Shanti’s Dispatches

Who invented the term “blog” anyway?

By now, it sounds normal. But remember when you first heard it? It sounded like someone had something caught in their throat.

I registered the domain sablog.com over 4 years ago now. Back when it was trendy and cool to be a blog.

Sometime around when Apple started suing bloggers, it stopped being so cool. It became better to just be an online magazine. That way, you enjoyed the same freedoms & protections as the press. (which a blog is, in a sense. a very inexpensive online printing press)

I’m also a huge fan of Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham and the like.

So, with that in mind I registered onwebapps.com and will be blogging there from time to time now, with a focus on longer and better posts. (posted less frequently)

While there are many blogs who cover “Web 2.0″ and post about (it seems like for the majority, at least) all the startups that have raised millions of dollars without having seen a penny of revenue, I happen to have more personal experience in bootstrapping ventures & webapps.

Hence the tagline How to Start and Grow a Profitable Webapp. That should be the goal of any sound venture — not to simply Get Big Fast and sell out to an Even Greater Fool.

BTW - Don’t get me wrong, we’d love to raise some Venture Capital. (and probably will) But you can’t sit around waiting for someone to drop a $2.5M check in your lap.

When all else fails, go out there and build a kickass product, attract an audience/clients, and you will succeed, regardless of big name financial backing. Fred Wilson writes about some of the things he looks for in a company that can survive another bursting of a bubble.

note - no need to subscribe to both feeds, I should eventually auto-merge subscriptions to sablog over to onwebapps.com, and just use sablog.com as a dumping ground for random links n such.

Why do you read this blog?

I’d love to hear from you. There are about 300 RSS subscribers but I swear there couldn’t really be that many!

Do you like reading about:
A) Technology and/or Ruby on Rails related things
B) The business of starting startups & my experiences in that realm
C) Pictures of my cat (disclaimer: I don’t have a cat)
D) Random links I find on the interweb (have tried to cut that down lately)

??? Please drop a line in the comments with your thoughts, or hit me up at: shantibraford @ gmail

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos