Come for the Ride…

As with Wei, I too am reflecting more so this year than in past about how I have been changing and growing in my professional development. Personally, 2007 has been a breakout year. I’ve bought a house, a second dog and gotten engaged. All pretty big stuff. For 2008, one of my main goals is going to be a movement away from being the average grunt, trying to take on all tasks myself (and not getting them all done) to putting my efforts into finding others to help with the work and use my own expertise to ensure they are doing the job right.

In my current 9-5 job, I’m still a bit of a grunt, but in the past 4 years I’ve come across the proper development environments, the proper people at work are trained on software I’ve written and I’m moving much of my responsibilities to others who it is more appropriate to do daily tasks such as logging in shipments, reporting results and creating invoices. However, as the company grows, I’ll be put in a more managerial position and others will be in charge of what I am currently. I’ll need to delegate better. I’ll need to learn to allow people to do things their own way, yet still be able to keep track of what they do ad ensure it’s done properly with my own experiance.

So, it will take time and help from Wei and Bryan, but I know moving from doing work myself to overseeing others do it will move the site along at a more rapid pace. In the end, we’ll end up with a great product and an excellent management team.

The founders met again on Saturday… We were due on the status of the project plus we scheduled a meeting with Bryan who we have been considering for business development / marketing position for the last month.

Overall, we are still on track with programming and now with the additional help, I think we are now better equipped to hit our target beta release date and properly market it (or try to). Granted, I would love to get some additional help/backup on both programming and marketing but we’re going to tackle it one step at a time.

With regards to “why we’re doing this…” my reasons are slightly different than Randall’s. As you can see, my dogs love food and I feel the need to provide them with such. They really are spoiled… but I can’t help it; they’re just too cute.

As a desperate measure to gain some control in the matter of no communication, we decided to do a couple of things to resolve the issue of the missing designer.

1. We started shopping around for alternative shops that also provided image to code services and got a few recommendations from some friends and fellow entrepreneurs. Yes, we probably could have taken the time to do the work ourselves but given the time constraints, I felt it would have been money well spent to hire some professionals that could knock the project out of the park in a very short time. After all, the goal of this venture is to launch a business, it isn’t to make sure our team members can conquer certain technical skills just to say we can.

If you are designing a new site and desire xhtml code, below are some options for you we have found over the last couple of days. We did not end up using the companies but from the examples some showed us, they are great.

www.psdxhtml.com - very impressive portfolio, $89 per page, quick turnaround.
PSD2Html.com $153+ per page
xhtmlized.com $249+ per page

One important thing to note is that you (and these shops) can probably churn these things out pretty quickly if all you’re doing is one page. The value-add here is more for projects that have multiple pages with various differences in their layouts or maybe even complex layouts. Note: We did not get into details with these shops to know if they would charge more for complex layouts.

2. The second thing we did to resolve the issue was contacting Guru to see about getting what’s left of our escrow money back. The idea was to take the unspent budget and apply it to one of the shops above to finish the project or to get as close to it as possible.

Guru offered to mediate the issue and also contacted the designer to let him know of the refund request. If the professional did not respond with 5 business days, we would get the money back. Guess what? Within hours, the designer came back, responded to our inquiries and provided some sample pages for us to review.

Fancy that…

As it turns out, nothing bad had happened to the designer but he has been avoiding us due to lack of progress. Again, lack of progress was not what I was concerned about; lack of communication was. I had to explain that concept to the designer again but hopefully he’ll get it this time.

Saluations!

My name is Randall Prince. Wei has given me the great honor of accompanying him on this journey of learning and entrepreneurship. I’ll be the hacker involved with putting all this information we’ll be aggregating into a real, honest-to-God, Web 2.0 site. I’m hugely excited about this project due to the normal reasons, but more so because the inner circle of entrepreneurs have a certain panache and thought process among them which most of the population lack, even in groups of very smart people. Honestly, it’s refreshing as all heck.

With that said, I’ll continue Wei’s precedent of showing off great videos that help the new guy in this Web 2.0 world. As you’ll find, I’m more of a list guy, but this video really shows how simple and effective the right web idea can be when executed thoughtfully and without going overboard or doing too much work yourself. It’s about organization and having a well defined goal in mind (and it’s got a list in it too).

This video shows that it’s really not a matter of the how to do it. This video is a strait up how-to guide. It doesn’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t say why to do it. Though those are very important issues. But what I take away from this (as with many other things in my life like equity trading) is that you actually have to do it for it to work. And if that idea doesn’t work, and you have another, then try another idea. It’s cheap enough (you can do a project for far less than the one in the video). As with most things, it’s about getting off your butt and doing it. So, let’s get moving towards EasyAutoSales.com!

Randall Prince

About Me:
- Serial entrepreneur, never short of ideas. Created some useful and failed dot-com’s in the past; learned from all of them. I now have what I believe is a great idea for a web service. The demand is constant, the advertisers’ pockets for this vertical is pretty deep; overall, it could be a great thing.

What I’m Looking for:
Hacker - You know php, MySQL, html, ajax, CSS, JavaScript and all related scripting languages to help get the site off the ground. A design has already been established and I’m just looking for the right CTO person to make it all work. However, I want someone who has passion for their work, who isn’t afraid to challenge the instructions if he knows of a better alternative. You should have some previous experience building large scale projects, code or blog for fun on your own time, and know the business implications of everything you do. If you are used to writing perfect code from the get-go and are willing to sacrifice the launch date by a few months to get it just right, then this position probably isn’t a good fit for you. However, if you can write great code and realize it’s an evolving process, contact me! I want a sprinter who can evolve into a marathon runner; not a sprinter who will burn out at the end of a 2 month intensive dev. cycle. (In all honesty, it’s not even that intense.)

Buzz Maker
You can be a blogger, guerrilla marketer, SEO expert, a person with a ton of friends on Facebook and Myspace, a PR girl or guy or be a close friend of a celebrity. As long as your passion and talent lies in talking things up (whether it’s the iPhone or celebrity gossip), then please contact me. I am *hoping* to get this new idea off the ground with a huge budget of $0. Can it be done? I’m hoping with the right person it can be. (*Actual budget amount may vary…)

I’m located in Atlanta Georgia. You don’t necessarily have to be but if you are one of the two people above and are local to me, great!

I posted the following on Craigslist and Facebook groups about 2 weeks ago and have received great interest from a bunch of great people since. My goal was to write a smart ad that will appeal to other smarties and it seems like it has done the trick. From the people that I’ve had conversations with; one I actually met today at Emory for the hacker position. The meet and greet process went pretty well and I think we’re both pretty pumped about the project. Now the search is on for the buzz maker.