Startup Progress Report - February 2008
February has been a busy month for us but luckily we get an extra day to work!
Website programming for the most part has been on track. While working with off shore developers from India, I think we did a really smart thing by smashing the large project into many smaller pieces. However, despite the foresight to do that, I think we still over estimated their ability to see not just the trees, but the entire forest.
Although the majority of the site is done at this point, we have yet to get into debugging. Unfortunately, I think there is a lot of work there but maybe it won’t be as bad as I imagine it to be.
Development on the XML feed side has also been very interesting. Due to the amount of cars we want to launch with and the vast number of images that are associated with these vehicles, we came across some interesting challenges that would have been difficult to resolve just 2 years ago.
Without getting into too much details, let’s just say we are very thankful for Amazon’s EC2 service and their S3 service. If things like this didn’t exist, we would be looking at a very expensive hosting bill before the first user even comes to the site.
On the business front, we have formed an LLC and are now official! Previously I had used incorporate.com to form the company but this time we opted to support a friend of mine whose family also has a company that specializes in Delaware, Florida and Nevada incorporations. www.incnow.com’s prices are pretty competitive and they are also the only place I know online that offers a Series LLC from Delaware. For those of you that aren’t aware, Series LLC is great for people who want to form a company to hold multiple real estate properties or are serial entrepreneurs who may operate a number of separate business entities. If either sounds like something you may do, it’s worth checking out their site to read more about it.
On the funding front, we are still in bootstrap mode. While we are open to funding and are actively looking, we still can’t decide if we should try harder to get money now, get money after launch, or get money after we conquer the state of Georgia. Either way we all realize cash flow is king… so it will be interesting to see what kind of plans we run with once the site launches.
I will say that being in bootstrap mode does really lock you down to worrying about the essentials. We’ve had to rethink our marketing plan as well as hosting plans to make sure we can put money where it matters most. While it would be great to blow $10k a month to host on a dedicated rack, it probably wouldn’t be the best idea.
Speaking of hosting… after evaluating multiple Grid/Cluster hosting plans, dedicated servers and other options, we’ve decided to host on a VPS with WiredTree.com. Using a VPS was definitely not my first option and I had previous rejected the idea for my other ventures. However, despite Gird-hosting’s claims that they offer multiple points of support reducing the chances of down time, many still fail on a regular basis. (Maybe grid is just a marketing ploy like everything else.) These days, you get a lot on a fully managed VPS for not a lot of money. Two things in particular that I liked: 1. NAS backup comes with the service. 2. Full support and management.
I’ve always felt it was better to outsource things I don’t know so I can focus on things I do know. In this case, WiredTree has received a lot of praise for their service and we will definitely do another review in a month or two to see if they are as good as people say they are.
With that… the clock is tickin and we’re ready to move into March.
Wei on February 27th 2008 in Business Development, Milestones, Startup Resources
