big teddy
  • Mar
    18
    My three-fisted economic recovery package.
    by mike at 11:49am

    Alright I’m not Mark Cuban or Paul Graham I’m not a self made millionaire ready to invest in early stage startups.   What I do have is a bit of time and a few  good ideas that I’ve kind of left behind that might be able to be resurrected by a few people who may be unemployed with some time on their hands and an interest in starting a business.   These are two ideas that I started building on my own and then lost a bit of interest in.  I still think they’re viable ideas and you’ve got a headstart because a certain chunk of the early development is done.

    So in one fist I have A Different Engine my new Interactive Television application development company.   This is my bread and butter, but its a new services company with few clients right now so I might have some down time – and idle hands are the devil’s playground.  So I have two other ideas for more traditional intenet startups both these apps have working prototypes and one has been soft launched even (with no traffic ;-) .

    My goal is to really get a couple of teams up and running and then just provide whatever guidance I can.

    The Ground Rules

    Note I’m stealing a bunch of these from PG and at least one from Mark Cuban.

    • The Goal is to build successful businesses NOT an exit.   There is the possibility of taking some intial funding and maybe down the road some sort of exit event, but that’s not the goal – that’s the journey.   This goal is to build a business that keeps a small, competent team paid and happy to come to work every day.  Get revenues, then profitability and grow organically.
    • Get Ramen Profitable.  If you haven’t ready Paul Graham’s 13 rules for startups do so now.
    • Start with 5 people per team.
    • Take no more than $100,000 in seed funding – if any.  You may ask “why take any?”  The answer is that funding allows you to get through some rough spots starting up.  Infrastructure is expensive and credit cards suck.  Now this may end up being only $5-25K for some servers but that’s fine.  The second thing some investment brings is exposure to that investor’s network.  Ask most what the most valuable thing they got from the Ycombinator program was and its likely going to be “Investor Day” when they get introduced to the founders network of potential investors and possible acquisition partners.  You may ask “why take so little?”  the issue here is that taking significant VC capital comes with a whole  world of expectations,  and requirements that I think are too high.   At the end of the day though this will be your product.  Make the decision that you think makes sense.
    • Everyone works on the product.  You’re either building the app, keeping it up or maintaining its content.  If you’re not doing something that affects what users see then you’re not that useful.  The Managment structure is pretty much flat.
    • Work agile – ideally on monthly iterations.  If you’re not familiar with the agile process yet, get there, its pretty straightforward and places a heavy emphasis on getting the product out.  Both these projects fit this model well.   And note I’m not an agile nazi, far from it, but I think working off a prioritized product backlog and getting release quality code out each month is a great way to work.
    • You can live anywhere.

    Equity.

    Note there may be no way this concept could work, but I haven’t thought of why not yet.

    So the way I see it I’d hope to take a small bit of equity, since I have a lot of early work done – this will be negotiated with the team but maybe 5%?  Then I was thinking on the most equitable way to distribute equity when teams may be in flux and the only thing you’re working for is equity.

    What I was thinking that for the first few months or years – until staff starts getting paid, that equity would be based on full months worked.

    The concept I have in my head is that at the end of every calendar month, everyone who worked the entire month gets one share of equity.  So say 5 team members start on May 1st, on May 30th everyone gets a single share out of a total of 5. End of second month everyone gets one more share but the   pie is out of 10.   If at the end of the second month someone leaves they walk with their two shares, if someone new comes on they, like everyone else gets a share at the end of the month and the pool again grows by 5.

    The thing is that while shares get diluted each month, the initial founders would still hold the same 20% as long as they stay with the company (though this could dilute with any investment)

    Anyone have a better way?  I’m not sure how to handle asking someone to leave (a firing) yet, but that would need to get worked out.

    The Apps

    wesayitiz.com

    The Team Needed

    • 2 Ruby on Rails developers
    • 1 designer
    • 2 Content Editors and Product Managers.

    The Concept

    Alright the name sucks, it came from “Its news because we say it is”.  The basic idea is that as successful digg, reddit and fark are I think there is still a space for a real meta news site. The idea is that news stories either come from users, or the content editors browsing the web and finding the best and most current stories.  The more I hear about digg or reddit or even hacker news being gamed to get on the front page the more I feel that a site that’s maintained by a few plugged in individuals may be the way to go.  While the community thing works, I think each of these sites skew a particular way, and I still end up at sfgate or nytimes for my “real” daily news.   Why not focus on the news and manage the content that way?

    Once stories are approved for the front page, the stories are ranked on the page by clicks.  More clicks, the higher on the page.  This is my user generated bit but could be removed.

    I’d love to see this site end up a bit like the NYTimes site, except the content is all externally linked.

    One thing I was going to do that was relatively unique was to be as public and transparent as possible with this site.   Why not let users know what kind of traffic its getting and the revenue being generated.  This whole thing is a bit of an experiment why not make it public?  More details on that

    Current Status

    The site is up, user authentication and it’s got an adminitrative interface, and even harvests RSS feeds in order to jumpstart finding content.   An Adsense account is already in place for revenue and there’s a comment system.   It could use a sharper design and once it gains traction I think you’re going to break out the content categories (content is categorized but there’s no display function behind it yet).   It still needs some QA and my test coverage is pretty sparse, I’d recommend the first thing done.

    Also its hosted on a slicehost chunk that it will likely need to move off of ASAP.

    HeyThere

    The Team Needed

    • 1-2 mobile application developers (got to be multi talented, iPhone and Android are the initial client platforms).
    • 2 Backend Apps developers – Java and Rails
    • 1 designer
    • 1 Product Manager

    The Concept

    HeyThere is not as developed as wesayitiz but it may have longer legs.   HeyThere is a location based messaging app, kind of like Loopt’s little brother. If I’m at a bar (back in my single days) and saw a cute girl at the end of the bar and wanted to find out who she is, how could i do this?

    HeyThere is essentially a hybrid IM and Chat client that broadcasts messages to the 20 other users closest to you.  No mapping or tracking, just broadcast chat/IM based on proximity – there are similar services that do this via a bluetooth broadcast mechanism.  There isn’t yet a revenue stream – but it couldn’t be hard, allow local vendors to send an occasional message for a fee and you’ve got something.

    Current Status

    The app is based on XMPP/Jabber and its been a while since I tabled this one so it may take some jumping from some hoops to get these running.

    I have 2 client prototypes in some kind of working state, the first runs on flash (the user inputs location) the second works on Android with GPS enabled.

    I have a backend working that is a plugin for the Openfire Jabber server which is Java based – I’ve also patched that server with something so I have a version of it in the repo (at this moment in time I can’t remember why).   I also have a few hacks in there that allows you to use any Jabber client for testing – you send location in text to a bot instead of using a built in GPS mechanism.   Scaling this piece may be a difficult task, I played with some caching mechanisms but they’re really hacked together. You may want to take a look at porting this work over to ejabberd.  Its Erlang based so its not as easy to find competent devs for this but it may scale better. Openfire can be clustered however so maybe just stick with that.
    All code is in a subversion repo and I can give access if you’re interested.

    This one is a bit of a beast to get running but I’d work with anyone interested on the different issues around it.

    The Rest

    So that’s it really,  two apps with working prototypes looking for the team that can take them to the next level.  They’re likely not commented enough but hey I’m here to answer questions.

    Think you have what it takes?  Then email me at recovery@bitdamaged.com

    Any questions or comments, then leave them underneath!

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