So one of the most important aspects that I looked over at the beginning of all of this is reference photos.  in order to model a head from a picture the reference photos need to be  high res and also at the right angles. A front face shot, and a side face shot work the best. I was trying to see if I could get this to work without having good quality photos, and the answer is No. It is so important that some of the heads I intended to model, I just cant because I have nothing of value to base off of. If any of you have any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.
Currently I browse several locations for photos.

Google Images…
Flickr.com
Photobucket.com
Sprixi.com
emailing and requesting photos directly…..

Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

This is similar to “Crucial Questions to Ask“, but i thought it was another good base for ongoing business thought.

1. -In one sentence, what does your product do and who buys it?
2. -In one sentence, why does someone buy your product?
3. -What one thing is most responsible for preventing sales?
4. -What’s one thing you could do to get more feedback from customers, potential customers, or sales you’ve lost?
5. -If you had zero revenue from now on, on what date would you run out of money?
6. -If someone handed you $100,000 today, how would you spend it to maximize future profits?
7. -If you were forced to hire someone today, how would you define her job such that she would contribute enough revenue to cover her expense?
8. -Which of your business operations do you hate?
9. -What initiatives could be done half-assed without significant impact?
10. -If you could get one solid hour of advice from a guru you respect, what would you discuss and what would be the goal of the meeting?

read more from where I found this post.
I am not going to answer these now, I will however come back at a later date, and use these questions as an evaluation tool. The purpose of this post is mostly to stimulate thought.

There is no need to spend time on things that can easily be implement via other sources.. Why code a feedback forum into your site, when you can easily use somethign like; “getsatisfication.com”. These are just a few examples of how you can save lots of time and resources on many different aspects of your startup.

Up until now I never really thought twice about needing a Project Management Software. I also just took notes on my iPhone or whatever else I had when I had an idea and wanted to remember it. Later I would then organze all those ideas into to do list and prioritize them, but now I figured if I want to do this right I should at least check and see what these Project Management Solutions are all about.  Turns out they are pretty much want I was already doing, most had bells and whistles, but what I learned is that if you are just a one man team, Whatever works for you, just keep doing if. There is no need to spend time learning a Project Management Software, if you aren’t really using its feature set.  So I will let you know that I now use a mixture of my quick notes, and “Redmine” a solution built on Ruby on Rails, Which works nicely to  turn ideas into categories of “features”, “tasks” and or “bugs”.

If I was working with a team, I would say it is an absolute necessity to use a Management Solution. It really does keep everything  neatly organized.

Other solutions I looked into:

37signal’s “Basecamp”
5pm
Google Wave
Protoshare
Thymer
GoalKeeper
Action Method
and many many more HERE

Redmine just turned out to be a super simple solution without all the bells and whistles, and that is what I needed.

I read a blog post a while back, not sure exactly where, although I did jot down the main points so I could remember and use them to evaluate my start-up. Below is that list.

Project/Startup Name : PaperEGO.com

Problem (who is the client and what client problem does the project solve?): This is a difficult question for me. I don’t want to say halloween costume buyers, but that seems like the most probable scenario. I do want to think my product will sell year round, but I see most growth potential during that season. 

Solution (what is the proposed solution for the client problem?)The problem it solves is a much simpler question to answer.  It gives the client the ability to create their own funny costume from a few sheets of paper, very simply and at a low cost.

Business Model (how do we make money?)  Money is made from the sale of different  heads.

Underlying Magic (what makes the project different?)  The heads we feature on our site will  all be of famous people. Actors, politicians etc. Giving the end user the ability to step inside a famous persons shoes and ”indulge their inner wannabe”.

Market (who is the client? what is the market size? in number of customers? in total money spent?)The client is going to be the young, goofy, “want to make a statement” type.  The market size is as big as my marketing can reach. That could be a few hundred customers, of a few hundred million.

Competition (who are the competitors? national? international?)  There are a few sites out right now that sell “papercraft” which is essentially what this is. I even found a site that allows you to take your own picture and turn it into a 3d mask. What is going to make this stand out is the way we market. Our mask will be used to poke fun and create parodies of famous people, because each head will be a large replica of a famous person.

