Would this be a good time to mention that I sell custom and pre-designed pinback buttons online? ;) Or, perhaps, that I’d be interested in doing some kind of skill trade for a better website for it? (I’d love to outright pay someone to do it, but I can’t afford to. I’m able to do it myself, but I really don’t want to.)
A topic I’d like to see addressed in this area is “how to make your resume/cover letter make you look like the badass you really are, but have no paperwork to prove.” I have the opposite of your “typical nerd” problem—I’m really great at customer service and dealing with people*--but little to show for it. I have very little work experience and there’s no particular career pattern in it. Plus, no degree.
I eventually got so sick of trying to find a job with the above for qualifications that I went back to school. But was I missing something? How could I have improved my chances?
*So if we start the LW co-op, I could do those bits. ;)
“how to make your resume/cover letter make you look like the badass you really are, but have no paperwork to prove.”
Qualifications:
I work in tech and frequently interview people.
I’ve previously helped friends and strangers (via a /r/favors post) helping people redesign their resumes.
I’m a freelance application security specialist and have to make myself look like I’m worth the $80 an hour.
My friend Bhavna is an Indian who is a US citizen, and many tech employers do not trust Indian applicants, as lying on a resume is prevalent among Indian placement firms. She was able to trade up from a 6 month gig (her only work experience) into a $80k a year project management job in the LA area (a very difficult place to find jobs).
If you don’t mind talking about it, are you making enough from it to make a difference to your quality of life?
I have a button business and an ugh field about doing much with it, partly because it’s so large (about 5000 slogans) that doing anything significant involves a lot of work, so I’m curious about how much can be done with a couple of dozen images.
are you making enough from it to make a difference to your quality of life?
No—well, sort of. I don’t often sell any online, but I make bike designs for the Berkeley Bikestation, and I’ve done other batch orders from time to time. If I had a job, it wouldn’t be a noticeable amount, but since I don’t, it doesn’t take much to be noticeable.
how much can be done with a couple of dozen images
I do most of my sales in custom designs. My main goal is to have a really low barrier to entry for single buttons—as the site puts it,
to reduce as far as possible the obstacles that lie between “Hey, I’d like that on a button” and “Check out my cool button!”
I focus on this because it’s a service I want to exist and enjoy being able to provide, more than because it’s an especially profitable model. So I do scattered customs in quantities of 1-10, and occasionally a random internet sale of a planet set.
and an ugh field about doing much with it
Know what you mean. There are three things on this site I’m disliking dealing with right now:
Upgrading the website to provide an interface for custom button design. (I currently arrange custom designs by email with the client, which is a totally unnecessary trivial obstacle and doesn’t need to take up my time.)
Pricing. For some reason I find pricing (not the stuff posted on the site, but estimates for bulk orders) unreasonably difficult. Part of the reason for this is that my pricing cannot be competitive with mass-produced-in-a-factory buttons and still be profitable for me, and I feel lame when someone chooses to buy from me because I’m a small local shop and ends up paying a lot more because of it.
Uploading images of a new button set. The set’s done, the page is ready, all I need to do is take pictures and upload them … but taking good pictures of small round shiny things is really hard, and I keep forgetting to buttonhole the photographer friend who offered to help with it.
And, I suppose, a little bit of malaise. There’s a sense of “almost nobody sees or buys these, why am I bothering.”
I have problems with setting prices too—I suspect there’s a delusion that it’s possible to get prices right, while in fact while there’s definitely too high and definitely too low, there’s also a middle range where you might as well say something and the odds are in your favor that it will be accepted.
And I might not even be very correct about the too high and too low. For some reason, prices for used books at amazon don’t converge to a market-clearing price. I have no idea what economists would say about that.
For some reason, prices for used books at amazon don’t converge to a market-clearing price.
Shipping costs? It’s generally uneconomic even to give books away. I was going to offer a spare copy of a book here until I realized the shipping costs were such a high percentage of the cost to buy it new.
Amazon prices for Simak’s Time and Again—there’s a rough correlation between condition and price, but it’s very rough.
