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:

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In my opinion, one of the riskiest tasks to creating an internet startup is the hiring of developers to create and build your website. Especially, for those of you who are web entrepreneurs, but not programmers. So much is riding on this aspect of the business in the beginning. The bottom line is you have got to check these people out! I am so tired of seeing people get ripped off. Why, because it almost happened to me during my first venture and it actually did happen to one of my colleagues. Nobody ever thinks it could happen to them, yet some of the smartest people get taken every day. I like to use the analogy that programmers are like home contractors, they can build you something great or they can take you to the cleaners. You have got to do your homework on these people! I cannot stress this point enough. Don’t just check their portfolio, find the contacts under each website in their portfolio and give them a call. If there aren’t any contacts, be weary. If there are, call these people and get some feedback. Get references, but don’t just ask for two or three. Ask them to supply you with ten and then you decide which ones to call. Anybody can find people to give bogus references. So don’t be surprised if you think your calling the CEO of some company, but it turns out to be his best friend. The bottom line is these guys are good. Very good! They know exactly what it takes to earn your trust and appear legitimate. My dad always told me that the greatest scammers are the best at appearing honest and sincere. Thats how they suck you in! A colleague of mine who spent about a year of his life creating an internet business related to the music industry, fell victim to one of these scum bags. Its really ashame because he had a great idea too. This company appeared so legit that he even flew out to visit their office and did not suspect anything. I would have fallen victim to this company as well, but my gut told me that two things were suspicious. First off, the guy just appeared to be trying to earn my trust a little too much. He sent me a video of the company, he even sent pictures of him and his family. It just didn’t seem right. Always trust your gut, I’ve found that its usually right. Secondly, for a company that was supposed to have over eighty employees, this alleged CEO had just a little bit to much time on his hands to try and convince me to use his services. Even their site looks kosher and I must admit, its actually pretty neat http://www.ispg.co.in/. Do they look legitimate? You be the judge. Happy hunting and tread carefully…

While watching the NBC news tonight, the big discussion was about how Obama copied a small portion of the speech from another governor and how Hilary copied some of Bill’s speech from years prior to help make their points.  While making the point on air, they showed clips of Deval Patrick from YouTube to point out the similarity in the words.  I wasn’t so into the topic as I was with the technology NBC was using, which were clips of very poor quality from YouTube.

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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.

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Are you currently working on your startup and want to help bring more exposure to it?  If you feel like you have things you can teach our audience, please feel free to contact us for a guest blogger spot.

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