So the experts tell me not to do link exchanges, but I want to anyway. I’ll hold off.

So if you’re reading this, I sure could use some links.

Still very early in the marketing rollout, but I’m behind schedule. My Sunday was hijacked by unexpected browser compatibility issues. (IOW Internet Explorer SUCKS)

I need to write an article and get the Facebook fan page up.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Worm-Gin.com announces affordable worm bins: vermicomposting with red wigglers made easy.

Keys to success are built into the design, with unique features not found in home-made setups.

Sherwood, Oregon, Oct 12 2010 — A new worm bin product line was announced today by Wormgineering LLC, which will sell WormGin™ worm bins at http://www.worm-gin.com in two sizes and two configurations. Customers will be purchasing advanced versions of a tried-and-true system, complete with the Red Wiggler (Eisenia fetida) worms that make the self-contained ecosystems work.

Using a worm bin to compost food scraps has been gaining attention recently. If a person wants to “go green” and make a change of personal habit that actually helps the planet, turning their kitchen waste into vermicompost is hard to beat. If they garden, or just keep a few houseplants, they can witness for themselves the spectacular results obtained by using the compost.

Wormgineering LLC was formed earlier this year to bring worm composting to a broader population by providing a full-featured solution at a low price. The WormGin™ line of advanced worm bins is now available for <a href=”http://www.worm-gin.com/cart”>secure purchases</a> just in time for Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns. Red Wiggler composting worms love pumpkin.

Many people get interested in vermicomposting, but when they do their research, they find two warning signs that give reasonable pause on the enterprise. The key to the WormGin™ approach is that both these issues are firmly dealt with. First, many home-made worm bins fail. Secondly, the existing systems on the market are limited in capacity, so there is always more kitchen waste to be composted than can be used. What would be nice is to keep all the food scraps out of the garbage can!

WormGin™ worm bins can provide the capability to match a family’s production of food waste. No other product on the market can make that claim.

Owners of WormGin™ worm bins enjoy unlimited customer support at <a href=”http://www.worm-gin.com/forums”> worm-gin.com’s support forums</a> and the website provides all the information needed to “take the mystery out” for those considering this easy lifestyle change. The strategy is to combine excellent customer support with simple but highly effective design features to come as close as possible to eliminating all the problems that can afflict home-made worm bins.

“The setup may look simple and easily duplicated but the key to the system is the Feed Shelf inside; many do-it-yourself folks are going to want to skip that part, but if they do their bins will have problems. Do-it-yourself worm bins often work out, but typically only because of frequent maintenance – while the WormGin™ system was conceived from the beginning as the lowest maintenance possible way to keep worms, combined with the ability to really crank it up to a high capacity food-eating ecosystem” says Bob DeWitt, the one-man show behind the WormGin™ and the website.

Also available are options, supplies and a micro-worm bin called a <a href=”http://www.worm-gin.com/wormjug.html”>Worm Jug</a>. Put it on a bookshelf and you’ll be sharing the room with a bunch of bookworms.

Look for future announcements as the Wormgineer looks to bring Red Wigglers to homes across America.

About Wormgineering LLC

With sales operations on http://www.worm-gin.com, Wormgineering is on a mission to capture the attention and business of all those people looking for a way, on a personal level, to be a part of America’s sustainable future. Initially a one-man operation by owner Bob DeWitt, a Mechanical Engineer by profession, Wormgineering LLC will be looking at larger installations and company growth, creating a few new green jobs.

http://www.worm-gin.com

Owner: Bob DeWitt

P.O. Box 151

Sherwood Oregon 97140

503 625 9562

bobdew@gmail.com

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At long last I have all the puzzle pieces in place and this enterprise can begin actively looking for sales.

It’s one thing to start a small business, but when you’re doing more than a few manufacturing operations yourself, there’s a whole lot more to do.

In my case, I figure it is strategically important to have a mature product line at introduction, so that early customers do not end up with inferior product. So I kept testing and tweaking and testing and tweaking. And making tooling.

And getting the whole place re-organized to shift  from prototyping mode to production mode. That took a full two weeks right there.

The product is ready, everything is dialed in and I am ready for production mode.

I don’t usually get nervous, but today I am nervous. Here goes.

