We were both featured in this week’s issue of Woman’s World Magazine. Woman’s world magazine picked us as a “Hot Website” Article is below with cover:
What to do if your startup is about fail (or “Don’t Stop Believing”) [Jason Calacanis Article]
Attribution + A Note: Jason Calacanis has an awesome email list, you can subscribe here. He always writes great emails, but this one takes the cake. I hope it motivates the entrepreneurs that read it. He normally doesn’t like reposting, but had okay’d it due to the importance of the post.
A lot of CEOs with less than 12 months of capital left have been
asking me for advice about what to do, given the massive economic
turmoil we’re facing. I thought I would take the time put these
various conversations into one email to help those who are “up against
it,” as we say in Brooklyn.
Now, sprinting to the startup precipice is one of the most horrible
and exhilarating experiences you can have as an entrepreneur.
The exhaustion sinks in as you slam on the brakes. You dig in your
heels and watch the dirt and pebbles fly off the cliff as your left
foot dangles down in the ravine, with your right foot desperately
trying to save you. Your momentum could–if the wind kicks in–send
you straight down to your death. Heck, even the two inches of earth
under your right foot could give way and send you to your death. Or,
you could slip and fall on a magic carpet that will take you to the
Promised Land.
OK, that last part is made up. You’re probably screwed and you know it.
This email is intended for startup companies with less than 12 months
of cash in the bank, who know in their hearts that their VCs have lost
faith, and that Google, Yahoo or Microsoft aren’t going to pick them
up on a magic M&A carpet ride.
This is the email I’d like you to forward to your friends who are
running startups that could go under in 2009.
Some background
————————-
I’ve been to the precipice and faced the fall a couple of times. I’ve
learned a couple of things from the experience. I can tell you that
the first time it happens, you’re terrified, because everything you’ve
done–all the effort and dreams–will probably be lost (like tears in
the rain).
The second time it happens, you’re deeply concerned, but know it ain’t
over until you’re splattered on the boulders below.
The third time it happens, you smile and say “let’s get it on!”
You see, there are two types of entrepreneurs in this world: real ones
and the folks who play entrepreneurs for some portion of their lives.
>From a distance, most folks can’t tell who’s who. In up times, when
the market is flush with cheap money and unexplained exits (Bebo,
anyone?), everyone looks brilliant.
It’s only when the tide goes out that you know who’s naked. (Who said
that? I hear it on CNBC every other week now).
The differences between the two types of entrepreneurs become clear
when the fan and the manure meet. The faux entrepreneurs run for cover
rather than dealing with the storm. They go back to their plush,
somewhat mindless jobs as VPs at mega-companies, while the real
entrepreneurs suit up and clean up the mess.
We’re going to find out who the real entrepreneurs are in 2009 because
they are going to spend another 12 months, on top of the last six,
cleaning up the mess. It will be two years of total pain, so before we
go any further you gotta make the decision if you’re in or you’re out.
In or out?
————————-
Here is a really easy way to figure out if you can deal with the mess
in front of you. How many of the following can you deal with:
1. Laying off half your staff.
2. Laying off half your staff again three months later.
3. Spending 20 hours a week on the phone being yelled at and
threatened while trying to renegotiate a dozen contracts–like your
T1, phone system, rent, equipment leases, etc.
4. Having an investor scream at you and tell you that they will ruin
you, your career and that “you’ll never raise money again, you mother
f-er.”
5. Laying off half your staff for a third time.
6. Getting served a half-dozen lawsuits, courtesy of the folks who you
tried to renegotiate with in point number three who wouldn’t deal.
7. Having one of the people you’re renegotiating with come to your
office every week and ask for their check in person.
8. Having the same media outlet that once claimed you were the next
Barry Diller write that you’re a fraud.
9. Not getting a good night’s sleep for six months.
10. Having dozens of paying clients default on their bills.
11. Having staffers who you really need to double down and focus walk
out the door after you helped make their careers.
12. Have the people who begged you for a meeting at the peak not even
return your emails or phone calls.
