[luke_s]

Well, as others have pointed out, there is a difference between 'make a donation and we will send you something' to 'we are selling laptop stands - click here to buy now!'. There is no reason you cant just go straight for the latter.

Thanks for asking about my business. I sell tools for grafting trees via http://www.grafting-tool.com/ . It’s a very small business, that I setup in my free time - the website sits there and takes orders, and every week I spend an hour or so posting tools and answering e-mails.

At the moment I'm actually kind of stuck at a local maximum, of 1 or 2 orders a week. There are a million things I could do to improve the business, but with so few customers it’s hard to know what is actually making a difference. It’s impossible to do things like A/B testing to figure out what is working and what is not. Case in point - I tried cutting my prices in half, and the number of orders actually seemed to drop! However it’s impossible to know if I was just having a bad week, or it actually made a difference.