So I got laid off and decided that I was going to start my own manufacturing business. Find a need, design product, build it and sell it on my own web site.

I had a well-developed product for the beer homebrewing hobby but it was a high end luxury product and in this economy I figured there was no way it would sell in the volume required. But I did work on it for a few months to get quotes and determine the economics of the device.

While working on the brewing thing I also decided to answer the call of our new President to Do Something worthwhile. I wanted to do something “green” and I wanted to do something that would be a change in my personal habits. I went into research mode to find as many choices as possible, and came up with a list. But the thing that jumped off the page as easy and cheap and green was keeping a worm bin.

So I built a homemade bin out of plywood, bought some Red Wigglers and it’s been going ever since. I got pretty excited about doing it as a hobby and about making it much more popular. I did a large website outlining the scheme I came up with and providing information for folks interested in doing it too.

Upon deciding that the brewing product wasn’t going to happen, I quickly realized that there was an opportunity to sell a less expensive but more effective product than what was (and still is) on the market.

Many moons later, it is ready.

I’m really not a social media type person, I never have been that kind. Back in my Fraternity days, the only part I didn’t like was rush week. Once a geek always a geek.

I love the internet and I too hated to see it get taken over by commercialization. But it was inevitable and it is here, so I don’t feel bad about not getting on Facebook until I have something to sell.

In other words I hope it’s OK with everybody that I will be using Facebook to promote my new business:

www.worm-gin.com

I’m not going to cross-post everything but I did write this up and thought it belonged here as well.

Bio:

Decided on Mechanical Engineering by age 12, finally got my BSME at age 38.

The story of my professional career is the story of the series of owners I’ve worked for. I estimate that fewer than 25% were mentally stable. That always bothered me more than my co-workers.

Personally, I’ve had a very fun life so far. Never married, no kids and no regrets on that score. I’ve been able to explore my interests and hobbies and have become adept at quickly gaining expertise in diverse subjects. I love the internet.

We live in interesting times and some of it pisses me off, but for a fan of science and the discovery of knowledge, it’s a great time to be alive.

Why so late to the whole social media thing? Mainly, I am a recluse by nature. I just am, most people are not but some of us are just that way naturally, so I have long since accepted it as normal.

As a recluse, social media is the LAST thing I want to use the internet for. The internet for me is about research and interaction of message boards. I’m not anti-social after all, but I am much better communicating about interesting concepts with the informal written word than spoken.

I’ve always been terrible at idle chit-chat, but love to converse on interesting topics. That’s the way I’m going to approach my blogging and social media.

This is the most I’ve written about myself in many many years. I’m allergic to narcissism but I’ve been preparing to make the changes needed to be a blogger on my terms, and I cannot do that well and hold back everything personal.

There, at least you cannot say my bio is totally boring.

Oh btw the real reason I’m doing this now of course is because I am launching my business today.

www.worm-gin.com

Today is the day I begin telling the internet that I exist. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, here I come!

Why the delay since the last post? I’ll just say that I am not willing to make a bad first impression and there were quite a few neglected “back-end” issues I decided to not wait to take care of until after launch.

In other words I wanted to get all my ducks in a row so that when orders come in, I can concentrate on production and shipping and customer service. Also promotion of course.

The last three weeks have been busy ones for me. Production did indeed begin, but there were tooling issues and one last design change. Searching for the best value for my customers. Another 5 bucks is another 5 bucks.

So again it has taken longer to get the last few steps done, but I am very happy with the result. This is an apology-free product line. These bins work, they are built to last and are very affordable, especially compared to the stacking tray systems.

My favorite part is that the price levels make sense compared to each other in terms of value provided. $8 to upgrade in size, $20 to upgrade to the expandable habitat.

The expandable habitat thing works, my testing has verified it repeatedly. The extra $20 will let you deal with more food and sooner.

I kept the top of the line product under $100 and that pleases me very much. It wasn’t easy, folks. Everything in these WormGin™ worm bins is there to provide value. Yes, it is a simple design, but there are more than a couple subtle yet very effective tricks built in.

In a way of offering “fair warning” I should mention somewhere that if you want to build a worm bin like what you see here, you better do a very close copy, with the tray-mounted posts and all that, or it will have a decent chance of failure. I’m not making this up, but I am also not going to explain it for a while yet.