If you can’t deal with these 12 situations, then you’re out. It’s time
to refresh your resume, tell your board you resign, sublet your place
and go to Thailand. Go sit on the beach and lick your wounds for $40 a
day (all-in) like the fauxtrepreneur you are. You suck. I hate you.
You’re smart enough to cut your loses in a way I could never
understand.
If you think you can handle most of the horror above, well, then you’re in.
How do I know this?
Those 12 things–and more–happened to me for over a year when Silicon
Alley Reporter, my first business, got whipsawed by the dotcom bust.
We went from $11.6m in revenue one year to $600k the next. From 70
full-time people to 12. From a 20,000 square foot office to subletting
ten desks at a PR firm.
Personally, I went from being on top of the world, with appearances on
Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, CNN, and Fox News, to being savaged in the
press as a fraud who got lucky and who no one would ever hear from
again.
My office used to get 100-200 phone calls a day and I had two
assistants. Six months later, I answered my own phone–on the rare
occasions it would ring. When it did, it was either my mom calling to
check in on me or a vendor calling to yell at me.
It was the worst year of my life, but it made me who I am today. I’ve
never talked about the tailspin that my business went into, and how I
barely managed to land the plane, but I get the sense that there are a
lot of twenty-somethings about to experience the same thing, and
perhaps my lessons could help.
I’m not going to tell the story. (That would take 80,000 words, a hard
cover and the right publisher), but I’m gonna share some of the
lessons.
Let’s get to work.
The Good News
————————-
If you’re a real entrepreneur, you’re still reading. If you’re a faux
entrepreneur, you’re writing your resignation letter, considering
which beach to surf and how long to grow your beard. God bless you
fauxtrepreneurs, because you’re gonna have a much nicer 2009 than the
real entrepreneurs who are “up against it.”
Of course, a year from now, the real entrepreneurs will be
battle-scarred beasts who are capable of taking big bold risks, and
you’ll still be crying about what could have been with your last
business while attending back-to-back meetings about nothing at BigCo.
Not that I’m judgmental of fauxtrepreneurs who create noise, distract
investors from the real workhorses, suck at their jobs and take no
real risk in their lives.
No, on the contrary, I love you fauxtrepreneurs, because you create
the foundation upon which real entrepreneurs stand. At the start of my
career, it wasn’t east to stand out, but by the time I’d done two or
three businesses and become a fixture in the technology industry, I
had figured it out: Longevity is a big part of credibility. I met
Esther Dyson, Fred Wilson, John Brockman, Jerry Colonna, Mark Cuban,
Ted Leonsis, Seth Godin and countless other luminaries between 1994
and 1997.
Well, it’s a dozen years later and they still take my calls and
respond to my emails.
Longevity is credibility.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the good news: People’s reputations are made
in the bad times more than the good times.
Even if you’re 100% sure your company is going to crash in the next
six months, you’ll learn more from staying on board than you will from
running. You’ll also earn the respect of your peers and you’ll learn
exactly how people break down and lose their cool. You’ll see how
certain VCs screw entrepreneurs, you’ll see entrepreneurs screw VCS
and you’ll watch the lawyers and landlords collect their vig the
entire time.
Most of all, you’ll realize who you are and who your real friends are.
So what’s the sitch?
————————-
You need to figure out your runway immediately. This is really easy to
calculate: you look at how much cash you burn every month and divide
that into how much cash you have in the bank. Your accountant can do
this for you or you can simply look at your P&L and bank statement.
Once you know how many months you’ve got left, you’ve got to do the
hard work of trying to extend it by at least 1/4. This means cutting
staff, negotiating with your landlord and cutting any and all
recurring bills. You then need to look at your revenue streams and
figure out if you can double them. In most cases, if you do these two
simple things, you will have increased your runway by 50-100%. If you
double your runway, your chances of figuring out what your business
actually is will go up exponentially.
You also need to do a monthly P&L review with your management team.
Look at every single recurring cost you have and figure out how to cut
it. In an up market, this level of obsessiveness is often wasteful,
because you’re in a race to take market-share. In the case of MySpace
vs. Friendster vs. Facebook all having unlimited funds for a period of
time, this makes total sense. Why worry about $100,000 in server costs
if you’re racing to see who gets bought for a billion dollars first?
