I'm a control freak at times. I like my HTML a certain way. It's got to be pretty (readable) as well as functional and if it's not, I don't feel as though I'm doing it right. This leads to me never really trust people when programming up web pages. However, I've got to say I'm pleasantly surprised for some very readable and usable code. I've finished up programming the car details page and the car search page. With the code I wrote in Python-Django, I just plugged the HTML into my templates, made sure some loops were formatted properly with the pre-generated code and within 30 minutes I had the pages up. The majority of the time was to determine where to put the CSS files, image files and how to link them up in Django's framework.
Now, granted, my XML feed formats are messed up and need a reworking of the model as to allow for some null fields I'm now finding, but that shouldn't be more than a days worth of work.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
"I can't afford it."
That's not true.
At least it's not true almost all the time. Very few of your prospects literally can't afford it. What they are really trying to say is, "it's not worth it." As in, it's not worth reprioritizing my life, not worth the risk, not worth what I'll have to give up to get this, not worth being in debt for.
The blog title and the quote above were pulled from Seth Godin's blog. Although he was talking about selling a product or service, I've actually received a similar response recently while talking with my friend about starting a company.
For me, it's always been "you can't afford not to..." after all, life's too short not to try. However, my friend's response to my question on why he hasn't started a venture when that's all he reads and writes about, really baffled me; until I read the quote above.
Even though many entrepreneurs have the courage to just go-for-it and take it for granted, there are many others out there who just can't seem to do the same. If you guys have any good advice on how to release the fear, I would love to hear about it so I can pass on the encouragement.
Edit: Releasing the fear is just the first roadblock of many to pass through when jumping into the world of entrepreneurship. However, everything else including money, technical skill, resources, etc. can all be resolved once a person set their mind to it. So the question is, what would make an entrepreneur climb over that first wall so s/he would learn that they can in fact think creatively and scale any wall?
At least it's not true almost all the time. Very few of your prospects literally can't afford it. What they are really trying to say is, "it's not worth it." As in, it's not worth reprioritizing my life, not worth the risk, not worth what I'll have to give up to get this, not worth being in debt for.
The blog title and the quote above were pulled from Seth Godin's blog. Although he was talking about selling a product or service, I've actually received a similar response recently while talking with my friend about starting a company.
For me, it's always been "you can't afford not to..." after all, life's too short not to try. However, my friend's response to my question on why he hasn't started a venture when that's all he reads and writes about, really baffled me; until I read the quote above.
Even though many entrepreneurs have the courage to just go-for-it and take it for granted, there are many others out there who just can't seem to do the same. If you guys have any good advice on how to release the fear, I would love to hear about it so I can pass on the encouragement.
Edit: Releasing the fear is just the first roadblock of many to pass through when jumping into the world of entrepreneurship. However, everything else including money, technical skill, resources, etc. can all be resolved once a person set their mind to it. So the question is, what would make an entrepreneur climb over that first wall so s/he would learn that they can in fact think creatively and scale any wall?
As Expected, Money Talks...
As a desperate measure to gain some control in the matter of no communication, we decided to do a couple of things to resolve the issue of the missing designer.
1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn't to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.
If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.
www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page
One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you're doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.
2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what's left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.
Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.
Fancy that...
As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he'll get it this time.
1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn't to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.
If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.
www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page
One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you're doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.
2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what's left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.
Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.
Fancy that...
As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he'll get it this time.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Partnership, Ownership and the Whole Pie Thing...
We're still scouring the web and networking events looking for awesome entrepreneurs to join our startup. As we're checking out various areas on the web and seeing what other people are writing and asking about, there seems to be a common theme among the newbies which is: how much equity or options should I give away to attract raw talent?
Well, I'm sure the answer differs for everyone, every industry and especially for people who think their ideas MAKE the business and everything else is secondary. However, my experience has taught me that it's much better to share. Think about it... would you rather have a 40% stake in a King Monster sized Twix or would you rather have a complete piece of a fun size Twix? If you opted for 100% of the smaller piece, you are definitely not seeing the BIGGER picture.
