Comp Versions Blog

root :to => "home#index"</pre>

before_filter :redirect_to_marketing


def redirect_to_marketing

  unless user_signed_in?
    redirect_to '/imdex.html' 
  end

end

You can follow me on Twitter here.

Disclaimer: This post is NOT for experienced Rails developers. It is for designers and non-developers thinking about diving into code and trying to decide which language/framework they should use.

Why did I learn Ruby & Rails?

I am fairly new to Rails & Ruby. I just started learning about 8 months ago when I started developing CompVersions. 

CompVersions is a web application that allows designers to upload multiple versions of their designs – so that their clients can easily give them a thumbs up/down and add comments as necessary.

The idea for CompVersions comes from my previous experiences working with multiple designers. I have, at various points in the past, worked on projects where I was either project lead or project manager and had to coordinate designs and feedback from multiple designers and multiple stakeholders.

Getting  & forwarding emails with PDF files as attachments and notes specifying the line and page number in the PDF was not cutting it anymore. I tried Basecamp, and it wasn’t designed for this problem, so it didn’t work the way I needed it. So I decided to build my own solution.

Why write this post ?

A friend of mine (wassup Hector) is doing a similar journey (i.e. building a web app/site while learning), but he is in Microsoft land (Dot Net, IIS, MSDN, the whole nine yards).

I was explaining to him why I love Rails & Ruby, and how it completely abstracts the pain of doing things like SQL queries (although, if you want to work with SQL you surely can).

I was trying to find a real-world example of what I meant, but all I found were the regular ‘build a blog in 15 minutes’ and tutorials and articles that take you through the entire app process. I didn’t want that, so I started looking through my code. I realized that I have the perfect use case to highlight how wonderful it is to use Rails. He appreciated it, and understood what I meant, so I figured I would write it up and release for everybody else.

What is my example ? 

Rails is known for allowing the developer to focus more on the business logic of the application, rather than the technical behind the scenes stuff. 

What does that even mean ? Here is an example: 

I was hooking up the email functionality where once a designer registers they get an email from the app. I use a rails gem (the equivalent of a plugin) called devise that makes it relatively easy to get up and running with an authentication solution. It handles users logging in and out. Registering, forgotten and resetting passwords. Locking and Unlocking an account (say if your application requires high security where you only allow X login attempts, then the account is locked). Plus a few other features. All in one plugin. All done to industry standard best practices – e.g. when a user forgets their password a unique link is sent where they can reset their password (i.e. a password is not sent via plaintext in email, that’s very insecure). I get all of this functionality with very little effort (relatively speaking given the amount of functionality I get). 

So the first question I was faced with is, how do I address the designer? Do I say "Hi John!" ? But what if there is no first name, how do I fallback to their username (sexyjohn79) and then subsequently their email (sexyjohn79@email.hotmail.com). That’s ‘business logic’.

How do you implement this business logic? 

The registration form for CompVersions has First & Last Names, Usernames & Email addresses. A user can login with both their username and email address. But I haven't decided whether or not I am going to let first & last names be mandatory. Most likely will, but I wanted to implement it to gracefully handle the situations when it doesn't have one or the others. 

Rails uses what is called an MVC structure. Model, View, Controller. Rails encourages you to put all of your business logic in the ‘Model’ portion of your app.

Show me some code, damnit! 

In my User model (which is where Rails handles all the business logic related to the 'users' of the app), I have a method called 'pretty_name' that handles this option. This is how my ‘pretty_name’ method looks:

def pretty_name 
   f_name || username || email              
end

Please explain that code to me

To break it down for my non-developer friends out there:

·         Line 1 is the definition of the method. The method is what I will call to 'execute/invoke' this block of code. This will become clearer shortly.

·         Line 2 basically says "If the value 'f_name' exists, return that value" - i.e. if there is a first name (or if the first name is NOT null) return the first name. Then it moves on to say "...OR ( ||  = OR ), if that doesn't exist check to see if a 'username' exists. If it does, return that value..." and continues to "...OR if no f_name and username exist, return the email_address". The assumption here is that a username MUST exist because the user will be getting this message in their email. Ruby executes left-to-right.

·         Line 3 ends this method 

That's it. That's the business logic.

Then, in my template for the actual email (i.e. the “View” from the MVC), this is what the first few lines look like:

<p>Hi <%= @resource.pretty_name %>!</p>
 
<p>Thank you for registering with CompVersions.<br />

The system says 'Hi ' and it executes the method 'pretty_name' on the object @resource (@resource is an object that devise – from earlier – uses to refer to the current user account) and then returns the best value. So if the person's first name is John and it is there (i.e. the value is not NULL), the email will say "Hi John". If there is no first name, it will say "Hi sexyjohn79", where 'sexyjohn79' is the username. If there is no username it will say "Hi sexyjohn79@email.hotmail.com".  

Here is an example of how the end product looks. All for the simple “Hi Marc!”

So is Rails really a walk in the park, for non-developers ?

I don’t want you to misunderstand what I am saying. I am not implying that in order to get from nothing to a full app with login, for a non-Rails developer it is easy and quick. It’s not that easy. But as a general rule, the things you will be struggling with (once you get the basics down) are how the app will function – the business logic – rather than missing semi-colons and errant SQL queries.

Like all languages and frameworks, it has its quirks. Rails has a set of conventions that make sense and force you to develop one way (many consider it 'the right way'). There are some that it doesn’t work for. It has worked for me, and makes total sense – based on what I have seen so far.

I hope that helps encourage you to try Rails, or even consider it for your next project.

There are many awesome tutorials out there, for starters I would use Rails for Zombies. I am in no way affiliated with them, I just love their product.

