It has been officially decided this is the path we're committing to for the forseeable future so I wanted to give you all a baseline for the people involved in this whole venture and how it all began.
Who am I? (Locke)
Those of you who've been around the ECGCE discord for a while may vaguely recollect seeing my name and title as a "Dev" for quite a few years. However, this frankly had nothing to do with ECGCE for pretty much all that time. I have been working with Ben on side game development projects for the vast majority of that time, and he decided to give me said title in the ECGCE discord for Ben reasons.
I've been programming for over a decade. I started in web development, moved to app development for a bit because I hated web development and the direction it was going, and then have spent the last 5+ years primarily in game development.
I spent a small stint early on in corporate and absolutely refuse to be worked as a slave or with little-to-no voice where I work or how my work is used. Autonomy and being treated like a human being means more than money to me and I have turned down quite a lot of money even when in dire financial straits because I refuse to compromise on said principles. That in no way means I have to always get my way but I do expect to at least be seriously heard and involved in the decision-making process where my work is required/used.
Ben is extremely good about these things, and over the years we've found we just work well together - even, and in many ways especially, when our ideas clash.
Breaking the Seal
For as long as I've known Ben, ECGCE has always been one of his core businesses and over the years I've been privy to his complaints and annoyances regarding it and the comic industry as a whole. These complaints and issues slowly picked up in their frequency and fervor over time. They finally reached a sort of boiling point over the last couple of years.
The first complaint I stepped in on was Patreon. Patreon has been going downhill and making utterly ridiculous decisions for years - frankly I could write a book on it. Ben finally got to the point of really wanting to be off the platform and I didn't understand why more people didn't just create their own Patreon services to begin with. He hit a breaking point and I was curious as to just how difficult an alternative outside of Patreon would be - which eventually led to me writing some custom Stripe and Shopify integration.
Up to this point I'd kind of brushed off Ben's requests to do any sort of web work. When he'd have problems or irritations he'd often ask me about potential solutions and if I would/could do anything, and I'd generally point him to third party solutions.
I was mainly under the impression that there had to be a lot more work or complication involved that I just wasn't aware of for there not to be more solutions on the market. Getting Ben off of Patreon and writing the Stripe/Shopify integration was the breaking of a seal in many ways. It was incredibly eye-opening just how easy it was to do and how these market gaps and abusive services can literally exist purely due to do general laziness.
Memberships and Pagefly
I still wasn't really all-in after that bit of integration though. I left Ben mostly to his own devices after he migrated to Shopify. Unbeknownst to me he built everything on this foundation of half-assed apps from the Shopify app store and Pagefly.
I didn't fully understand what Pagefly even was for a while but his battle with it was constant and I heard about it regularly. He'd lose entire days due to Pagefly hiccups and fuck ups while trying to conduct ECGCE sales. And that time loss was regularly impacting my ability to get him to focus on anything game development related. Also every time he explained the issues they sounded asinine. Issues that should never even remotely be possible of being issues.
So finally I sit down and take a more proper look at Shopify and Pagefly - and over the course of part time work over a Friday and Saturday I just recreated the layout/site he had via Pagefly and got him off Pagefly.
This happens somewhat early in 2024. I want to say around March or April. This is when I unofficially become the actual dev for ECGCE.
Shortly after solving for Pagefly, I have an epiphany while familiarizing myself a bit more with liquid (the language Shopify's sites/templates are built with) that leads to me creating full membership functionality. It literally takes me a day of not even arduous work to accomplish.
By this point the routine of Ben going, "Hey, can we do _?" and me going, "Yeah, one sec." is cementing itself for all things ECGCE-related.
And then Ben buys a comic shop.
The Comic Shop, FOCs and the Future
The timeline of events blurs a lot at this point. The last 4 - 6 months have been very much a blur.
If at the beginning of 2024 you'd have told me I'd be working on full-blown enterprise software and services by the end of the year, I would've laughed in your face. Similarly, if someone had told Ben he'd be owning and operating a cafe and comic shop, he'd have been laughing too.
But sometimes you just roll with the opportunities life presents to you, and being flexibly open to potential opportunities (within cautious reason) is a trait Ben and I share.
For years Ben has been wanting to provide more value to ECGCE members but didn't have a way to feasibly do so. I've always reassured him and held the belief that the lionshare of ECGCE's patrons are what I refer to as "actual patrons" - people who want to support the service and what Ben does more than necessarily get some major bang for their buck, but Ben being Ben has never been satisfied with the value proposition on offer to patrons. The purchase of the comic shop changed that. The distributor accounts he got from said purchase opened new doors.
I really wish the shop had cameras that had recorded how the FOC service began. Ben just turns to me, in the middle of the shop after we'd arrived one day - it couldn't have been more than a couple days since he bought the place too - and goes, "Do you think we can get FOCs up on Shopify?" That literally lead to:
Me: "What's an FOC?"
Ben: "Final Order Cutoff"
Me: "You want try that in English? I don't know what that is!"
After he explained what FOCs were and showed me Previews I just told him I'd look into it. By about 3pm that same day I'd written the foundation for pulling FOCs onto Shopify. The following week we were rolling out the initial test.
That's how suddenly and out-of-nowhere all this started.
Before 2024 it'd been almost a decade since I touched python or javascript - and I hadn't even heard of liquid. 4 - 6 months later and we're now hoping to make a serious push at providing a solid online and retail FOC service, and hopefully positively impacting the comic/manga industry in the US at large in a myriad of other ways too.