Entrepreneurship

The Weekend Web App – Zerg Rush Scores!

Have you seen Google’s new easter egg? If you shoot on over to the Google and search for “zerg rush” your page will get attacked by Google zerg! You can defend against the attack by rapid fire clicking on the circles. This is, of course, a play on the popular video game Starcraft.

When my coworker discovered this at work on Friday, we naturally tried to compete to see who has the highest score. I was keeping track of our scores on our whiteboard, when I decided I should make a new webapp for people to log their scores.

I want to know who has the best score at this ridiculously simple game, even though victory doesn’t seem to be possible. So, I spent a few hours today and launched Zerg Rush Scores.

It’s amazingly simple, but does exactly what I want.

I was able to build on my experience with web2py and put together this fully functional app, start to finish, in just a few hours. To gain time, I used as much included functionality as I could and repeatedly stopped myself from adding new features. After all, for a site that actually serves no purpose, the beauty is in the simplicity.

Entrepreneurship — No Comments
24
Apr 12

Rocky 3 is a Movie About Internet Startups

I know it sounds ridiculous. Bear with me for a moment.

Rocky is the big institution in a market. He holds the heavyweight title. Since he already owns his industry, he becomes content in his position. He’s resistant to change and assumes he’s good enough to beat anyone – so he doesn’t concern himself with startup boxers. No need to bother with innovation because he’s already in control.

Glubber Lang is a startup. He’s hungry; he’s fast; he’s agile; he’s kind of a dick; he has a different take on the market. He destroys Rocky in a fight that Rocky didn’t even bother training for seriously.

The beatdown makes Rocky realize he’s lost his edge (thanks to outside consultant Apollo Creed). He then changes his training strategy to be better equipped for the next fight. He maneuvers his position so that Glubber Lang doesn’t have such a huge advantage and effectively bumps Glubber out of the market.

If this isn’t an exact reflection of the internet startup world, then I’m just crazy (also plausible).

Entrepreneurship — No Comments
12
Apr 12

The Strain of the Solo Entrepreneur

After launching my first serious web application (Roster Brain) without the help from any cofounders, I now understand why investors shy away from one man teams. Even on a simple project, it’s an impossibly difficult undertaking.

Even beyond the sheer amount of work that is required, a solo entrepreneur must be capable in so many different aspects of the business. For a simple web project, you have to understand the overall strategy, programming, design, and marketing just to get to launch. This doesn’t even count the ongoing tasks like finance, promotion, or inventory management.

Then, even if you can manage to figure out how to do all of these things yourself, you have to find the time to do them. I think this is the ultimate problem for any project of size. Unless you hire out a lot of the different aspects, it’s just too difficult to complete everything within a reasonable time frame.

When building Roster Brain, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money (mostly because I’m a cheapskate). This meant doing everything on my own. While I have great strengths in strategy and problem solving, I’m not quite as talented at marketing and design.

Everything has turned out decently well anyway, but I believe the project may have launched much more strongly if I had a cofounder or two to compensate for my weaknesses. The trouble is that I haven’t found someone that matches the profile yet and is interested in the same type of projects.

For my next project (which is inevitable and already fairly well defined), I’m not going to be so skimpy on the third party tools I use. There are a lot of cheap or free tools that can help launch a project. If you know the ins and outs of the project before you get too far down the road, I imagine using a few more tools can save some headaches and a ton of time. And if you believe your idea is good enough to make money, why not spend $100 to get it to market sooner?

Some examples of what I’ve been contemplating using for my next project:

LaunchRock – free tool that allows you to create and host a simple splash page. It gathers email addresses from interested site visitors so you can notify them of launch and encourage them to share on social media. If implemented well, I bet this would be a great tool to find beta testers. Mostly, it lets the search engines get your domain in the index and start the ever important domain age clock.
Interface themes/templates – You can buy customizable themes and interfaces from several places online. I have been impressed by the choices at ThemeForest. They’re not free, but most are extremely reasonable for what you get.
Stock photography – It wasn’t necessary for Roster Brain, but imagery is important for most websites. You can struggle to search through thousands of crappy images available for free commercial use or pay a few dollars at a place like iStock and move on to other aspects of the project.

Entrepreneurship / Internet Marketing — 1 Comment
6
Apr 12

The Terrifying Prospect of Pitching

Despite coding Roster Brain in language I hadn’t used extensively, on a platform I hadn’t used before, with a database larger than I’ve ever managed, and more dynamic features than I’ve ever put into a site, I was most concerned with the marketing aspects of the project.

I figure the sports fan who would appreciate Roster Brain spends their internet time on message boards and reading sports blogs/news. To get in front of these audiences, it means I either need to post on a bunch of forums or get featured on sports blogs somehow. Since spamming forums that I don’t regularly participate in is not likely to go well, it means I really need to pitch to sports bloggers.

The trouble is that any kind of direct marketing seems intrusive and I don’t like to be the guy filling up email boxes with unwanted messages. Admit it – when you get an email that’s obviously just trying to get you to do something, you delete it immediately and develop a negative impression of the brand.

Because of this, I’ve defined some rules to keep my cold messages from annoying people:

Messages are either very brief or customized
Messages are not pushy
Messages are only sent to website owners with posted contact information

Either the person is interested or they’re not. Since there are about a million sports blogs, I don’t really have to worry about contacting bloggers several times and agitating anyone. I am keeping a list of bloggers I contact so that I don’t accidentally hit anyone with the same message multiple times…this also lets me follow up later with any leads that seem promising, but didn’t materialize.

