Don't Start a Business

Unless you have people willing to pay for your services

http://www.businessworld.in/index.php/B-School/-Don-t-Start-A-Business.html
Philip Anderson, professor of entrepreneurship at INSEAD

Its a great article and touched a nerve. A lot of my ventures have revolved around starting a business rather than figuring how its going to pay for itself. I've always thought that if i built a great service, the money would come. I suppose, in part, i've been led by services websites around me but that really hasnt happened. I may have gained some experience but i've also lost a whole lot more in terms of opportunity and time.

When i started the math website, i had the alternate opportunity to become a coder at a pay that was 50% better as opposed to what i am getting right now as a GA. And this is about 5years ago. If i had stuck to it, i would have been doing a whole lot better. Ass that i am, i "didnt want to code" and so preferred to stick it out with the math website. End result-- Peanut husks for all my efforts.

I was exploring setting up another services thingy when i read the above article. Given that i am in the middle of a job hunt and end of term, i've put that on hold. I was never sure how i'd make money off it anyways and my job is more important right now.

Lets see if i ever come back to it.

installing wordpress

For the .info domain that I have been working on, i had to install Wordpress on the various sub-domains. The problem is that i have a huge number of sub-domains. At last count it was some 70+. And for some reason Fantastico wasn't installing wordpress correctly. So i had to install them manually. Let me tell you what a huge pain it is! If you've ever tried installing WP on one domain, then you know how cumbersome the process can be. Imagine 70! I had to copy the installation files, manually create the databases and run the installation. Theming is still left. I gave up and focussed on my top 13 sub-domains. I have begun populating them via FireScribe so hoping that makes my job easy. Not sure though since FireScribe seems to be buggy. Or atleast 1 installation of wordpress is.

I also decided i need a mouse. However, given my past record of spending before making a dollar, i decided to not make a purchase till i get some money selling some text-books. Not sure if this is a good idea. On the one hand, if i do go ahead and buy the mouse, its pressure on me to make up that money. On the other, i have used a similar excuse and still not lived up to it. I need the mouse badly and i'm sure the inconvenience will only spur me to make the money faster.

Here's to people buying my text-books :D

Social Experiment

On the off chance that deals2buy might have something interesting, i hit jackpot!! A .com domain for only 99cents!! usually, depending on the registrant, anything between $7 to $10.

So yeah, i went and got myself one. Will have to start keeping track of all these domians :D AND make some money off them as well :D

This time its for a little experiment. I dont expect to make any money off this one except in donations, and while people do tend to be generous,i'm hoping that they'll be generous enough for me to be able to recover my renewal fees and hosting expense for next year. This year, hosting is free but i dont know about the next.

Oh well, High Risk High Reward :)

Welcome a new domain

A .info domain to my little kitty of domains. Admittedly not a very big kitty, but it still excites me every time i buy a new domain :)

My investment in building this site is only going to be $1.19 and time. I have free hosting from IFTK Hosting (thanks to facebook forums and thank you to IFTK too for re-activating it so quickly after i let it go inactive)and am using Google apps for e-mail. Might use Weebly for the frontpage. Am definitely using Social Media Toolkit

I did want to use Alstrasoft's StartPage software but the price is prohibitive, i dont have SSL with IFTK( cant expect everything on a free account no?) and Alstrasoft doesnt seem to have a free co-branded option.

Quite a lot seems to be getting done for free :D

If you have an Idea

What do you do when you have an idea but

* Dont know if a Market Need exists as such
* Dont know if you'll make any money
* Know implementation will cost you a bit in money and a lot in time

Do you go ahead and implement it anyway?? Or do you just get a move on and look for something that can be more profitable?

Money also does flow in!!

Between the 13th and 21st, I've had 7orders(technically 9 but 2 are distant shipping so they have to pay twice) and i made 1 refund because the customer didn't respond to repeated mails. Actually, the mails kept bouncing so I preferred to do the refund.

Good feeling though to have so many orders coming in even though suddenly, it looks like i'm not going to be able to meet them all in time. I've placed the order for things i need to fulfill the order but I dont know when I'm going to get them. And that is a bit worrying.

Business is up!

Awesome to be able to say that!! With the new season about to swing into full flow, i'm suddenly making quite a few sales. 3 are done and 3 more are expected! All in a span of 4days!!

Compared to last year where i did 2 in 6months if not longer. And plenty of international orders too! Let's just hope I can make some profit on the international orders. I did try and work out a tie-up with another company but haven't heard from them since.

Fingers crossed!

Do you know what you want?

Struggling with the vast amounts of data in a particular area, i chanced upon the idea of using a CMS to aggregate it in a useful way. However, deciding on what I want to offer my end user and whether it will be really useful to them is something I am still trying to figure out.

In other words, I haven't written down what i want. I only have an idea in my head and i'm already out trying to implement it, exploring options on how to make it better and derive some benefit as well as invite users. Cue Deja-vu.

Really gotta work on this impulse of rushing into things before figuring out what i really want to do.

Research Wisely

before you spend money. I spent $50 on code which i don't use. In fact, i researched enough to use code i found for free and use it without any trouble.

What a waste! That's money i could have used for so many other things. The worse part is that i haven't even made a Re off the app that i needed the code for. So what was the point in spending that money then?

Will somebody please take away my credit card??

A new domain!

Can't believe i didnt give this a whole post. I mentioned hosting but I never mentioned that i also registered a whole new domain!! That my dear solitary reader, is a big BIGGIE!!

So go on, cheer for me!! I'm certainly enjoying having a new e-mail id :D

Lots of Updates

Its been a while since i last made my post. In that time, i've learned to navigate around Joyent, though i dont think i'm making the most of their offerings. I've partially finished coding(Ha! can you believe it?? I'm coding!!) my study app and it's even gone live. Lots of code to learn here, a lot of it was new(FBML,PHP and MYSQL) but i like to think i've coped well.

Now, while not a lot of the people who've added it have utilised it, i guess i just have to show more patience. Its been only 3days ( I launched on Friday, today is Monday) and i've spent a while today marketing it to people so hopefully the numbers should go up. This btw, is Idea3 that was mentioned below.

I also signed up for and was alloted free hosting on another server. I havent started using that yet but the interface there appears to be more like GoDaddy so i guess it should be easy to use that. That said, took me quite a while to figure out how to work Joyent and i'm really pleased with myself. Especially since its a Solais interface which means i had to SSH/SFTP. That took some getting used to.

I also migrated all my e-mails to Google Apps. Find it very convenient and i love Google apps so it was no-brainer really.

All in all, an extremely useful phase of learning and work.

Some more money flows out

Source Code $50
Hosting $11 (approx)

After plenty of e-mails sent back and forth, in which some things were mentioned as possible but finally not delivered and some things which were promised earlier but still not delivered i'm now the proud(?) owner of code for a quiz, 2months hosting and 1domain name registered for 1year.

I've got some semblance of user base waiting to try it all. Not sure if i'll make any money out of it. Though i'd like to think as a stepping stone to bigger things.

Let's see how it goes :)