Tag Archives: crowdvine

23rd Feb, 2011

1 comment

Social Workshop — A lifetime of products

Social Workshop

Since 2007, Social Workshop LLC has been a small thing: the owner of a Tax ID, a bank account, and CrowdVine. In 2011, I’m excited for it to become much more of a thing–more projects and more contributors.

First, since you can’t have a thing without a website, say hello to the Social Workshop website [1].

If I’m going to work another 40 years [2], then there’s going to be a large number of projects and products along the way. I always have side projects going and I don’t see that slowing. Having a company amplifies that. Here’s what we have going on right now.

Current projects
CrowdVine – Our main project and where most of the ideas for the other projects were tested. CrowdVine was originally just event communities but is moving toward simple, modern event websites where modern includes community and social networking features to help attendees network and plan. User growth was 68% last year.

Yak.ms – A simple, programmer friendly content management service. We’ll be launching a version shortly where simple means just the basic concepts: pages, layouts, and files and where programmer friendly means: raw html editing, RESTful, open source, and great import/export. The open source part is key–we’re building the core features so that they can be a drop in replacement for CrowdVine’s existing CMS features (Yay, synergy!).

Hubnik.com – CrowdVine has gotten so conference specific that we had to break out the online groups aspect into it’s own service, Hubnik. There are major changes on the way as well. The current version is heavy on social networking and light on discussion. That will be reversed. Think of this as Google Groups modernized.

IHeartQuotes – This was originally just a two day project to put up a web based database of quotes based on some Unix utilities that have existed forever. Then there was an @iheartquotes Twitter account. Now that Twitter account has a dedicated crew of moderators and has picked up 300k followers in the last year. The moderators do the bulk of the work although we did some recently upgrade the design and start publishing to Facebook and Tumblr.

Philosophy
In short: be useful.

There are two sides to that.

First, there is a life goal to do work that people use and that makes people’s lives better. I’ve posted before about impact and how easy it’s been for me to either fool myself into thinking I was working on something important or to end up in situations where any important work I did was abandoned/deleted. So, partially, this company minimizes useless work years. Maximizing usefulness is another story, but definitely a consideration.

Second, it’s a daily approach to the decisions that come up during development. In feature development you often have a choice between cool features which will impress your tech-savvy friends and simple features that will impress your users. In sales, you often have opportunities to sell features that don’t matter. It’s always tempting to go the wrong way, especially if your rent check is on the line, but it’s explicitly my goal to be building features that are verifiable as useful to users and to be selling verified results.

Longevity

This is not an incubator, as in this is not merely a fishing expedition for hits. Although I certainly hope to have some hits along the way.

Products should be able to live for as long as people find them useful. There’s some harsh portfolio management that goes on in the corporate world and in the startup world where products get killed before their users are ready for them to die. We’re not as harsh.

As evidence, in 1999 I built a survey creation service, OpinionPower on contract. Today, most people would choose SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, but there’s still a niche where our service fits and still regular users. This service has existed successfully for twelve years with minimal changes. I don’t see any reason to take it down.

Thanks for reading and I hope we can build something useful for you.

[1] The main feature is an activity feed pulling together everything that we’re working on. Websites are no longer about who you say you are–they’re about what your actions say you are. I got the idea for an activity-stream-focused website from First Round Capital. I love what that feature says about them… and when I saw their site I realized that underneath the conference features of CrowdVine was all of the infrastructure to build my own–feed aggregation and content management.

[2] I’m 32. How long do you think I’ll work? This is an interesting prediction exercise. They say lifespans are increasing. Is the onset of diseases that block programming also getting pushed back (arthritis, etc)? Will the economy crash? Peak oil? Assuming resources are available, I expect my retirement to be pretty cheap in that I’ll be living in a tube, hooked to an IV, paying $19/month for a World of Warcraft subscription. But that’s for another post. I picked 40 more years of work as an average. It could be twenty years followed by post-apocalyptic living or it could be seventy years. It’s hard to know.

4th Nov, 2010

3 comments

Experiments in Software Services

I want to build useful products. I’m glad I know that about myself. Some programmers want to solve hard problems. That’s not a priority for me. Some programmers want the internals of their code to be beautiful. I consider that just a means to an end. And some other programmers just want to be on the winning team, personal contribution be damned (BTW, the winning team often pays well).