Fighting pitch anxiety

I’ve always been easily immobilized by anxiety and sending out the first few of these pitch emails was certainly subject to anxiety. I intended to send them out the day after launching, but it took me a week and half to work up to it. I was fighting the same nerves and uncertainty I had when launching, but managed to finally work through it. After all, who cares if a no-name blogger doesn’t like my website?

The rush of success

So I only sent out about 10 emails yesterday and did not receive a single reply. However, I did see on the analytics that a couple of people checked out the link I sent, which is a good sign. An even better sign though, MLB Trade Rumors, a blog I contacted, included a link to Roster Brain on a weekly Bloggers Weigh In post.

I got so excited to see some new traffic flowing in from that link, that it completely invalidates any anxiety I had about sending out the emails in the first place. I guess that’s the rush of success that propels salesmen forward. Sure this is only a small victory in a marathon of promotion, but it’s a huge first step and definitely gives me some marketing momentum moving forward.

Entrepreneurship / Roster Brain — 1 Comment
3
Apr 12

A Look Back at Launch – Good, Bad, and Ugly

The launch of my new sports trivia website, Roster Brain, was simultaneously a great success and a huge collection of errors. It has now been a week since the site went live, so it seems like a great time for reflection before I move on.

Let’s start with the successes!

The site launched and the world did not entirely collapse.
The “soft launch” brought in nearly 20,000 pageviews in the first 24 hours of the site being live.
I got awesome feedback from coworkers, friends, and random strangers.
Users seemed to flawlessly understand the functionality and calls to action on the site.
The site actually made some money.
The site must have worked well on mobile devices, because pages per visitor on all platforms was equally awesome.
There has been some continued traffic even though my launch links have dropped out of site.

Despite all of these great things, my favorite stat is not listed above…it’s the awesome percentage of type-in traffic. Direct traffic on an unknown site either means people have remembered their previous visit and come back later or that people are sharing the website with others. Both of these are great indicators that the site is well liked and actually a decent idea.

An odd side note: I received more pageviews in the first 24 hours of this launch than I did in my months of SEO work during my self employment stint. A lot of this has to do with the inherent high action rate of users clicking through a quiz, but it’s still hilarious to consider.

Now…the negatives:

The site launched broken.
For whatever reason, the URL rewriting I had worked into web2py took a huge crap when I imported the launch version onto my production host, despite testing in two other environments. Luckily I was able to resolve this by stripping the rewriting in a timely manner. See lesson 2 below.
The site stayed (partially) broken.
I had users report other broken functionality later in the day, which I wasn’t able to resolve until the night of launch. Luckily it only had to do with the roster portion of the site instead of the main quizzing functionality. See lesson 3 below.
Search engine spiders could only index 4 pages of the site.
Until nearly a week later when I wondered why the site wasn’t getting crawled deeper, spiders were stuck on a few basic pages. I tested without javascript on a previous version, but not the launch version…and it broke somewhere in between. Also a part of lesson 3 below.
Users didn’t share on social media.
I had high hopes that when users completed quizzes, they would share their scores on Facebook and Twitter using the buttons I provided, creating a minor traffic draw. Outside of a few friends, this did not happen once. See lesson 4.

Lessons learned:

1. If you launch a product as a side business/project, take the day off of work.

Despite having my morning launch plan laid out in a flawless step by step manner, I was a little late for work. I had to clean up some of the functionality bugs with launch or everyone I had just emailed, spammed, or otherwise gotten the attention of would have arrived at a crippled web experience.

During work, I was ridiculously distracted watching the visitor counts and interactions on my real time analytics (I’m using Piwik and it’s awesome). I know my coworkers could see my enthusiasm, but if I had anything critical happening at work on launch day, it would have affected my performance.

2. Always test in an exact copy of the production environment.

Neither I, nor the gurus on the web2py google group, could explain why my rewriting was failing (mostly because I don’t think it was). The production environment acted different than my local machine and my live testing server, despite having the same web2py version and the exact same code. If I would have testing on my production server (in a non-public directory), I would have seen the problem in a much more pleasant timeline. This brings me to #3…

3. Freeze development 2 weeks before launch.

Especially if you’re a one man show…you need time to test absolutely everything that you’re going to launch. I tested in several places and even had other eyes on the private beta, but some late changes/additions broke some significant portions of the site at launch. If I had frozen development except for bug fixes, I wouldn’t have created some of the launch problems.

Also, this will give you time to focus on other aspects of the site. Make sure you’re launch plan is in place, notify some key people, and create some minor launch hype.

4. Social media promotion pretty much sucks.

I expected a lot more out of Facebook and Twitter. Even with some supportive coworkers sharing my site on Facebook, traffic was pretty dismal. As a one man show with a one trick pony, I don’t have a lot to say on these platforms to create any type of draw without sounding like a desperate beggar. Without people sharing themselves, these promotions went nowhere fast.

In addition, shouting into the blackness of a Facebook or Twitter timeline doesn’t seem to get many eyes on it. I don’t have that many followers to start with, but my posts must have been either completely uninteresting or pushed below the fold pretty quickly. Unfortunately this means that marketing the site is going to be 100% manual, something I’m not very excited about.

Maybe all blog posts should have a summary

The site got a lot more traffic than I anticipated, but dropped off after about a day and a half. Users seemed to understand and like the idea of the site, but did not share using the social media buttons I provided. I got a lot of awesome feedback and suggestions that I’ve put into a plan for a phase 2. There were a lot of bugs at launch, but everything is working now!

Allmendinger EnterprisesChoose Your Own Adventure