Thursday Morning - 9:36 am
The last of the emails with the site password are sending out this morning. The past couple of days have gone pretty well.
Behind the scenes we are struggling with an order for shelving to store paracord. The order was placed weeks ago but hasn't shipped yet. So we have stacks and stacks of paracord scattered to the 4 winds of heaven in the warehouse.
We also had a couple of orders flagged as fraudulent charges. Sometimes this is a mistake by the credit card processor but it looks like these were in fact fraud. So even in an awesome community like that of paracord weavers, there are some hooligans.
Wednesday Morning - 8:03 am
Today we send out the email with the site password to the balance of our signup list. Our email gurus were concerned about open rates and other things that affect our emails actually ending up in your inbox. But everything looks good and they have given us the greenlight to send out to the rest of the list.
Had some minor glitches yesterday with a few folks getting some error messages that we don't ship to certain locations in the USA. But these issues were quickly resolved.
Made a few changes to the site to make navigation a little easier.
With everything going well we will likely take the password protection off of the site next week. Along with the official opening all the deals for the VIP's well end. So don't delay in ordering what you want.
Tuesday Afternoon - 3:25 pm
Managed to get the doors open this morning and so far not too many issues. Some nice orders have come through already.
Open rates on the emails has been high so we should be able to accelerate getting everyone else in the door. Overall not a bad first 4 hours.
One thing I am concerned about is that a few folks have been adding the project kit to the cart in addition to getting the free kit (plus goodies). So I hope we aren't confusing folks. We'll make some adjustments to the images to be sure.
Thank you for making the first four hours awesome. Fulfilment is going smoothly which is a testament to our teams preparations. So far so good.
Tuesday Morning - 10:32 am
Doing some final checks and fixing some issues with the way the filters for paracord 550 (and other sizes) works. One little snag that came up last minute is our email gurus are telling us to send out to the list in smaller tranches than we originally planned. This is to make sure we don't irritate the Google gods (and Yahoo) so that our emails end up in folks spam folders. That reminds me I am a little hungry...
Monday Afternoon - 4:26 pm
Things didn't go as we planned and we delayed the launch a day. For those curious we were trying to get the system to automate the creation of bundles for the paracord 550 into common lengths. You know, 10ft, 25ft etc.
The system would do it but it looked super funky in the shopping cart. In some cases you couldn't actually see you had added the item to the cart until you clicked checkout. No Bueno.
So we postponed the launch until tomorrow and spent the balance of the day manually making adjustments to all the 550 listings.
Sorry folks. But one day isn't going to kill us (fingers crossed)
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Monday June 17th - 6:37 am
Thank you for being here today!
Today is launch day. Fingers crossed. We keep reminding ourselves this is a pre-launch (behind locked doors) but every time we look around we see something that we feel needs to get done before we let you in.
But in the end you are just going to have to see us still in construction clothes with paint in our hair and sawdust and debris everywhere.
Our mission is educating the world on the fun (and practical use cases) for making cool projects out of paracord. Lot's to do there (and share with you). Welcome to our website. Help us make it better.
This post will remain the same throughout the next two weeks and I will just add to it each day as a kind of journal. So if you come back a few more times in the next week or so check out the updates.
And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please email me at mark@paracordweavers.com.
Best,
Mark
