saint-rebel

Sean Tierney is writing a 32 part series on the book “Founders at Work” , so far the first 2 parts are available at grid7.

I have not read the book yet, but intended to. Sean read for us, and is giving us his cliff notes, saving us time. Sure Sean will take different things away from it than me, and so I am getting his filtered version. But isn’t this how it always is, your VP or your Management team gives you their version of events, leaving you to make a judgement.

Since I know Sean and we share similar mindsets, I trust the info he is passing on will be of value to me, and I am saving time, getting the value of the book, without making the time investment.

Leverage: your best friend.

Popularity: 15% [?]

I just quietly launched dailyhoopla.com.  The premise is Big News from Small Agencies.  By aggregating news/press in one location for locally based web firms, the local newspaper guy covering the tech beat only needs to go to one place to find the latest, coolest stuff in his own backyard.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Sean Tierney, a good friend and fellow entrepreneur invited me to sit down for one of his ongoing series of Venturecast interviews last week. The podcast of our conversation is now online at grid7.com. Thanks to Sean for the opportunity.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Are you a Skull?

If you were, you couldn’t say cause we would dip you in hot oil. Seriously, I put together a little monthly lunch roundtable for Phoenix Web/Tech industry CEO’s called the Phoenix Skulls.

There is so much work out there, and we all benefit by helping each other..

Ritz, design a logo already.

Popularity: 17% [?]

No really, the more I look at it the more it like it. It just makes sense: an elegant solution for a business problem.

Scenario: You own a web shop and you get the calls from clients with big dreams and no cash. You refer them to some Joe freelancer. What do you get, squat. What does the freelancer get, a little project to add to their portfolio. What does the client get? Hit or miss. They may get the solution they need, or they may just pay for the freelancers learning curve.

So how does flare9.com fit in? Most of these low-end clients just need brochure ware. They have an idea and they need a web presence to get it going. The agencies cannot be profitable at that low a price point. Flare9.com is a website builder with integrated hosting, domain reg, email service, and CMS. An agency simply needs to register as a flare9 affiliate, refer the low-end work there. The client gets a great solution for their needs, and the agency picks up a few bucks for making the referral. But it gets better. The agency also maintains a list of these referrals in the flare9 system to contact later. Think of it as a holding pen. The client is happy to have found a low cost solution, and as their needs grow out of flare9’s capabilities, the agency should contact them and offer the more robust, custom solution. It is a little bit of CRM.

The more I think about it and the more I talk to other agencies, it becomes clear it is a no brainer for these web agencies to have this low-end solution in their process. They stop leaving money on the table, as well a groom future clients. The client is happy they got what they needed then, and are happy knowing they can go back to the referral agency when the time it right.. Goodwill all around.. priceless.

In the future we will even have a co-branded licensed version available for the web agencies to purchase.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Here is an idea I am putting out there: Think awesome social experiment.

American Idol style text voting for US president.

Set up a twitter like service and allow anyone to vote (1) time for the 2008 US president election. Prior to the election you let people vote on questions like “If the election was held today..”. Use this for beta testing and polling up to the election day. But on the big day of the dem/rep primaries and general election, you clear all votes and let the entire world vote for a candidate. example: TEXT vote “A” to 3434300.

The website would need some nice fancy graphs, and stats, and a google maps mashup with red and blue colored states and countries. Try to break down the data by geo-location, age, ethnicity, etc.. you’ll get this data via the website profile user fill out when signing up, then just combine with their vote. (if thy say it is okay, otherwise votes are not attributed to an particular user)

Ways to promote it:

• Team with MTV’s Rock the Vote who has a direct line to the kids.
• Team with the campaigns themselves (both sides, or 3 if Nader is in)
• Team with a 3rd party like clean elections fund or moveon.org
• Partner with a wireless carrier who wants tons of free press.

Ways to make money off it:

• Capture basic demographics data and sell back to the campaigns
• Adsense for cell phones baby
• Run it like a lottery, where it is $.99 per vote but 10 random people win a fat cash prize

Why do this?

• Very simple, it would be the coolest mass opinion poll the world has ever seen.
• Social impact.
• Get the kids engaged in the democratic process.

This idea is copyright 2007 Joshua Strebel, I am open-sourcing the idea and asking others to improve upon it, and even implement it.

Share your thoughts.

Update: Barack Obamma’s website links here.

Popularity: 18% [?]

703 is a made up number, but about a 2.5 years ago my wife and I thought it would be a good idea to create a low-cost website solution for small businesses that could not afford the high end services of ObuWeb. Not a new concept.

About a year ago my firm started using wordpress to power the majority of our brochure sites. If you have used wordpress you know how slick it is. A perfect fit for our goal of letting you (the small business client) create your own website.

About 4 months ago we finally started working on it. With the efforts of the super tenth-level ninja programmer Joshua Eichorn, we began building flare9.com

Problem we are attempting to solve: New and Small businesses need a website, yet rarely have the capital to spend on a custom site by a web design agency. We (obuweb) kept turning clients away simply because we could not serve them, and be profitable doing it.

Our Solution: Flare9.com is website builder powered by wordpress2.1. We have attempted to craft a solution that delivers an easy to use DIY website builder, yet limits the amount of control the user has in regards to design. (No blinking text or color/font mis-matches). The client focuses on content and message, not design.
We tapped a few API’s to:

• Register a domain name
• Set up the client hosting/email in Plesk
• Recurring Billing
• Site creation via wordpress

Therefore the entire signup and site creation process is hands free from our end. Server side scripting takes care of everything. If you have ever used Wordpress you know how nice it is, and that they have solved many problems already. By using wordpress as our core, and writing custom plugins to extend app, we managed to create the entire solution and only change about 2 lines of wordpress code: read upgrade proof.

How it works:

Client Side: The client picks a theme from our gallery > creates an account > registers a domain if needed > purchases > logs in and uses wordpress (with our enhancements) to manage thier website.

Server Side: API Call to payment gateway and establishes recurring billing profile > API call to register domain > API creates client/domain profiles in plesk 8 > Site files checkout from subversion to new client account > SQL script populates database

From client registration process start to new site login with domain purchase < 3 minutes.

Go to Market: We are targeting other web design agencies, whom have the same problem we do at obuweb. Lots of leads, yet few people that can afford the services. Our affiliate program pays a handsome referral fee to these agencies that send their prospects over. WIN-WIN-WIN: Affiliate gets paid, we get paid, client gets a great website.

So now it is Late on a Tuesday March 6th. We have finished our private beta testing and are set to launch live tomorrow. Just in time for my trip to sxsw where I will be promoting it to no end.

Learning’s:in 703 days I have learned quite a bit. Here are some highlights:

• A good idea will always be a good idea
• Finding the people to help you execute the idea is key
• Timing has a lot to do with everything
• It always takes longer than you think
• Test, Test and Test some more
• You stop craving sleep after the first few weeks
• Shear dogged determination will make anything materialize
• Running/Launching more that one business at a time is tricky
• Seeing an idea realized is ecstasy
• Wordpress appears 9 times in this post.

Popularity: 11% [?]