New copies range from $48 to $130. Good copies range for 50 cents to $23. The ratings of the vendors don’t have a strong correlation with the prices.
It took me 3 tries to get a price page like that (Heinlein’s Expanded Universe and Byatt’s Possession don’t show the pattern, but I can tell you that it isn’t rare for science fiction that’s been around for a while.
My programmer-mind wonders whether any of the work which (I assume) scales with the number of buttons could be automated. (Of course, if that’s so it still requires someone to do the work of automating it...)
There are different issues with different amounts of scalability. Posting images scales with the number of slogans. Some sort of javascript system to make ordering easier is a good idea because there are so many slogans, but doesn’t scale with the number of slogans,
I dunno if it would help Nancy, but there are parts of mine that could definitely be automated. I just really don’t want to do the work of automating it and haven’t figured out another way for it to get done yet.
I hate to make this suggestion to someone who can actually do her* own web-design, but have you considered using a free wordpress e-commerce theme? I used one for my first e-commerce website and it worked fine. You can save a lot of money and the themes are about 80% as good as a cheap commissioned design.
Heh, don’t hate to make the suggestion when I just told you I can’t be bothered to do it! I hadn’t looked into that, and will; thank you. I’m a little reluctant to use Wordpress for non-bloggy things, probably because it’s one of the reasons my college’s website is so bad, but that’s not enough reason to reject it without more exploration.
and profit. For the record, you needn’t point it out on my behalf—the error doesn’t bother me, and I don’t tend to correct people unless it’s particularly relevant.
That website is pretty well-designed, actually. It’s easy to navigate and it’s pretty obvious what it’s trying to sell. Yes, it doesn’t look like a professionally designed site, but I’ve seen sites that are much worse; it’s not something that would appear on Web Pages That Suck.
(Suggestion: Swap the “About Pin Poet” box and the “Custom Buttons” box.)
Thanks. I’m not really satisfied with the navigation, and I’d love to do something complex where you can set up custom orders online instead of emailing me, but it helps to hear that other people see something other than the weak points. :)
ETA: Upon testing, I agree about the boxes, and switched them.
Would this be a good time to mention that I sell custom and pre-designed pinback buttons online? ;) Or, perhaps, that I’d be interested in doing some kind of skill trade for a better website for it? (I’d love to outright pay someone to do it, but I can’t afford to. I’m able to do it myself, but I really don’t want to.)
A topic I’d like to see addressed in this area is “how to make your resume/cover letter make you look like the badass you really are, but have no paperwork to prove.” I have the opposite of your “typical nerd” problem—I’m really great at customer service and dealing with people*--but little to show for it. I have very little work experience and there’s no particular career pattern in it. Plus, no degree.
I eventually got so sick of trying to find a job with the above for qualifications that I went back to school. But was I missing something? How could I have improved my chances?
*So if we start the LW co-op, I could do those bits. ;)
I’d be glad to write on your proposed topic:
Qualifications:
I work in tech and frequently interview people.
I’ve previously helped friends and strangers (via a /r/favors post) helping people redesign their resumes.
I’m a freelance application security specialist and have to make myself look like I’m worth the $80 an hour.
My friend Bhavna is an Indian who is a US citizen, and many tech employers do not trust Indian applicants, as lying on a resume is prevalent among Indian placement firms. She was able to trade up from a 6 month gig (her only work experience) into a $80k a year project management job in the LA area (a very difficult place to find jobs).
I am interested in this. Was it ever written?
If you don’t mind talking about it, are you making enough from it to make a difference to your quality of life?
I have a button business and an ugh field about doing much with it, partly because it’s so large (about 5000 slogans) that doing anything significant involves a lot of work, so I’m curious about how much can be done with a couple of dozen images.
No—well, sort of. I don’t often sell any online, but I make bike designs for the Berkeley Bikestation, and I’ve done other batch orders from time to time. If I had a job, it wouldn’t be a noticeable amount, but since I don’t, it doesn’t take much to be noticeable.
I do most of my sales in custom designs. My main goal is to have a really low barrier to entry for single buttons—as the site puts it,
I focus on this because it’s a service I want to exist and enjoy being able to provide, more than because it’s an especially profitable model. So I do scattered customs in quantities of 1-10, and occasionally a random internet sale of a planet set.