However, this is not that time. You have to change your style. There
are times to hit the gas and there are times to conserve your gas.
Look at it this way: Getting the most market-share and running out of
cash is the equivalent of getting to the moon first without the
ability to get back to Earth. Congratulations, you won the race… and
now you’re dead!
My primary business right now, Mahalo.com, is lucky to have raise a
large amount of capital and is going to fairly easily make it to
profitability based on our growth curve, runway, modest spend and
significant traffic (we’re at 5.6m unique visitors over the last 30
days).
We couldn’t be in a stronger position.
However, even we recently did a deep review at Mahalo and were able to
cut 30% of our costs in under 60 days. The company is still growing
just as fast, and in fact we’re actually more efficient. There is
something strange about that: 25-person companies seem to get more
done than 40-person companies in my experience (other CEOs have told
me the same thing).
Perhaps it’s because after you trim down you have the most efficient
folks left, or maybe we’re all more focused because we don’t have to
communicate what’s going on to as many people? Does anyone know if
there is any research on optimal team size for startups? I’d be
interested to hear what the studies say. Anyway, we made the hard
decisions and that extended our runway by a year. That means Mahalo
will be here in 2013 if we make every single wrong decision and we’re
asleep at the wheel. Of course, we’re focused like lasers on getting
to profitability and developing a really helpful service. If we can’t
figure this business out by 2013 or 2014 then, well, either we really
suck or there is no solution to combining search and knowledge
exchange (of course we know search and knowledge exchanges can and
have worked–so we’re bullish).
Also, when your company goes through this kind of economic boot camp,
I think you get stronger. You understand which parts of your business
are working the best and which ones are, well, not working at all. We
had one area of our business that was two percent of our spending
making 30% of our revenue. You figure these things out when you start
cutting. It’s a sick and sad process to be sure, but Darwin is your
friend at a startup.
Put your VCs to the test
————————-
If you’re running out of money, you’ve got three choices: cut costs,
make money or raise capital. We’re going to get into cutting costs and
making money below in a minute, but I’m a big fan of testing your
investors. When the market is crushed, most VCs get realistic, greedy
or paralyzed. You’ve got to figure out where you stand with your
current investors as quickly as possible, and the quickest way to do
that is to ask them for more money.
Let’s say you’re burning $200k a month and you have a million dollars
in the bank. Go to your VCs and say something like the following:
“John, we’re going to run out of cash in five months. I’ve developed a
cost-cutting and revenue-generating plan that I believe will extend
our runway to 10 months. I’d like to present it to you and your
partners tomorrow for a half-hour with the goal of doing an ‘A+ round’
of one million dollars. I truly believe in this business and I’m
willing to do a flat-round, bust my ass for the next two years and
come out of this recession on top.”
Now your VC is probably going to start asking questions–as they
should. They may try and push off the discussion of the “A+ round.”
Your job is to stand firm and say something to the effect of:
“Well, we’re both vested in this business and I’d like to take the
time to present to you guys this week and get a response from you
either way within five days. I know it’s a compressed time frame, but
we’re living in extraordinary times, and if you guys don’t believe in
the business the way I do, I can accept that and make other
arrangements.”
At that point, you say nothing. Silence is the greatest negotiating
tactic ever created–use it. Your VC right now will be thinking the
following:
a) “This guy/gal’s a real killer and I wish all my CEOs were this
focused. At the very least, I should hear them out.”
b) “This guy/gal has another opportunity, so I’m gonna have to deal
with this train wreck myself–that will suck.”
c) “This business is a dog and I shouldn’t have invested in it. Since
they’re asking for the truth, I might as well give it to them.”
d) “I’m an idiot and I can’t make decisions. Let me push this out a
couple of weeks and make this person’s life hell while I
procrastinate.”
That last part is not what the person would actually say, but that’s
basically the translation of “let me think about it.”
Now, in cases a, b, and c you’re in good shape. You’re gonna either
get your meeting and money or you’re gonna get told you’re not getting
any more funding. Situation D is what you don’t want. If you’re
running out of provisions in the middle of the Atlantic, your best bet
is to go either East or West–not in a circle.
