Our New Website is LIVE!

Well guys, AmmoSquared 2.0 is finally live. At exactly 5pm on Friday February 19th we flipped the switch to shut down the old site and start up the new site.

I’m not going to lie and say everything went smoothly, because it didn’t. The emails and Facebook messages started flowing right away. Even after addressing 200+ emails over the weekend, we started Monday with nearly 500 messages related to site issues. It was a rocky start to say the least, but throughout the week Chris and Ramin worked hard on addressing issues while Danielle, Josh, Kristy, Emily and even yours truly kept up with customer support. By the close of business on Friday we had addressed all of the emails and messages we had received and had fixed most, if not all of the major issues and dozens of minor bugs.

It was a humbling beginning to AmmoSquared 2.0… but we’re LIVE with a new site and that is a huge milestone!

After 5 years of using Wordpress in a way that it WAS NOT designed for (and if you know Wordpress, you know it is pretty flexible), we now have a brand new CUSTOM web app. The old site was only really designed to test out my initial business idea of “buying ammo like a 401k”… and get confirmation of “product-market fit” as they say in the startup world. It took us well beyond that.

Danielle and I knew it wasn’t a permanent solution (in fact, in 2016, we talked to a web development company and got a ($35k!) quote to build a nicer Wordpress front end for our customer inventory. They thought we would get to 700 customers and “cry uncle” to have custom work done. Little did they know how stubborn, frugal, and okay-with-Excel-drudgery I am… we got to 5 times that number of active customers before retiring the old site last week). We certainly stretched our little Wordpress site to the limits with dozens of plugins and so many Excel work-arounds it would make anyone I tried to teach, throw their hands up in frustration. Let’s just say it was a good thing I wasn’t hit by truck these past 5 years… ;)

This week saw the culmination of thousand of hours of work that actually began in April 2019 when Danielle and I decided to team up with Chris and Clay to get a custom site built and launched.

While the existing site isn’t perfect, it is completely custom and will serve as a great base for further functionality in the future. I have a “wish list” a mile long which is why we’re now actively seeking a full time developer to help going forward.

Unfortunately, with this launch we also turn the page in other ways as well. Ramin will be leaving us soon to pursue other ventures, but he was instrumental in getting the new site off the ground and launched. Clay, our design guy, likewise has decided to join a new startup now that the site is launched.

While this is just the beginning of a long road of improving and enhancing the current site, it is also a good time to take a step back and recognize how far we’ve come and where we started.

I know I am.