Come for the Ride…

As you all know, we are based in Atlanta, GA. As recently as earlier today, we have had multiple tornadoes today touch down in the city and cause some pretty heavy damage. Even my own family saw some damage due to extreme hail and we had quite a weekend of picking up and cleaning up after the storm. Heck, my phone and internet even suffered through the weekend due to this damage. The people downtown were even worse though:

AJC Tornado Damage Pictures

All the images shown are images submitted by readers of the AJC who have sent them into the news paper. I recall a day when you had a staff photographer at news papers that were sent to take all pictures. A majority of all pictures taken still show either the AP logo or some sort of freelance photographer that the newspapers pay for their pictures. However, with the invention of Flickr, Webshots and Google Images Search, it begs the question: why should I pay someone a full-time salary or expensive freelance fees when I can ask for people to send us images with the privilege of having their images show up on the AJC website. For example:

Flickr Atlanta Tornado Damage Pictures

Here’s another example of the recent crane collapse in New York City:

Flickr New York Crane Collapse

Not only are the pictures better than anything I’ve seen on TV or any media website about the accident, they were done immediately after the incident without having to send out a team to get pictures or manage the logistics someone on the payroll.

So… we are due to launch the beta in five days. To be brutally honest, we’re not ready and I don’t foresee us to be completely bug free in five days. However, if history has ever taught me anything, it’s that perfect launches do not guarantee success but hiding in pre-launch mode indefinitely does guarantee failure.

While this website probably won’t meet my personal standard of launch-acceptableness in five days, hopefully by having the website being live will push us to work even harder and faster to crunch the bugs.

On the bright side, the public seems to be pretty forgiving these days with flawed websites and maybe improving the site with the audience instead of for the audience will help build a loyal following.

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.

Wired.com has a great article on the free economy - which is the very same thing we’re looking to do with EasyAutoSales.com.  For those of you that are struggling to understand why free makes money, I would highly recommend you to check out the article.

I must say… every time I read an article like this, it makes me try to think what else I can offer for free on top of an already free service.  BTW, Wired is offering 10,000 copies of their March edition for free for the first 10,000 people that want to receive it.  (Not sure if it’s already too late though.)

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.