VCs and investors will sometimes send entrepreneurs in circles, either
inadvertently or as leverage. Sometimes VCs are juggling a lot of
balls and can’t focus. Sometimes they’re inexperienced and/or they
have issues that don’t concern your business, like their limited
partners, their partners or their divorce settlements. Sometimes
they’re cutthroat and know that, when you’re down to your last two or
three payrolls, they can extract a 2-3x liquidation preference out of
you.
It’s your job to force the issue now–don’t wait.
Heck, even if you have a year’s worth of runway, you should probably
do this kind of thing so your VCs know you’re the real deal and so you
know where you stand with them.
Put your staff to the test
————————-
If you’re down to six months of cash, you’re gonna have to cut the
bottom 1/3rd of your staff, if not half. This sucks, but there is no
choice. You’re gonna also have to cut salaries. So, here are some
suggestions on how to do this:
1. Get rid of the non-core staff. Look in places like PR, marketing,
and admin to cut. See if you can put some of these folks on part-time.
2. Look at the salaries of your current staff vs. market and look for
ways to cut the high-priced ones who you can get cheaper at the
current market. I know this sounds cutthroat, but remember, this is
advice for folks going out of business in six months. Another way to
run this test is to ask yourself “Would I hire this person for this
amount today?”
3. Go to each member of the team who is over-paid by today’s market
rate and tell them that you’re probably going to be cutting their
salary and that you’re increasing their options. Ask them how they
feel about it. Some people can take a pay cut, others can’t–you don’t
know until you ask.
I’m really against cutting people’s pay above cutting position because
you want the people remaining in your organization to be happy. Of
course, sometimes that’s just not realistic. Many CEOs overpay in a
hot market because they feel they have to, and those folks are the
ones who really need to take this hard action now.
Put your landlord to the test
————————-
Call your landlord and ask them to get a cup of coffee. Do this in
person. Let them know that it’s 50-50 you’re going out of business and
that you need their help in the form of four months free rent,
starting today, the ability to sublet some space (if you don’t have
that right already) and to keep the rent at the same rate you already
have. Tell them you feel horrible about this, and you wouldn’t ask
them to do this if it wasn’t urgent, but you didn’t want to drop the
bomb on them five months from now when there were no more options.
Remember, silence is your friend. Tell your story and see what they
say. I did this at one point and not only got free rent, I got 50% of
our letter of credit freed up. It was a win-win. Trust me, your
landlord is probably facing a LOT of fallout right now… better to
get half than nothing.
Put your vendors to the test
————————-
Since you’ve probably got webhosting, CDNs, equipment leases, and
other recurring charges on your credit cards, cancel those cards
immediately. Call up each vendor and tell them you need six months
free while you figure out your status, and if they can’t do it, ask
for suggestions. Then call each of their competitors and let them know
that you are willing to switch over for the first six months free. If
you get one of four vendors to do this you just saved 25%–I bet you
can get two or three.
Vendors would rather eat some profits for six months than lose your
business. If they can’t support you in your time of need, then you
should find someone who will. There is a LOT of competition out there
and you can negotiate harder than you probably think you can. Tell
vendors you’re willing to switch if they give you six months free and
see what they say. We’ve had folks offer us a *year* of free service
to switch (of course, that’s an exception, not the rule).
Put yourself to the test
————————-
If you’re going to ask so much of your staff, investors and vendors,
you obviously have to take a hit yourself. Go to your VCs and ask them
to participate in the next round–the A+ round. Tell them you know
it’s not a lot but you want to put in $5 or $10k in the round as a
show of support. This will result in them saying it’s not necessary.
After that, tell them you’ll sell your car and take a bike to work and
put $20k into the business if you can get that for your car. Make sure
your staff doesn’t take a bigger cut than you do in salary if you’re
doing salary cuts.
Even if it’s just ceremonial, it means a lot to make cuts. I’ve
stopped traveling as much to conferences even though they cost me
little to nothing (normally people pay me to speak or at least pay for
my travel). Of course, don’t cut traveling if you’re going to
conferences where you might find clients or investors (which is why I
travel half the time!)