Team (just you? plus others? how many? what do you do?)  Currently the team is just me. I am the CMO, CTO, CEO, etc etc. Once we launch I be looking into hiring an individual whom can model  heads on a full time basis.

So what do you guys think about my evaluation?

The most frustrating aspect of my journey so far has been the research, and here is why. I love to research, but it is the one thing that is keeping me from really moving forward. Research to me is a way that I am able to wrap my mind around things, to understand fully how something works from the inside out. I love doing it because it is such a great learning experience. The only thing that bothers me with researching for this project is that I am not yet set on one technique. Mentally I just want it all figured out, so I can get down to work, and start pumping out heads to sell. But I know it is not that easy, and the research is an important part.

Below you will find a list a products and services that I have looked into. When first starting this, I had never used any of these programs. Making the judgement call on whether these will in the end meet the needs of this business is quite the duanting task. I had no idea if what I wanted to do was even possible, so I spent about a day with each product, trying my best to learn its feature set inside and out. Ultimately narrowing down this list to one or two products that allowed me to do what I needed.

Face shop plug-in for PhotoShop- never got this to work… wasnt really expecting much on the other hand
Poser 8 and FaceRoom – this works, but i felt that all the heads I tried looked the same. The texturing wasnt that good either.
FaceWorx- Works wonders, but just not what I need it for. The UV MAP ended with a million triangles. Which I was trying to avoid. Quad polygons look a lot better.
Daz Studio 3- this works ok
z brush- I pretty much knew what I wanted to use, so I didnt spend much time trying to learn this
Mudbox- An awsome program, makes nice heads, but also makes a million polygons.
3d studio Max-Another awsome program, huge learning curve, modeling from scratch takes forever…
FaceGen Modeler 3.1-Does an alright job, but the texturing and bitmaping from an image royally sucks…
FacGen Modeler 3.4- same as 3.1
FaceFen Customizer- never figures out how to use this, waited 12 hrs for it to setup…pure bullshit…
Pepakura Designer 3- really neat program to unwrap your models and print, terrible texturing
Pepakura HD-have not yet tried, will soon…
Blender- very cool prgram, very very large learning curve, time consuming…
google sketchup pro w/ unfold plug-in- not that bad of a combination. unfolding takes a long time.

The only thing I am not going to tell you about this start-up is what I ended up using. I will tell you this: “PaperEGO uses a proprietary blend of publicly available products and services that work and meet their licensing agreements.” What combination of products we ended up using might or might not be in the above list.

I wanted to take out a little time to tell you about myself. I already covered the basic idea and what motivates me in doing this, Now I want you guys to be able to get to know me a bit better. Step into my my Life.

The first question you might have is, why a web start up?

The second question you might have is, what makes me think I can do this, without having any prior expirence?

So I am going to try and attempt the unthinkable. Launch a web start-up in less then 45 days and live to tell about it. Actually I am hoping that this works out and I am able to provide daily updates throughout the whole process.

Whats the start-up Idea?
Like all things Start-up, it is secretive, but I promise you it wont be for long… I intend to share every aspect of my adventure with you, start to finish. How I came up with the idea, marketing strategies and even managing sales… You can however see from the Name “PapeEgo” the we are doing something with paper, yes that is true… well sort of…

Update:

Alright I give in. I told you guys I would be transparent in all the things I do, so why not start out that way. The Idea is fairly simple. 3d Model heads of various people so that they can be printed and put together as a wearable costume. The idea sprouter from my expirence with JibJab and the “elf yourself”. I liked the idea of a big head on a small body and wanted to bring that into the real world. I then saw an example once and thought it was so cool. Link . I thought to myself…”I would totally buy one of these”, I searched a bit and there is really not a store for this kinds of stuff, at least from what I can tell.

This got my wheels spinning and I began to brainstorm a bit. “What if I create a ecommerce store where a user could select from a variety of printable heads or even upload their own images and have a custom head modeled from them” and the idea was born. Here I am now, ready to commence on this journey to creating goofy-ass 3d paper heads for absolutely no reason what-so-ever other than I think they are fantasticly cool.