So what is a fair split in equity? 33% across the board would be fair on paper for a three person company, but that seems a bit too simple and well... not fair in practice. I'm not sure if there is a magic formula for this question but I can tell you what we're doing.
My original plan and the one we're using for now is 40% (me) ideas / 30% developer / 30% marketing. This split is of course, pre-funding and pre-slicing the pie for other roles in the company. My thinking is, the business would not exist without the idea, at the same time, without programming and without marketing, the business would also not exist. So because I'm in need of all three key positions to sustain the project, I'm happy to give away large pieces of the pie (or Twix) for those that would work towards the shared vision.
However, ownership percentage aside, the above split is also how I envision the work to be split. Many, MANY startups focus on 98% programming and nothing else. I've been there, it doesn't work. You can't sit in a bubble and code all day and expect your product to meet some demand and suddenly gain interest if you never get any feedback or market it. We all should know by now: If you build it, they won't come unless they have a reason to. Therefore, just as I believe my CTO should get 30% of the company for months of hard work, my VP of business development/marketing should also do about 30% of the overall work and get 30% of the equity.
In the end, hopefully all the hours will add up and something nice, possibly a monster Twix will await us on the flip side.
Speaking of marketing and networking... while Randall has been busy hammering away at the technical stuff, I've been out in the field talking to people and avoiding sitting in front of a computer. Though I must admit, after just a couple of weeks of these events, I'm a bit networked out...
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Wednesday night was an AiMA meeting where I met some marketers and learned about Business Lead Gen. (Great stuff!)
Tonight was the Atlanta Deck Party which was also a pretty cool networking event. Surprisingly, the crowd was a lot older than I thought since I expected half to be GaTech students.
I did make Randall come out for this one cause I figured it's probably more his crowd than mine. Also, I see a common theme between all my programmer friends which is: they don't network enough. In any case, it's great to see such a huge turnout for the Atlanta area... Maybe I don't have to move to Silicon Valley for awhile after all!
Well, I'm sure the answer differs for everyone, every industry and especially for people who think their ideas MAKE the business and everything else is secondary. However, my experience has taught me that it's much better to share. Think about it... would you rather have a 40% stake in a So what is a fair split in equity? 33% across the board would be fair on paper for a three person company, but that seems a bit too simple and well... not fair in practice. I'm not sure if there is a magic formula for this question but I can tell you what we're doing.
My original plan and the one we're using for now is 40% (me) ideas / 30% developer / 30% marketing. This split is of course, pre-funding and pre-slicing the pie for other roles in the company. My thinking is, the business would not exist without the idea, at the same time, without programming and without marketing, the business would also not exist. So because I'm in need of all three key positions to sustain the project, I'm happy to give away large pieces of the pie (or Twix) for those that would work towards the shared vision.
However, ownership percentage aside, the above split is also how I envision the work to be split. Many, MANY startups focus on 98% programming and nothing else. I've been there, it doesn't work. You can't sit in a bubble and code all day and expect your product to meet some demand and suddenly gain interest if you never get any feedback or market it. We all should know by now: If you build it, they won't come unless they have a reason to. Therefore, just as I believe my CTO should get 30% of the company for months of hard work, my VP of business development/marketing should also do about 30% of the overall work and get 30% of the equity.
In the end, hopefully all the hours will add up and something nice, possibly a monster Twix will await us on the flip side.
Speaking of marketing and networking... while Randall has been busy hammering away at the technical stuff, I've been out in the field talking to people and avoiding sitting in front of a computer. Though I must admit, after just a couple of weeks of these events, I'm a bit networked out...
.jpg)
Wednesday night was an AiMA meeting where I met some marketers and learned about Business Lead Gen. (Great stuff!)