Put your product to the test
————————-
As Mark Cuban told me over and over again, “Sales solves everything.”
If you can’t sell your product, it’s not a product–it’s a hobby. Take
your consumer service and sell it as a software package to someone. Go
on the sales calls yourself. During the final year of Silicon Alley
Reporter I made cold calls and set up lunches to sell folks on our new
product, Venture Reporter (the rebranded Silicon Alley Reporter). It
works. When people see the CEO making sales calls, they respect the
company and take it seriously. When the VCs and staffers see you doing
this, they get inspired.
Put a whiteboard up and count any stat you can: sales calls made,
meetings scheduled, contracts sent and sales closed. Give your team
something to think about other than just the bottom line, because you
might have to celebrate the little victories before getting the check
in the door. Celebrate getting the meeting. Celebrate sending a pitch
out.
What to do if it’s over
————————-
If you’re going to hit the wall, you should do so with three or four
months of capital left in the bank. You should cut down to your core
staff and tell them “we have 120 days of cash left and we’re going to
try to land the plane safely. If you want to leave at any point during
the 120 days you’ll get the reference of a lifetime from me. If you
help us land the plane safely I think we’ll all be better off because
of it.”
Then make a plan to do one of the following:
a) sell the business
b) close the business
c) sell the assets of the business
There’s a little bit of overlap up there, since sometimes you close
the business and sell the assets, or you sell the assets and leave a
shell behind. The point is, don’t wait until you have a month left. Do
it when you have 120 days left. If you signal to everyone it’s over,
you’ll have done the honorable thing for your employees, by giving
them the maximum time to have a safe landing, and for your investors,
by allowing them to roll the business or its assets into another
company.
The worst thing to do is to delay this process. I’ve gotten down to
this point exactly, but when I was at break-even at my first business,
we looked for a buyer, because I didn’t think we had much chance of
making it on our own in the 2001-2002 market. I could have been wrong
about that in retrospect, but either way, I’m glad I got out because
it set me up for Weblogs, Inc.
And that is the final lesson: when one door closes, three more open
up. When you shut down your business properly, you will have a clean
slate and renewed energy to take on your next project. You might even
get the investors to give you the company with the 90 days worth of
capital left to start your next project with a recapitalized
structure.
Remember that there is no shame in failure but there are honorable and
dishonorable failures. If you’re going to lose the game, remember that
it’s just that: a game. There will be another and another and another
yet to play. Don’t lose your cool and don’t get depressed. Just get
yourself back up, dust yourself off and get back in the game. The
precursor to success is almost always failure.
[ To the 17 folks who made it to the bottom: If you're struggling with
failure right now, if your business is failing and you don't think you
can go on, remember that at the very least you've been lucky enough to
take your shot. That's more than most people get. You're going to be
much stronger for getting through the heartbreak of a failed business.
Also, you've always got me--your pal Jason--if you need a shoulder to
cry on. I'm only an email, tweet or IM away jason@calacanis or
jasoncalacanis on skype/twitter/AIM. ]
Posted in Musings.
Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes - IsHilarySwankHot.com
Prologue
Stupid, silly, and catchy pop culture things just work. Like our IsHilarySwankHot.com. It’s that big watercooler effect. You can debate all you want, but products like iFart grow. I’d never want to make a company around them, but they’re awesome promotional tools. In a lot of cases, they can bank too.
The Lightbulb
I love the show The Office, it rocks and it’s huge (insert that’s what she said quote here). I started watching last night’s episode, which spent half of the night asking whether hilary swank was hot. Seriously, it was an intense debate between everyone in the office. After the show was over, I sent out a tweet saying that I did not think she was hot. Right after that I started getting a couple of messages in response. BOOM- LIGHTBULB. I knew this was officially one of those pop culture moments to take a hold of for purely promotional reasons. It was going to be the talk of the watercooler, and everyone loves the Office. We needed to continue the discussion and give people a way to vote yes or no if hilary swank was hot.