For me, it’s the building of the product and the feedback of how and why it’s useful that matters. So, it’s odd to me that so much of my company, CrowdVine, is based on providing services for setting up, configuring, and customizing our software. That’s a little far afield of how I initially imagined the company and I wanted to talk about the good and the bad of building a services company.

What are services?
I used to think software companies that sold solutions were crooked. It turns out there’s not really anything wrong with offering a solution. It just means that you’re selling your time and know-how along with the software. Your time and know how is the service part.

For example, we get asked all sorts of detailed questions and since we have a lot of experience, we can give pretty good answers. For example, a conference might ask when they should launch our software and we’ll walk them through a decision tree, when will they hit 100 registrants, are they hoping for a marketing boost, how engaged do their attendees tend to be and then we’ll just give them our expert advice. Without that advice the conference would call a staff meeting filled with people who have no experience at all and try to reason it out on their own.

Or more concretely, a lot of people want to customize the CrowdVine design to look like their existing website. Sometimes this is as simple as uploading a logo and anyone can do it. A lot of times this means customizing CSS and requires someone who’s good with HTML, CSS, and a debugging tool like Firebug. Some of our customers have such a person. But even if they do, we have someone on staff who’s the world expert on customizing CrowdVine designs. That’s all he does. He can spot gotchas before he starts. He has a quality checklist for when he’s done. And he’s 3x faster than someone who’s trying it for the first time.

Those are good examples of services.

Bad examples of services are when your service covers up flaws in your software. For example, we use a simple but important recipe for how our software is launched. We can make sure almost all of our customers follow this recipe because we’re already talking to them. But being able to rely on that holds us back from developing an even more intuitive launch system.

There are simpler examples too, like our CSV importer which choked if the last line of the CSV was blank. That bug lived a long life because the only person who ever used the CSV importer was our account manager and she knew how to work around it.

Services guarantee customer development
Providing services puts you in a situation where you almost can’t help but be engaging in customer development. You’re constantly talking to customers and they’re expecting that when they ask for something you do it. This gives you very deep feedback because you can get your customer on the phone to talk for an hour about why something is working or not. It also means you’re often co-developing a feature with someone who you know will use it.

There’s a downside too. You’ll probably be too busy to engage in any build-it-and-then-they’ll-come development. But it’s very easy to fall into a trap where you build something that only gets used once. I suppose that’s learning in a way. If the feature didn’t set the world on fire with the first customer and later customers didn’t demand it, then it’s not a feature that warrants extra development. But I look at CrowdVine and see a lot of hidden features that look more like they need to be iterated rather than abandoned.

Bootstrapping
While getting a company off the ground, you can either dip into your savings, work a side job, take somebody else’s money, or build a services business on top of your first prototype. We did the latter.

It worked. People work for me. I took vacation this year. I have clean socks. However, I don’t drive a Tesla (yet) and I feel like purchasing an SSD for my laptop would be too luxurious. That’s my way of telling you how well, in dollar terms, it worked.

The first few gigs were extreme early adopters and it really didn’t matter much that the software was in such bad shape. One early reviewer said it looked like it had been built by a 12-year-old with a learning rails book. That definitely meets the definition of releasing while you’re still embarrassed by the product.

The downside to bootstrapping by selling services is that it’s hard to look too far ahead. How do you order your product development queue? By whatever feature will close the next deal. There are plenty of features that got promised before they were built.

Running sales
I’m a terrible sales person. I’m not great at the ask. Putting together supporting material triggers severe procrastination. I’ve never written down and rehearsed my demo or pitch. And yet, I’m the absolute best sales person in the world for the niche of software that CrowdVine provides.

The lean startup theories say that the founder should always be the first sales person. That’s scary if you think being the first salesperson requires traditional sales skills. Thankfully, founders get to use what I call the founder sales process.

