The Kitchen

The store is live!

Well, mostly live. There are a few still little glitches in the matrix where it's not estimating the shipping costs exactly correctly. This problem should go away in the next 24 hours*, but until then don't worry about it. If the shipping charges are a bit more than they're supposed to be, we'll correct it by hand before charging your credit card, so you get the proper price.

OK, the point is, the store is working. Go ahead and buy something! I recommend the Pasta Variety Pack to get you started.

*It takes about 24 hours for the DNS changes to fully propagate across the net so that all of Google Checkout's servers are hitting our new server, which knows how to handle the ASP.NET 2.0 pages over SSL. Thus concludes the technical mumbo-jumbo.

UPDATE: All the store features are working fine now. I'll have to send our webhost a nice basket of fruit Light Pasta.

Sorry for missing a few days, as I was upgrading the blog software. Hopefully that should cut back on some of the spam.

Yesterday I picked up the labels and dropped them off at the pasta factory. It's surprising how small 18,000 labels looks in real life. As soon as they slap the labels on the pasta that's already been manufactured, we'll have some real product to sell and the store will go live!

After pestering our label printing company with changes for the last month, we finally went in today and signed off on the final color proofs. Then, about two hours after going home, my sister noticed the proofs in the kitchen. Here's a paraphrase of the conversation:

My Sister: "What does this line over here mean?"
Me: "We wanted to tell our customers that we verified all of our numbers by actual lab tests, so they shouldn't think we're faking anything"
My Sister: "Oh, I thought it meant that the numbers weren't so real, because you had to use some alternative test."

Incredible, isn't it? Two people read the exact same sentence, and arrive at completely opposite conclusions. I argued for a while, but eventually had to admit that she was right. Ultimately, it didn't matter if I could demonstrate the ironclad logic of my interpretation - until I can stand in every supermarket aisle and deliver my oratory to every prospective customer, the line had to go - or at least change.

In case you're curious, the sentence in question originally read "Calories and Nutrition determined by independent lab analysis". The new langauge is "NO GAMES, NO GIMMICKS! Calories determined by laboratory analysis"

So, clear as mud?

When operating an online storefront, some argue that there are benefits to be found in accepting credit cards. Many traditional Internet establishments may sniff at this new-fangled fad, and continue to engage in commerce as did their grandfathers before them (all checks delivered through the postal service, cash by trusted carrier pigeon). But some of the rising Young Turks on the "bleeding edge" of this newfangled industry - your Amazon.com's, your Pets.com, your goldnosestuds.com - believe that the future may lie in "credit cards". And, crazy as it may seem, I'm going to take a leap of faith and try it for our business. How bold!

However, the thought of securing our customers credit cards gave me the chills. How often do you read about some little company that thought it knew what it was doing, but because of some little oversight, a bunch of Russian hackers made off with their entire credit card database and proceeded to purchase most of downtown Latvia (which consists of about 3 buildings)? Actually you don't hear about it, because a) it happens so often that its not even news, and b) most little companies probably have no idea they've even been hacked. The only time it blips into the headlines is when it happens to some big company, with enough resources to even figure out what happened.

So I sidestepped the whole issue. Instead of accepting the credit card information myself and passing it on to the processor, I opted to let a big company handle the entire transaction. Both Google and Paypal offer a system in which I simply hand them a shopping cart, and they handle all of the data collection and storage. I never even find out my customers credit card number, I just see a credit to my account. You can't leak what you don't know.

But now the question was, Google or PayPal? I hemmed and hawed over technical issues - ability to setup subscriptions, branding capabilities, how charge approvals are handled, etc. - but ultimately it came down to money: Google was offering free transaction processing through the end of the year. Free is a price I can't resist.

It's nice when big companies go to war, and we customers profit. Probably kind of like being some little country like Mauritania during the heyday of the Cold War, with the US and USSR jockeying for power. I can envision the scene in the solemn halls of the United Nations:

Mauritanian ambassador: "Did you see the swag the Soviets are offering? I got 6 million dollars for voting their way on Resolution 42976!"
Tuvalan ambassador: "Aw man, you should have checked out the US pavilion first - 7 million dollars, plus this free T-shirt!"

OK, perhaps I don't know what international politics sounds like. But the Google thing was still a good deal. I only hope you guys like their checkout experience. Once the store is open, please tell us how your checkout went - if there are any problems I'm sure PayPal would love to get our business.

I'll be a man about it. We missed our deadline. And I'm sorry.

