Shanti’s Dispatches

See this post and this one (inc. comments) for some backstory.

Disclaimer: Vested Interests

I worked on SproutIt’s hosted Mailroom app since their early days.

I would say the target market between Mailroom and Litepost are fairly different.

Mailroom offers:

• a completely outsourced (hosted) solution
• spam protection right out of the box
• 24/7 monitoring for downtime/issues/etc
• great support (shoutout to Peter & the gang!)
• killer 100% AJAX UI (fine work of Charles Jolley)
• a team-based approach to handling large volumes of support@ and sales@ type of repetitive mails
• … lots of advanced features even GMail doesn’t have — i.e. autosaving & later autosuggestion of replies, etc

Litepost offers:

• ability to host the app yourself
• ability to modify the source code ass you see fit
• a typical “gmail for domains” type of approach to webmail where each user gets his/her own account (In Mailroom all mail is routed to a central account, with multiple users picking off their own messages to reply to)
• have 100% control of your mail data and how its stored/archived/etc
• an interesting take on email with the ability to rate conversations for later re-ordering

I’m sure Nathan has more but I’ll stop there. One thing I did notice is at this exact moment, Litepost does not seem to have a way to combat SPAM (unless it is first run through a filter). Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Of course I’m sure SPAM protection is on it’s way for Litepost. Heads up to Nate dog: combating SPAM (well) is a hugely annoying problem to solve and could easily be handled by a whole team of engineers working on it day & night, especially when when these spamf*ckers keep coming up with new & innovative attacks each week.

Nathan’s Reply

In the interest of fairness, here’s Nathan’s reply from Litepost:

Hey Shanti,

Thanks for buzzing me re this. Since the product isn’t remotely finished yet– we haven’t clarified the precise licensing provisions for the software.

Suffice to say, we want to abide by all relevant FOSS rhymes and riddles, and while there may be a tacit request to limit direct competition, I agree with you that this may certainly violate the spirit of open source:

So…I was actually planning on releasing the software under the NSL, Nate’s Software License, but I didn’t know if that would be too abominable or egotistical (to create yet another new license)…

This isn’t finished yet…it’s a work in progress so please tell me what you think of it (!).

NSL - Nate’s Software License v0.1 (aka GPLv4 LOL edition)

PREAMBLE

Software is too easy, free and fun to a) charge exorbitant sums for and b) require complex legal documentation (or indeed ideally documentation of any kind!!).

(Software is like sex and I don’t like getting my sex partners to sign contracts.)

So:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

1. Litepost is totally free software. PLEASE FEEL FREE to do whatever the hell you want with it!
2. Always use condiments.

END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS

3. Interpretation of Section 1:

*ie, as long as it’s legal, lawful, loving (abiding by all other relevant licenses) and in all other regards respectful and reasonable.

Ideally, you will improve the software and contribute to the community.

Naturally, there are no warranties for software released under the NSL. Please modify the NSL as you see fit and as it suits the situation. Please send any good ones you come up with to me at nathan@litepost.com.

Thanks again for requesting the clarification; I am most happy to give it!

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, clarifications, advice.

Best
Nate

Good luck, Nate. Competition is always a good thing. If anything, you’re primarily competing against GMail and that is one crazy sonofabitch thing to do!

Okay, this post might be a bit boring / narcissistic for some people’s tastes - but if you haven’t been to one of these shindigs here it is layed out from one dude’s perspective.

Tickets were $10 which I got from a Googler friend (shoutout to anxman) and drinks were free (woot woot).

Getting There

August Capital is about 30 minutes away from the city without traffic. The drive was quite pleasant — nice scenery, etc.

Google Maps told me to make a U-Turn at Saga Ln but you actually just make a left there and go up the hill to August Capital, Benchmark, etc.

The Line to Go #1

Taking a leak proved quite cumbersome. While I was entering the party, a guy who looked like Ross Mayfield (probably wasn’t him) in a hawaiian shirt was stepping outside, mentioning how he needed to find a bush.