Unlike your average sales person, a founder gets a ton of credibility for free. You’re an authority and can give a deep explanation on whatever the potential customer needs. You’re also naturally curious about what’s working and why, and that curiosity seems to give even more credibility to the times that you’re speaking authoritatively or debunking some crazy concern of theirs. So when I need to do a sales call, I just get on the phone and focus on being thoughtful. I um, ah, stutter, make a buzzing noise when I can’t think of the next word, cut people off, and yet…

It works. There were only two places where lack of sales skill hurt, neither fatal. One, there were plenty of times where I left money on the table or didn’t pair a concession with an ask. For example, I gave big discounts to an early customer because I needed reference customers. But then they didn’t launch. The second thing that was hard to understand was the importance of maintaining relationships. I lost an early customer to a new competitor because they had feature X. We’d had feature X for six months, but I didn’t know that it was even important to this customer. The whole decision to switch was made without me in the discussion, because I’d been ignoring the customer.

Doing the work
We’ve done two types of services work.

One is where the customer provides the idea. For example, a customer might come to us and say they want to build a social network for everyone who owns a cell phone (we turned away this client). They’re talking to us because we have social network software, but the actual implementation would probably include all sorts of client-defined customizations.

The other type of services is where we’re telling the customer what we’re going to do. For example, we provide social networks for conferences. We’re constantly testing and refining our process for doing this. We’re happy to take suggestions from our customers, but for the most part the work we do for one customer is the same as what we do for the next customer.

I greatly prefer the second type of services work. It has a much higher success rate. Success means more work from the customer, more word of mouth, and more job satisfaction. You can tell your customer with certainty that they will get good value for their money.

The first type of services work has a lot of launch risk in it. That guy who wanted to build a social network for cell phone owners got his idea while working in a cell phone kiosk. To put it mildly, he was not savvy. But he was opinionated. So that job would have been either saying yes and billing for work that was never going to work, or constantly fighting, saying no, and pushing our own ideas for what might work. If he’s reading this he’s going to be pissed that he never got me to sign an NDA.

The other nice thing about having similar services that you do repeatedly is that you can standardize them and delegate them to someone you hire. That’s what we do. I do the sales call, but then other people do all of the actual work of delivering on my promises.

Growing Sales Team
The standard approach for a services business is to start piling on sales and account management employees while taking a few dollars per head for yourself. This is where it gets gross. If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen some positives to offering services. But this path puts you up against a decision: do you want to be a product company or a services company. I want to be a product company.

So, I’m running an experiment to see if I can offer services without a sales team.

There are a couple of pieces to this. One, we have a product that does generate word of mouth sales. Two, we have a self-service option. Three, we just started listing the prices of our most expensive packages ($3000-8000).

What we’re trying to do is maximize the number of people who will be happy in self-service while cutting down the sales process for people who are going to purchase our services. With word-of-mouth, people are coming to us already convinced and with transparent pricing I’ve removed most of the negotiation. So when we do get on the phone, we’re mostly talking logistics.

The transparent pricing part is the most new and I’m curious to see how it turns out.

We do have competitors, but they must already know what we charge because they charge the exact same thing. Maybe having our prices public will let them underbid us or contact all of our existing customers with lower bids. But they can already do that and don’t.

I’m a little bit worried about having a price war, although not for the reason you probably suspect. I’ve paired my prices with some consideration for margins and I’ve been trying to take as much cost out of the sales process as possible. If somebody merely drops prices without also keeping their costs in line, then they’re going to go out of business. I used to want (and briefly had) 100% of this niche market. But then I realized that nobody will take this niche seriously if there are no alternatives. It’s much better to be the best of four options than it is to be the only option. We already had one really visible implosion and the founders wrote a post-mortem giving a lot of the blame to the product category.

Another thing I’m wondering is if public prices are beneficial to marketing agencies who want to sell their own support services on top of our self-service software. We do talk to some people who seem incredibly suspicious when I tell them they could charge their client thousands of dollars. We also work with some agencies where our public prices may be exposing an outrageous amount of markup on their part.

When do you stop offering services?
The standard business advice is to try to run as focused of a company as possible. So if the self-service side is huge, then the services side has to go. Except, I don’t want to do that. I like having a few deeper relationships with customers. I like my services team. I like that if a customer gets in a bind, we can get them out. That makes us a lot smarter about our product. It also makes us a lot more valuable to customers–think about how scary it is when some key Google service dies on you and you realize you have absolutely nobody to turn to.

