Come for the Ride…

Things have been super busy here for the EasyAutoSales team - so busy that we skipped our April update. However, the good news is that we’re finally starting to see some fruition from our hours and hours of hard work.

Top 5 Highlights for the Month:

- We squashed about 99.5% of all major bugs on the system. We have scoured and removed dead links from the website. The data displayed on the website should be correct barring any fancy marketing tricks from dealers sending us extremely high or low prices to get special attention.

- SEO and XML efforts are finally paying off. Right now we average about 5,000 to 7,000 visits a day with the majority of our traffic coming from two primary sources. While this is great news compared to no traffic, it is also pretty scary. If any one of the sources decide to stop working, our business would crumble pretty quickly. It is my goal to eventually even this out so we don’t rely on any one particular source for more than 15% of our total traffic - Google included.

- More SEO and more expansion! At my previous startup, I paid for the majority of my traffic due to my inability to change asp.net code to fix our SEO. Even though my old budget was only $2,000 a month, we still managed to make a viable business out of the few referrals we did get. Unfortunately while good money was made, Google Adwords ended up getting most of it.

Our current efforts in SEO has propelled the website to get a LOT of free traffic from a few sources. Current projections are at 200,000 visits in the next 30 days (and growing!) Thanks to our team’s hard work, I feel like I’m actually getting a refund from Google through Adsense. Our goal now is to see how far we can push our SEO efforts to get free traffic before dropping another dime for paid traffic. I guess not having money for marketing has its benefits. Instead of just throwing money at the problem, we’re definitely using our noodle more and learning a lot more about optimization which is helping with our bottom line.

- We can cover our hosting now! We’re not ready to throw any profitability parties just yet but at least we can now pay for our own hosting without needing to dig deeper into our own pockets. We started this venture on the assumption that photo hosting should be cheap or free for our sellers. While we’re still keeping the motto, it’s really not as cheap as I had hoped. Even using Amazon’s S3, our AWS bill for this month was over $700. Yikes! On the bright side, we can now afford to pay it without selling our bodies.

- Partnerships! We’re now working with a couple of famous brands like CARFAX to help make our results more relevant. Not only can you search for the car of your dreams, you can also make sure it’s safe to take home. We plan on doing a few more of these deals to help make our results more useful and relevant.

In June, we will finally be able to start tackling some more fun stuff instead of just fixing bugs and making sure mundane features work. I’m actually looking forward to some of the cool integrations we have in planned with a number of popular web 2.0 websites to get our name out there. Our goal is to move the needle up to 350,000 monthly visits so I look forward to seeing how things play out.

The month of March has been a big month for us. For the first time in awhile, I feel like all pistons are finally running at full speed. I wouldn’t say we’ve been slacking off prior to this month, but now that the site is in beta and people can see it, we are definitely getting a warmer reception from our potential partners who had insisted on seeing something on the web.

So what did we do this month?

We launched our beta on March 21st. In order to get to that point, we had to shave a bunch of features off the priority list (including advanced search). If you had asked me 4 days prior to launch if we’d be ready, you would have found me sitting in a corner pulling my hair out. Thankfully, my team pulled through and now even I’m impressed.

Within a week of launch, we loaded 50,000 cars on to the site. For people in the autos industry, this probably doesn’t seem like a big number. However, if I were to view this holistically, we’ve just beaten about 95% of the online classified sites out there in terms of available vehicle inventory. Not only that, we’re on par with AJCCars.com who also has about 50,000 cars.

Within the first two weeks of launch, we also realized our hosting was inadequate for what we needed. Right now it’s a mix of unoptimized code + tons of data and updates on a small, limited VPS server. After much thought, we have decided to take the process in house and hope that it pays off in the long run as the cheaper option. For anyone whose trying to create the next YouTube, Flickr or banner ad network - Good luck! Bandwidth, hosting and serving media is a huge issue for bootstrap startups.

Obviously with the site sitting at low traffic volumes, I can’t quite claim we’re successful just yet. However, we are purposely delaying our announcement until we get even more cars in the system - which we are diligently working on. For most startups I know, a beta launch = some friends and family feedback resulting in more development work. While perfect code is important, marketing is most likely what will make or break a startup so we’ve been doing tidbits of that as well. Seeding for SEO if you will…

Other than that, our team is working on the GRA/TAG business competition. I must admit, it’s been six years since I’ve written a paper and it’s tough. Day-to-day, I’d much rather be working on the business than writing this paper. On the bright side, our mentor has introduced us to a number of smart, local entrepreneurs who have given us a lot of feedback. As a result, we have changed amended our business model with different revenue streams at least 10 times this month - which is part of the reason why the business plan is getting harder to complete.

I’m hoping April will bring other challenges though. We are definitely ready to take things up a notch and do some marketing tests.

Following 37Signals’ advice, we launched our beta site today to the public and will continue to work on bugs and enhancements as we gather user feedback.  I must say,  it’s been a huge sigh of relief to see the project get to this point.  If you had asked two days ago if we’d be ready for this forced launch, I probably would have laughed and jumped out the window.

However, I am proud to say my team and outsourced developers came through and our first beta is actually pretty good.  So far, most reactions have came back positive so I hope that trend continues!

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.

On this historic Wednesday…

Oil again hit the $100/barrel mark except this time it actually broke the $100/barrel price.

The Navy wants to take out a satellite in space at a cost of $60 million dollars.

We had a lunar eclipse which made the moon red for a brief period of time. (Still no telephoto lens for Wei)

Easy Autos LLC was formed, thus making this venture official. (Our color, also red!)