Making It Happen
This is the type of thing that needed to come together in a few hours or we were at a disadvantage. Spending years learning + subscribing to the notion of rapid development + simplicity pays off. Seriously, stop bloating your shit, you’ll be able to do things so fast. It was a little bit before midnight, and IM’d Mark Bao (fellow cofounder at Ramamia). I told him the logic, and that I was going to buy the domains ishilaryswankhot.com and ishillaryswankhot.com . We went back and forth on layout for a few minutes, and within an hour or so, Mark had a prototype ready. Seriously, it’s a one page novelty web app. I got it on the server, and by about 1 am it was live.
Promoting It
We put it live at like 1 am, and I was up until 3 or 4 am doing other shit. We agreed we’d promote it tomorrow since it was late. Ironically, so far, we have about 1460 votes. The count has increased by a couple hundred within the time it has taken me to write this post and increases approximately 10 per minute. We’ve gotten an article already on tvsquad, a Weblogs Inc. blog: http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/01/23/so-is-hilary-swank-hot/#thankYou. Below is basically our strategy for promotion. Most of which we haven’t even gotten to yet.
- Our Personal Network- Everyone watches The Office. Seriously, it’s a huge show. Over the past few years, Mark and I have built a hell of a network on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. So we started there, just sending it out to those networks. Most of my friends I contacted via im afterwards had already seen it + voted.
- Viral Hooks- People want to talk about this. They want to let people know their opinion. It’s also a funny hot topic. So we built in two buttons: Post to Twitter and Share on Facebook. The Twitter button has been working for sure. (Facebook is hard to tell).
- Advertising- I gave Facebook ads a shot. A lot of people have the office listed in their profile. Approximately 2.4 million i think. I went and got the free Visa Business Network ads for like one hundred bucks, so it was free. I’ve only spent 5 bucks so far. It brought us about 30 clicks. Not bad, but not insanely effective. We’re doing that in under 5 minutes organically. Maybe we’ll up the spend, and focus in on college kids. They talk more.
- Press- We’re going after all the major tv blogs, celebrity blogs, and pop culture blogs. After i write this post, ill basically be emailing my life away. If you have contacts or would like to write about it, email us. TVSquad already gave us a hit, which was awesome. I’m a long time reader there, so it’s pretty cool to have an article on there.
- Community Sites- I’ll be going to every office fan site and forum to pitch them. The fan sites are a lot like press. As far as forums go, I won’t spam, but will just make a simple topic. People who are fans of the show enjoy this.
In Closing
Dumb, novel, pop culture focused apps can somehow be a great promotional tool. We haven’t been able to see the correlation to it in regards to Ramamia sign ups yet. That may be another post. Even if it doesn’t bring us a ton of sign ups, it’s cool to make something funny that people enjoy. That’s the great thing about the internet, you can make things just for the hell of it.
Posted in Company News.
Big Product Updates- Spanish/Portuguese Translations + Password Support
So we’ve done it again and made some awesome/major product updates:
- Full translation/support for spanish and portuguese
- A password system is in place. It’s not required, but a lot of people wanted it.
- Ability to delete individual photos
- Support for no http:// in link sharing
Let us know what you think! Email us.
Posted in Company News.
Genesis Of a Web App: 46 Days, 3 Separate Cities, Countless All-Nighters
A few days ago we launched Ramamia to our friends + family (a lot of which was on Hacker News). Many people asked us to chronicle the Genesis of Ramamia: how we created the app from a tech perspective, how we communicate (Mark is in Cambridge, Matt is in Miami, and I’m in Silicon Valley), what software we use, and how we take in feedback. Below is some basic commentary from Mark and I. Matt was involved as well, but less on the initial product, as he’s focused on monetization/conversion. The factors we looked at and will look at, will be in a separate post by him.
How It All Happened
The Initial Concept + Development
Mark’s Take
About 35% of Ramamia was done in an adrenaline-fueled crazed block of a day, where the general foundation, authentication system, invite system, photos, message and event posting systems were finished. Then came constant improvements to the system, eventually the auxiliary features for creation of sites, recovery of login links, and a ton of other things.
