How Hard Could It Be?: Unfocused and Unabashed

A side project threatens to get totally out of control and I think, "How fun!"

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I have about 236 stupid ideas a week, and luckily, I don't usually act on them. A couple of summers ago, however, I did. Here's what happened.

I was sitting there watching Donald Trump's "reality" TV show The Apprentice and thinking, jeez, that's not business. Maybe it's how TV producers imagine business, but these dumb projects, with the good-looking contestants trying to get passersby to come into a theme restaurant--what the heck kind of management challenge is that? That's a minimum-wage job! Usually, the women with the longest legs were the winners. Well, at least one thing is realistic.

I had four interns that summer creating a new product. That's a real business challenge. So here was my stupid idea: Why not make a documentary film about it?

By way of introduction, I should mention that my company, Fog Creek Software, is, indeed, a software company. We make project-management software for other software developers, not documentary films, so this idea was precisely the kind of monumental distraction that every venture capitalist warns you to avoid like the plague.

There was another problem: Our interns were chosen for coding skill, not telegenic appeal. Not only that, computer geeks are extremely unlikely to suffer one of those spectacular emotional meltdowns that make for good television. But who knows? Maybe there was somebody who would want to learn about what software development is really like. (Hint: Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap. Click!)

I found a documentary filmmaker, who filmed the interns from all angles. The keyboard tapping got a bit boring, so he added some goofy stuff. With cockroaches. And canceled dorm parties.

At the end of the summer, he rushed to edit the movie--which we decided to name Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks--so that we could sell it in time for the holiday rush. Our idea was that some parents might buy it for kids who were about to graduate from college and begin pursuing a job in software. We burned 1,000 copies of the DVD and started taking orders (at $20 a pop) over the Internet. Within a couple of days, we realized that we had better order another 1,000. And then another 1,000. Then another 3,000. In all, we ended up with about 5,000 orders.

Of course, everyone wanted delivery by December 24. And unexpectedly, the orders came in from all over the world. Our office manager started buying padded envelopes in bulk and printing postage stickers on the Pitney Bowes machine. I started running huge mail merges to print out shipping labels.

It's amazing how small problems turn into huge nightmares when you're shipping thousands of orders to buyers in 60 different countries. The customs declarations were what caused the biggest problem. There was this page on the USPS website where you could fill them out online, but it could only handle one at a time, and we had 2,000 international orders. So I became a software entrepreneur again. I wrote a little computer program that filled out the webpage automatically and pushed all the right buttons to print the customs form. Unfortunately, what you got was still a sheet of paper that had to be signed. And collated. And then inserted into a plastic sleeve.

I didn't relish the carpal tunnel syndrome that would result from signing all these forms. We tried to "sign" them by running the forms through the laser printer again to print the signature in the right place. But, as I learned, something traumatic happens to paper on its way through a printer. Once a sheet of paper has been through a laser printer, the next time you try to print on it, it's going to fight back, jamming the printer and resulting in the deaths of three other pages, and you're going to spend five minutes with a putty knife cleaning up the bloodshed.

There was one printer in our office that had the ability to print twice on the same sheet, so we used that one for the signature overprint. Murphy's Law kicked in, and it ran out of toner. It was a Dell. Dell doesn't let office products stores sell its toner. The only way to get toner was to order it from Dell and pay a lot of money for overnight delivery. Meanwhile, it was taking three minutes of work just to ship one DVD. This wasn't going to work.

So I holed up in my office for two days and built a shipping station. I ordered a laser printer that could print directly on those green customs forms. I searched the Web to learn what the high-volume shippers used for labels. I ended up getting a top-of-the-line Zebra printer. It spews forth labels at unbelievable speed, and even peels off the wax paper backing for you.

For postage, I signed up for an Endicia account, which lets you print specially formatted bar codes instead of stamps. For software, I wrote my own. The big parts of the project were laying out packing slips and customs declarations. Microsoft Access had a built-in report feature that worked perfectly for both: It's designed to put things from a database onto paper at the exact locations you need them. In all, we cut the time to pack a movie from three minutes down to 30 seconds.

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