I feel like such a rube whenever I come up against this type of decision where it’s “standard practice for maximizing shareholder value” versus “feels like the right thing for my customers” and I choose “do the right thing.” But then I think of Matt Mullenweg and how he breaks all sorts of rules like having a company where most people work remotely or pairing support services with WordPress. They seem to be doing ok.

So that’s my answer. If you like providing services, then never shut it down. There always seems to be people who really want them. If you hate services and feel like they get in the way, then obviously, shut them down as soon as it’s financially feasible (or start raising rates as a way of gradually shutting them down).

31st Jan, 2008

2 comments

Weak Dollar Means More European Business

I recently started seven straight work days with phone calls to Europe. That was a little jarring at first but made some sense because we’d just run successful networks for conferences in London and Berlin. What took me a little longer to figure out was how little pushback I got on prices. The conversations we’re all about whether it was a good fit, not whether they had budget available. At first I thought it was just a different style of negotiation. But then I realized that with the weak dollar our prices are extremely cheap.

That’s a good thing when you’re trying to bootstrap a business. I’ve often wondered if it would be easier to start this business if I lived in Brazil (my aunt has an apartment there) where costs are low but continued to sell to the US where prices are comparitively much higher. Lucky me: I found the exact same dynamic living here and selling to Europe.

I’ve been wondering if other small businesses are on to this trend. Apparently, yes. Marci Alboher (who interviewed me for this NY Times piece on small business blogging) published an article in today’s small business section: Weak Dollar Has Small Businesses Thinking Globally.

The main reason CrowdVine has been so against taking investment or debt is because as programmers we think it’s more rewarding to run an independent company than to run a company that’s dependent on VCs or credit card companies. It wasn’t all personal preference, a lot of trends were pointing this way. Cost of development went way down. So did hosting, hardware, and bandwidth. And now there’s an entire continent of wealthy customers.

Not everything about the weak dollar makes me happy. I’d like to travel in Europe for example. But it is an opportunity for small business, and that’s fine by me.

14th Nov, 2007

1 comment

Launched: CrowdVine for Conferences

We just launched our new product, CrowdVine for Conferences. Here’s the official announcement where I try to explain the product in layman terms.

We’ve done six conferences now through our professional services (that’s where we do everything from setup to community management): Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, MX East, Future of Web Apps / London, Foo Camp, Maker Faire Bay Area, SoCon.

And we’ve had people setup regular CrowdVine networks for BarCampBlock, IDEA 2007, Ignite Boston, and PodCamp Atlanta.

Our new CrowdVine for Conferences service is just making official something that we’ve known for awhile now: CrowdVine networks are a great replacement for the traditional printed attendee list. They let you put names to faces, find out real information about people, and then get in touch with the people you want to meet.

From a conference organizer perspective, more networking means a more valuable conference that attendees are more likely to return to. Plus we’re able to pull out information to help make the next conference even better, information like which topics were attendees most interested in, which speakers were most popular, and which attendees acted as connectors who made the conference better for everyone.

If you know conference organizers or you are conference organizer, please make an introduction.

23rd Oct, 2007

1 comment

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

We’re getting ready to launch a CrowdVine network for Web 2.0 Expo Berlin. I was at their fall expo in San Francisco and thought the sessions were excellent (That was also the first time I got to speak as founder of CrowdVine). This Berlin conference seems similarly great.

The CrowdVine network should be a big boost to the lobby-con experience. We’ll also have icalico integration so you can do session calendaring.

One nice thing (for us) about this network is that Jen from CMP used the software at FooCamp and then recommended it for this conference. That’s a nice vote of confidence!

18th Oct, 2007

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Bad Online Dates

Back in August, we took on two clients who wanted to use CrowdVine as the platform for a more customized site. Today, the first of those, Bad Online Dates, launched. Bad Online Dates is the topic, not the offer. The CEO, Jennifer Kelton, is an author and speaker on the topic of dating. She came to the conclusion that profiles on existing sites were too conducive to lying. You’re asked to spin a compelling story about yourself, which can help sell you, but also prevents anyone from getting a true sense of who you are.

