Going live in 3..2..

Hello, and welcome!

It's been about 6 months since I started down this journey, and half of that was before I had even considered trying to turn this into a business. Most of that time was figuring out how to make good engravings. It didn't happen right away -- I have a big pile of failures in my scrap wood bin that can attest to that. Then a couple months spent working out the logistics of starting an actual company and figuring out how to set up a product-focused manufacturing process, rather than a sequence of on-off designs. And then for about the last month and a half I have been primarily focused on putting together this website.

Never having done any customer-facing web development before (I have an embedded software background), it turns out I didn't exactly begin on easy mode by choosing to start by offering a product that requires individual customization. Creating a tool to do that customization is certainly a non-trivial task, especially while trying to simultaneously familiarize myself with the esoteric and jargon-heavy terrain of AWS, where the tool lives. But who doesn't love a good challenge??

Well, nothing is perfect yet. I had a CEO where I worked a few years back who used to say that the right time to start putting a product in front of customers is right when you don't completely hate it. If you wait too much longer, you risk over-optimizing details that turn out not to matter so much. Better to let customer feedback drive development at that point. Well, here we are. It's time to flip the switch.

The customization tool needs a lot of work before I'll be happy with it. It currently lacks a lot of important features that will be really helpful in giving good results right from the get-go every time. Currently the tool is necessary to find the right settings configuration to get a good-looking engraving. In the medium-long term, I hope to get the tool to the point where users can upload a photo, and they will be offered a variety of results, all of which look great. Most of my development time over the next days (and probably weeks) will be trying to get the tool to a point where it is simple to use and yields good results right away for most cases.

Expect more updates soon. Feedback is encouraged!

--Aaron