First month = $495 in expenses. $20 for my first month webhosting. $99 for Dreamweaver (I was still hand-coding HTML). $375 for that damn Verisign SSL certificate.
First month I made $300, so was a little in the red. Second month I made $700 and was profitable ever since.
First 10 musicians were just people I knew. After that were friends-of-friends since the first 10 were so happy with my service. Then some people started mentioning it in their newsletters, and more strangers kept signing up.
That whole first year, the site did almost nothing. I didn't even know PHP+MySQL at the time, so it was just a hand-coded HTML site that let you put a CD in a shopping cart, and enter your payment info. Whatever you entered was emailed to me, and I'd copy it by hand into my merchant account to charge their card, then copy it by hand into a label printer to mail their order, then copy it by hand into Eudora to email them a thank-you email.
Though this was 1998, yes I think the same approach applies today.
Fair enough. I was only 11 in 1998 so I don't have any idea what the fraud/security situation was like (and should have thought about that before posting criticism). I'm sure CD Baby made the transition to more secure methods as soon as it was more apparent that sending CC information via email was a bad idea.
I was just surprised to see that, since it's such a well known Bad Thing now.
First month = $495 in expenses. $20 for my first month webhosting. $99 for Dreamweaver (I was still hand-coding HTML). $375 for that damn Verisign SSL certificate.
First month I made $300, so was a little in the red. Second month I made $700 and was profitable ever since.
First 10 musicians were just people I knew. After that were friends-of-friends since the first 10 were so happy with my service. Then some people started mentioning it in their newsletters, and more strangers kept signing up.
That whole first year, the site did almost nothing. I didn't even know PHP+MySQL at the time, so it was just a hand-coded HTML site that let you put a CD in a shopping cart, and enter your payment info. Whatever you entered was emailed to me, and I'd copy it by hand into my merchant account to charge their card, then copy it by hand into a label printer to mail their order, then copy it by hand into Eudora to email them a thank-you email.
Though this was 1998, yes I think the same approach applies today.