Come for the Ride…

According to AdAge, the autos industry will be pushing more ad spend online in 2008. While this is definitely good news for us, what I’m more surprised about is how little they’re spending online now compared to other media.

Changing languages in mid project is one of those things that’s uncomfortable to do and very uncomfortable to talk about; especially for startups. When things like this change in big organizations, something must have failed or someone must’ve gotten fired. However, neither of that has happened here.

Although ultimately it doesn’t matter what a site is coded in (unless it’s Cold Fusion), I felt our team’s grasp of the Django/Python platform wasn’t up to par with what it should be for the team to crank out the code in a reasonable speedy time. From a business perspective, our goal is to build this site using a familiar platform and to build it in the cheapest, fastest and easiest way possible. What we don’t have… is the luxury to learn as we go.

I can say from experience that intimately understanding your technical platform is key in being agile. In my last startup, we used a language I had no idea how to edit and that ultimately killed it. It wasn’t necessarily bad programming or a bad language, but the lack of personal knowledge kept the business website stale and eventually out-of-date. (Of course, everything can be fixed with more resources, but that wasn’t available.) On the flip side, this is why so many CMS systems exist today to help larger organizations manage their content; even if their team aren’t all techies.

After evaluating our team’s strengths and technical prowess, I think for us, php is a better bet. With more overall support on the php side, I feel safer knowing that help can be more easily found if needed. Also when we are ready to pull off more complicated targeting abilities, php will be the easiest to manipulate and update.

For a startup, the runway can best be described as the cash flow you have to keep operations afloat. The use of the airplane runway paints a vivid picture because once you reach the end, you are forced to either take flight or crash and burn. Unfortunately for most startups, they usually result in the latter. However, choosing the right plane and having a clear flight plan may help you avoid tragedy.

Like all things in life, if you have cash (or credit), then you have some wiggle room to make things happen. Without cash, nothing happens. On the flip side, if your runway is too long, it’s also possible that nothing may happen. A plane that never takes off is basically a bus… and no one gets excited about hopping on board a bus.

The trick to making a startup work is to make sure you can create a reasonable runway for the startup you want to take flight. Obviously if you want to fly a Jumbo plane, you will need a longer runway. If you only have enough money to maintain a short runway, you will have to reevaluate your plane; this means shaving off nice-to-have features and focusing on the core necessities (e.g. the engines and the wings).

Realizing what you need to shave off early on will help significantly as you will *hopefully* end your project with a lite but fully functional product instead of a half-completed, bloated pile of junk. Obviously, you can’t fly a half completed plane so what’s the point of trying? Surprisingly many startups do just that… They dive in and just build and build without looking at the whole picture and the length of their runways.

It makes you wonder don’t it?

So, how long is your runway?

I guess this can be considered “why are we doing this: part 3.” This video is great, watch it before it’s taken down by the copyright nazi’s.

As far as corporate blogs go, I would rate “customizing” a very low priority item. This is especially true since we only have a limited number of readers and EasyAutoSales.com, the main business, lacks a working beta for testing. Also in all honesty, people go to blogs for content, not their design; when was the last time you cared about how TechCrunch or TechMeMe looked?

However, since I’m not familiar with our chosen code platform and I can’t help in that department, upgrading and moving the blog was what I’ve spent the last few days on as I took some time to learn more about WordPress and everything that it offers. As of this post, our new home is now at http://comefortheride.com

Compared to Blogger, Xanga, TypePad, LiveJournal, MySpace and various other platforms, WordPress seems to be the blog platform of choice for serious bloggers who want to make money and host their own domains; cause well… personal domains = BIG time. For once, I am happy to say that I am not a first adopter and that hopping onto WordPress this late in the game had the benefit of using a number of templates, plugins and migration tools that made the customization and transition from Blogger to WordPress a piece of cake!

I remember back in 1998 when I first started blogging, I literally had to create my own platform, first from static pages and quickly thereafter via a database. Creating a look required even more work as I literally had to spend days in Photoshop working up a template and then cutting everything to work as a html document; bloggers sure have it easy these days. WordPress templates (free or paid) are everywhere… and installing them was also cake. Blogger.com unfortunately only had a number of templates available and being a visual person, it was unsatisfactory.

So with a little manipulation of the CSS file and some simple installation instructions, our new blog is now fully customized and most of what we cared about: SEO friendliness, custom look, RSS feed, transferring content, etc. were all setup without too much sweat. As I dig into other needs, I’m sure I’ll be pleasantly surprised with additional features that WordPress can offer to help. Let’s just hope I don’t go overboard with it.

On a somewhat related note, Google Analytics now offers new code on its admin console for tracking and reporting additional stats (ga.js). It’s unclear what more they will be reporting for now but if you’re a stat freak and want to test out their new features in the near future, it may be worth logging in now and grabbing the new html code to place on your site. Had I not upgraded our blog to a new domain that required new codes, I probably wouldn’t have remembered reading about this a couple of days back.