Come for the Ride…

As we all know, there’s nothing sexier than a confident, smart and knowledgeable woman who can take the helm and run the show. If your current startup happen to have these women as a part of your co-founding team, you may want to consider participating in Pitch 2008, a business competition for women based start-ups.

I participated in the 2007 version of this contest with another business idea I had and even though our team didn’t make it all the way to the top, I did learn a great deal about the business we wanted to start. Through the application process, I also met some really cool people whom I will be connecting with once our current project takes flight.

The only criterion for this competition is that at least 50% of your startup has to be owned by a female. Depending on what you’re working on, this probably won’t be an issue. So check it out… meet some cool people, (possibly VC’s) and get your idea started!

Deadline is April 1, 2008.

If I was setting up a new web company as short as a year ago, I would have had a ton of headache worrying about web hosting, email management, Intranet and communication tools for my team. For my startups, this is on the top of my list for pulling the team together via a virtual office. The chore is still important even today but luckily things are much easier now.

In the older, more expensive days of working together via remote offices, getting people together usually involved MS Exchange or some kind of enterprise email system, VPN’s, central storage, company servers, etc., etc. Needless to say, the upfront investment to getting the basic business necessities were costly and security is a constant concern.

Thanks to broadband and Google, things have gotten a lot easier. Google Apps is something we’re currently using for EasyAutoSales.com and it’s something I highly recommend for other entrepreneurs. One of the major misconceptions is that this service cost money. Yes, you could pay for more storage and more advanced features but you also get a lot through the free service.

One of the best things about Google Apps is that you can get email at your domain.com. Your emails aren’t sent “on behalf of your domain via you@gmail.com” but it actually comes straight from your domain. Not only are you using Gmail which in my opinion has one of the best SPAM blockers and interface; you are getting tons of storage for your emails and the convenience of web based access. Best of all this package has a zero cost vs. an expensive MS Exchange system that will ultimately slow to a deathly crawl as your business grows.

However, in addition to email you are getting other tools to help expand your business.  You have free access to online documents, online spreadsheets and an online equivalent to power point. The latter tool is still pretty weak but it’s only a matter of time before it gets upgraded to be on par with the software it’s mimicking.

So while this post may seem pretty obvious for some, hopefully it will get others to try it out who may have overlooked this free service. At the end of the day, we all just need to get the administrative tasks out of the way so we can focus on what matters, which is the business at hand. Setting up Google Apps only take a few minutes… and it’s another way to save you money and weeks of work shopping for servers, softwares and VPN solutions.

Convolute: highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious;

Convolute is something you don’t want to do in business. We seem to still be working out the small number of convoluted ideas we had about our database schema, but we’re getting better at streamlining everything. Example: Work and Business addresses are the same thing, no matter the user. Be it for individual visiting our site or a business who posts their wares on our site, the phone at their place of business is still their work phone number.

It’s not easy to find a good team that you know you can trust to build your business on. Early in our companies creation, we had a few discussions that developers have a mindset (I’ve felt this before in my past) that we are the center of any computer / online based startup. Without our coding ability, the company is nothing. We’re irreplaceable and how dare you question our methods for coding? I’m recently realizing that developers are a, for the most part, a unique group of people. They are used to doing things their own way. They often program for their own enjoyment and answer only to themselves for a majority of their coding career (when younger). They have only themselves to rely upon for learning all their programming skills and thus they aren’t used to being led by others.

Going through various sources to find a developer or development team has given me some insight into what the positives and negatives are in going to various sources to find a team of developers.

1. Craistlist - This is where I came from Craigslist is full of a ragtag bunch of developers who are a bit of hit, miss or guess talent. Some people just want some small side projects. Some people are advertising their development companies. Due to the large number of spam messages, Craigslist has a high signal-to-noise ratio though. If you find someone who fits, consider yourself lucky.

2. Guru.com / oDesk.com - Selections are plentiful and you have a lot of great feedback from previous people. They have “tests” that can give you an idea of how good the technical skills are, but then again, there’s only so much a test can tell you about a developer. Right now, our top developer choice is off Guru.com. Though it sounds cliche, they are an offshore development team from India. We started out a bit rocky, but we’re still on target. There were some people who were very flaky from Guru and oDesk about communication and contact in reasonable times. Quotes were all over the place, but they all averaged to a reasonable number that we had projected in our project description. I’d recommend this for anyone looking to hire a freelancer with high reliability.

3. Forums - I’m still getting responses from this source. I believe this is the source that could yield the best deal. The talent here ranges from newbies to actual PHP creators. You’ve got people who are coming to a forum of their own volition to offer advice and get help. The potential for finding talent here (and people who can vouch for them as well as being able to search the forum for their posts, communication skills and others who can recommend them) is immense. I wish we would have come here first, but we’ll see how everything turns out. In the future, I will use this source more to find new talent as well as a source to change and edit code we do ourselves.

4. Friends - Greatest potential to save money here. I really wish I had a few friends who knew PHP. I have no less than 3 friends I would trust without fail to do work with us. However, two of them are more high level developers who work with lower level languages. two of them are steeped in .NET development (we need a neutral platform that we know how to code ourselves in a pinch: PHP) and all three don’t have a high degree of PHP experience. Two friends in particular went through the same software engineering classes at Purdue I did and I would trust them implicitly, however a lack of PHP knowledge seems to be my main stumbling block in using them. Bummer.

My father has this saying, “Never stop learning.” He’s in his mid-70s and he’s always trying to learn new things. Mind you, he has a B.S. in Chemistry, Masters of Public Health and a Ph.D in Toxiology, so he’s got no shortage on knowledge already stored up in his noggin. With this said, every challenge you take up in life should be a learning experience. You should be looking to expand your horizons and grown in your professional. Without going beyond what you normally do and what you already know, you tend to stagnate.

Early in our projects life, I felt like after the initial startup period and development, I stalled as a person. I was using all my acquired IT skills in a very comfortable manner. To a certain degree, we had the basic site and communications up in a timely manner. However, when the actual site development came into play, I’ve found my current system of site development is too slow and methodical for our purposes. My experience comes from projects that have high availability and mission critical reliability needs. We do testing to no end. We come up with programming plans, have code reviews and  reliability is job one. However, EasyAutoSales.com is a highly agile, web marketing company that needs to exeute quickly for maximum effectiveness.

In a few situations, my programming methods have had to be replaced with a small development team that can work more quickly. I’ve had to change my role and learn to be a manager. Wei has pushed me to contact developers via Guru, oDesk and any PHP forums and choose a team that reports to me, and in turn him. In this, I’ve had to admit to myself that I didn’t have an answer for every programming situation. I like to think I’m a pretty stout developer, but learning how to change my role is something I need to learn for this project and future projects.

My advice to anyone starting up a new business (online or otherwise), roll with the punches. You’re going to have to learn new skills and expand your horizons. Don’t fight it. You’re going to have to choose to pick your battles about doing things “your way” versus whatever it takes to get things done.