Know what you mean. There are three things on this site I’m disliking dealing with right now:
Upgrading the website to provide an interface for custom button design. (I currently arrange custom designs by email with the client, which is a totally unnecessary trivial obstacle and doesn’t need to take up my time.)
Pricing. For some reason I find pricing (not the stuff posted on the site, but estimates for bulk orders) unreasonably difficult. Part of the reason for this is that my pricing cannot be competitive with mass-produced-in-a-factory buttons and still be profitable for me, and I feel lame when someone chooses to buy from me because I’m a small local shop and ends up paying a lot more because of it.
Uploading images of a new button set. The set’s done, the page is ready, all I need to do is take pictures and upload them … but taking good pictures of small round shiny things is really hard, and I keep forgetting to buttonhole the photographer friend who offered to help with it.
And, I suppose, a little bit of malaise. There’s a sense of “almost nobody sees or buys these, why am I bothering.”
I have problems with setting prices too—I suspect there’s a delusion that it’s possible to get prices right, while in fact while there’s definitely too high and definitely too low, there’s also a middle range where you might as well say something and the odds are in your favor that it will be accepted.
And I might not even be very correct about the too high and too low. For some reason, prices for used books at amazon don’t converge to a market-clearing price. I have no idea what economists would say about that.
Shipping costs? It’s generally uneconomic even to give books away. I was going to offer a spare copy of a book here until I realized the shipping costs were such a high percentage of the cost to buy it new.
Amazon prices for Simak’s Time and Again—there’s a rough correlation between condition and price, but it’s very rough.
New copies range from $48 to $130. Good copies range for 50 cents to $23. The ratings of the vendors don’t have a strong correlation with the prices.
It took me 3 tries to get a price page like that (Heinlein’s Expanded Universe and Byatt’s Possession don’t show the pattern, but I can tell you that it isn’t rare for science fiction that’s been around for a while.
Markets are imperfect. Shipping costs dominate the exchange value of books in my experience.
If anyone wants a ‘free’ first edition of The Four Hour Work Week and is willing to pay shipping from Canada let me know.
My programmer-mind wonders whether any of the work which (I assume) scales with the number of buttons could be automated. (Of course, if that’s so it still requires someone to do the work of automating it...)
There are different issues with different amounts of scalability. Posting images scales with the number of slogans. Some sort of javascript system to make ordering easier is a good idea because there are so many slogans, but doesn’t scale with the number of slogans,
I dunno if it would help Nancy, but there are parts of mine that could definitely be automated. I just really don’t want to do the work of automating it and haven’t figured out another way for it to get done yet.
I hate to make this suggestion to someone who can actually do her* own web-design, but have you considered using a free wordpress e-commerce theme? I used one for my first e-commerce website and it worked fine. You can save a lot of money and the themes are about 80% as good as a cheap commissioned design.
*not his, thanks Will_Newsome.
Heh, don’t hate to make the suggestion when I just told you I can’t be bothered to do it! I hadn’t looked into that, and will; thank you. I’m a little reluctant to use Wordpress for non-bloggy things, probably because it’s one of the reasons my college’s website is so bad, but that’s not enough reason to reject it without more exploration.
My knowledge of the general LW population indicate ‘his’, but in this case, I’d bet on ‘her’. Relsqui?
and profit. For the record, you needn’t point it out on my behalf—the error doesn’t bother me, and I don’t tend to correct people unless it’s particularly relevant.
That website is pretty well-designed, actually. It’s easy to navigate and it’s pretty obvious what it’s trying to sell. Yes, it doesn’t look like a professionally designed site, but I’ve seen sites that are much worse; it’s not something that would appear on Web Pages That Suck.
(Suggestion: Swap the “About Pin Poet” box and the “Custom Buttons” box.)
Thanks. I’m not really satisfied with the navigation, and I’d love to do something complex where you can set up custom orders online instead of emailing me, but it helps to hear that other people see something other than the weak points. :)
ETA: Upon testing, I agree about the boxes, and switched them.