Bootstrap’d The Misadventures of Starting a Company

Day 10: Search for a UPS23:55:41

I left off yesterday declaring that I would go out and buy a UPS battery backup first thing this morning.  What I soon learned was that I didn’t know anything about UPSs (UPSes? UPS’s?).  I also learned that retail clerks don’t know anything about them either.  I came home and decided my time was better spent researching UPSs online and probably ordering one from NewEgg.  I’ve narrowed my choices down between two models, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.  The prices are definitely cheaper online, and NewEgg’s free shipping would be worth the wait (forecast is for sunny skies for the next several days).

This next topic is goofy, but I think it’s cool. I’ll tie it in with the whole starting-a-company thing in a minute.  For my birthday, my parents gave me a series of 5 bowling lessons with the pro at my local lanes.  I can’t really explain why, but I love bowling.  It probably has to do with all the physics involved, and being a nerd, it was one of the few sports I was pretty good at as a kid.  I called the pro today and scheduled my first lesson for next Monday.  He said the lessons are usually scheduled two weeks apart and that I should practice between lessons.  Makes sense to me.

How does this relate to business stuff?  One word: distraction.  For the last 10 days I have done nothing but eat, sleep, drink, and breath this new company.  That is, of course, to be expected.  However, if I don’t come up for air once in a while I will surely drown in it.  Having these bowling lessons, and then taking the time out between them to practice a bit, will provide a healthy break from the work.  Sometimes you need to let your brain switch gears and let your subconscious focus on things for a while.  Ever wake up in the middle of the night remembering the name of the band that sang that song on the radio earlier in the day?  That’s your subconscious sorting things out while your brain rests.  I certainly have plenty to think about with this company, and I fully trust my subconscious mind to figure out the really hard stuff.

So, long story short, I’m excited about the lessons.  If you need me next Monday at 3pm, I’ll be unavailable.

I played with some new server technologies for web apps today (the tech isn’t new itself, but it was the first time I had learned about them).  This took the bulk of my day.  I left several things on my ToDo list undone today, and this was the reason why.  I felt it was worth it, though.  It prompted me to spin up another VM image to mirror my cloud server so I can do local testing before pushing things into production.

That’s about it for today.  I’m calling it quits earlier than normal tonight becuase I’ve started to stay up too late working on things.  If I had my druthers, I would sleep all day and work at night.  Alas, that won’t work when I have to interact with other people.  Looking forward to meeting with my web designer tomorrow.

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Day 9: Coming Along Nicely23:55:02

Today was, as predicted, a full day. Woke up for my morning client call which gave the official go-ahead on the freelancing project.  We exchanged contracts and signatures, and I will officially begin work for that project on Thursday.  It has a tight (but manageable) schedule.  It should be fun to work on something with a quick turn around time.

As noted yesterday, I got my Small Business American Express card in the mail and ready for use (more about my planned first purchase in a moment).  The entire process for the AmEx went something like this:

I applied online in about 15 minutes.  This was made smoother by the fact that I have a personal account with AmEx already. At the end of the online application I was told to call an 800 number to get a final decision.  I called up, was on hold for about 2 minutes, talked to a representative who cheerfully exclaimed “You’re approved!” and said I would have my card in the mail ASAP.  After waiting four days I had the card in my hot little hand.

I also applied for a Visa card last week (for use exclusively when AmEx is not accepted). I also did the application online with a bank of which I am already a member and have a personal credit card.  Having not heard any updates from the bank about my application, I decided to call and ask about the application status.  After going through phone menu purgatory, I managed to speak to a Live Person.  The Live Person (who was actually quite pleasant) informed me that she accessed the application and that, “No decision has been reached yet.” (I submitted the app 6 days ago)  Silence. I thought she might volunteer more information, but apparently it was my turn to talk.

“When will you have a decision?”

“In about 10 to 14 business days.”

“Then will they notify me?”

“Yes, then if you are approved we will send you a letter in the mail.”

“Postal mail?”

“Yes.”

So, they will send me a “letter” if I am approved.  Does that mean it will contain the card? Or will it say “Congrats! Your card will arrive in 10 to 14 business days!”  This is a tad frustrating.  Just let this be a lesson that you may have to deal with juggling personal and business credit cards for a while.  I can deal with it, but sheesh!

