Dec 14, 2020

String Theory roadmap

This past week I pushed changes to our site that included us moving over to Shopify for our e-commerce backend. Our previous stack was using Braintree Payments and a custom checkout solution using Firebase to store product and order data. This was dumb. Building e-commerce from scratch is a lot of work and I’m grateful Shopify handles all of it for only $10/month. It’s an easy win and will open things up a lot for us moving forward.

Price and speed were initially important to me when creating String Theory. This was misguided. It is way too difficult for us to compete on price when we haven’t yet established the key relationships with suppliers to get good rates on materials. Speed is too difficult to guarantee at this point as well without more people, data, and money invested. Price and speed may end up being important for the future but not at this stage. We need the horse before the cart. Our primary vectors of differentiation right now are quality, transparency, and convenience.

Right now, I am working on designing stringer pages. We believe it is important for stringers to have their own brand separate from the String Theory platform. It is better for customers to have the transparency and reliability of knowing who they are working with. It also gives the stringers more accountability since it’s their reputation on the line. I will be the first stringer with a profile on this platform.

Once I am set up with my own page, we will run a giveaway to build our following. My profile on String Theory will be an experiment that shows how we can add value to stringers and players. We will work out the kinks and convince other stringers to join String Theory this lacrosse season. Let’s fucking go.