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.

New article up over at On Web Apps.

Note: this was written a while back but was sitting in my drafts section. Worth a read if you are coming from a Microsoft background at all.

About two years ago, I implemented a billing system in ASP and SQL Server. It took about a month and a half to get fully flushed out.

Even so, we still experienced intermittent problems with it that drove our salespeople batty. (we could never replicate the problem in-house, since we didn’t have a test lab)

The requirements were, however, different, since we needed to charge cards in real-time in the ASP scenario.

With Sprout, though we might at some point need to do that for certain things (i.e. re-enabling locked, past-due accounts), we generally have the luxury of billing people as needed. (on the backend, at a time of our choosing)

Billing Systems on Rails

The system we just knocked out at Sprout took only about a week. Though, Charles had been working on the requirements for quite some time.

Requirements really do help us programmers. That way I don’t have to idle on IM, asking my manager every 5 minutes about some minutiae of how the system should be implemented.

Yeah - you can always plow ahead and just do things your way… but once you’ve been burned too many times from just doing that, you tend to seek out a little more guidance in the future.

Our system at SproutIt is also a lot more robust than my previous ASP endeavor. Our Sprout system includes a really robust notification system that includes:

- three days worth of charge failed notices
- three days worth of no card present notices
- Activation reminders (signed up for a paid plan, but haven’t entered a card yet, etc)

Hopefully we won’t have to send too many of these various types of notices… but it helps to be prepared.

Rails Productivity Numbers Legit?

Much has been bantied about re: productivity and rails (10x productivity boost, oh my!). Let me just say that I think a 10x number is pure hogwash.

However, even if it were only a 50% increase … that would be incredible. Can you imagine going to a decent manager and explaining that you can get 50% more done if you just use X technology? They would be crazy to ignore that possibility.

In all reality though, I think the number hovers somewhere between 1.5 and 3. That is, you can sometimes get things done in Rails that it would take you three weeks in PHP, or ASP.Net, for example.

Now, Rails productivity vs. Java/J2EE? You’re probably 4-6X as productive in Rails compared to such a bloated monstrosity as J2EE.

Here’s a few new innovative lending sites that I’ve come across lately in my web travels:

Kiva - an innovative new site that connects micro-lenders (as little as $25) to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

Prosper - the online marketplace for people-to-people lending.

I believe both of these sites (or something like them) have the power to change the world. Just like eBay did with P2P selling, they democratize the capital / fund raising process between individuals.

Instead of having to go through a tight-fisted loan officer as GloboCorp Inc., you can obtain a $10k loan for a new biz idea from just about anyone in the world. That is, if you can convince them of your credit worthiness and your project’s potential.

The one complaint I have with Prosper is that you really have to put yourself out there, to attract the attention of lenders.

Most people publish a photo and essay about their lives and why they need to borrow the money. (pay off credit cards, student loans, etc)

This could be embarassing for some people, who’d prefer that a rough time in their lives (like having $10k in credit card debt, or whatever it may be) not be recorded indelibly by Google & the likes.

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.

I (acting as benevolent guy behind the scenes of Ajax Blog) had a chance recently to sit down with the breakout team of vSocial.com.

We wanted to pick the brains of the vSocial founding team and learn about: starting a new social networking site, building a large-scale, high-bandwidth web app, developing with Ajax, building traffic/buzz, life hacks, and more.

The numbers speak for themselves: vSocial has gone from 0 to 71M+ monthly page views, 270K+ unique daily visitors and 45M videos served a month … all in about 120 days!

Brad Webb and Mark Sigal of vSocial were kind enough to sit down with Ajax Blog for the following interview. Enjoy!

Can you describe how the company or concept behind vSocial.com came about?

The core platform behind vSocial was developed over the past three years (with vSocial’s other co-founder, Brent Oesterblad) as part of a general purpose social media platform for uploading and sharing pictures, music, movies and other rich media content items. Looking at the market mid-last year, it was clear that Internet video was about to hit in a big way, and we felt that we had a lot of “secret sauce” to bring to the equation so we opted to focus there. The underlying platform is quite feature rich, and we expect to roll more of it out into the market in the coming months.

(Cont’d…)

Read the full interview: How vSocial Went from 0 to 71 Million Page Views in (about) 120 Days