Tonight was the Atlanta Deck Party which was also a pretty cool networking event. Surprisingly, the crowd was a lot older than I thought since I expected half to be GaTech students. I did make Randall come out for this one cause I figured it's probably more his crowd than mine. Also, I see a common theme between all my programmer friends which is: they don't network enough. In any case, it's great to see such a huge turnout for the Atlanta area... Maybe I don't have to move to Silicon Valley for awhile after all!
TechJournal Deck Party
http://www.techjournalsouth.com/deckparty/atlanta.php
Well, it was my first face to face tonight with our adoring public. Wei and I met at the TechJournal Deck Party at the ATDC (atdc.org) at Georgia Tech this evening to network with some like minded entrepreneurial individuals. There were a few note worthy people like Lance Weatherby who works at the ATDC and Alan Pinstein, another web entrepreneur. I even got to chat with some Peak 10 girls who have some nice solutions up in Norcross if Wei and I decide to go with the CoLo. There were deffinatly some VC people there, a lot of developers, some marketing people sprinkled in and some students who showed up as well (perhaps for the Bass and Stella Artois). All in all, it was a great learning experience and I look forward to speaking with some of my contacts again.
Wei, Mike Schinkel and I were discussing though, that it's hard at a meeting like this that has so many people who might not actually be anything we need. And when you spend a lot of time chit-chatting and find out 10 minutes later that, though they are an interesting person, they offer nothing to Wei and My venture. If nothing else, it's nice to hone the people skills and it's a good way to teach yourself to go up to complete stranger and talk to them.
Well, it was my first face to face tonight with our adoring public. Wei and I met at the TechJournal Deck Party at the ATDC (atdc.org) at Georgia Tech this evening to network with some like minded entrepreneurial individuals. There were a few note worthy people like Lance Weatherby who works at the ATDC and Alan Pinstein, another web entrepreneur. I even got to chat with some Peak 10 girls who have some nice solutions up in Norcross if Wei and I decide to go with the CoLo. There were deffinatly some VC people there, a lot of developers, some marketing people sprinkled in and some students who showed up as well (perhaps for the Bass and Stella Artois). All in all, it was a great learning experience and I look forward to speaking with some of my contacts again.
Wei, Mike Schinkel and I were discussing though, that it's hard at a meeting like this that has so many people who might not actually be anything we need. And when you spend a lot of time chit-chatting and find out 10 minutes later that, though they are an interesting person, they offer nothing to Wei and My venture. If nothing else, it's nice to hone the people skills and it's a good way to teach yourself to go up to complete stranger and talk to them.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Top 4 Ways to DESTROY a Business Relationship
Okay... so it seems like we've hit our first official hiccup in this project. In the past, I can at least attribute the screw up or misunderstanding to one thing or another; this time I am completely baffled. Our designer, the one who delivered great layouts (that I will post about soon), the one who turned those layouts into compliant HTML, the one who has AMAZED us with his creativity... has now gone MIA for the last 5 days. The weird thing is, the only thing left to deliver from our short and sweet project is the CSS code and the only thing we're asking for are status updates. In theory, this should be the easiest portion of the project since there is quick way to determine from the code what's right and wrong.
I really don't get it. I thought he would finish on time, we would pay him, life would be great and down the road I would refer him other business. The designer has been very impressive thus far with his creativity but more recently became a pain to manage as the project heads towards the end. Where did the communication break down? I'm not really sure... My guess is maybe he's hit a bump in the development and are now avoiding us. Either way, if we don't get what we need soon, we will have to look elsewhere, which will suck for everyone involved.
For those of you running your own freelance gigs or running your company, the following are the top 4 ways to DESTROY a working relationship (from the perspective of your customers.)
1. Over promise, under deliver. (Timeliness) I've actually had a few projects I outsourced in the past that have come back perfect to spec and gave me exactly (or more than) what I wanted. What separated those would-be perfect feedback from the average ones I gave were the false expectations set by the bidder when the project was posted. Now, I understand in order to bid for the project, you may need to make your bid more attractive; however, over promising and under delivering will leave a sour taste in your client's mouth no matter how creative or technical you are. As it stands, I've already set myself up and padded the delivery date by 2 or 3 times the desired date to meet my own expectation. However, if you tell me you can meet a certain date and then miss it; that's just really poor business. If the technologists can be more honest about these due dates and/or services that are provided, the world would be a better place.
