Brad Bartell

Author: Brad Bartell

  • The Projects I am most proud of

    There have been a good amount of sites/pages I’ve had the opportunity to work on. My work as the Manager of a Front End Development team allowed me to inject creative ideas into high level meetings as well as empower my team to push creative ideas when working with other teams.

    Share API

    This one isn’t a typical project but dealt with a unique issue to the company. It was an MLM where we had a marketing site and shopping site. The marketing content was built to be cool and flashy, but they couldn’t talk to the shopping site’s cart. Now since it’s an MLM linking back to a consultant’s store is key.

    The way around this was to use cookies so that if a user came from a shopping page, we could change the links on the page to have the consultant link. BUT how would we set a cookie for a first-time visitor? well using JS we could look at a URL query string and get values out of it and set cookies. And again, we run into another issue (isn’t that the standard of any development), how do we get the consultants to share the marketing URL with their info?

    Enter the ShareAPI, through JS we were able to get cookies from the consultant browser, Link to marketing pages with the consultant info in the query string, then when a prospect of the consultant clicked the link it would cause the browser to link all shopping links to the consultants site.

    Through all of that you may say why not just create better shopping pages? We had severe limitation with our shopping platform and marketing wasn’t happy with the limitations, so we built a second set of pages to empower them to make effective marketing material

    Digital Catalogue

    Again this was created from my time at an MLM, one thing our consultants did was drop off these catalogues that had all the products in them. It was a nice leave behind but each one cost consultants something like $2 a catalogue. And in that business, you would want to give as many leave behinds as possible. Well that cost would add up and wasn’t very green, the company very much advertised how green they were. So I had an idea to make the catalogue into an epub.

    For those unaware epub is the file format for a digital book (think book apps). This offered some really cool features that couldn’t be done in a print book cheaply.

    1. We could add links to the shopping pages
    2. We could customize the book with consultant info / their store links
    3. (never realized but had a plan) remove sections if you didn’t like the product line

    I worked with the Print team manager to get the files and have him add a few extra elements for an epub document. Once I had a working example I setup a meeting with the Chief of Field Development to embrace the project and sponsor it, any major project needed an executive sponsor at this company.

    I then brought in the rest of my team to help add links and setup a web version to make it viewable in a browser. We used an open source project that we modified to make it change out links based on user cookies. Books were generated using Node.js

    Working with our DevOps team we setup a server for the Digital Catalogue using AWS Lambda to run the Node.js code. We also setup the billing to be tagged so we could track costs to this specific feature and compare it to sales in google analytics.

    Once it went live it took a bit of communication with the field to get them to start using it. 3 months in it was costing us ~$1000 a month but generating $980,000 a month in sales, use using last click attribution. Not a bad payoff for the cost.

    Unfortunately, this project died due to office politics after I left the company. There was a director who wanted to switch it to Flipping book, basically a glorified PDF, which lacked a lot of the features we had built into the epub viewer. Since consultants wouldn’t get links to their shopping links, they stopped sharing it and it has since died as far as I can tell.

    Digital Toolkit

    This is honestly my favorite project as a manager because I had very little to do with the actual writing of the code but everything with empowering people to do what leaders didn’t know they could do.

    For background at this time the company was going through a phase of offloading major projects to 3rd parties. It was killing the development team to see the fun/important projects go to outside vendors at crazy price tags, we’re talking tens of millions and in my opinion subpar results.

    Well one of my team members had been working on an app to allow consultants to take a base image and customize it with on brand gifs and fonts. I got him in front of c-level IT leadership and eventually we get told to take it to the C-level of Customer Experience. He takes this concept, which was pretty much done at this point and we just needed a UI skin, and outsources it to another vendor. This completely kills my team members morale. I tell him to keep working on it and I will find some options. Talking with the C-level of IT we weren’t able to take it back at that time.

    Thankfully the company had monthly breakfast with the CEO. I signed up to attend and let the CEO know where morale was. With all the projects moving to outsourcing no one wanted to be there since it was all upkeep work and that we would come up with good ideas only to see them go to other companies and hear about the large bill to create something we already had a Proof of Concept created.