My ethics called for mentioning that, so am moving on. Yet I see no reason to give away all my secrets right off the bat. Even if I do have an open source attitude about this enterprise.

The last-minute sudden death overtime design change also made it much easier for my customer to understand the choices to be made. If nothing else, this last delay was worth it for that.

So off to Saturday Market in the morning.

Then it’s time to introduce this website to google and everybody else I can reach. By this time tomorrow, I should be twittering and have a bunch of other new social media accounts.

I didn’t want to take that step until I had product to sell. With a modest inventory (w00t!) and ready to produce a lot more at the start of next week, there are no more reasons to wait.

It’s a great value, so this thing is going to sell, right?

Hello my name is Bob and I am a perfectionist. I had been in recovery but I’ve been off the wagon since the opening blog post. Immediately after posting that I realized I had inadvertently lied: the secure credit card transactions were a l-o-n-g ways from actually being secured. I was a babe in the woods then. I had moved everything over from wormgineering.com to worm-gin.com and was thinking that part was done.

But I am now as good an expert on installing SSLs and securing web pages as you will find. Seriously.

Just for the record, because it is about to become ancient history anyway: I was originally going to launch this business on June 11. Besides moving URLs, three major delays got in the way, all three of them decisions driven by not being willing to let “good enough” win the day.

This product I’m selling can be replaced by a do-it-yourself project and meet success. Or failure; and that’s what my value proposition is all about: Let me do it for you, get you started and comfortable with it, so you don’t have to ever go down the failure track.

If ever there was a time for my perfectionism to assert itself, it is now. The basic concept, which I am going to hold to the vest for a bit, has proven to work exactly as envisioned from the start. I have tested these bins and they work great. The thing to do now is to release a mature design so that later I don’t have to manage tweaks to already shipped product. I can do that because I’m on the fifth generation of internal development as far as the product lineup goes.

The first delay was getting the credit card solution totally locked down. I didn’t want to do it if it wasn’t state of the art, but I didn’t want to spend a lot either. It took a while but both those objectives were met. I say it again, you gotta love open source software. Even if I did have to fight a two week, two front campaign with the cyber universe to get it done.

The second delay was that I needed to make a change to the WormGin™ design that came out of my testing program. I resisted the change because it meant I had to scrap quite a bit of inventory, but my commitment to providing the maximum value to my customers demanded it. Perfectionism is not always evil says I.

The third delay is about one last manufacturing detail on both the WormGin™ and Worm Jug products, which is pretty much the entire product line. In both cases it’s a matter of whether I add a part and thus a feature. The cost is enough to affect the retail price so the final store and product pages cannot be created until I decide. I have joke pix up for now btw, it’s a secret strategy thing, lol.

My next step is to produce more product so I can get lots of good photos for the product and store pages and to let me put together the ready-for-shipment inventory needed to launch. I want to be able to ship on demand within the constraints of the shipping policy.

Maybe I’ll launch on July 4, that would be cool. I’ve quit setting dates, it will happen when the perfectionist says so, which is not before things are ready enough to let me hit the ground running.

Ever since I learned FORTRAN in the 70′s, in high school, the first program they have you write is a Hello World program. That’s why the default first post is named Hello World. Of course it was more fun to change the message to something witty if possible but I’m already digressing.

For this enterprise though, this really is Hello World! There has been a lot of work getting my business up and running, especially the website stuff, and the next-to-next-to-last part is creating the blog.

The web pages are all in place, the two methods of payment are in place – PayPal express and a Secure shopping cart for state of the art security for your Credit Card purchases – and so are the forums.

Can you believe that almost all of the software behind this website is free and open source and very easy to use? The web has come a long way, and so have the good people who developed software such as Unix, Apache, cpanel, php, html, CSS, javascript, ZenCart, phpBB, WordPress and more. I feel I must thank all those people. Thanks, people!

Just two more major tasks before the press releases and other emails go out: Getting product ready to ship while taking photos to finish up the product pages.

Anyway, hello world! Announcing the debut of Wormgineering LLC, bringing you advanced Vermiculture products, available on www.worm-gin.com and locally in the Portland Oregon area.