Come for the Ride…

Summer is here! Well, for everyone who isn’t working in a startup who has had a chance to look outside, summer is here. For the rest of us, this seems to be the time when things slow down, motivation is low and when potential customers are harder to reach as they disappear for weeks on various vacations.

So what do you do when you want to move at the speed of business but business is crawling like a snail? Change things up!

When I worked in the corporate world, summer was the time when all the co-workers wanted to duck out early, go out for lunch, and stay at home on Fridays. Not a lot has changed. If you’re feeling the cabin fever, schedule some networking meetings over coffee or lunch outside and join the rest of the people in the afternoon Sun.

On the subject of scheduling meetings and making deals - avoid Mondays and Fridays. People are busy catching up on stuff from the extended weekends on Mondays and they’re either physically out of the office or mentally out on Fridays. Either way, if you want to be heard, try the middle of the week.

Do you really want to hurry up and wait? Sometimes it’s good (and healthy) to go with the flow and take a break from time to time. Now that we spend our days doing SEO and waiting for responses from various business people, I find on some days I’m busy manning the computer when not a lot is going on. On some of these afternoons, I really feel like going to the pool and just hang out for a bit; and maybe I should.

Burning yourself out when everything is slow is just… bad.

Do any of you know any developers that fit the following?

Who We Are Looking For:

We are looking for a senior level php developer who understands what it’s like to work for an unfunded startup to take us to the next level. (Yes, we know you could very easily still be a student at one of the local colleges.)

You must know php, mysql, html, ajax, CSS, JavaScript and apache intimately to apply. (If you have a blog that talks about php or apache that is a plus. Having successfully exited a previous web based startups is a HUGE plus!)

Our basic site already works and now we’re looking for someone who can come in, update it for SEO, squash all the bugs and tune it for enterprise level performance. Ideally you can come in as a startup sniper and do all the work mentioned above within 2-5 months. (If you don’t know SEO, we can teach you!) Either way, this would a great experience for both parties to learn as well as make a very profitable site.

More work will exist after the 2-5 months, but skillz and speed is of the essence for what we currently need.

If you think you qualify and would like more information (and our URL), please shoot us an email along with your resume, sample URLs, your contributions to those URLs and/or development blog. If you’re a good fit, we’ll be happy to discuss what we’re doing, as well as what we are expecting from the developer.

Thanks!

After working with our developers in both India and America over the past month, I have come to think about various differences between the two. I have started to see similarities in people I know here in the US and able to divide them into groups with respect to the skills needed to be an entrepreneur. For example, our American developer is a very independent person who can take an idea and run with it. He lays out a variety of prospective directions to take a project and goes out of his way to present the best solution for a given project. With his knowledge, we’ll be able to use Amazon Web Services and EC2 services to process a large portion of the code we’ll have to run on a daily basis. It will cost us money, but in the long term it may save us quite a bit due to the costs of maintaining hardware and the omnipresent possibility of hardware failure. He’s creative and really knows everything within and surrounding the scope of what we need, allowing us to expand what we would otherwise be able to do.

On the other hand, we have our Indian developers who are very strict about what they do. Any questions and there is constant contact. There is very little initiative and creativity involved in their development. Much of the project is done with a lot of hand holding. There’s not as much initiative. There is, however, consistency. I can expect consistent updates. I can expect questions every few days. And in the end, we do still get excellent code that works.

What this all comes down to is Americans value creativity and innovative thinking well above and beyond most other cultures. I had read an article a long time ago about why startups work in America the best and one reason was our educational system. It’s unique structure often allows for children to go through 21 years of schooling and still not know what they want to do when they grow up. It allows for a higher degree of success (and failure). It values hard work and creativity above pure intelligence (Warren Buffett is a very smart person, but if you’ve read his biography you’ll see that hard work and creativity got him where he is today). That’s what entrepeneurialism is all about: hard work and creativity. It’s the reason you go out and start you own company. It’s the same need for freedom, not the “promise” of security, that drives people to put time and effort into a project that may or may not succeed. It’s faith in something you’re passionate about.

Being the senior interactive marketer on the team, I feel I need to address something that recently happened on this blog. For our regular readers, nothing noticeable happened. However, for those affected, I want to apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.

As part of the team’s training on everything interactive, it is my job to come up with various exercises for the team to test and enhance our understanding of new technologies, online promotions, viral marketing and business development.

During a recent meeting I assigned one of the co-founders the task of promoting this blog. Even though his primary function is business development, I figured learning how to build traffic would be useful to learn while the main site is under construction. The goal of the assignment was to get 100+ subscribers via FeedBurner before our main services launches since the idea of this blog is to share our story with fellow entrepreneurs who may be in similar stages on their startup. After all, the point of this blog is to chronicle our progress and to educate others based on various successes and failures based on our actions.

Unfortunately it seems I may have over estimated my co-founder’s understanding of building web traffic and as a result, the vague assignment resulted in us crossing the line of acceptable promotional techniques.

In addition to some of the valid methods of web promotions through networking events, telling friends and family and so on… it seems he had made a questionable post on Craigslist which brought in unqualified traffic. I remember getting an IM from him while working that said “I’m testing something new and I’m confident this will be in tons of traffic.”

Well, as most of you know, no analytics program has live, up-to-the-minute data so after receiving the message I kind of just left it at that.

A few hours later I logged into Analytics and saw the graph above. We had indeed gotten a spike in traffic. As I dug deeper into sources of referral, it seemed like half of the increased traffic was typed in while the other half came from Craigslist. Curious… I dug deeper until I finally landed on referring page.

What I saw REALLY disgusted me and even more so, I was shocked that we were the party responsible for the message. It would appear for his test, he had placed a job opening on Craigslist saying the blog needed to a designer to revamp its looks but on top of that, he also made the claim we had a $10,000 budget for the revision!

Even though we did receive a spike in traffic, unfortunately neither of the statements are true and I am honestly disappointed and sorry that we resorted to tricking users to come to the site. As someone who uses the web and hates spam, this action was totally unacceptable.

So why am I writing about this mistake instead of just letting the incident pass and hope nothing bad happens? Well, there’s a lesson to be learned here and I’m hoping this entry will prevent others from making the same mistake.

1. A spike in any unqualified traffic from any source is a waste of resources. People that came to the site looking for a $10k payoff don’t care about our content vs. people who are coming here to get stories about our entrepreneur adventures.

If this was done at a larger scale where we would have to pay for bandwidth, the additional traffic would have costed us money and the visitors would not have converted to paying customers; a double whammy.

2. People don’t like to be tricked. While my co-worker may think this was a clever idea when he made the post, his actions made the entire team (and business) look bad. Have we now completely lost our credibility? I don’t know but we are still getting hate mail and comment spam days later as a result.

3. Screw ups out shine a good performance! While my co-worker did actually generate some good traffic in parallel, his efforts to generate qualified traffic were completely lost in this scandal. In case you think this is a good way to impress your boss, don’t do it!

4. People still get tricked easily. This isn’t so much a mistake on our part as much as it’s an observation. Even though the post looked questionable, we are getting a good number of people asking for a chance to chat in order to discuss the project at hand. Sorry guys, we don’t have the budget for this upgrade right now.

5. The unknown… while I can only see what the immediate feedback has been, I’m really not sure what extended damages this unintentional test may have caused. I really hope no long term or permanent damage has been done but in all honesty, I just don’t know for sure.

With that note… I hope our mistakes will prevent you from making the same.

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.