I also looked into getting some business cards printed.  I found a lot of resources and good info.  I’ll write an entire post about the different options when I finally order some.  Right now I am leaning toward getting some nice Moo Cards – http://moo.com/ – and a big stack of regular, plain cards to hand out depending on the person/event/etc.

I received an email today that Mosso, er The Rackspace Cloud, would now be rebranding their name from Mosso, er The Rackspace Cloud, to The Rackspace Cloud. Also, they are changing their website from http://mosso.com/ to http://rackspacecloud.com/ effective next week.  The email also politely asked if we (the current users) would mind changing the links from http://mosso.com/ to http://therackspacecloud.com/ on our websites, blogs, etc… So, I have done my part of the deal.  I have changed all references of Mosso to The Rackspace Cloud in all previous posts (excpet ToDo lists).  I’m sure they will be pleased.

As for actually working on the product today, I managed to make a lot of progress – probably more than I have on any other day.  I am quite happy with the way things are coming along.  I was getting a bit discouraged by the aforeposted bug, but making this much progress in one shot makes me want to continue further and faster.  The mini-demo I have created to show my web-designer is pretty cool (sorry, you can’t see it yet).  I have all day tomorrow to develop it further before our meeting on Thursday.

While I was taking my break tonight, there was a massive thunderstorm in our area.  The power went out. I ran upstairs to my office to bring all of my servers back up.  I brought up my main test server and got everything running again and made sure the demo still worked. I started tweaking a few lines of code. Then the power went out again. Then I brought everything up again. Lucikly the storm started to pass at this point. This is a very traumatic experience when it happens.  However, I did take advantage of the situation to plug my new Kill-A-Watt into the wall where all of my surge protectors converge so I can actually see how much power is being drawn from my various machines. Right now I have 3 (of many) computers running, and they are drawing about 300 watts of power.  That’s about 100 watts per computer, which isn’t bad considering two of them have older inefficient power supplies.

You may be asking yourself, why doesn’t this idiot have a UPS in his office?? (No, not the shipping company, an Uninterruptible Power Supply, also known as a battery backup.) That’s a good question, and  I am vowing to go out and buy one first thing tomorrow morning.  They are quite expensive for the amount of power I would need to last through some electric-grid downtime, and frankly having one wasn’t very critical before.  But, now the game has changed, and having one has all the sudden become extremely critical.  Plus, I can now write it off as a business expense.  This shall be my first real business purchase!

I think I will work a bit more on the code before I go to bed.

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Day 8: Something Witty Goes Here23:55:37

You’ll notice that each of my summary posts is miraculously posted at 23:55 each night.  Actually, it’s usually like 3 or 4 AM when I write these summaries, but to make the post align with the correct date, I backdate it ever so slightly.

Speaking of dates… what happened to Day 6 and Day 7?  Oh, they happened.  They just happened to be the weekend.  I fully expect to be working on the weekends, but I have made the decision that I will be taking a break from posting on the weekends.  If something big happens I will write about it, but usually I will just be coding (which was the case for this past weekend).

Today I finally got in contact with my underwriter for the merchant account.  He verified my account information and clicked the approved button to make everything official.  Now I just have to go through PCI compliance to actually start accepting credit cards on websites.  But, seeing as I do not yet have a product, I’m in no huge rush to do all that.  What is PCI compliance, you ask?  Have no fear.  In my “Merchant Account Posts To End All Posts” post, I’ll give all the fun little details.

I spent a good hour on the phone with a very nice fellow by the name of Sean from TweetPhoto.  He emailed me last week asking if I was considering adding any photo posting cabailities to TweetGrid, and if I would consider adding TweetPhoto as the primary site.  We setup a call for today to talk about some of the details.  It was also a good conversation because TweetPhoto just launched as a business entity only a few short weeks ago, and it was a good opportunity to ask him about building a business on top of Twitter, etc, etc.  I gained a few good nuggets of information which I will tuck away for later use (more on that much later, I’m sure).  I am planning to add TweetPhoto support to TweetGrid by the end of the week, time permitting.  It shouldn’t be too hard; their API is fairly straight forward, and I’ve written some previous code which deals with image file uploading.  I’m hoping it will take an hour or so to make it happen (famous last words).