While standing in the whiz line I bumped into Josh Knowles, a Phoenix-area Ruby on Rails developer who I had met previously at Refresh Phoenix.

Phoenix Connection

Next I met up with several other Phoenix entrepreneurs/developers:

Kimbro Staken and Sean Tierney, who were there demo’ing JumpBox and Joshua Strebel of Obu Web.

While we were taking a picture with the four of us, Julia Allison, heretofore unknown by any of us, decided she’d also like to be in it with us.

Of course we happily obliged. Sean says those pics will be up on Grid7.com at some point.

Snip: edited to protect the innocent.

The “Million-dollar Members Only” Episode

A bit later in the evening I was standing by the margarita station and saw someone who seemed a bit out of place for the party. Sporting a cool black jacket & british accent, he looked like he could be a member of a punk rock band, not a startup entrepreneur.

Upon introducing myself, another buddy of his showed up, who had two nametags on. I didn’t recognize their startup / company, but one of the nametags rang a bell — Alex Tew, creator of the Million Dollar Homepage.

Now, I’m sure this is kind of an awkward situation for this guy. For 99.9% of the planet, making a million dollars from, let’s face it, a pretty simple webpage, would be seen as an incredible accomplishment.

But for the TechCrunch party scene, it’s not quite as monumental.

I personally still think it’s really fuckin cool - the ~20 year old doesn’t have to work a day for the rest of his life, if he doesn’t want to. And being an entrepreneur with a million bucks in the bank must certainly be a different experience than when you’re starting a company right out of school and living off of ramen noodles.

He was also the first out of the gates with, in hindsight, an ingenious idea that was executed brilliantly.

I called over Joshua Strebel who I know would get a kick out of meeting Alex. A few minutes later Joshua led a 10-minute long conversation on Member’s Only Jackets, because, apparently, Alex was wearing a jacket that looked very “Members Only”.

I asked Mr. Tew what he thought about all of the knockoffs of his idea, e.g. 1000 tags etc.

Tew responded (paraphrasing):

They’re all shite. It’s the kind of thing that can only be done once mate, y’know?

So true, mate, so true.

Michael Arrington’s Followers

I’ve heard the Arrington line can get as bad as 20-strong. It wasn’t that bad last night — at most I saw maybe 5-10 startup entrepreneurs playing man-groupie to the ever-powerful TechCrunch Founder & Blogger, Michael Arrington.

Hey — I don’t blame em. Web 2.0 lore is rife with stories of startups being featured on TechCrunch and subsequently getting inundated with calls from Venture Capitalists. (Scribd, for one, launched that way to phenomenal success.)

Photo credit: “Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” - laughingsquid.com.

Apparently a very attractive asian lady was in Arrington’s tow throughout part of the night as well. (not sure if that’s her pictured above or not…)

Other People I Bumped Into

Trip Adler - co-founder of Scribd

Babak Nivi — co-writer of Venture Hacks, a must-read blog for any startup entrepreneur

I’ll definitely be attending next time if I can get my hands on some tickets. The free-flowing drinks and bumping into some old pals definitely made the trip down to southbay worth it.

A lot of people still don’t get the Google/YouTube deal. This article makes a few good points, the best of which is:

…a reallocation of the $67 billion that advertisers spent on TV in the US last year.

Now, for many of us in the web advertising world, it’s crazy to think that all these BigCos spend so much money on television ads.

Especially when you factor in the direct accountability and measurability of online systems like AdWords.

But I think the sexy world of television advertising & bloated Madison Ave. budgets will be the next industry to take a major hit.

Why does Coca-Cola need to spend billions on fancy tv ad budgets, when a few kids in a garage somewhere can bang out a viral Coke ad for $0, spend $0 on hosting, and have it watched possibly tens of millions of times.