2. Communication, or lack there of... This is probably by far my biggest pet peeve when it comes to working remotely with a virtual team. If nothing else, communication is the KEY thing companies NEED to keep wide open and free flowing; especially when working remotely. (See in the picture above how Guru.com has ratings available for Communication on both sides of the gig? It is THAT important!) Why do you think there are so many tools out there that focuses on improving communication? Phones, email, cell phones, SMS, AIM, Skype, twitter, iChat, G-talk, video conferencing, so on and so on. Your customers 3. Professionalism. Now I'll admit, I've worked with some amazing college students and even more amazing high school kids. The talent out there that gets computer programming and the whole "dot com" businesses are plenty. What makes you better than them or vice versa? Simple, professionalism. One would assume a freelancer would have more professionalism than a kid or that someone who runs a business would have more professionalism over a part-time freelancer. Are they right? No, not always, but the impression of professionalism helps when you want to win clients.
I remember sending some RFP's (request for proposals) awhile back and getting a few well written responses back. No, not all of them were good, but that's beside the point. During the same RFP process, I also remember this one guy who didn't really read the requirements but wrote back anyway giving me his standard copy-and-paste pitch. I told him "No thanks. You simply don't meet the level of service we're used to dealing with." Once he got my email and email address, he then proceeded to contact me via G-talk to try to close the deal. As if that wasn't annoying enough, he didn't even pay attention during the chat!!! Seriously? You're going to contact me after getting rejected, start a conversation then make ME wait for a chat response while you get up to get an apple or whatever the @#$@! you're doing? I'd honestly be surprised if that guy ever got any business from those methods.
P.S. - No matter how cool you think you are, don't IM me until we've established a working relationship; that is just not cool.
4. Technical Expertise For small projects that doesn't have the luxury of a large budget and/or development research time, please don't BID on it if you don't know how to do it. Bidding for the sake of bidding is stupid and it will lead to more bad than good especially if you're a small business starting up. If you don't have the technical expertise on staff, let the opportunity go to someone else who does. Ultimately, you want clients who require technology you're comfortable with and in turn, will refer you to other people knowing you are a pro at what you do. If you are new to something and don't have a great grasp of it yet, don't waste both of our time. What will end up happening is you will mess it up, then probably violate a few of the other points mentioned above due to the lack of technical expertise which will lead you to shame, anxiety (for both parties), and a bad rep for your business.
On the flip side, if you work on things you already know intimately, you'll be able to enjoy referrals from your other customers who also love your work. Isn't that what you ultimately want? ...To be able to work on your business and your core skills instead of spending day and night attracting new customers? Finding new clients is hard work and it's costly!!!
Think about it and don't make the above mistakes.
edit: Are any of your xhtml gurus or can you refer us to those who can convert design to compliant code for cheap in case our design is really MIA?
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Introduce Us!
Do you like this blog? Does it inspire you?
As we start this venture to start a dot com business, we are also looking to network with other like-minded people. If you feel that we are worthy of being introduced to other entrepreneurs, please tell someone about us; or better yet, write about us on your blog!
No, we're not looking for a free link-back or looking to make money off of this blog. (no ads!) However, we would love to meet other people who are on the same journey as us and maybe help each other out as things progress.
Thanks!
As we start this venture to start a dot com business, we are also looking to network with other like-minded people. If you feel that we are worthy of being introduced to other entrepreneurs, please tell someone about us; or better yet, write about us on your blog!
No, we're not looking for a free link-back or looking to make money off of this blog. (no ads!) However, we would love to meet other people who are on the same journey as us and maybe help each other out as things progress.
Thanks!
GoDaddy Promo Codes
This is just a reminder that if you are buying domain names from GoDaddy (like me), that there are promo codes out there to help save you from the slow but increasing prices that GoDaddy has been charging year over year.
