Every good business starts selection of a business model. After 15 minutes of exactly zero  ideas we decided it was too difficult and we’ll just deal with this later. Well … but hey – we are IT nerds, so it can be somewhat understood.

So we moved on to something we know better – implementation and execution. Already after couple of hours we understood that we are implementing something without any designing or planning, nevertheless we were at full speed.

First – let’s register a domain name.  After 10 minutes spent in Godaddy absurdish UI we had a domain and we had raised our first round of capital – $10.95 (my credit card) for one year registration. The sad part is that in the next two hours we understood that the domain name we picked does not anyhow reflect what we are planning to do on the site so … this tenner was gone. We were still excited.

Cloud Computing to the RescueNext step – picking hosting. As we are nerds then it has to be the cloud. After 20 minutes we had an Amazon EC2 instance up and running. The only problem – the instance was pretty much naked, so we went ahead to dress the bride or apt-get the pride.

We had chosen Wordpress as our platform and for that we also needed Apache with PHP support and Mysql as a database. Yet again – amazing how fast can you download and install this software nowadays. Another 15 minutes gone and we had the infrastructure in place.

20 more minutes and we had a working Wordpress installation and the theme of our choice working on top of it. Creating new users in Wordpress showed us that there was something wrong with the e-mails and we had to spend another 20 minutes on the infrastructure configuring the e-mail server.

Our past experience shows we need some protection when launching a public site, so we added ReCaptcha and Akismet to the pool. Another 15 minutes gone.

Even though we didn’t have a clue how we should be making money we were sure we needed to pass on the message. So – we needed Feedburner for RSS feeds, Facebook Fan Page for the endless amount of fans we are going to have and of course – a Twitter account.

As all these things required registrations and sent some kind of confirmation e-mails via e-mail. We created a project e-mail address using Gmail that we could both access.

Now we were already overwhelmed with different tasks at hand – both setting up the site and creating content. To handle the list of tasks and change ideas asynchronously we used Google Docs. Even though I proposed Wave originally, I had to agree with ma partner in crime who said he will drop the project if I ever mention this topic again. Considering his arguments good enough I agreed with the old-fashioned Google Docs.

We had a bit more luck with monitoring tools – a prompt nod from co-founder when I proposed to add Google Analytics to the site. Wasted 15 minutes with Google Chrome while registering a new site in Google Analytics before giving up and doing it in Firefox in 5 minutes.

Now the fun part was over and the only tasks left were

  • Customizing the Wordpress installation
  • Creating the content
  • Figuring out the business model

As the first two topics seemed boring as hell we decided to come back to the fact that we were still lacking a business model. Considering that our costs so far were $10.95 for the domain registration and about $1 paid to Amazon for the EC2 instance we needed to figure out how to earn at least $65 to get the 6-fold return on investments which VCs consider as a successful exit.

Being still not so clear about how we make money we figured that no matter what it is we are selling, we need to integrate PayPal and Zong as payment channels. Technically we proceeded just fine, but for some weird bureaucratic reasons these channels took two days to manually confirm our payment integrations. So we were off the hook for two more days.

And there we were again – how on earth is this thing going to be a successful business? We had now integrated not one but TWO payment options on the site and we didn’t have the slightest clue of what we were going to sell. Few beers later – status quo remained. And then it stroke – we were going to be a content site. And what content sites do is – they advertise.

So thank god for AdSense! What were they actually doing before this? Like selling the ads all by themselves? So 1999. Would like to give hi5 for Google for the service, but – why on earth does it take 5 days to confirm our application? Are you guys using pigeons to carry data around in Google?

All in all – it took us:

  • 9 man-hours to build the site
  • 7 calendar days to build the site – mainly due to the delays from Zong and AdSense
  • 6 beers to come up with a business idea.
  • approximately $15 for infrastructure, mainly domain name registration and EC2 fees

This series of articles will describe how and what we’re doing. The plan is to publish a post once a week on different topics, so stay tuned. While reading – bear in mind that we both have our day-to-day jobs to attend and this is something we are doing on our free time (read: on Friday evenings).

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