Now I have that idea.

My wife recently decided to open an Etsy shop for handmade greeting cards.  She’s been making them for years and has gotten very encouraging feedback about them.  She’s at a point in her life where she has some time available, so she decided to see whether she could make a business selling her cards.  It’s exciting to watch.

I have the aesthetic ability of a fallen tree limb, so I won’t be much help there.  I am working on a website for her (Etsy is expensive), and hope to convince her to let me use her customers as a marketing lab.  Thinking about her business and running into a very old post on Hacker News, I realized there was something else I could do, and that it could be helpful for others as well.

Once her business gets an order, she’ll need to an invoice (WooCommerce will probably do this for her), a packing list, and a shipping label.  All of this could be done on paper or with Word/GoogleDocs/whatever, but it’s basically the same information on each document.  So I’m going to create a web app to do basically that.

I hope.

It’ll certainly be some work.  Most of my programming is done in SystemVerilog, which is about as far away from web programming as you can get.

Anyway, my plan is to document as much as I can about both the technical and business sides of this project here.  Leave a comment if there’s anything you’re particularly interested in hearing about.