My focus on getting things done has taken me down some weird turns in the past few months. Any idea of something I want to do goes into my Todoist list, and when I’m sitting around, I just jump in to something.

I’ve made several batches of homemade pickles this way.

I also decided that I wanted to try to get some legwork done on my programming side projects. Part of doing that was to list them all out and decide what needed to be done. And then once I had that list, I thought “it’d be cool if I had a website that listed all these out”, and so that went on the list. And that’s what happened to create Thwiv.io. Kind of an online business card of sorts, listing out all my side projects.

And now that that exists, it allows me to point people to it when they ask “What do you do?”. That happens a lot during South By Southwest, which is coming up next week. So then I decided that I was going to get business cards.

I don’t know how to describe the feeling I have about business cards, especially cards with my own domain name on them, with my name, that are completely for me. I decided this not as a part of a company who decided to give them out at a trade show, but as a normal, everyday person who decided “yeah, I need 500 pieces of paper with my contact information on them”. It feels like I’m lying to myself. But it was on my list, so I did it.

I used VistaPrint to create the cards. They have to be the most well known printing company out there, and for good reason. Their ads are EVERYWHERE. I’m not even sure where I found the first one.

So, the buying process at VistaPrint is like nothing else. They are the kings of the upsell. You start out with the pitch “starting at $16”, or “50% your first order”…really it doesn’t quite matter what it says. There’s no way you’re landing at that low of a number.

I started with the “Signature” series at $24.00. This offered a higher quality stock, to which I thought “Yes, the Patrick Bateman in me is pleased”. The design process is easy enough: you can comb through thousands of patterns, and customize any piece of text, its font, and it’s location within reason (the very edges are off limits, as their printers have a hard time printing there). The online design process is very simple and they let you save a variety of styles to compare against and order at any time.

And then once you’re done that, you think “I’ll purchase these”, but you’re nowhere near done. You’ll be offered pages of upsells, from glossy ink, metallic lettering, card holders of all different types, and even a set up for an email campaign. It’s really quite a thing to behold, from a sales perspective. As a client, it’s pretty annoying. But I did end up ordering the glossy ink and 500 instead of 100. So I guess it worked.Everything all together cost me less than 50 dollars though, so I don’t feel too ripped off.

I received my cards in just a few days. They have a very quick turnaround which will make me come back in a few years when I finally burn through 500 business cards. Quite possibly by actually burning them. Here’s some pictures of the product.

The cards themselves I am very happy with. They’re very pretty, though I’m thinking that I may have wanted the metallic lettering over the glossy. I’ll be proud to hand out these cards over South By Southwest. And maybe at least one person will actually hold onto it, stumble across this blog, and then this whole thing comes full circle.

I’d recommend VistaPrint, because I wouldn’t know where else to get business cards. Their product is very good. Lets hope this whole thing works out.