Come for the Ride…

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

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.

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?

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 for hundreds, 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.

Does anyone still watch SNL? I swear… Andy Samberg is an entrepreneur in a class of his own.

Oh… and yes, follow your dreams. =)