Hey hey everybody, I made some new shirts! I wanted some T-Shirts that were more of just the straight CSS-Tricks logo type. So I had some made up. While I was at it, I moved the entire store system (as you do).

Now on Shopify

The store is now hosted on Shopify.

I used to use Wufoo for all the sales. Wufoo is really great at payment forms, for stuff like a single T-Shirt or a paid event or something like that. But it doesn't really have shopping cart functionality, inventory, or shipping integration - and for that reason - I've moved over to Shopify.

This was my first time really digging into Shopify and it's pretty fantastic software. I'd absolutely recommend it. It's great how much control you have. Perhaps I'll do some more tutorials on it in the future.

New Shirts!

Old Shirts!

All the old favorites are there as well. And the CodePen and ShopTalk shirts are in there as well.

Limited Time Discount Offer

Now through Friday, use code CSSRULEZ for 15% off any order of anything.

Stocked and ready to go!

Purchasing this swag helps support CSS-Tricks. That means supporting me, and the few people that work for CSS-Tricks keeping it going. It means helping pay for the software and service costs that keep this site up, safe, and secure. It also helps the fun stuff like being able to commission open source stuff and hire industry people to make the site even better.

New T-Shirts! New Store! is a post from CSS-Tricks

Build a Simple iPhone App has been updated to teach iOS 7 and the latest version of XCode.

In Build a Simple iPhone App you’ll learn how to use the core tools of an iPhone developer: Objective-C, XCode, and Interface Builder. By the time you finish you’ll know how to create animations and respond to touch and motion events. Build a Simple iPhone App is a great way to get started in the world of iOS development.

Start Build a Simple iPhone App

The post Build a Simple iPhone App, Refreshed for iOS 7 appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Monica Gallagher ’01, visual arts, was recently featured in the BuzzFeed Geeky post, “20 Pieces of Advice for Female Artists from Female Artists.”

Her advice to her fellow female artists?

Draw all the time and keep going despite any negativity.

Gallagher’s work was included in the Winter 2012 issue of UMBC Magazine when she created an illustrated essay about her post-college life.

About Monica Gallagher: Gallagher is a designer, illustrator and comicker who lives in Baltimore with her boyfriend and two dueling cats. She graduated magna cum laude from UMBC in 2001, with a degree in visual arts, emphasis on animation. While at UMBC she learned Japanese, traveled to Greece with the ancient studies department, fainted in a yoga class, participated in film festivals, worked in the photo cage, stayed up way too late in the computer lab, got hit in the head with a volleyball, and has many, many other awesome memories.

Learn more about alumni events and services.

Find us on Facebook. // Follow us on Twitter.

UMBC’s 2013 Maryland Charity Campaign has launched. The campaign raises vital funds for nonprofit organizations that serve pressing community needs. Our goal this year is to once again reach at least 1,000 donors through gifts of any size.

UMBC has shown itself time and again as a caring community. In last year’s campaign, UMBC had the highest participation by far among Maryland public colleges and universities.

Make your gift today—your support is more meaningful than ever. Thank you.

Every Dollar Makes a Difference! $2 bi-weekly buys…

• 200 pounds of food—enough for 168 meals for the hungry
• 12 elementary school students with trained volunteer tutors to help with reading and math
• 10 children with bilingual beginning-to-read books to build early literacy skills
• Three 30-minute appointments for health assessment and counseling for individuals facing physical,
  developmental or mental health challenges
• 1 acre of unprotected tropical rainforest which assures protection of the natural areas vital to our climate and diverse species
• 1 hour of expert training for a citizen’s group interested in preserving natural areas in their communities

…that’s $52 a year.

$10 bi-weekly buys…

• Two months of meals for a homebound person
• Five wigs for children with cancer undergoing chemotherapy
• Two nights of shelter for a troubled or neglected youth
• After school care (food, health, recreation, and homework help) for one child for a year
• Clothing, shoes and a winter coat for one individual who has lost everything in a home fire
• Temporary shelter for a family of four for three nights following a disaster, or shelter for 10 people for one night
• Three bowling trips for seniors
• Gas or power service for an elderly or disabled person who has been threatened with a utilities termination notice

…that’s $260 a year.

