HeavyInk is profiled in Mass High Tech:

http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2008/06/23/weekly3-Heavyink.com-hopes-to-digitize-comic-book-sales.html

Heavyink.com hopes to digitize comic book sales By Christopher Calnan

An Arlington company has launched an online store for comic book fans that includes a social networking feature and software for collectors.

Technical Video Rental Inc., which has offered rental arts-and-crafts DVDs and how-to DVDs since 2004, is expanding its business to comic book sales after an eight-month beta test of its HeavyInk.com website.

HeavyInk.com sells comic books and hosts a social networking feature that next week will include the ability for comic book enthusiasts to preview a digital version of the first four pages of new comics, founder Travis Corcoran said.

During the fourth quarter, HeavyInk plans to release a free, on-demand collection-management software product for users to track details such as author and artist names and comic asking prices, he said. More than 1,100 users have joined HeavyInk’s network since November 2007, Corcoran said.

Robert Scott, founder of the Comic Book Industry Alliance, a 10-year-old California-based organization with 800 members, said other Internet-based businesses have tried and failed to replace comic book stores. “It’s going to be difficult to supplant,” Scott said. “People want a place to browse their books — they also want them now.”

The self-funded Technical Video launched SmartFlix.com in 2004 and now stocks nearly 6,000 DVDs about topics such as metalworking, knitting and guitar making. The 13-person firm generates more than $1 million a year, Corcoran said.

He expects comics to boost HeavyInk.com’s top line because comics’ subscription model provides recurring revenue.

Comic subscriptions generate revenue of $500 million to $600 million annually in the United States and Canada, said Corcoran, citing figures from Maryland’s Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. He expects HeavyInk to generate $2 million to $3 million in sales in 2009.

“We want to be a one-stop shop for all sorts of thing,” Corcoran said. “We have everything in one place.”

We got our biggest delivery of comics ever – the pile of Diamond boxes was almost as tall as our shipping person!

The UPS guy demanded help, because the boxes of Atomic Robo graphic novels were tipping the scales at over 70 lbs each.

Anyway, there’s an all-hands project going on right now (well, maybe not all hands…I’m exercising my managerial perogative and sitting on my butt!), as folks unpack comics and then repack them again.

We’ll get a fair number of comics out today, but – as always – we don’t promise that everything ships out on Wednesday. Some items will be boxed up tomorrow, etc.

As our volume continues to grow (we’ve been increasing the number of comics shipped per month by 30% each month so far, but we’re expecting a slight slowdown to 20% / month starting in July), we’ll ramp up our shipping staff, of course.

We’re also negotiating with our landlord for an office suite about three times larger elsewhere on the floor. Keep your fingers crossed on that one, please.

And, have pity on our local USPS employees…I’m told that we are apparently the largest single chunk of mail volume in the entire town!

I have a wood lathe.

I make bowls.

And other things.

We’ve coded up an affiliate program (I mentioned this in the forums a while back), and now we’re contacting some comic-book community related sites and pitching the idea of them getting a new revenue source by becoming affiliates.

So far we’ve had a decent level of interest.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned is that no deal is ever done until it’s really really REALLY done…and even then, things can go sideways.

...but I am modestly hopeful that we’ll start seeing some hey-I’ve-heard-of-them level folks signing up as affiliates over the next few months.

I finished the code a day or two back, and as soon as Pete has a moment, he’s going to deploy it (maybe tomorrow (Wed) ?):

• a new page, linked to from your profile page, where everything you’ve ever bought is listed, grouped either by shipment, or by title

• ...and on this page, the ability to quickly give 1-5 star ratings to everything you’ve purchased

• ...and an automatic weekly email (that you can opt out of) that reminds you of the new things that you have just received, and gives you a link to the ratings page.

I’m looking forward to using it myself!

If you do a google search for, say, “Ex Machina #31”, you’ll see that the top links on the page (or, maybe at the bottom of the page, under the search results, if google is doing A/B testing), includes three companies selling the issue:

• us
• two others.

I note that one worthy competitor of ours advertises the issue at $2.24, but then when you click through, the actual price is $2.69.

I tried this again with Ex Machina #29. Again, our competitor advertises it at a cut-rate $1.79, but then actually charges $2.69.

Not too cool!

I’ve been writing more reviews of comics recently.

What this site really needs is a page that shows you everything you’ve had shipped to you and gives you a chance to give ratings and write reviews all in one place.

I would totally use that feature.

Who do I have to talk to to make that happen…?

Oh.

Right.

:-)

It’s been the plan all along to ramp up print advertising at HeavyInk. We may someday get to the point where we run an ad in every issue of every comic book.

Well, we finally got our first ad in print! The fine folks at Red 5 have reprinted Atomic Robo 1-6, and have run off a lot of copies of various titles for Free Comic Book day, and we’ve got a full page ad in the inside back cover of every one.

The ad is cobranded – it uses the Atomic Robo character, and ads a bunch of HeavyInk specific text extolling the wonderful features of the website.

Code Jedi Tyler has dropped a few cool new features on the site recently, but aside from that…what are we up to?

We’re doing a fair bit of work on backend tools for our customer support staff: stuff to make it easier to issue refunds, investigate and quickly resolve customer issues, etc.

We’ve also been splitting our time with our other brand: SmartFlix. For better or worse, SmartFlix is our cash cow right now, and we’re doing a bunch of A/B tests over there. For folks who don’t know, A/B testing is when a website has two (or more!) different versions of a feature, or of graphic design, navigation, etc. Half the folks viewing the site see one version, and half see the other…and then, using web server logs, check out ratios, shopping cart size, etc., we figure out which feature is liked better by customers, and then we change the website. It’s a way of rolling out new features and testing to make sure that they’re ACTUALLY useful.

This is a technique that we’re going to be using at HeavyInk pretty soon.

I’ve been working on a lot of administrative stuff (getting taxes done for 2007, setting up a retirement plan for the code ninjas here, etc.), but I’ve also had a bit of time to do some coding recently. Out at Google, there’s a feature called “Google Products” which lets vendors upload descriptions of products, and (a) store these in a global Google-maintained database; (b) have these show up on certain searches. I thought I wrapped it up yesterday, but it turns out that our most recent (attempted) upload of 10,000 products had a character or two that Google didn’t like, so I’ll be back at that soonish.

The military theorist Clausewitz wrote of "the friction of war" - plans take longer to execute than you hope, and things are hard to do.

We've got so many features planned for HeavyInk, but this past week or so I've found myself getting a bit bogged down - I'm working on a tool to put up Google Ads, and the SOAP API is a bit of a pain.  I'm dealing with customer support issues for the first brand, SmartFlix.  Pete, the lead engineer, is off on a one week vacation.

...but just when I start to get really frustrated, I'll have a little break through.  And then another.  Stuff DOES get done, and things DO move forward.

Clearly, the solution is (a) faith and optimism; (b) hiring another engineer to share the load!

If you're in the Boston area, and are a great programmer, read our hiring ad in the forums.