paulsingh

Clickable: http://ilubut.com

Abso-f*cking-lutely. :)

CRM: who's buying from me, what are they buying and what should I market to them so that I can make more money.

Inventory Management: what's in stock, what do I need to re-order, are my employees stealing from me?

I can keep going... :)

Happy to share... I think I'll write an entire blog post on this.

MailFinch: Cold calls and asking for referrals. NotaryCRM: lots of SEO (notice the "find a notary" directory and the theme of almost all of the blog posts)

For both, there was a lot of call-to-action testing (in terms of verbal calls to action during my phone/in-person conversations) and rapid iteration (breaking features down into the smallest chunks and deploying often).

More recently (like, a week ago) I built a really basic site to force myself to learn a little more about consumer-focused community building.

As with all of my ideas, making money comes a close second behind the most important thing to me: learning something new.

Yeah, it can get tedious and time consuming. Though, at this stage, I've got a pretty cool process hacked together (think temps, cronjobs and sweat) so I've gotten a lot of my own time back to work on other things.

Not sure if you're bring sarcastic, but I'll bite.

Yes, but you need to peel off a specific problem within a given vertical. I bootstrapped both of these ideas and, because of the limitations that come with bootstrapping, I targeted them specifically.

MailFinch is on demand direct mail for real estate agents. Over time, companies that send a lot of invoices started using it too.

NotaryCRM is for notaries - plain and simple. Over time, it became apparent that signing companies were also looking for a solution that solved their specific pains.

Yep, this is definitely the post I was referring to.

FWIW, I fundamentally believe that smart people tackling brick-and-mortar-businesses-using-spreadsheets will make obscene amounts of money over the long term. (Not only are my products examples of this but, few people know this about me, I actually bought a gas station earlier this year to force myself to feel the pain.)

For anyone thinking about doing anything like this, feel free to reach out - I want to help you. :)

Now that I think about it, I think you planted the seed about that idea through one of your blog posts last year. Thanks! :)

http://notarycrm.com and http://mailfinch.com are doing pretty well for me. Still side projects but they're both profitable and steadily growing.

My rule of thumb: if you see a business using spreadsheets to manage something, there might be an opportunity there

Actually, I have to design for my mom -- I built my latest niche product for notary publics. :)

The funny thing is that I knew she was doing notary stuff on the side for a long time now. I simply didn't realize she was using spreadsheets to manage it all.

The UI is really clunky still but most of that is a casualty of releasing something "ghetto, but useful" ASAP. I'm in the process of rebuilding it right now and it'll have a much prettier/useful interface rolled out in the next 3 weeks or so (though, mom's account is running the latest version of the UI). :)

http://notarycrm.com - simple CRM for notaries (and an online directory for SEO-goodness)

http://www.mailfinch.com - on demand direct mail

Built by me and profitable.

In general, stick to a service like odesk or elance -- they both have built-in NDA/IP stuff that assigns everything to you.

One of the downsides to billing $12/year is that you have to really start thinking about unearned revenue and all that fun stuff. This might be a way to avoid that mess and give him the ability to reprice in three months if that becomes necessary.

I'm using ContemporaryVa and am very happy with it.

Vesting: Absolutely, no questions about it. Everyone should vest -- this keeps someone from getting equity and immediately quitting (for example).

You'll want to talk to a lawyer about anti-dilution provisions but I suspect that you'll want to make sure that the minority shareholder has voting rights to prevent situations like the one you describe.

FWIW, this is a relatively "vanilla" type of situation. (You'll setup a new company, each of you will sign over the IP to the new product and then have equity stakes in this new entity.) Have a lawyer review all the docs before you sign them and this will be pretty straightforward -- please do yourself a favor and don't cut corners just to save a buck. :)

LLC: easy to setup, vesting/equity can be tricky, pass through taxes. C-Corp: harder (more expensive) to setup, vesting/equity relatively easy, double-taxation.

If you can swing it, I think the "right" way would be to setup a C-Corp so you've got all your ducks in a row from the get-go -- you won't need to worry about restructuring if you ever add staff/funding in the future, one of you decides to leave, etc.

If nothing else, I strongly recommend that you setup this new product outside the existing company that the consulting is done under. (I have direct experience with this as one of the companies I'm advising had to deal with this mess recently when they wanted to give out equity to employees, deal with investors, etc.)

I run a similar setup on the Rackspace Cloud (1 DB + 1 Web) for multiple sites. I use iptables to lock down all non-essential ports, I setup MySQL to accept connections over the private IP and, frankly, that's it. (FWIW, I use Moonshine on my Rails app to keep the config easy/repeatable.)

Don't let these guys get to you. Focus on being the best candidate and they'll naturally want you to move (and you'll have the leverage to ask them to pay).

An alternative is that you pay for yourself to move out there prior to the job hunt. :)

I grew up in the DC area and moved to SF for a couple of years when a company hired me out there. They ended up paying for the move, the airfare for the interview, etc.

My advice: don't worry about the move, worry about finding a company you love. They'll inevitably ask you about relocating during the screening/interview and you'll simply say "yes."

In my case, I was looking for an employer prior to moving (so they'd pay for my wife and I to move there).

I'd love to write a blog post about this, but you don't have any contact info on your profile or site. You can contact via me email (it's on my profile) if you're interested.

You could make money off of ads but you'll need some serious traffic (ideally, within a niche) to command decent CPMs.

A better strategy (and one that I'm using on NotaryCRM.com) is to sell the audience something else that's useful. In my case, notary publics get a free listing in my directory but I try to sell them on a CRM system to make their lives easier.

This title is misleading...

"I’m not saying that angels don’t wish that valuations are lower (I certainly do). But there simply is no way that such a conspiracy could be effective, given the economics of the market."

Actually, I've been trying to write a little bit about this here: http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/category/back-office-expo...

HTH!

Agreed, 100% There are tons of APIs now available for email delivery, billing, etc.

Great job with this!

Love the fact that the email alert contained a "X people have received this alert" -- people's paranoia (or vanity) is a wonderful thing to exploit. :)

Time to split test the call to action on the widget to see how you can improve the CTR? :)

Could you add a link on the bottom of the widget to get people to click through to your ad-driven site?

I use it to track the names of friends (so I can send the occasional "Hey, congrats on XXX") and competitors for a few niche products I've been building.

More lately, I've been using it to keep track of companies I'm advising -- I'll run alerts on key phrases to their industry, the names of their competitors, etc.

Totally agreed. I started a niche site (a directory for notary publics that funnels visitors into a paid app that helps notaries manage their businesses) as a lightweight SEO experiment.

It's only been ~6 weeks but, even if I can't get many of the visitors to convert to paying customers, I've learned far more in the past few weeks than I could have learned through meetings/reading/dreaming.

First hand experience FTW.

>> $50k, issued in tranches based on milestones

Tranches generally aren't very entrepreneur friendly, I wonder how much pushback they'll get about that that.

Heroku's definitely easier to setup and use - it's usually the right choice when you're first starting out and/or you don't have any advanced needs.

I don't use it much anymore - I stick to Moonshine and the Rackspace Cloud. The setup and management of a private slice is super easy and, IMHO, it's worth the small amount of extra work to setup.