I could spin you a tale of woe - how close we came, how many obstacles were overcome, how the back-and-forth with the label printer (excellent though they are) took longer than expected - but that would be callow. The product isn't here, the responsibility is mine.

Can we get a week's extension? Pleeeaaase?

In the meanwhile, I'm working on a great post for the Diet Debunking section. If you'll bear with me while I get the photography right, I think you'll appreciate it.

Again, my apologies, and I hope to be purveying fine reduced-calorie delicacies to you soon!

I call it pesach, but you probably know it better by its standard English translation: Passover.

The word "Passover" is apparently a compound of "pass over", and is a reference to God passing over the houses of the Jews, and only slaying the firstborn of the Egyptians. Rashi (11th-century Talmudist, considered Judaism's most authoritative Bible commentator), actually uses the word dilug, which literally means "skipped", but I imagine it was altered in the Anglicization to lend the holiday a tad more gravitas. ("Yeah, I have to take off for ... Skipover.")

However, Rashi actually lists dilug as an alternate definition of pesach. His primary definition (Exodus 12:23) is chamal, or "mercy". The intent here is that God had mercy upon the Jewish firstborn and spared them from death. Frankly, I think it's a much more beautiful and meaningful translation.

I'm afraid there's going to be a brief break in the blogging. We're the archetypical startup - literally two guys in a garage - and since both those guys happen to be Orthodox Jews, I'm going to be on blogging hiatus during Pesach/Passover/Mercyfest (Yeah? Let's try to get the name adopted).

Hope to see you again on April 12th rested and refreshed, and bursting with blog posts. And then just a few more days until the Lunch...

• The excellent art department at our label printer is hard at work polishing our final draft.
• Still waiting to get my online credentials from the bank, which I need to set up the paypal account.

Most things I can think to do are dependent on other people at the moment. Kind of hard to sit around twiddling my thumbs, though.

According to the marketing books I've been reading, perhaps a lot Supposedly your name is the single most important aspect of your brand. It should:

• Encapsulate the unique mission of the company;
• Conjure up a positive image to associate with its products;
• Provide quick recognition for existing customers; and
• Be easily transmitted to new ones.

Our name has gone through a number of revisions, such as HalfCalories (too specific), FiberSurge (bad connotations...), and several more that were rejected even earlier in the process. I'm actually pretty happy with FiberGourmet, which:

• Conveys that we have a lot of fiber, but still taste pretty darn good;
• Conjures up an image of high-class item (which it should, considering what we're charging :o );
• I have not yet heard it horrendously mangled by my various relatives, who I have inundated with so many different names, I'm surprised they still remember mine; and
• Passes at least the e-mail test of transmittability: I don't have to spell it when telling it to people.

What do you think? It's not too late to change the name again, so chime in fast!

Today I was supposed to go the Bank. You need a bank account to do little things like take checks from retailers or accept credit card orders from customers, which are somewhat valuable if you don't want to go bankrupt after the first month.

However, today is not a good day to go because two gunmen have been holding some people hostage in the bank since this morning. In the words of the immortal Dave Barry, I am not making this up. The bank is literally a block from my house/office here on sunny, sleepy Miami Beach, but the entire area has been cordoned of by the police and SWAT teams. I can actually hear the helicopters circling overhead as I type.

It is surreal to watch the news. I know that store! I recognize that intersection! I walk past that mailbox every day! What are you people with guns doing here? And how do I go about my mundane routine (polishing the website, futzing around with this new blog software, trying to find a picture of myself where I don't look like a drooling imbecile, etc.) while just a few hundred feet away as the crow flies - less than the distance of a football field! - the hostages are going through an ordeal of terror and existential uncertainty? And what if I had scheduled my own visit to the bank for a few hours earlier? The mind boggles.

Welcome to The Kitchen, a blog about our food company, FiberGourmet, which specializes in "light" or reduced-calorie foods. I'll have a lot more to say on that topic as the blog progresses, but right now, I'd just like to kick things off with a countdown.

We've been developing and refining our products for a long time, and we're finally (almost) ready to bring them to market. I'll be posting about our mad scramble to get everything done leading up to the Lunch (get it?), and will hopefully continue posting with news and updates after that. I'll also occasionally dip my toe into the general field of nutrition, a topic near and dear to my heart given that I'm the co-founder of a reduced-calorie, high-fiber food company. And there might be some bashing of our competitors, but I can't promise anything ;).

The Lunch date is April 16th. That would make today T-minus-21-days.

Please stick around, and don't forget to subscribe with those handy RSS links on the side.

21 days...