Author: Jacob

The best part of waking up….

One of the interesting things about running a small business where you sell software on the internet is that people can buy what you’re selling without you having to do anything.  In my case, they go to my web site, click a couple links, and make the purchase entirely online.  When they do that, I get an email and a piece of paper comes out of my printer.

Lately, for some reason, the vast majority of my customers have been in Europe.  So most of these transactions happen while I’m asleep.  My routine in the morning is to get up, turn on lights, and glance at the printer to see if there are any invoices on the printer.  Of course, with the number of “overnight” customers I’ve been getting lately, there has been paper on the printer nearly every morning.

While I know that it doesn’t really amount to money for nothing, I am slightly amused at the thought of making money while I sleep.  It’s always nice to go to bed and wake up in the morning with just a little more in the bank than there was last night.

Of course, that’s not quite as nice as when Marcia comes to town in the morning and I get to see her first thing in the day and make her breakfast… That really is the best part of waking up.

Invitations

Wedding stuff today…

Today we started putting together the painfully long list of people to whome we intend to send wedding invitations. In about 30 minutes, we came up with roughly 200 people who will receive invitiations, and that’s without consulting our parents for lists of people that THEY want to notify. We’re making the invitations ourselves (correction: Marcia is making the invitations herself), so we bought supplies to do 300 announcements. Hopefully that will be more than enough, but if not we can always get more.

I have been tasked with shopping around to find the best price on getting pictures printed. There is an abundance of very nice digital cameras among our family and friends, as well as a few talented photographers, so for the announcement pictures we’re simply going to take them ourselves digitally and have them printed at a professional shop. Here’s what I’ve discovered: Walmart’s photo counter prints 4×6 photos for $0.19 each if you are getting more than 50. The relatively new online service Shutterfly charges the same 19 cents as their base rate, and the prices go down from there as you order in bulk. Buy 200 prints and they’re $0.15. Get 400 prints and they’re $0.14. The question is whether shipping makes up for it and still makes Walmart more economical.

Finally, last night in a fit of work avoidance curiousity I googled for “wedding blogs,” and found that Scott Adams, creator of the very funny Dilbert comic strip, recently got married. He astutely observed that when you take a product and attach the word “wedding” to it, you get to triple its price.

That’s why we bought the supplies for our wedding invitations at Staples and a scrapbooking store – no “wedding” stuff in sight there.

Thank goodness.