David Pitlyuk

I’m pretty excited, I’ve hopefully found what I call my “Dillsmack”. For those who don’t know who Dillsmack is, his real name is David Dellanave, and he has been the other half of projects with Shoemoney (Jeremy Shoemaker) such as AuctionAds. Not having somebody like this at my disposal has always been a big problem of mine in my opinion. While I feel that I can design and market well, when it comes to true programming, it doesn’t stick. I could outsource various projects, but I want somebody I can trust that I could feel comfortable giving up a portion of the business so they have the same sort of drive I have for it to succeed. With that said, I’d like to welcome “Mubs” to the team.

With this in mind, we’ve quickly took on our first project, TweakMag:

As you can see from the launching soon graphic, the site will be one that specifically targets modifying (”tweaking”) the new Magento eCommerce platform.  Magento doesn’t even have a version that should be used in production yet, but there is a ton of hype surrounding the new open source product.  We want take advantage of this at an early stage in order to build a strong audience before the real following comes…at least that’s what we’re counting on!

The Process

I’ve personally run into a lot of personal issues and concerns about eCommerce platforms (and blogged about it here), so I started to closely follow the Magento development.  I quickly realized that this would be the answer to a lot of problems I had, and I wanted to somehow utilize this early “hunch”.  I came up with a concept for providing information on modifying the software, but there was some specific things I wanted to do that I knew weren’t going to work exactly the way I wanted unless I brought in a developer.  At this point I ended up finding Mubs (Thanks Travis!), and I ran the idea by him.  He thought it was a good one as well, and wanted to be a part of the project.

At this point we decided to get on the phone and brainstorm what was possible to have on the site, then weed out what was not needed, and then prioritize what was left over.  Since we are counting on the site being successful due to early hype, it’s important for us to launch quickly.  From the list of six content features we wanted to put on the site, we cut this down in half to three for the launch.

Aside from the timing benefit, we cut down a lot of the features for now just because there isn’t a ton of modifying going on just yet.  Magento (aka Varien) is in an aggressive timeline for development, so especially at this stage, there is a lot of changing in the code.  People are still modifying though, and it’s a great sign for the potential success of TweakMag!

Monetization

We plan on monetizing in a few ways.  Obviously we’ll have your standard ads, probably starting off with something like Google AdSense and Text-Link-Ads.  We also have some great ideas using some affiliate/referral programs, but integrating it into important content that users will like.  This is the best method, and hopefully the most effective…especially when new users start doing some research as Magento continues its development.

Keep Updated

Stay tuned, we’re trying to launch as quick as possible!  If you want an e-mail when we launch, enter it in the form on TweakMag.com.  I have a couple other ideas for projects with Mubs, so I hope this is the first of many successful ventures with him.