Remember $6.95 .com domain names? Yeah, I wish I still do too. However, if you're buying one domain or a block of domains, check out the GoDaddy promo codes and save yourself some change. Your future lawyers are calling dibs on that money.
Remember $6.95 .com domain names? Yeah, I wish I still do too. However, if you're buying one domain or a block of domains, check out the GoDaddy promo codes and save yourself some change. Your future lawyers are calling dibs on that money.
Friday, October 19, 2007
The Amazon Startup Challenge
There is only about a week left or so in the Amazon Startup Challenge. For our 3 readers who haven't heard of it, I figured I'd give you a heads up if you may be remotely interested in it.
Basically, if you are planning on building a service that can utilize a number of Amazon services including storage, cloud computing, payments, queuing, etc. You should submit your idea to see if you can get some free money out of the deal.
We will be entering our idea into the contest but since we are only planning on using S3 and none of the other stuff, I doubt we'll get selected. For some reason, I have a hunch that the overall goal is to allow Amazon to present a case study where they can showcase how the combination of Amazon Web Services helped some startup with a crazy setup launch online with low startup costs. Unfortunately for them, my goal isn't to design a business around Amazon, as sexy as that sounds.
Anyway, good luck if you're hopping on the train. Entries are due on October 28.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=377634011
What a Week...
I sold my soul to Power Point this week. No, I didn't come up with a short elevator pitch for the business or a cute 10 slide presentation about our 3 to 5 year projections. This week (and this past month), I've been working on a number of presentations for work (day job) and everything finally ended today with my last 2 presentations that lasted for 3.5 hours.
I feel completely drained.
So what went on this week besides power points? Well, now that Randall's handling the technical part, freeing me up to be a nerdy social butterfly, I've been trying to meet all the right people around Atlanta to get my idea off the ground.
The week started with lunch with my former boss who happens to be an Emory grad and a huge proponent of entrepreneurship for the Atlanta area. I invited him to lunch to get some insights into starting up and opinions on my idea. After all, as realistic I think I am, I'm sure I'm still in some kind of tunnel vision. A few tid bits came out of lunch which were great advice.
1. The cheapest way to get free legal advice from a lawyer is to take them out to lunch.
2. Getting some key people in the industry behind your product as advisers will greatly enhance your credibility especially if you're a first time entrepreneur.
Both seem so simple yet one of them I definitely did not think about.
He also raised another good question to me which actually required a bit of thought. How far do we actually want to take this venture? Despite all the videos we were taunting earlier last month, are we going to be happy starting this up and have it make $20k residual income on the side or do we want to get some venture money and take it mainstream? (Randall and I agreed, we're going mainstream. "Go BIG or go home!")
On Wednesday after work, I decided to go check out an entrepreneurial event sponsored by Emory. The great news is you don't have to be affiliated with Emory to go though I'm sure for networking purposes, that would've helped. While I was there, my old boss who helped with the event introduced me to a guy from Manheim, who spoke to me a little bit about our project. I must say, I was not pleased with my questions since 1. I didn't know what Manheim did and 2. I was not prepared to ask competitor questions. Either way, I'm sure I sounded pretty stupid asking the most basic questions that you could have answered from just searching the web. I did learn one interesting fact that I didn't know from previous research: AutoTrader also started off with a free to list version for consumers and eventually got to where they are today after finding out what was profitable vs. what wasn't.
The event at Emory was pretty cool. Amongst some cool (but awkward) entrepreneurs, I got to meet Sean Belnick and hear him speak about how he started his business. If nothing else, I wish I would have had some help starting up... I think that would have made a huge difference.
Thursday night was a bit of a different animal. I skipped a Google Oktoberfest party to go to another networking event. Instead of getting advice this time, I was dishing it. The Atlanta Entrepreneur Meetup group had another meeting and the topic this month was SEM (search engine marketing). Well, guess what? I do SEM as my day job and I'm somewhat qualified to give advice! Luckily I knew a bit more than the average bear and was honored with one of the panelist seats giving advice about what I do. The thing is, I actually learned a lot from the other panelists as well; overall, a great experience.