AND — this is a big and — they are watching the ad intentially! When you sit down to watch Heroes, if you’re lucky, you have a Tivo or DVR and the ads are just a 200mph blur. Maybe you catch a Nissan logo in the blink of an eye, but other than that, brands aren’t getting much exposure that way. And if you don’t have a Tivo-esque device, then the ads are just a major annoyance.

When you sit down at your computer and pull up an email from your friend, that contains a link to some hilarious new viral Coca-Cola video (I’m not even talking about the mentos thing, but maybe something like that), of course you’re going to check it out, and it’ll have your 100% undivided attention until you decide it’s either lame or cool. (and if cool, you’ll pass it along to even more friends!)

That, in a nutshell, is why the GooTube deal went down, imho.

Amazon is now using RoR in production code (for an admittedly non-core area of their business):

UnSpun - Community Opionions … Ranked!

Still, I wonder what kind of traffic a link on the Amazon.com homepage drives! (I’m guessing quite a bit)

Via: Signal vs. Noise

Sidenote

Amazon seems like they are really cool with their developers when it comes to letting them choose their technologies. Very Starfishy (just picked this up the other day).

From some of Stevey’s stories, it sounds like they even have some LISP code powering some backend processes there!

Looks like someone at Yahoo! needs a little Jelly to go with their peanut butter.

Sure, some of the points make sense.

But since when was General Motors the paragon of an agile, profitable corporation?

Ok, so you can bookmark things through Yahoo 360 or del.icio.us, two competing Yahoo services. And…?

It sounds like this Yahoo VP read some old management philosophy book (or memoir) & got all amped up about reengineering Yahoo as if it was 1960s General Motors.

If he did have a Jerry Maguire moment there at the Y! HQ, I hope he at least got a slow clap as he entered the building.

JumpBox, a local Phoenix-area startup, just launched this week. It was founded by two Phoenix entrepreneurs — Sean Tierney and Kimbro Staken.

I was quite impressed when Kimbro & Sean demo’d the app at Refresh Phoenix the other week.

If you have a web application that a customer or client needs to have onsite, JumpBox could be your answer.

It lets you build a server from scratch - say a default Fedora Core 4 Linux OS with Apache/MySQL/PHP installed and preconfigured to your specifications. You then load your application software and custom configurations onto the server.

Next, using JumpBox tools (which I understand are still undergoing refinement) - you basically make a clone stamp of that entire OS disk image.

You can then deploy that disk image to any server that supports Xen Virtualization. The image can be hosted at a data center, onsite, remotely, etc.

The trend lately has been for hosted webapps to host of all your data on their servers and make it available via API, etc. (Basecamp, Google Docs, Mailroom, etc)

I can see JumpBox shining for deployment of those applications that are notorious for their dependency hell and nightmarish setup complications. (*cough* Trac)

Simple Subversion, Trac & Other Open-source Team Tools
I would love to see a JumpBox stack that featured:

• Subversion
• Trac
• CruiseControl or some other continuous integration tools

Slightly OT: until it gets easier to setup a Subversion/Trac/etc. stack (perhaps via JumpBox), I would highly recommend checking out Unfuddle. (especially if you just love the simplicity and headache reduction, generally speaking, of hosted webapps)

They are a fully-hosted service (featuring liberal amounts of AJAX and built in Ruby on Rails) that can power your Subversion, Ticket / Bug Tracking, and Project Milestones needs.

More at JumpBox.com.

I guess this post was making the rounds this week while I was busy coding up a storm. Ironically, I was implementing a billing system so that we can charge cards at Sprout.

Hello. It’s never a good time to start a company without the intent of making money.

You don’t have to make a lot to begin with… Overture started by making pennies (literally) and went on to be acquired by Yahoo for $1.63 billion.

Evaluating Business Ideas

Whenever someone tells me about a new business idea, the first thing I ask about is the business model.

Here are some simple business models

- Buy widgets at $2, sell them for $4. (Wal-Mart)
- Offer a free, limited service to attract clients. Also offer a premium service and charge for it. (Sprout, 37 Signals)
- Blog about interesting things, sell advertising. (Weblogs Inc.)