$20 bi-weekly (Leadership Giver) a week buys…

• One ton—2,000 pounds—of food that translates to 1,612 meals to hungry Marylanders across the state
• Two days of care for a terminally ill individual
• Baby formula for 52 low-income infants (one each week)
• A full year of scouting for two girls
• Five and a half weeks of work training
• One month of preschool for a child at risk of falling through the cracks
• Funding for daily radio legislative updates, during the legislative session and monthly for interim committees
• Lightweight wheelchair for a person who is physically challenged
• Posters and other educational materials to inform national park visitors about steps they can take to help prevent increased air pollution in their parks
• Five people being treated for mental illness to attend recovery classes that provide education, peer support, and healing strategies.

…that’s $520 a year.

Often times when I’m on Twitter or Hacker News I find my feed full of links about yet another startup failing. Success rates for startups are quite low but this seems to be a separate breed of problem. These startups aren’t failing because they had a great product or idea, but didn’t get the little things right, or because they were in markets with high barriers to entry. No, this seems to be a case where there was absolutely zero product market fit – startups pursuing ideas that didn’t solve any real or perceived problem, where customers had no interest in paying for it.

These failures, which may come as a big shock to the founders, don’t really surprise many. Sure, part of the problem is that “failure is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you in Sillicon Valley” but the bigger issue stems from an inability to solve a real problem.

That may sound like a simple goal, but the reality is that even finding a problem to solve is quite difficult. I’m sure these startups set out thinking they had a real problem at hand, but on further exploration nothing could be further from the truth. It’s hard to come up with ideas that people are willing to fork over their cash for (and then much, much harder to execute on these ideas).

Real problems do exist, though, and will always exist. In this day and age, with the relatively low barriers to entry in the tech industry and the ease of distribution, the chances of having a unique idea are quite low, but your ideas don’t have to be unique. You can take an existing idea and put a different spin on it or offer a more pleasant customer experience with better design, and chances are you can strike gold. Of course, you will have to get all the little things right, but that’s another story altogether.

One of my favorite examples of this is Nest. Thermostats have been around since 1883, yet Tony Fadell found a way to reinvent the device and find a niche in the thermostat market. Now they’ve moved on to tackling smoke detectors in the same manner. Another example that I recently heard of on an episode of Planet Money, is Fan Duel. Fantasy sports have also been around for a while now, the first official league being created in the fifties, but Fan Duel found a way to put a new spin on an existing product by offering single day leagues with smaller cash prizes. Apparently it works, because they awarded payouts totaling $50 million last year, and secured an $11 million investment from Comcast for revenues that are supposedly well into the $100 millions.

Now if you do a bit of research on both of these ideas, you will find that the founders were annoyed with the existing implementations and set about to solve problems that occurred in their lives. Unfortunately, finding these problems to begin with isn’t something we’re wired to do. Most people get frustrated with daily annoyances but move on. When we think of money-making startup ideas, we tend to think of the fun, cool and glamorous ideas like AirBnB or Pinterest, but there’s also plenty of money to be made solving mundane ideas like clunky and ugly thermostats. The key is to find the right problems to solve in the first place.

Habit Forming

I propose we start an exercise to help us identify these problems. This is nothing new, and it’s been written about before, but as more people start implementing this idea, more successful startup concepts will start to emerge (or at least I hope).

Starting today, write down a problem that you would like to solve, a problem that you have in your life, or a problem you have identified. Undertake this exercise daily. If you are an iOS developer, be like Matthijs Hollemans and come up with a new app idea every day. Or if you are an inventor, like Meredith Perry, carry a notebook around, jotting down ideas of things you want to improve.

Carry out this exercise daily for a month. At the end of the month, go through your list of ideas. Discard the ridiculous ones (there will be plenty of those) and research the remaining ideas. If a solution already exists, note its shortcomings. Is there room for improvement and how would you make things better? As you vet each idea, your research will reveal the complexities of solving the problem and you will find that you aren’t as interested in it as you were when you wrote down the idea. That’s fine. If you’re bored by the idea already or the thought of tackling it, discard it immediately. Creating a company around it means being surrounded by the idea 24/7 for the foreseeable future. You have to be passionate about it and if it’s boring you now, don’t even bother trying.

At the end of this, you may or may not have a few ideas that you deem worth pursuing. If not, repeat the exercise. As Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Soon you will learn to identify problems, figure out solutions and carve out a market for it. Then you’ll be on your way to building a legitimate company, solving a real problem, that people are willing to pay for.

And then, hopefully, there will be a lot fewer of those “Help, my startup is dying” posts.

The post Solving Real Problems appeared first on Treehouse Blog.