Come for the Ride…

Although most startup entrepreneurs are dedicated, motivated, and hard working - sometimes things just don’t get done.  It’s not your fault really… You are already wearing more hats than most people are willing to and when you have to do 5 or 6 jobs as one person, it can easily get distracting.

While many entrepreneurs prefer to skip to the beat of their own tunes, the best way to stay on track is to make sure you have a destination and a pre-defined track to get there.

Marathon training is a great example of breaking up a large task into short term, measurable goals and forcing yourself to push forward based on a set schedule.  Since most people don’t have the agility to run 26+ miles without some intense training, breaking the task up into smaller, managable chunks forces you to do what matters and ignore the fluff.

Earlier this year, we decided we needed to get the website out there sooner than later so we set a date for launch and stuck to it. Even days right before the launch, we were still not ready and many items were still broken but when launch day came, we put together what worked and threw it out there.  Our reasoning was once the website is public, we would have to start developing against a public time line whereas if we hid in pre-launch mode, then no one would be pushing us to go forward.  In the end, it worked out really well.  By having the website out there, we were approached by many potential partners and we knew we had done the right thing.

So what’s next?

Now that the website is launched, our next steps are to set measurable growth goals and put it against a time line.  For us, this means setting short term traffic and registration goals for 2009 and 2010 and working from the top down to figure out what we need to do each month to hit those numbers.  Again, we are hoping the goals will help us push out the fluff and help us focus our spending and efforts on what will get us to our milestones.  The alternative would be to sit around and hope that people find us by ???? then PROFIT!

With that said, do you have short term goals for your company for development or traffic - one that’s placed against a time line?  If so, what are some of the things you’re looking to achieve?

Bootstrapping a startup is certainly not all fun and games and unlike a day job, you can’t clock out and you don’t get benefits.  We are coming up on our year one of operations as a team.  What started as an idea over a year ago has now blossomed into a tangible service with over 1.8 million cars serving almost 80,000 users a month.  We basically have 50% of AutoTrader’s inventory right now and looking to grow like Dubai skyscrapers.  What a difference a year makes.

Due to increasingly busy schedules and to-do items, we haven’t updated this blog too much over the last few months.  While I would love to say that a lot of crazy things have gone on, the truth is we developed a simple playbook and have been hammering it like annoying telemarketers with a huge list of numbers.

So the pay stinks, the job can be boring, why do this at all?  Why not join a large corporation with a nice salary, huge benefits, and a chance to travel?  Well, at the end of the day, its the love that keeps us going.  We’re not doing this to get on to Mashable or TechCrunch though being recognized would help our ultimate goal.  What keeps us going is the fact that we know we have a better mousetrap and when its complete, we want to make sure the world realizes it too.

It’s funny - of all the people I’ve networked with in the past year who were dedicated to their ideas, many of those startups no longer exist.  Maybe the pay cut is too deep, maybe they learned quick their idea won’t fly or maybe the lack of passion killed it before it ever had a chance.  Whatever it is, it’s amazing to see what a difference a year can make.

Someone once asked me if you found something you loved doing, would you really do it for free? I guess the answer is yes - with some contingencies of course.  But one year later, I’m really glad to see the progress we’ve made and to experience everything we have learned.  Despite the struggles, sleepless nights and developing a habit of talking to my dogs to get their opinions, I probably wouldn’t trade it at all.

It will be interesting to see where we are another year from now.

If there’s anything watching the news has taught me, it’s that excessive spending and uncontrolled growth will ultimately lead to a big crash.  Sure, when the times are good and your customers are paying for your R&D, growth or fancy company retreats, more = better.  However, during the tough times when most people are double clipping their cash to make sure it stays in their pocket, have excess fat on your operations could cost ya in the long run and chances are the government will not bail YOU out.

Since our operations for the most part is still pretty compact, I’ve been pushing the team to focus on trimming the fat in our technology.  When you face a scaling issue with your website, there are a couple of options available to help relieve the issues:

1. You can simply buy more machines to scale up if you can afford the cost.
2. You can tweak your code and squeeze more out of your existing infrastructure.  This one costs money and time as well but the improvements will help you exponentially as you scale up buying more machines.

Of course, both are really valid ways to grow - but if you do 1 without at least attempting 2, then you’re setting yourself up for bloat and wasted expenses.

In the case of EasyAutoSales - our monthly AWS costs for processing and storing images are getting close to  $1,000 a month. For a service that is supposed to the cheaper solution, it either means we’re growing well beyond our initial expectations or that we need to tweak the setup to work faster so we can save some dough.  Luckily for us, our problems are a combination of both growth and some bloat, the latter which we can fix.

In addition to tweaking some processes to make sure everything runs smoother and faster, we also found that Amazon now offers a cheaper mid-sized EC2 where it offers more computing power at half the price.  I guess Amazon realized that many are using EC2 for computing and not necessarily storage for a website and have decided to offer this new service to respond to the usage patterns.  By making code changes and instance changes, we expect to save a significant amount of money, possibly up to 25-30% of our monthly bill with Amazon.

With that said, what have you done with your startup this month to curb expenses?