SEM is actually something I'll write about here in a few months; it's just so far away at this point for this project and there's definitely no need to put the cart before the horse. However, from meeting some of the other entrepreneurs last night who told me what they knew, I would say this is definitely an important part of a startup's success that you should learn with care. Hopefully the people I met last night will keep in touch; some of them are definitely further ahead than we are in terms of where they are in their business so it'd be great to bounce ideas.
I feel completely drained.
So what went on this week besides power points? Well, now that Randall's handling the technical part, freeing me up to be a nerdy social butterfly, I've been trying to meet all the right people around Atlanta to get my idea off the ground.
The week started with lunch with my former boss who happens to be an Emory grad and a huge proponent of entrepreneurship for the Atlanta area. I invited him to lunch to get some insights into starting up and opinions on my idea. After all, as realistic I think I am, I'm sure I'm still in some kind of tunnel vision. A few tid bits came out of lunch which were great advice.
1. The cheapest way to get free legal advice from a lawyer is to take them out to lunch.
2. Getting some key people in the industry behind your product as advisers will greatly enhance your credibility especially if you're a first time entrepreneur.
Both seem so simple yet one of them I definitely did not think about.
He also raised another good question to me which actually required a bit of thought. How far do we actually want to take this venture? Despite all the videos we were taunting earlier last month, are we going to be happy starting this up and have it make $20k residual income on the side or do we want to get some venture money and take it mainstream? (Randall and I agreed, we're going mainstream. "Go BIG or go home!")
On Wednesday after work, I decided to go check out an entrepreneurial event sponsored by Emory. The great news is you don't have to be affiliated with Emory to go though I'm sure for networking purposes, that would've helped. While I was there, my old boss who helped with the event introduced me to a guy from Manheim, who spoke to me a little bit about our project. I must say, I was not pleased with my questions since 1. I didn't know what Manheim did and 2. I was not prepared to ask competitor questions. Either way, I'm sure I sounded pretty stupid asking the most basic questions that you could have answered from just searching the web. I did learn one interesting fact that I didn't know from previous research: AutoTrader also started off with a free to list version for consumers and eventually got to where they are today after finding out what was profitable vs. what wasn't.The event at Emory was pretty cool. Amongst some cool (but awkward) entrepreneurs, I got to meet Sean Belnick and hear him speak about how he started his business. If nothing else, I wish I would have had some help starting up... I think that would have made a huge difference.
Thursday night was a bit of a different animal. I skipped a Google Oktoberfest party to go to another networking event. Instead of getting advice this time, I was dishing it. The Atlanta Entrepreneur Meetup group had another meeting and the topic this month was SEM (search engine marketing). Well, guess what? I do SEM as my day job and I'm SEM is actually something I'll write about here in a few months; it's just so far away at this point for this project and there's definitely no need to put the cart before the horse. However, from meeting some of the other entrepreneurs last night who told me what they knew, I would say this is definitely an important part of a startup's success that you should learn with care. Hopefully the people I met last night will keep in touch; some of them are definitely further ahead than we are in terms of where they are in their business so it'd be great to bounce ideas.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Just Some Stats for You Crazy Kidz...
So... autos is a $380 billion dollar industry you say? (advertising makes up for $31 billion dollars with $2.8 billion for online) Well, advertising aside, these were the number of cars sold in the last three years which accounts for all sorts of other $$$.
2004 – 7,505,932 cars
2005 – 16,912,553 cars
2006 – 16,559,970 cars
edit: is it bad that I did my research on the web in the exact same way that teachers are teaching kids not to?
2004 – 7,505,932 cars
2005 – 16,912,553 cars
2006 – 16,559,970 cars
edit: is it bad that I did my research on the web in the exact same way that teachers are teaching kids not to?
