Posted by Jennifer Rapp Peterson
It took a long time to get here. In fact we are not really here yet. But we are so close I can taste it. IndieMade® was an idea that came to me about five years ago. In the early 00s, I had designed and launched a couple of websites on my own--even one with a Paypal ™ shopping cart. I used Dreamweaver to design and ftp my files to my hosting company. I must say my site was easy to set up, yet time consuming and not so pretty. But functional…
I owned a greeting card company and needed a way to get these cards into the hands of customers who couldn’t find our irreverent humor at the drugstore down the street. It was awesome. The orders starting trickling in and once people knew who Pulp Couture was, I was making a little extra income in addition to our specialty store wholesale business. But after the site was live, I met my now husband (a software developer) who said, “oh, I can make that a lot better.” So I said “please.”
And away we went on version two. Then I started thinking about my friends—handmade crafters, DIYers, artists, handmade designers, and other small businesses that didn’t have the skill, time, money or boyfriend to put together a website with a shopping cart. Most packaged shopping cart websites out there have less than attractive templates, require a merchant account—they are too busy and too littered with unnecessary features to be handy for a smaller entrepreneur. So IndieMade® was born.
I registered the domain and the idea kept brewing as I pursued some of my other creative ideas in toy invention. We slowly started to put the pieces into place. Last year, during the recession, my husband’s client base dried up a bit and we got more serious about rolling out the software. And although I had spent many of my professional years working in software, I promptly forgot that it always takes longer to release software than you speculate. Just like home construction. Always longer than you think.
But now, we are so close we can taste it. And we are looking for a few people to try it out and become beta sites for us. If you have a product to sell, blog on your mind or work to share, IndieMade can help you. If you beta test for us, you get our service for free for one year. After that it is only $4.95 - $24.95 a month.