Jennifer’s idea was that you could change the dynamic by asking a different question, “What are your bad dating experiences?” By reading people’s stories you can get a real sense for who they are and what’s important to them. Thus Bad Online Dates.

She was right. Here’s an example of a guy who insisted on paying for the date but then complained about every cost, picked a restaurant because he had a two-for-one coupon, and then paid for dinner with a roll of quarters. It’s a good story, but read it while trying to judge whether you’d go on a date with the author. On a traditional site she might describe herself as unpretentious and you’d have to take it on faith. I read the story and agree, she is unpretentious. However, maybe you’re the kind of guy who struggles to make ends meet while still wanting to shower affection on the ladies. You might read the story and think she’s stuck up. At least you have something honest to work with.

Also, the stories are funny.

One last thing, I didn’t do any of the work. Jay built the customized features. He’s the man. Neatworks did the design. And our friend Leona is handling online PR/Marketing. Jennifer is a marketing machine. She’s on Playboy radio right now and seems to be on TV or radio almost every day. That’s tied for my favorite part about this project, working with someone who’s so passionate.

15th Oct, 2007

1 comment

MX East

We’re doing a CrowdVine social network for Adaptive Path’s MX East: Managing Experience through Creative Leadership. The MX East conference is for VPs, directors, and managers involved in product strategy, product development, service design, or design management.

They’ve put together a pretty cozy conference with a great location and great opportunities to mingle with other speakers and attendees. There’s still time to register.

Dates and location: Philadelphia, PA — October 21-23, 2007

12th Oct, 2007

1 comment

BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit

Business Innovation Factory put on their annual Collaborative Innovation Summit this week in Rhode Island. For two days some amazing speakers told stories of innovation, highlighted by Walt Mossberg and Mark Cuban on stage (no dancing).

CrowdVine was there, running a social network for the conference. This is the first time we’ve used CrowdVine for a non-tech conference and I’m proud to say it worked great! We’re not just for geeks!

Congrats to the entire staff for putting on such a great conference.

9th Oct, 2007

8 comments

Commodity Web Startups

Interesting posts from Paul Graham and Fred Wilson about the trend of decreasing software development costs leading to lots of people starting companies. They tend to focus on the impact on the VC world (because they’re VCs). I’m interested in the impact on founders.

From what I can tell by living and working in the bay area, the assumed life cycle of a startup goes like this:

You have an idea, you turn that idea into a compelling elevator pitch, then use the pitch to raise a seed round of investment so that you can build a prototype. Then you raise another round so you can build it to a point where it might actually attract and support customers. Then you raise another round to build up your infrastructure because you’re about to get heavy traction. Hopefully you’ve sold by this point. If not, you raise another round of funding so that you can build the company into a real business with actual revenue. Hopefully someone buys you soon because there’s no way your new revenue is going to cover your expenses. If you somehow ended up with a profitable business and no one has bought you, then you IPO.

My experience building CrowdVine is that the drop in software development costs and the increased availability of low-cost
infrastructure turn the above idea on its ear. Here’s how I’ve experienced it.

Seed Stage

When I started CrowdVine I avoided investment for three reasons. I felt that venture capitalists weren’t aligned with my goals as a programmer. I didn’t need money because I thought I could build everything without help and because I had a few small contract gigs that paid the rent without sucking up all my time. Also, nobody was offering me money.

Plenty of people have noted that the goals of VCs and entrepreneurs don’t always line up, but at least they draw from the same motivational well: financial gain. As startup costs drop you’re going to get more founders who aren’t primarily entrepreneurs, they’re primarily do-ers (programmers, designers, etc.) A lot of them are going to have different motivations. Mine are, in order, pay the rent, build something, make that something wonderful, and get positive feedback. My motivations never line up with investors in the seed stage. They only line up later if I build something wonderful that lots of people want and delivering it to lots of people requires upfront money.

