Making Important Decisions and Playing Around With The Site

I've never run a web store before. I've owned a failed leather working business. I don't know how to make the site all perfect and pretty. I do, however, know how to make the site weird, and maybe funny. Normally, I wouldn't be allowed to mess around with an active website that handles money, but this one is mine! Let the nonsense commence.

In all seriousness, I am actively working on building up a legitimate site and business, and thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts on the process.

I find that the hardest part of trying to build anything of significant importance and/or complexity is the decision making process. It can be so hard to actually make some of these critical decisions. It's far too easy to get overwhelmed with options, question whether you've made the right decision, and then just stick with it. There are entire industries dedicated to improving decision making skills. I've found that my best defense against overwhelm is to just see what's working really well for others, duplicate it, and stick with my decision, unless it proves to be unsustainable. Then I burn it all down, start over, and try not to think about the resources wasted on the previous attempt. Boy have I ever started over many times before...

I started a little electronics project in 2020 that has just stuck with me ever since. Deciding to pursue it was a huge decision that ultimately lead me to create this website and the blog. When I keep coming back to the same idea over and over again, it just means that I need to take the idea seriously and start working on it.

The decision to use Shopify for this site was very challenging to make, until a very trusted source mentioned multiple times how much they like the platform. They took sponsorship from Shopify, which can make things a bit questionable, but after seeing the awesome customizations they were able to add, and the way the web store handled thousands of orders at a time, I was sold. The site in question is www.lttstore.com. It's a wonderful little store with some really nice stuff. I grabbed a hoodie at half price, a stubby screwdriver with shaft extension, and a keychain. The stubby stays in my pants pocket at all times and gets used almost daily. I'm wearing the hoodie now, and the keychain is used daily. The quality of everything was so good that it made me decide to finally take my dream of owning my own business seriously.

You can have all of the dreams you want, but they don't mean anything unless you act on them. Ideas are worthless without execution. I've had countless ideas for cool stuff to design and make over the years, put put exactly zero effort into bringing any of them to life. Then one day, during the 2020 Covid pandemic situation, I found myself living in a tiny camper pulled by a Tesla. We had this little 6 gallon electric water heater that I converted to run on 12 volts DC (like car batteries). It worked great on the solar and battery system, but ran the battery bank completely dead a few times when we were off grid and using solar and battery power exclusively. I needed a way to stop it from heating water when we were low on power. I wasn't sure of any system that could monitor the solar system and adjust the water heater, so I designed, built, and installed one myself. It's still active to this day, as far as I know. In the end, I got an Arduino microcontroller board, some automotive relays, a touch screen computer, and some wires and set up a custom controller. It would monitor the amount of power you had coming in or available, then either turn off the water heater if you were dangerously low on power, set the water temperature to a lower set point if you were a little low on power, or crank the temperature to the highest setting if you had excess power coming in. It had a touch screen with buttons, and even the ability to change the temperature. It would remember the last settings it had after a power failure, which happened fairly often as I worked on the electrical system. You could plug any USB device with a serial terminal program into it, such as a smartphone, and control and monitor the system with it. It was a complete solution for a very interesting problem. A problem I didn't see anyone solving in the way that I wanted. After thinking back on that project, I decided that I need to eventually refine it and make it available to other people with the same problem. Now that I have two ebikes for daily commuting and adventure travel, I find myself in need of a solar system, and a control system for that solar system. Time to dust off the old ideas and bring them back to life. Might as well make a cool product out of it while I'm at it.

The decision to make that custom solar power control system a real product created the need to make countless other decisions. Decisions that rely on skills and knowledge that I just don't have yet. That led me to the realization that I need money to fund development hardware and a test system, which led me to the decision to make this site and start making other cool things to sell. That, and the fact that my body isn't doing to well with my current line of work, or the industry that I typically work in. All signs pointed to starting my own business and taking it very seriously.

Now that I've rambled on about decision making, and made myself tired, I suppose I should talk about the new "products" I created for the site. They consist of 4 nonsense things, with AI slop generated images for comedic effect, and fun pricing. I also added a nice little gift card with another AI slop image. The payment system isn't set up yet, so the items can't actually be sold. It's probably for the best, as I suspect a few people would try to buy them anyways. I wouldn't be upset with some joke sales that bring in some real money, but I'd feel much better giving people something worthwhile for their hard earned money. The products were all based off of the circuit board theme, as I'll be developing mostly electronics, except for the desert oasis post card. I have a deep love for the desert, and long to return there every day. It just makes me happy to look at it. I have been working on a small machine to automatically print, cut, emboss, and crease paper products for a while now. It is very much a possibility that I will make actual post cards. And not just hire out the making of them, but actually build the machines that make them, and ship them out myself. I like the idea of making things myself. Not a big fan of relying on others...

For those looking at the product that looks kind of...phallic, the AI prompt used to generate it was "dildo made of circuit boards." 

P.S. I decided to make a "Donate" product just in case anyone actually wants to throw a few bucks at me to make cool stuff. I've had people telling me to make a Patreon page for a few years, but was never comfortable with the idea. The $40 per month Shopify fees aren't going to pay for themselves, after all. Right now I'm just taking that loss every month to keep myself motivated and create a real world consequence for not having things up and running. Good motivation.