Happy New Year!

I'm sorry it's been a while since our last post, a lot of things have been in flux behind-the-scenes, but it just so happens a lot is coming together just in time for the new year!

Where We Started

I didn't want to bog this whole post down in a bunch of historical data I know most of you likely couldn't care less about, so I put it all in its own post here.

Suffice to say, when we initially created the FOC service we were flying by the seat of our pants. We weren't sure about pretty much anything and still had to ask ourselves if we were even going to commit to creating said service to begin with.

The response we've gotten from you all made that decision pretty easy though. The level of interest and use even among just the small test group we have now has been surprising and overwhelmingly encouraging. We have decided to move full throttle with the development of pretty much all things comic shop/business related.

Establishing a Real Foundation

As I've mentioned before, when I initially built the foundation for the system I had no idea what FOCs even were. I was asked if it was possible and pointed to Previews as the source for all the information we needed. I've since learned a lot, like how Previews is not a super reliable source for FOC information. It's fine enough for consumers but with Previews Diamond acts as a sort of information middleman between the other major distributors and consumers, which creates confusion and information cracks that don't make sense for us as someone who works directly with said distributors to begin with.

Add to that the myriad of other lessons I learned from feature requests like subscriptions, variable shipping batches, variant sub differentiation, etc, and it quickly became apparent we needed a stronger foundation on which to further expand/better the FOC service for both ourselves and users.

So that's what I've been doing recently - building a more expansive foundational platform from which we can build out features - hopefully without quickly drowning in tech debt. This has included accounting for the future creation of both backend and frontend features, the former of which took priority as we quickly discovered potential fulfillment bottlenecks that needed to be solved/avoided.

I know the only thing different you all might notice this week is our own proprietary coming soon image on some non-Diamond product pages, but the work that has been done and gone live these last couple weeks is the core that will enable us to finally get some of the more requested features you've all asked for soon.

Looking Forward to Year One

These last four months were a prologue of sorts and now we're heading into chapter one of not just offering a solid, reliable FOC service but building out what we hope to grow into a positive example of a proper comic provider.

I won't act like I know what the future holds though. This time last year I would've never believed I'd be writing something like this to begin with.

I just know everyone here is very much looking forward to this next year, and I hope you all are too.