If you’re founding a company but you’re not capable of building the product yourself, then you’re not taking advantage of the trend. Software development got cheaper but communication didn’t. Pure idea/sales/marketing founders are losing value against founders who can build their own product. The wave of new founders will have only one early expense: cost-of-living. If they’re not capable of supporting themselves with contract work then they’re either too young to have the right contacts or they’re not going to do very well building a company that can support themselves (so they may as well get Venture Capital involved right away). Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator program seems smart to be targeting young entrepreneurs who aren’t necessarily ruled out for having founder-type qualities but also don’t have other good options.

The reason nobody offered me money is because I didn’t go around asking for it. All the VCs expect you to put together a power point deck, drive to their office, and make a pitch. But none of that plays to my strengths. The problem is that I didn’t know very much about what the company was going to do and I’m not good at hyping something that doesn’t exist. I think a lot of programmers are essentially realists and don’t like making promises about vaporware. The Y-Combinator program has started to emphasize the qualities of the founders over the quality of the idea. That seems appropriate. At the seed stage, engineer founders need VCs to remove a lot of the funding friction in order to even get to the point where venture funding is a choice. The only way I would have had the option to take seed funding is if CRV (the Odeo backers) approached me and said, “Heard good things about you from the other Odeo folks. Looks like you’re going out on your own. I can give you $250k if you promise to come back and demo a product for us in six months.” If they needed me to be convincing about the idea then there would never be a deal.

Early Stage

CrowdVine now has enough revenue to pay the salaries for two people (plus some). We’ve identified a market that looks promising (conference social networks) and we’re making headway in that market. Also, Jay and I are happier than we’ve been at any other job because there are no barriers to building software for people that are going to give us positive feedback.

Now we’ve got to polish the product, create a repeatable business process, and get a consistent revenue stream that extends past the end of the year. We’re lucky that revenue is already well above costs, so we have spare cycles to build the business. If we had gone with an ad or subscription supported model we might have a ways to go until revenue caught up with costs. In that case I’d be hesitant to continue to support the business with unrelated consulting. It’s unfair to your customers who are expecting your full attention.

We had a brief period of this which we solved with CrowdVine related consulting. We built two customized social networks based on the CrowdVine platform. Jay seems to like this work, so we’ll probably continue to do more.

We could also ditch the consulting and look for a seed round, although I still don’t think my interests are aligned with
the interests of venture investors.

Growth Stage

Hopefully we manage to get our product out of beta, build a repeatable business process, and attract a steady stream of customers. Our margins are good so it’s easy to grow slowly. However, we have a pretty big gap between contacting a customer and receiving revenue (let’s say six months). So if we wanted to grow quickly we’d have to find a chunk of money in order to hire a bunch of staff. The company would start to need skills that I don’t possess (like managing a sales force) and would need those skills quicker than I could learn on the fly.

In the current venture capital structure, this is the first time where taking investment starts to make sense to me. Our interests are roughly aligned (we both want to grow) and they have things I want (money and advice). However, there’s two other good options.

One option is to leverage the money from our conference business to build fully automated subscription or ad supported businesses. 37 Signals has several profitable subscription sites that don’t seem to take a lot of their time. They get growth because each site continues to grow and because they have enough spare cycles to roll out new products without hiring a bunch of people. They also started out doing enough consulting to pay the rent.

The other option would be to reject massive growth in favor of running a small company that’s great to work at. I wouldn’t call this settling. Maybe this is the Adaptive Path model. Despite selling every single product they ever built (one, to Google), they seem to have refocused on building a highly respected design and usability firm. I’d be pretty lucky (and thankful) to have what they have.

Exit Strategy

There’s a common perception in the startup world that all great visionaries and developers have short attention spans. This is bullshit. Linus Torvalds doesn’t have a short attention span, or at least not one that makes him switch projects every two years. Venture capitalists do have short attention spans, maybe for personality reasons, but definitely for institutional reasons. My attention span is at least ten years (proven three times now) so I’m pretty sure that any venture backed competitors aren’t playing the same game I am.

If we take any investment we’re going to have to commit to an exit strategy that is either to be acquired or to go public. If we don’t take investment money then we don’t have to consider either option. In fact, sale changes from an exit strategy to a sustaining strategy. If we end up with something that’s valuable but we’re tired of running, then it can be sold. The Ebay market for startups seems to price these sales in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not the hundreds of millions.