The real question is, will they sell?, and my answer to that is “yes, of course, why not”, there is a market for anything. To me, it is about how you package it all together and sell it. Marketing is essential and will be my main focus for this entire process. I once heard this, “ If your good at sales, you can sell bubble gum to a lock-Jaw ward”. That has always stuck with me and been my motivation. ( I think it si from the movie “Boiler Room”) Hell, if there is a market for pointed elf ear body modification then there is a market for anything..
As you can tell from the name now “PaperEgo” is some creative play on words I had thought up when thinking about what to name this venture. “large heads, check! Paper, check!, what combinations can I use? “MrBighead” sooo boring, “papermasks” yeah I thought not…. Then it came to me, if your “big headed” you must have a large Ego and “PaperEgo” was my epiphany. So I checked godaddy.com, it was available and I snatched it up.

Why I am doing this?
It is for a few reasons: to keep me on track, document my process, and also I want to share what I already know and what I learn. I know there are others like me that can use my experience and story as a base to start their own ventures. I hope to provide the mentality that you should not be afraid of the unknown, and to chase your dreams regardless of your inabilities. Know that you don’t have to have it all mapped out, or already know the ins and outs of a start-up process. Because frankly, I know nothing, and If I can do it, then anyone can. And here is why….

What things I have against me?
-no money
-Large debt (College Loans and Credit Card debt)
-apartment that is way too expensive for me and a roommate that is moving out
-me as an individual and no team to work with
-me as an individual and no contacts in the industry
-No experience
-No real world programming understanding (I took three years worth of Java, C++, and Data Structures, but I couldn’t even tell you what an “array” is anymore)
-Definitely not a Designer
-super busy (already work a full time job)
-a Huge procrastinator
-and finally a person that is not comfortable with the unknown. (I like to have things planned out in advance)

I just want to prove to myself and to others that you dont need a “team”, or money to make things happen. If you keep waiting for the right moment, you will be waiting forever.

What I am good at:
I am good at seeing the big picture of things. How all things fit together to make something work. So Pretty much my goal with this start-up is to partner people and or outsource everything I do not know how to do, or don’t have the time to learn.
Why blog about it?
I have always been a strong believer in transparency in all things. I for one have a natural interest in how things work, and believe many others do as well. Nobody can teach you how to create a successful web company, and I for one have no clue. I just figured that the “School-of-Hard-Knocks” is the best way to learn. Blogging will provide a way for me to share this experience with others.

What is my inspiration?
Like I said above, I came a cross the idea after a designer made himself a Halloween custom. Link. But not only is my motivation rooted from this idea, it runs deeper in me. It has always been my desire to be self sufficient, and challenge myself in order to break free from the complacent life that I have been living. If there is one paragraph that sums up my feelings exactly it is this: read the “Our CEO’s Open Letter”

Why 45 days?
45 days is only so that I don’t get caught up with all the details and also so that I launch fast and light. I can easily over complicate things, so to prevent this, I set a deadline. The idea is not a complicated one, and doesn’t take months of testing prototypes. It is mostly a simple ecommerce store with a little social interaction, but more on this later…
I didn’t feel like 30 days was going to be long enough, but didn’t want to extend the project past two months, so I picked a happy medium. If it turns out that 45 days is not enough, oh well its not the end of the world as long as I am still making progress.

My goal?
I have always told myself I would be an independent, self sufficient business owner by my 24th birthday. It is just a personal goal of mine that I am holding myself to. It is Dec 11th 2009 and I have until May 21st 2010. Not that long but plenty of time to make things happen.

Hopefully I can use this experience as a springboard to move onto bigger and better things after this.

What is my background?
As I said above, I have become complacent in my current job. It feels like a dead-end life. I hate the feeling and have decided to change things. My dad always told me, nothing happens till you make it happen. So instead of just changing jobs to another ( what I like call a “nut-sack job” i.e. working in a cube for the man, which I currently do) I decided to follow my passion and see what happens. Worst that can happen is I fail. But at least it is better to fail trying then not to have tried at all.

Please forgive me; I apologize in advance for all the grammar and editing errors in my posts. I am very busy and will try to go back and check all of my work, but I sometimes miss things. I will try my best to keep it comprehensible.

Stay tuned for more posts.