards were exceptionally low; we needed only to sell one product with a couple different t-shirt colors. Sadly, I couldn’t even create a site that I was comfortable associating with the Superkix brand. So, I asked Jack the designer via IM if he would be interested in joining me on another HiiDef adventure, and Goodsie was born!
In February 2009, Kevin Sheurs from Vimeo agreed to sacrifice his nights and weekends to help bring our little retail project to life. Our plan was to launch before Jack’s wife Marissa was due to give birth to J3 aka: “BabyJ” in June; evidently we underestimated the project scope a touch. Based on our experience with the Flavors.me beta, we realized that in order to cross the goal line, we needed to add a full-time development heavy with some real horsepower, pronto.
Enter Eli White, who joined us on Monday to lead the development of Goodsie! Eli was among the first few developers at Digg, spent time at Hubble Space Telescope and TripAdvisor, and was most recently the Community Relations Manager for Zend. He wrote the book on PHP 5 and is a tour de force in the open source community. It’s only been about 72 hours, but Eli is already wearing full body armor around his house, and Goodsie is that much closer to becoming a reality.
So what is Goodsie? Goodsie allows anyone to create a unique web presence to sell physical or digital goods. Retailers of all kinds, from eBay power sellers to artisans in handmade marketplaces, or even musicians on MySpace, can have their own branded online store, without any of the traditional hassles of setting up shop online. We are building Goodsie to modernize selling online. Built on Amazon’s cloud, Goodsie integrates the Paypal, Google Checkout and Amazon gateways. It incorporates structured attributes in product categories such as Apparel, Media, Art, Pets, Furniture and Jewelry, leading to a consistent search and shopping experience. With native support for digital file preview and delivery, downloading purchased audio, video, stock photography and e-books is seamless.
The long awaited alpha testing should finally start in a month or two, perhaps during SXSW in March, which a handful of HiiDef team members will be attending.
In the meantime, Eli will be speaking at both ConFoo and tek-X. For those in attendance at either conference, please seek him out to say hello, buy him a beer and challenge him to a medieval-style joust!
I’ve closed up shop and become what the Japanese like to call a ‘salary man’.
Well, not exactly. In early 2008 I started working with Jonathan and David Marcus on a ‘little shoe project’ which eventually turned into Superkix.com. Since then we’d been throwing round the idea of working together exclusively, and late last year we decided to go for it. After all, they were my favourite clients by a mile.
This is a big change. Even though the actual work is much the same, the situation of dealing with a dozen or so clients (essentially bosses) on a handful of simultaneous projects is very different from working on a single large project. As a product designer, I’m working alongside former Design Director at Vimeo, the one and only Jack Zerby. Jack’s an OCD designer with mad skills. He’s also the mastermind behind the interface on HiiDef’s other recently launched product, Flavors.me.