Jason’s Take
I had just privately left my startup of two years in Early November (that is another huge blog post that I will write someday), right after the election. Ramamia was an idea that was brewing for a while between Matt and I, but there was no time for it. I was still fired up to make a web app happen, and always had this certain gut feeling about Ramamia. The goal was to make the web app dead simple, and to make the specification document one page. We literally got the initial spec down to one page. Obviously things expand, but it’s better to have one page expand than three pages expand. I’m normally a PHP guy, but Mark was getting into Rails. He was kind of shocked, when I said: “Let’s do this in Rails. We need something quick, easy, and simple. It seems like Rails is the way to go for that”. Mark started jamming on the code that night to just set a foundation (i think it was a Friday). By the end of Saturday night, he had a proof of concept going (November 8th). The rest of the night we both tore the app apart to get it simpler and closer to where we wanted it to be.
Getting Ready For a Soft Launch To Family + Friends
Mark’s Take
Over the span of about 2 months afterward, Ramamia was being continually improved, as the team decided on the Ramamia system specifics. An early preview was released for Thanksgiving. Finally, we were getting close to Christmas Day–and we needed to have something out–the rest of the beta was finished and released on the production server.
Jason’s Take
As some of you may know, Ramamia has a heavy latin american focus, so it made sense for us to launch when I was back in Miami for the holidays. Mark was pounding away to get the first version ready to share with friends + family. Once we had major bugs out, mainly IE support (F’n IE has been the phrase of the week), Flash 10 uplloading, and then we made what was referred to as “Project R” public to our friends + family. Mark, Matt, and I have made good networks through facebook, twitter, linked in, offline,etc. and just pushed the app there. Our goal was not usage and getting a big bang, because we knew that wasn’t happening. Our goal was to get feedback so we could rapidly iterate. I’d say, we hit those goals above and beyond how we thought we would.
How We Operate
We use a ton of different pieces of software to operate the tech end of Ramamia:
- Ruby on Rails
- Passenger on Apache
- MySQL for the database
- FogBugz to track bugs (which is awesome–we use the free student/startup edition)
- Hosted on a simple Linode account. Plans to stay there over time.
- Amazon S3 for photo storage
- jQuery (hosted on Google’s Javascript CDN)
How We Communicate and Deal with Distance
We’re a distributed team (described as being on each corner of the US except the northwest) and we’re able to work really well by using Google Docs to get our thoughts together, AIM to talk general chat, Dropbox extensively to share pictures, files, and related documents. We use both iChat AV for pseudo-face-to-face and TokBox when iChat doesn’t work out. We also use RivalMap to track our competitors and do analysis.
The negatives of working remotely are still here, but with web software and being able to be available, almost as if you were there in-person, sharing files on the same hard drive, talking to each other, passing documents around, it’s so much easier to manage a distributed team. Since starting Ramamia, I haven’t met with Matt or Jason once in person.
Getting Feedback
On the 23rd of December, Ramamia was submitted to Hacker News for tearing-apart by the HNers. Met with criticism (which is awesome) and a lot of opportunities to change the application, as well as dealing with bugs. We’ve received feedback from Twitter and blogs and everywhere, and we continually make improvements to the product based on this feedback. We also met a lot of great people who helped us tremendously in improving the product and fixing problems with it, as well as people who spread the word about Ramamia. We thank them highly for helping us.
A couple of days afterwards, we released a new homepage as suggested by much of the feedback we received. It was great to get some feedback and greatly improve the product, and a few days later, we released a revamped design with many of the features people were asking for. Changing family name, auto-capitalisation, fixing some security things people were concerned about.
A couple of days after that, we completely redid the user interface on the application itself, added birthday alerts, avatars, and more performance fixes. Inside of 5 days, we’ve basically redone the entire application. We’ve also added an internal admin section to track usage, statistics,etc.
What’s Next
We’re working on a few more things before a full on press launch in early January. Right now we’re still focused on feedback, working on the overall vision for the company, and preparing a press campaign. We’re still sticking to short dev cycles, thinking in 60 day periods, and how to keep things deadly simple.
Posted in Musings.
MAJOR Update: We’ve Revamped The Entire Application UI + Small Feature Updates
Alright, so it may have been Christmas week, but the team here has not slowed down a one bit. We’ve already updated the homepage, revamped some of the app ui, and added security/other updates. This is a Big One folks. We took your feedback, and we completely revamped the application user interface.