You should follow me on Twitter here, and read my blog here.

(download)

Click here to download:

why-developing-with-rails-is-fun-and-pleasant-upejyAvrHkbzxhJzHlvF.zip (625 KB)

One of the most requested things since launch has been a video tour of the interface.

I am excited to announced that it's finally done and has been released today!

Check it out and let me know what you think:

Tour of CompVersions.com from CompVersions on Vimeo.

Marc Gayle
www.marcgayle.com
www.twitter.com/marcgayle

Ben Mills, Apr-18 15:42 (CDT):

Hi Marc,

I just saw on Hacker News that you launched Compversions! I just wanted to say congratulations from the team here at Braintree.

Let me know if you need anymore help with your integration.

Ben Mills
Braintree Developer

Marc Gayle
www.marcgayle.com
www.twitter.com/marcgayle

(download)

Click here to download:

Building_a_webapp_tailored_to_.zip (931 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

traffic-stats-from-two-guest-posts-JjjoIlejJtHFscCuhHhc.zip (468 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

traffic-stats-from-two-guest-posts-DthzamFDFgrshwoEgkrc.zip (446 KB)

Finally, here is the graph I am most excited about - it is from Campaign Monitor that shows the subscriber growth over the past few months. As you can see from Jan 11 to the next green point (Feb 11) the growth curve gets a bit steeper, but from Feb 11 to March 11 the growth curve gets even steeper.

Of course, these are just subscriber info to a mailing list to find out about launch info - so the real proof will be in the pudding when I launch. But this data is pretty encouraging.

Hope you found this as interesting as I did. If you did, you should follow me on Twitter here.

Variable Hosting Costs are any hosting bills you have to pay due to higher usage (on a per unit basis). So in my case, since designers will be uploading images and they will be stored on AWS & CloudFiles, my variable hosting costs are not my regular server costs. They are costs associated with both AWS & CloudFiles, because I only incur them when people upload images.

Non-variable hosting costs are server related costs – so if you rent a server with Rackspace, your monthly Rackspace bill would go here. Now I know this might be a bit confusing, because if 1 server can only manage X amount of traffic (say 500,000 uniques per month), if you double your traffic you will have to add more servers.

However, you don’t have to pay hosting costs per unit. In this case, you don’t get charged by Rackspace per Unique Visitor. That’s the major difference. For instance, for the same monthly fee you pay for 1 server, you could tweak the server so much that you increase the # of visitors it can manage to say 750,000 unique visitors without paying anything extra. With a true variable cost, you can’t do that.

Gross Profit

I also added Gross Profit lines. These lines are very important because you need to get an idea as to how one of the most fundamental costs of your businesses are working. For instance, if you are experiencing phenomenal revenue growth, but your gross profit margins (%) are reducing, you know that likely indicates that your Cost of Goods Sold is increasing – which should be a worrying trend.

Usually what happens is as you push more volume, your unit costs should come down significantly. Not just in the tech industry, but in most (if not all) industries. So while your revenues are increasing, your COGS should be decreasing – for instance, if you look at the pricing chart for AWS you will see the cost per GB reduces as you go up in volume.

However, at some point in the future – it might become less beneficial to host my images with Amazon rather than hosting it on my own. 37Signals is famous for discussing outgrowing Amazon’s web services for their primary storage – because it has gotten too costly. I suspect, this is likely what happened. At some point, they realized that their Gross Profit Margins are getting thinner and thinner – which would cause them to look at the variable costs associated with their revenues. If it didn’t, it should have.

So in my case, I suspect that at some point in the future, my gross profit margins will stop decreasing and start increasing again. At that point, I will want to look at other options.

COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)

I added a ‘COGS’ sheet, which breaks down the entire Cost of Goods Sold. If you have other variable costs (aside from the ones I have included) this is the sheet you will want to update. Once you update that sheet, you can then link it to the main sheet with a line item that has the total of the new variable cost, and update your Total COGS.

At the top of the main ‘Figures’ sheet, I added the breakdown of the pricing plans and the distribution of the % of customers on each one.

This is to give you a quick overview for which plans make sense and which don’t.

On the COGS sheet, I also broke down the Gross Profit ($ and %) of each plan – which can quickly tell you which plan makes most sense for you. With my default numbers, you can see that the gross profit margin (%) reduces steadily as the plans increase in cost.

That is because I chose to give each plan more space and transactions (relatively speaking) – for the purposes of this article, that is. So the $99 plan gives more than double the storage space than the $49 plan does. As a direct result, you can see that the gross profit margins (%) decrease from 89.69% to 89.14%. This trend continues as you go up in price. So even though you are making more money per plan, you aren’t keeping as much as the lower plans. This is an important figure to watch as you decide to tweak your pricing and value proposition.

Please note though, that the Gross Profit amounts in the ‘COGS’ sheet are plan specific, and do not include transaction fees (e.g. Paypal, credit card processing, etc.) and other things included in the true COGS from the ‘Figures’ sheet.

Quarterly to Monthly

Lastly, another key change I have made is getting rid of the bottom section that spells out some key metrics quarterly. I have put Net Profit (% & $) monthly, and have re-calculated CACR monthly. I have very low marketing costs – because I am bootstrapping, at the onset – but I expect to boost those significantly. As a result, my CACR ratios look pretty high early on. But that will change as we progress.

Please remember that all of the figures here are just placeholder default values – that are approximates according to my needs. Feel free to tweak, add, subtract, multiply & divide as your needs see fit.

This post was originally written for ThinkVitamin. 

You should follow me on Twitter here.