The Trixie Update

What a cool surprise when I picked Trixie up from school

Sunday was a beautiful day to be out.

One year ago today, Trixie Tracker launched. The past year has been a very educational one; it taught me a lot about creating and running a business as opposed to a fun design project. I wasn’t too focused on the business side of things when I was developing the beta. I loved designing, testing, coding, surveying, copy-writing, deploying, working with beta-testers and developing with developers, and generally making the site as good as I could. I didn’t spend a whole of a lot of time thinking about how a business works, and I fell into the question mark trap. You know, step number two:

1. Cool idea
2. ???
3. Profit!

I shouldn’t have been so naive.

The real issue is that I had no expectation of the company making any money while we were in beta. How could it? But once we threw the credit card processing switch, everything changed. Now the company didn’t have an excuse to be a freeloader. It’s funny how a labor of love becomes a cold economic calculation overnight. I quickly realized that I needed to subsidize the company (as well as take care of my family) so I got a job and let Trixie Tracker run.

Well, it’s been running for a year now without any problems. We did a good job building it in beta. But I wasn’t able to invest anything else into the company until it proved itself. Trixie Tracker had to sink or swim. I’m happy to say that it’s swimming. The application has proved itself and can start paying for its own development. That’s exciting to me. Of course, I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to develop all along. But I’m interested in where Trixie Tracker is going to be 3, 4, 5 years from now. And that may mean that I have to take a slow steady course. It’s better than crashing and burning.

Is it a good idea to reveal so much about a business in a personal blog? In my case, I think so. Since the day I signed up my first beta tester, I felt that users were trusting me with some very special data. It’s important to return that trust and be transparent. The hardest thing I’ve had to type repeatedly on the Trixie Tracker forums is, “that’s a great idea, but I don’t know when it would be implemented”. We’re going to be moving slow, but we are moving forward.

Thanks to everyone who has supported Trixie Tracker over the last year and helped us grow. It means the world to read about how the application is helping parents from all over. Here’s to another year!

Related:
My Other Baby is Turning One
We Launched

Day two was better!

Tomorrow is an exciting milestone for me. It’s the one-year launch anniversary for Trixie Tracker!

I’m proud of what we launched with, slightly less happy about development during the first year, but really looking forward to what we’re going to do in the next few months. I’m writing a piece about our anniversary for tomorrow, but a dedicated user already beat me to celebrating her own Trixie Tracker anniversary. Thanks for the testimonial, Nicole. It really means a lot!

Today was Trixie’s first day of soccer. There was a lot of confusion, then 3 jumping jacks, about 4 passes and a snack. I’ve never seen kids work so little to get a juice box and single-serving size bag of goldfish.

Trixie took a while to warm up to the whole endeavor. Most of the time she assumed a position of professional attention — feet firmly planted shoulder width apart, hands clasped behind her back. From a distance, it appeared as if she was following directions with a military precision, but no one told her to stand that way. Not sure where she picked up that one. Maybe we’re watching too much Star Trek on the weekends.

There’s a few other pics up on my flickr site.

Trixie decorated a birthday cake for me this year. I stuck up a handful of pics on flickr that show what a good job she did. I’m biased, of course. Any cake decoration that includes dinosaurs is going to be good, so she had me at stegosaurus.

I’m still playing around with flickr. It’s just too darn easy to use for me to go back to my old way of doing TPODs. However, I think what I really need to do is finish moving the TPOD archives to a new install of wordpress and build a Picture-of-the-day theme.

(test from flickr)

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