For the last week I have been grappling with an interesting bug in one part of the code for my first product.  This bug is particularly frustrating because it centers around network coding and internet protocols.  Now, I went to school to learn how to think about such problems and specialized in networking as part of my computer science degree.  I even have a Cisco Certification which states that I am Good At Networking.  Right now I just feel like an idiot.  I have a workaround in place, but I still feel like I have not solved the problem.  I was heartened to find out that I was not the only person having this problem, but I still feel like it should be solvable.  The problem, now, is that I have spent the last three whole days trying to get to the bottom of it to the detriment of working on any other code.  I think I am going to have to learn that there are some times when having a workaround is “Good Enough” and I can come back to it later if it really needs fixing.

Tomorrow morning I have a call with one of my freelancing clients which should give me the official go-ahead for the project.  At least this will force me to get my mind off of the current problem and work on something a little unrelated.

I also have a meeting scheduled with my web designer on Thursday.  I want to have a simple working demo ready to show him by the time we meet; this will force me to get the other sections of my code built up to create a whole system that actually works.  So, I can no longer fester over this one small (yet unbelievably annoying) bug.

In the next couple of days I am planning on writing out some goals with concrete deadlines.  Having a daily ToDo list is nice for day-to-day things, but I need to know where I am heading and make sure I can get there on time.  I don’t need to, oh, for example, waste three days on a bug that isn’t critical.  I am not yet sure if I will post these goals/deadlines publicly or not.  I still need to think that over.

I now officially have a corporate credit card (with a whopping credit line of $3,000 (yes, that was sarcastic)). Also, apparently the intro APR period is only 6 months and not 12 as the offer stated (bait and switch?).  I have never carried a balance on a credit card, and I don’t intend to start.  But, I am willing to carry a small balance if the APR is 0% to get things started in the beginning.  Right now I don’t have any purchases that I need to run out and make (thankfully), but I will probably start moving over the charges for services I’ve already started (like Freckle and Rackspace Cloud) onto this new card and off of my personal card.

Tomorrow should be a busy day. Oh look, it’s only 23:55 so I can get plenty of sleep!

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Day 5 – Still Feeling Good About This18:37:42

Thus ends my first 5-day week of being Chief Cook and Bottle Washer of my nascent company.  I heartily expect to be working all sorts of odd hours and especially weekends as things move forward, but I think I’ll declare this week over right now and go celebrate with a humble pizza.

Today went pretty smoothly except for a few minor bumps.  My GoGrid server has been up and down like the stock market during the last two months, and I’ve just about had it.  I fully expect to be migrating to my Rackspace Cloud server early next week (or over the weekend) to avoid this mess.  I had a dialog with a GoGrid employee about the situation, and he is going to find out if my server can be moved to a more reliable rack or something.  As I await those details I will be creating my backup server in case I just have to cut the cord.

I had a very constructive conversation with Twitter today about the problems I was seeing yesterday with parts of the API. I really appreciate the time they took to talk with me directly, answer my questions, and consider my feedback. Using this information I was able to continue working on my product while they went back to check on a few things themselves.

I ran a few errands in the afternoon and noticed that my car still had a full tank of gas after filling up a week ago.  I guess one major upside to working from home most of the time is that I will use little gas.

About a month ago, I received an email from the Consumer Electronics Association – http://ce.org/ – inviting me to present TweetGrid in a booth during CES 2010 in January.  I was very excited at this prospect.  I have always wanted to attend CES, and I have never been to Las Vegas.  Now I was being invited to be part of CES?  This was too good to be true.  Well, there was a slight catch: it will cost me a little upwards of $5,000 to get a booth, plus travel and lodging.  They will take a down payment of 60% to reserve a booth, with the rest payable later in the year.  But, that’s still around $3,000 I would need to cough up to get my foot in the door.  I have been exchanging emails with them over the last few weeks getting more details and asking about financing options.  I talked with them a little more today about my options.  I think that this would be a great opportunity to showcase my company (if it is still in existence in January), and really $5,000 would not be a huge sum of money compared to the amount of attention (and potential press) I would get out of it.  The problem, however, is coming up with the funds right now.  If I don’t hand over some cash soon the opportunity will vanish.  I am still grappling with this.  Now I am thinking that since my new business credit card(s) come with an introductory 0% APR I could charge it there and pay it off before the normal APR kicks in. I just have to wait for the cards to arrive, which should be early next week.  More on this as it develops.

So far I am really enjoying this; both the actual work and writing about it. Thanks for reading along! Let me know if there is any way for me to make this more interesting or entertaining for you.

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