In the 37 Signals model, it looks hard to sell any one product because there doesn’t seem to be any person who owns any one of the products. However, if you setup the products so that each one has a clear GM/CEO-type then you can sell that product without giving away the entire company. Obvious seems to have gone down this road with Twitter. Ev is the CEO of Obvious and he spun Twitter out as it’s own company with Jack as the head. Jack is the man that makes Twitter run and if
they ever sell that company then he’s the one who’s going to join the acquiring company. I’m sure he also has ownership incentives that would make him agreeable to sale. I think of this as the Buffet model for structuring a company: find managers you trust and then give them incentives and authority to run.

I don’t have any exit strategy. I like working and having my own company has been an excellent excuse to work more. I think the most valuable thing I could build is a company that I’d want to work at for the next fifty years. I recognize though that not everyone is going to want to spend fifty years working for me, so I’m looking for people who I trust and who have the initiative to some day run their own businesses. My hope is that this company can give people room to grow so that they can eventually run businesses within it. Cheaper software development means that a lot of “businesses” could be run by a single person. Maybe Jay will be running our consulting division next year.

Going out of business

There’s a pretty big risk that the company doesn’t grow at all. If we were venture backed we’d have to start flailing until we ran out of money. If I was purely a businessman, I’d have to walk away or start over. However, I’m an engineer and running a two (or even one) person company still fulfills many of my motivations.

Since I built the company without debt, I consider the risk of going out of business to be roughly equivalent to the risk of having an extended streak of unemployment. I don’t have a fortune 5000 company that’s committed to pay my salary, but I do have a much better skill set than I did a year ago (I did a lot of programming) and I have a product that I can leverage for consulting work. I predict a lot more of these startups turn into small businesses that stick around.

8th Oct, 2007

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IDEA2007 Conference


IDEA 2007 joins BarCampBlock and PodCamp Atlanta as conferences that set up their own CrowdVine network to help attendees meet and mingle. Looks like it was a huge succes and thank you Greg Corrin for taking the time to set it up for the conference.

One thing I noticed is that people used blog posting to organize after hour events. This is something that used to happen (poorly) on a conference wiki. We’ve already killed the Who’s Coming page – it’s a lot more effective to browse a directory of people in CrowdVine where you can see their pictures and actually have a way of making contact. Nice to see another aspect of the old conference wiki get shot down.

3rd Oct, 2007

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Now with OpenID


Jay added OpenID to CrowdVine two weeks ago. I’d wanted to hold off until the libraries and UI kinks got worked out. But when we noticed that Simon Willison, one of the FOWA conference chairs, is an OpenID fan we decided we better include it as a feature of the FOWA CrowdVine.

It was a pleasantly surprising experience.

  • Jay used the open_id_authentication plugin and Ben Curtis’ Rails, OpenID, and Acts as Authenticated tutorial. It was just a couple hours of work including research.
  • We stole the 37Signals UI patterns of toggled OpenID fields. The link is visible enough to people who want to use OpenID but not so confusing to people who’ve never heard of it. Thanks 37Signals (and also for Campfire, Basecamp, and Highrise which we also use).
  • 7% of our new users are using OpenID. That’s a lot higher than I expected (although our users are pretty tech-oriented).

26th Sep, 2007

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Future of Web Apps on CrowdVine


The last Future of Web Apps was one of the best conferences of the year — great speakers and great attendees. This year Ryan and the crew over at Carson Systems have committed to super sizing the event. The speakers are huge. The attendees are awesome. And they’ve brought in CrowdVine, Pathable, and icalico to make sure the social aspects are top notch.

Check it out: fowa.crowdvine.com

CrowdVine provides the social network so people can connect before and after the event. Pathable is providing their social matching analysis and badges, and a text-messaging coordination service. And icalico is providing a social session calendaring feature so that you can mark the sessions that are interesting to you and see which sessions are popular within your network.

It’s based the work we did for Foo Camp. We added much better design customization. The contact model is new. Rather than marking contacts as friends (what does that mean in a conference setting?) you can mark fan or want-to-meet. You can finally control email notifications. The Pathable and icalico integrations are tighter. We’ve got OpenID. Basically, we’ve made boatloads of improvements.