Start-up Chores: Getting a Reliable, Scalable Web Host
Our last chores post gained some unexpected assistance getting us into the Grand Central beta. Thanks Ginene for sending us the invites! We will think of you every time we get a call that forwards straight to the voice mail. =)
Okay... so we're now in month 2, starting month 3 of the project. One of the things that should be easy but for our somewhat unique situation isn't, is web hosting.
I've done a few ventures before where hosting was a cinch! We pick a random web host, ran with it for awhile and when the time and/or traffic came to a point where moving was necessary, we simply packed up our files and DB and moved. Having setup both on shared hosting and dedicated hosting, I really, REALLY can not recommend shared hosting. If you're looking to code a brochure site or having a blog on your own domain, that would probably work great for you. The price is great and using admin software makes setup a breeze. However, if you are starting a serious business, it's hard to justify all the risks that come with shared hosting.
- If someone writes inefficient code on your server, WHAM! Your service can slow to a crawl or worse, go down.
- If someone SPAMs from your server, your site/IP could potentially get blacklisted if sharing the same IP. On another note, if you don't have your own unique IP for your mail server, chances are you can't even send mass mail to a majority of your customers.
- If someone on your server gets the DIGG effect, you too may suffer as a result.
- If you need to install something that isn't already provisioned on the server, depending on who you're with you may get a yay or nay; which could severely affect your services.
Basically all of the above are things I don't want to worry about when I should be focusing on growing the business. I've actually hopped about 10 hosting providers in a span of 6 months before so I do have some experience in this field.
"If you are serious about running a marathon, get the right shoes."
So what's so special with what we're doing that this is now a topic for discussion? Well, being that we're an autos website, we do plan on having a huge inventory of cars on the site some day. (That some day being sooner than later.) If you think about it... storing multiple images forhundreds, thousands, millions of cars can take up quite a bit of space. While we were playing around with some preliminary numbers yesterday during our meeting, we worked it out to about 300 gigs worth of thumbnails and about a terabyte worth of full sized images. That's pretty funny because I think all the actual code for the site will probably be about two megs or less. (Maybe it's easier if we just ran a porn site.)
So when we're talking about these kinds of storage numbers... Uh... first off, no company I know offers a terabyte of storage on one drive on one dedicated server. The reason I'm even using that criteria is because anything beyond one drive will require special coding that I don't understand. Anything beyond one server will probably drain our wallets faster than Paris can shop in 3 minutes. So for our sake, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. (On another note, if you have the money, you can opt for NAS storage.)
So what to do? What to do?
Well, there's been a lot of talk about Amazon's amazing, web 2.0, startup friendly web services that can help businesses scale from zero to infinity and beyond in terms of storage, processing power and etc. The Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is of particular interest to me because of its capacity and the fact the data is saved redundantly. If we use it, we *may* save thousands a month by not buying three dedicated servers to start to anticipate traffic. Then again, if they are ever to change their pricing again, we may potentially be screwed.
In terms of raw processing power, Amazon also offers the EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. Like asp.net, elastic computing is beyond my understanding... especially since neither EC2 or S3 solution provides a simple way to setup a domain, emails and databases. I guess if we ever need to pull extended queries, maybe we can make use of EC2 separately from our servers but right now it's in beta and it's still a bit scary for me to commit to using the service.
So what else is out there? Well, The Planet, Rackspace, ServerBeach all offer great dedicated hosting with great support, but if we want to do one or two machine and do it right, we would most likely need RAID's, backups, etc. all of which will eat into our bottom line. Hrmm, still no good.
During my research, a guy had also recommended hosting in a VPS like environment, except on a Grid. A grid? Grid computing - marketed to me as a elastic computing cloud but spread across different machines with true IP's and the ability to setup databases w/o it disappearing into thin air if the server crashes. It sounds great and all, but is this really just a souped up shared hosting? Upon further research, it doesn't appear that way, though, until (IF) we use it, I'm really not sure if it will provide all that much more benefits than just having a few dedicated servers.
