BUSINESS

Part 3
In Which I Am Shocked

Two quick things that gave me a serious case of eye-widening this morning.

On the latest Gilmor Gang, Michael Arrington of TechCruch said that the new news site NewsVine is “probably only burning $100,000 a month”. Jeeminy Christmas. My friend might have hooked me up with a free hosting option for my new site and I’m extremely happy to save that $60 a month.

TechCrunch also has a post about a new Web2.0 parenting site called Minti. The site just launched and is basically an old-school advice site with Web2.0 goodness and Ajax baked in. He mentions that they’ve raised $1.6 million in initial seed financing. Cripes. That’s a lot of freaking money, especially for a site that’s just barely out of the gate.

Sometimes I think that all this stuff about how cheap it is to start a new startup is only cheap from the perspective of all these guys who know VCs and are older with lots of money in the bank. I’d love to prove that somebody like me can launch a site, build a community, and get something real going without having access to all the stuff these big companies have. I’m a big fan of being ignorant so I can not fall into the traps people who know more fall into but I’m hoping that I’m being ignorant, not stupid.

I’m pretty close to going live though so we’ll find out. :)

Tags: grommes, business, startup, money
The stumbling block I’ve run into is that I had two potential sources of free bandwidth that have both gone away on me. The ISP I used to run, Spinn.Net, was sold to a larger outfit a few months ago and all the people I knew there left so I have no ‘in’ with them now. I also thought I might be able to put the server in temporarily in the rackspace we have for our servers where I work at my dayjob but our guy in charge of Engineering said no for various reasons, but it’s not my call and I respect his decision. So now I’m looking around. I’m going to talk to the data center we host our servers for work at and see if they might be able to do something for me. My boss at SpinnNet used to get people to let him do a ramp-up period where he wouldn’t pay anything or he’d pay a fraction for the first few months until some revenue started coming in. Hopefully I can get somebody to do that for me. I’m not as good with people as he was though so I don’t know what’ll happen.

I’m doing this on the extreme cheap so it’s presenting a great many challenges. Just coming up with $700 for a server was work. And everytime you see people talking about starting a company they always say flip things like “If you can’t raise $10,000 for your business, you shouldn’t be in business” which I think is dumb. I don’t have rich friends, rich family, anybody who could give me that kind of money (or even half that) for whom the money wouldn’t hurt them if I never am able to pay them back (a real possibility for any business starting out). I’ll have more to say about that later. Maybe in the end that flip wisdom won’t seem so flip but for now I’m counting on my cluelessness to get me going.

More later.

Tags: grommes, business, startup, web
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