It’s not too late to get passes if you can get to London October 3rd-5th.

Thanks to the FOWA staff for choosing us (and to Scott Berkun who put us on their radar).

28th Aug, 2007

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CrowdVine Reviews

Here are a couple of nice reviews of CrowdVine, including two by TechCrunch. Most people think the service is simple and easy to use. That’s great. A lot of competitors are tackling this space by creating social networks with loads of features. I want to do something simple that’s easy to combine with other services. Chris Messina called that “Small pieces loosely joined,” after combining CrowdVine with Pibb and PBWiki for BarCampBlock.


Roll Your Own Social Network with CrowdVine
9 Ways to Build Your Social Network

Setting your own network is dead simple. You just need to pick a name, pick some profile questions, and then send out invites with a personalized message. You network is hosted at name.crowdvine.com Profiles consist of a photo, location, personal link, description, blog posts, and the questions the creator of the network chooses. Members can also incorporate RSS feeds from another blog, photo stream, or social bookmarking site.


CrowdVine.com — Create Your Own Social Network

There are many reasons to create a network and with CrowdVine.com creating a network is easy. The homepage takes you through three easy steps. First design your network, basically choose your color, there isn’t a huge choice with designing your network at the moment. Then choose your profile questions, this is where you make your network unique, deciding what questions will be in your profile.


Facebook? Why Not CREATE YOUR OWN Social Network?!

This service is pretty straight forward to set up [and] is much less complicated and cleaner [than other sites].

There are no annoying Google Ads placed on the interface, and the simple way people can set up and place their information in their profiles will be appealing to even the most non-tech savvy group out there.

15th Aug, 2007

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Against the Grain

When I started working for myself I made a conscious decision to trust my gut. If it was the opposite of what other people were doing but my gut gave approval, then I’d do it.

For the most part that’s worked out great. I love owning a profitable business. All my options are open and that’s because I built it without investors or debt. Around here everyone is taking investment, going into debt, or building products with no revenue. Not all of those people end up happy.

One gut decision that didn’t turn out well was choosing a hosting company for CrowdVine. Everyone told me to go with ServerBeach but I chased some minor cost savings at CalPop and ServerAxis.

CalPop was awful the first month with lots of downtime. Lately they’ve just been a little disorganized but basically functional. I still host RateMyDanceMoves there but couldn’t trust them for professional work. Then I tried ServerAxis because they had a cheap VPS with 4GB of RAM and the underlying server was on RAID giving my data an extra dose of protection. A month later their hard drives crashed and they lost everything (I only lost a little bit of work). It took me five emails to get the complete story. Thankfully I never had a chance to host CrowdVine there.

Now CrowdVine is hosted with ServerBeach. I love them. I wish I’d made this decision a year ago. (BTW, you save $100 and I get $250 if you sign up with this code: U7S59BJ6R3)

Here’s the difference between the two decisions. A lot of people complain about taking investment or about dealing with debt. I haven’t heard anyone complain about ServerBeach. From now on I resolve to take glowing recommendations more seriously, even if my gut says otherwise.

14th Aug, 2007

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BarCampBlock CrowdVine

Coolness. Last night Tara Hunt invited the BarCampBlock participants to join a BarCampBlock CrowdVine network to do some pre-event networking.

BarCampBlock is this weekend (Aug 18/19) in Palo Alto. I’d go but I’m the minister for my sister’s best friend’s wedding and this weekend is the Vegas bachelor party.

Also, I’m pretty sure we’re going to do an icalico integration for this one.

13th Aug, 2007

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Time Enough For CrowdVine

Fred Wilson’s Time Is On Your Side, Yes It Is is a nice take on how many successful startups ran like a marathon and not a sprint. Starts with this quote from Marc Andreessen:

“Time is (in my opinion) the hugely unappreciated and unanalyzed part of the whole startup experience.”

A big part of why I built CrowdVine to have revenue from the start (rather than look for investors) was because I wanted to surround myself with people who took the long view.

This was also a big part of the No Investors Ever! Own Your Biz. talk at Foo.