- The header is 1/3 of the size
- The right column is fully focused on family members
- You can now have an avatar/picture!
- The welcome text is a LOT smaller
- The look and feel is a lot more fluid, with a gradiated background.
- The layout clearly focused on 3 columns now: (left column- “Share and Do Stuff” Middle column- “Stuff is happening here” Right Column “People Stuff Is Here”
- Birthday alerts!!!
Go Try It out now!
Before:
After:
Seriously, this team is amazing. Mark has been busting his ass day and night to get this release out. We’ve been going back and forth on changes until 5 in the morning. He’s been a warrior when it comes to iteration. Matt just graduated college not even a week ago, and he’s been helped revise the conversion factor on the app. Believe it or not, we’re already preparing for monetization- that’s his department.
There’s a few more things to come before we go out and do a full on launch in Mid-January. We’re Fired Up and Ready To Go. That I can certainly tell you.
Posted in Company News.
A Christmas Day Gift- New Homepage + Over 10 Updates
In the first 24 hours, we’ve gained tons of valuable feedback. Our goal was to do a simple launch to friends and family, for one sole purpose: feedback. Well, we have without a doubt succeeded there, but more importantly: we’ve listened and we’ve acted. Mark busted his ass hacking away on christmas eve and here’s what we have for you:
A New SIMPLER Homepage
- It’s less busy and more focused
- Everything above the fold
- A bigger focus on the demo video
- Ability for the user to understand what we do in 10 seconds or less
- Much easier on the eyes with more neutral colors and smaller fonts
Over 10 Updates- A Lot of Security/Privacy and Bug Fixes.
- fProtect non-public pages from public view
- Meta disallow robots.txt for family page
- Allow people to change family name (THIS WAS THE NUMBER ONE REQUEST)
- Ability to Delete Stuff
- public commenting redirects to private page
- public comments don’t post if main page isn’t visited
- Fix audio and video playback of video on homepage when on IE
- Sharethis widget removed
- autocapitalize family names
- commenting area view focus
- SEO meta descriptions
- Icons added to your family page (looks a TON better)
- Only access your family page when logged in
We’re working on some pretty damn cool things before the BIG PUSH and launch in January.
Posted in Company News.
Happy Holidays- We’re Launching Ramamia Into Beta
We started Ramamia because there was no simple tool to constantly communicate with our families. We had email obviously, but that wasn’t rich enough and the reply all lists were just annoying. Try planning an event over email… emphasis on the word try. Then we tried family sites like Geni, MyFamily,etc. They’re great web applications, don’t get us wrong, but they were like using a bulldozer to knock over a sand castle. The problem, unlike other applications, was simple: they were all too difficult to use and bloated. We’re into tech, and it was just overwhelming for us. We just wanted a simple way to upload a photo, post a message, or let the family know of an event. Maybe we were spoiled by things like twitter and seesmic, but we wanted something more rapid. Get started in under 5 seconds, post a photo or message, and our entire family would get notified.
So like all good entrepreneurs, we decided to just build it ourselves. It would be a side project, but something with a lot of promise. We originally had the idea back in early 2008, but never had the time to execute. Fast forward to late October and we said, “inside of 60 days, we’re getting this beta out the door. it ships by Christmas morning.” We took a small amount of angel funding, just to make sure the lights would stay on with hardware though a tough recession. Well, believe it or not, we met that goal, and here we are launching Ramamia on December 23rd. It’s not going to be a typical “web 2.0 launch” with tons of embargoes and press coverage. We’re going to launch it to close friends and family, figure out what people love/hate, and then after the holidays we’ll do a run for the press.
We hope the app is as useful for you and your family, as it is for ours. Feel free to contact us via email, phone (617 395 5633 786.301.2914,or 772.801.1058) or twitter.
Posted in Company News, Development News, Musings.
Getting Started Video (In HD!)
Here’s a simple getting started in under 2 minutes video we made of Ramamia.
Posted in Company News.
Welcome To The Ramamia Company Blog!
Welcome to the company blog. More updates to come once we launchin a few days. I promise :-).
Posted in Company News, Development News, Musings.