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how much dough you can potentially make with your business model.

If the model gets much more complicated than any of the above… I’m usually a little skeptical about its potential viability.

When to realize you’re in a Web 2.0 circle … you know what

99% of the population has never even heard of Web 2.0. Even in the tech industry in non SF Bay Area cities. (you’d be surprised)

These people:
- don’t have a gmail account, nor do they even know it exists (they are still using some crappy hotmail 2mb limit acct they opened 4 years ago)
- don’t read blogs
- especially don’t read TechCrunch (let alone know what it is)
- have never heard of Ruby on Rails
- Ajax? are you kidding? they think it’s a cleaning detergent

I’m not a part of the whole SF Bay Area thing (yet), but we do need to keep some perspective here… Pets.com isn’t going public again like it’s 1998. A few lucky (+ highly-skilled & passionate) guys in their garage got bought out for $15-30 mil. The rest of us have to actually bring in the Benjamins, with uhh, you know, paying customers n stuff.

Me-too companies… What’s the bfd?

Commenters on the Caterina post belittle all the ‘me-too’ companies coming out of the gates. I don’t really know what ‘me-too’ means exactly… Yes, there are some ‘me-too’ companies, but that’s really just a sign of competition and innovation.

The weaker ones will be weeded out, though, when hosting only costs $10 a month, what’s the bfd? Throw some AdSense on there and you’re all set.

Of course, if you’ve taken $5M in VC and your business model is “throw some AdSense on there,” well, you better have a lot of targetted content + traffic. They only make so many Yahoo/Google acquisition lottery tickets.

Six servers to scale to that kind of traffic. Not too shabby for the framework / language (Ruby) that isn’t supposed to be able to scale.

Site traffic is currently spread across all four web boxes as each box runs all of our sites by a hardware load balancer of unknown manufacture. Eventually we’ll switch to running 43 Things on a pair of machines and all other sites on the remaining machines.

More here.

MogileFS also looks really interesting.

Man, anyone know how to get into the Sprint Ambassador Program?

Aparrently it’s invite-only, but I’m sure there are ways to pull some strings.

Dougall, creator of WordPress Multi-User, has been invited:

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I’d have something about the Samsung A920 phone coming up. I don’t have the phone yet, but when I do I’ll surely be posting a review. But in the meantime, let me explain how and why I’m getting this phone, and do a little speculation…

Yesterday morning, mixed in amongst my usual slew of automated system emails and the slurry of spams that make it through my filters, was a message from Sprint. My wife and I use Nextel cell service (now owned by Sprint), and I had recently registered on the Sprint web site for their online account management, so getting email from them wasn’t a surprise. However, the subject of the message caught my eye in a curious way: “Attn: Dougal Gunter - Sprint Ambassador Invite”.

Nice… =)

My girlfriend recently (accidentally) put my cell phone and wallet into the washing machine. Nice, babe. =)

So, this would have come in handy… (and I actually use Sprint!)

O’well, maybe next time. =)

I have mentioned The Business Experiment before here previously.

Robert May has posted a lengthy explanation of some of the issues they are facing as they attempt to incorporate their first venture.

Why can’t we incorporate like a regular startup?

Most regular startups incorporate as a C corporation. The rules governing this were laid out in the securities acts after the market crash of 1929, to protect investors. Ownership in a C corporation is considered a security. It is illegal to advertise securities for sale under most conditions. As a general rule, securities must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, there are several ways around this . Unfortunately, we don’t meet any of the requirements, except the ones that still require a disclosure document (i.e. a $15,000 preparation). We could get an exemption if

a)we keep incorporation to fewer than 35 people

b)we keep all the owners in the same state, and the total value to less than $1 million

c)every owner is an “accredited investor,” meaning a net worth of $1million or more or yearly income of 250K

Read more here