That's where we are for now... if any one has any hosting hookups or recommendations, we would love to hear from you. The goal of course, is to launch the business and not get stuck in an infinite loop trying to figure out how to change our code to work with various hosting environments. It'd be nice if there's a hosting environment that'll change to work with our code.
Okay... so we're now in month 2, starting month 3 of the project. One of the things that should be easy but for our somewhat unique situation isn't, is web hosting.
I've done a few ventures before where hosting was a cinch! We pick a random web host, ran with it for awhile and when the time and/or traffic came to a point where moving was necessary, we simply packed up our files and DB and moved. Having setup both on shared hosting and dedicated hosting, I really, REALLY can not recommend shared hosting. If you're looking to code a brochure site or having a blog on your own domain, that would probably work great for you. The price is great and using admin software makes setup a breeze. However, if you are starting a serious business, it's hard to justify all the risks that come with shared hosting.
- If someone writes inefficient code on your server, WHAM! Your service can slow to a crawl or worse, go down.
- If someone SPAMs from your server, your site/IP could potentially get blacklisted if sharing the same IP. On another note, if you don't have your own unique IP for your mail server, chances are you can't even send mass mail to a majority of your customers.
- If someone on your server gets the DIGG effect, you too may suffer as a result.
- If you need to install something that isn't already provisioned on the server, depending on who you're with you may get a yay or nay; which could severely affect your services.
Basically all of the above are things I don't want to worry about when I should be focusing on growing the business. I've actually hopped about 10 hosting providers in a span of 6 months before so I do have some experience in this field.
"If you are serious about running a marathon, get the right shoes."
So what's so special with what we're doing that this is now a topic for discussion? Well, being that we're an autos website, we do plan on having a huge inventory of cars on the site some day. (That some day being sooner than later.) If you think about it... storing multiple images for
So when we're talking about these kinds of storage numbers... Uh... first off, no company I know offers a terabyte of storage on one drive on one dedicated server. The reason I'm even using that criteria is because anything beyond one drive will require special coding that I don't understand. Anything beyond one server will probably drain our wallets faster than Paris can shop in 3 minutes. So for our sake, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. (On another note, if you have the money, you can opt for NAS storage.)
So what to do? What to do?
Well, there's been a lot of talk about Amazon's amazing, web 2.0, startup friendly web services that can help businesses scale from zero to infinity and beyond in terms of storage, processing power and etc. The Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is of particular interest to me because of its capacity and the fact the data is saved redundantly. If we use it, we *may* save thousands a month by not buying three dedicated servers to start to anticipate traffic. Then again, if they are ever to change their pricing again, we may potentially be screwed.
In terms of raw processing power, Amazon also offers the EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. Like asp.net, elastic computing is beyond my understanding... especially since neither EC2 or S3 solution provides a simple way to setup a domain, emails and databases. I guess if we ever need to pull extended queries, maybe we can make use of EC2 separately from our servers but right now it's in beta and it's still a bit scary for me to commit to using the service.
So what else is out there? Well, The Planet, Rackspace, ServerBeach all offer great dedicated hosting with great support, but if we want to do one or two machine and do it right, we would most likely need RAID's, backups, etc. all of which will eat into our bottom line. Hrmm, still no good.
During my research, a guy had also recommended hosting in a VPS like environment, except on a Grid. A grid? Grid computing - marketed to me as a elastic computing cloud but spread across different machines with true IP's and the ability to setup databases w/o it disappearing into thin air if the server crashes. It sounds great and all, but is this really just a souped up shared hosting? Upon further research, it doesn't appear that way, though, until (IF) we use it, I'm really not sure if it will provide all that much more benefits than just having a few dedicated servers.
That's where we are for now... if any one has any hosting hookups or recommendations, we would love to hear from you. The goal of course, is to launch the business and not get stuck in an infinite loop trying to figure out how to change our code to work with various hosting environments. It'd be nice if there's a hosting environment that'll change to work with our code.
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