18 steps to mail a shirt

Thor and I have a Lennon/McCartney agreement when it comes to new ideas: since we talk about everything so much we can never keep track of who has which idea we just credit all ideas to both of us. (This is the same method John Lennon and Paul McCartney used for songwriting -- they shared the writing credit no matter what. John got his name first on every song, even if he was out of the country when Paul wrote and recorded it. This was probably still a good deal for Paul.) Thor and I haven't decided which one of us gets to be John, though my name does give me a slight advantage.

I bring this up because we can't remember who came up with the idea for Valleyschwag. I do know it was at SXSW, and that thor made the site while sitting in the hospital waiting room back in SF. I also know that I was skeptical about getting too distracted with a side project, and I wasn't sure that we should be dabbling so far outside our area of expertise. Shipping logistics was not something we knew much about.

Here's what we have to do to get a shipment out:

1. Talk to companies about schwag they want to distribute. We contact some, others contact us.
2. Coordinate production of some items, like hooking up a company with a silk-screener and overseeing shirt production.
   
3. Go pick up boxes of stuff. We now know that 1500 shirts fill a Min Cooper, a Volkswagen Jetta and a mid-size SUV.
4. Count what we have, while folding and sorting shirts.
5. Create a master list of all subscribers.
6. Break the list into segments by location, size, etc.
   
7. Decide who gets what stuff. This is mostly based on size, though we also have special cases for people who contributed to the VS community (usually by blogging or sending/uploading photos) or made a special request.
8. Buy massive amounts of postage online and print a custom shipping label for each subscriber.
9. Put the label on a big envelope.
10. Build each package: shirt(s) first, then stickers, paper stuff, and various other schwag items.
11. Wrap each package in a sheet of newsprint, creating a bundle that looks like meat from a butcher.
12. Cut and stencil a piece of burlap for each package. This took several days.
    
13. Cut a piece of twine for each package.
14. Wrap each bundle in a piece of burlap and tie with twine.
15. Place each burlap bundle in a labeled envelope.
16. Box up envelopes and load them into a truck.
17. Drive to the post office and drop everything off.
18. Track packages as they travel the globe. Help subscribers who have a problem or don't get their package.
    

Jeez.

Our first shipment wasn't very organized, and there were lots of post-it notes floating around with names, sizes, addresses, etc. We somehow managed to get everything mailed without completely missing anyone or sending drastically inappropriately sized shirts. This month our subscriber base is 300 times larger, and we have a pretty big logistical challenge on our hands.

But the point of this post isn't to garner sympathy - we've hired a crack team of shipping experts (actually a team of one, the multi-talent Noona Nolan, owner of NoonaCo) to do most of the hard labor. The point here is about living in someone else's industry for a while.

By definition people spend most of their time in their own industry. Software people think about software all the time, and they see a software-based solution to every problem. So lots of software is built to solve problems that software people have. This is why there are hundreds of different RSS readers but no high-quality Web 2.o products to run a hair salon. Getting a haircut is more popular than reading blogs, but people who write software generally don't run hair salons. They never see the problem, so they never think to try and solve it.

Of course there is software to run a hair salon, or handle a packing and shipping operation, or do any other real-world task. It's just that the software sucks. The coolest new web apps are being created by people who are solving a problem that they understand, like RSS reading. Well, now I understand the problem of scaling a pack-and-ship operation. There isn't a good web based product to solve our problem so we're building one as we go, and when we've solved a real problem for ourselves we're pretty sure that other people will need that solution too.

I feel like there's a land rush starting for this style of product development. People are taking the tools and methods that were created to build a thousand blog tools and applying them to old industries one by one. I don't want to sound too frothy here, but this might be a good time for all you non-software subject area experts to think about how the internet could improve your business, before someone like me comes along and does it for you.