    Thankfully he understood that we would lose a lot of talent, at this point the company had lost a lot already and brought the project in house. With the launch of the app, it enabled the consultants to create on brand content while also making our team feel valued. You can check this out at the marketing site for the App. It’s now called Content Kit but for me it will always be the Digital Toolkit since that was the Proof of Concept name. I think some of the APIs still reference it as DTK.

  • Web or App?

    Every once in a while, when people find out I work as a web developer they like to pitch this idea they have to make money. Some are decent, some bad, and others interesting. It could be an AR/VR idea, social media platform, blog, event management or a handful of other ideas.

    But typically, they say something along the lines of “I have this idea for an app”. They tend to mean a native app that you would download from the app store. In my head I immediately start thinking but why a native app? What feature are you using that requires a native app? How are you going to market this? What level of investment are you ready to put into this to make it happen? And then of course after some time of them explaining their idea they will say something along the lines of “Would you want to partner with me to build this”?

    I’ve honestly have yet to find one that is good enough and with a person committed to the idea enough to partner with them. Not to say that there hasn’t been good people or good ideas, just not both. I’m a person who enjoys being helpful, so I’ll challenge them a bit with some of the information on why you may not need an app.

    What features requires a native app?

    What are you really offering to your users? Is a list of events with event details on another page? A form for getting in touch due to an incident? A place to view updates and new information? It’s really hard to say you need an app with more basic features like the ones I just listed. It would be much faster and easier for you to create a simple LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) stack to host a Web App and pretty much any hosting service can handle that.

    Even when you get into some more interesting concepts you don’t need an app. One of my more interesting side projects is the use of AR to see a product at scale in your space. Apple uses this on their product marketing pages that have a callout “Use AR to see MacBook Air in your workspace.” but only works on apple devices. A company who does the same but without limiting the device support is Arcade 1up. When you view the product on your mobile device you can see the arcade in your own space, which is great for planning where you can put the arcade cabinet.

    Now that’s not to say every feature can be done on the web. When you have more advanced features you can’t rely on the browser to have access to those features. For example, video editing on the web is rough, that would be better on the device itself where you have access to lower-level processes that would handle the render better.

    How will you market this?

    A big part of creating something is making it discoverable. If I asked you to find me a system that managed event check-in, what would you do? The first thing the majority of people would do is a Google search. Now Google searches the web for its content, so data from an app won’t show up unless there is a marketing web page a company created for their app. So even if you had to go the app route due to the features you want to offer your users you would still need to make a website marketing your app.

    Let’s also think about the User Experience. If you created a native app and create a marketing site, you would need to the following to happen:

    1. User finds your site
    2. User likes your product and wants to install
    3. User finds and clicks the Call to Action that links to your native app in the device’s app store
    4. User clicks the install button
    5. User launches the app
    6. User signs up for the app
    7. User is now using your app

    Thats 7 steps from discovery to becoming a user. Now contrast that with having a website that is the app:

    1. User finds your site
    2. User likes the product and wants to sign up
    3. User signs up
    4. User is using your app

    Thats three less steps as well as the always stayed on your site through the whole process. This would enable Google Analytics or similar system to track if there are any areas cause issues with your signup process

    What are you willing to invest?

    This is where a lot of ideas die. In my case most people are who talk about the “I have an idea for an app” want me to develop it in return for a percentage of ownership. But let’s talk about the actual costs of a native app compared to a website.

    App Developer Costs

    Ok you really want a native app, typically you’re going to need a developer for Android as well as iOS. Each has a salary of ~110K or a contractor rate that can be between $50 – $250 an hour. Those are costs that are going to add up quick.

    App Store Accounts

    Not really a major cost but to distribute your app on Google Play as well as the Apple Store you have to register an account and pay a minor fee. Apple charges $99 / year and Google changes $25 for a lifetime account.

    App Store Revenue

    This is where both Apple and Google really make their money. For each sale you make each will get a cut of your revenue. Google gets 15% for the first Million then 30% after. Apple does the same 15% for the first million 30% for anything beyond the first million

    So, what should I do?

    With all these costs, people, and revenue cuts how can you optimize revenue, time to go live, and easily update your app? The wonderful Progressive Web App (PWA). PWA’s will allow your content to be found on the web through SEO and you can download content to the user’s phone, have a splash screen, and run some simple tasks offline and upload them when online.

    How do I make a PWA?

    That is a post for next week. (Once I create the content I will link to the post).