Tag Archives: Web 2.0

How To Create A Website Using Brains Instead of Money

Image representing Guy Kawasaki as depicted in...
Image via CrunchBase

By Gretchen Glasscock

A while back, in By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09,  web guru, Guy Kawasaki, details how he built a website on the cheap.  That is, for Guy Kawasaki $12,107.09 is cheap.  And it is cheap for a top ranking, major website.  But if you’re not in Guy Kawasaki’s league yet…. and most of us aren’t …. you can build an attractive website that captures eyeballs, brings in revenue and turns a profit for $100 to $250.00.  I know.  I’ve done it.  Many times.

Let’s look at how, working off Kawasaki’s list ( in italics).  Actually Kawasaki only had four expense items, and you can pare those down dramatically.

As Kawasaki says, “Here’s a quick overview by the numbers:”

  1. 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).
  2. 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Times have changed since people on the web spent weeks or months laboring over business plans. The web is fast, fast, fast and you have a built in, real world focus group.  Start from where you are with what you have. Put it out and see if people like it.  Or, as they say in advertising, see if the dogs will eat the dog food.  If they do, then keep leveraging up. You can and should leverage up for the life of the site to keep it fresh, interesting, constantly evolving and compelling.

As for money, I agree with Mark Cuban who said: “Rule #1: Sweat Equity is the best start up capital. There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customer’s pockets. You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders, As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t. The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.”

Kawasaki has plenty of brains and, if you follow his moves, you will be using and improving yours.  On to Kawasaki’s next point :

3. “7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

I couldn’t agree more. WordPress has revolutionized ordinary people’s ability to rapidly deploy an attractive, sophisticated website which can then be updated in plain text. According to Wikipedia, “WordPress is a free, open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today.” Being open source, it has thousands of man hours of coding and is constantly being refreshed and updated.  It is powerful and elegant, plus it offers many plug ins and widgets, automated pieces of software which work in the background doing essential tasks it used to take programmers many hours to do. These tasks include search engine optimization, providing Google with a sitemap and a constant stream of updates and a thousand more functions, all of which work together to make your site a success.

As for design, WordPress has a huge array of free themes you can select.  There are also some premium themes for which you pay a small price. A lot of professionals prefer the Thesis theme, at $87,  because it is simple, elegant and endlessly customizable without having to code. Thesis is, right off the bat, an expertly-coded HTML + CSS + PHP framework. Thesis is known for the quality of its design and search engine optimization, SEO, which is critical because it is SEO traffic which drives the success of a website. There are also many free or inexpensive”skins” or looks available that overlay the Thesis framework. But to keep it simple, and for your own look, go to Istockphoto.com, put in your keywords to search for suitable photos then pay a buck or so each for a half dozen photos to go in your rotator or media box and you’re ready to go.  Add your Twitter.com widget on the sidebar to drive more traffic.

At BlueHost.com, you can get great web hosting, features and service, 24/7 for $6.95 a month, payable a year in advance and only slightly more by the month.  Among the many features they offer, to make life really simple for a webmaster, is the ability to install a WordPress platform to your site with one click.

  • · $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

These guys at at Electric Pulp are top notch talent who’ve developed a well deserved reputation and  consequently are well known.  You pay top dollar for well known.  I am a believer in remote teams and, trust me, a lot of remote techs aren’t well known and their prices are correspondingly much lower.  Last week-end, I had an issue with a website and, through eLance.com, I located a Canadian demon coder who worked through the night and all the next day to fix it.  I paid him $150 including a $60 bonus.  I also brought on a certified IT Security Expert from Ireland who handled all the IT security for a global firm.  He did a review of my site security for $125.  You don’t have to be expensive to be good.  You just have to know what you’re doing.

  • · $4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something. Here’s a breakdown of what I got for this amount of money.

I agree with some of Kawasaki’s thoughts on this. With lawyers you can pay now or pay later.  And, if you get very successful and are negotiating an investment or liquidity event, you definitely want top notch lawyers  “not only for her expertise but to show opposing counsel that you’re not clueless.”  Agreed.  But, if you’re bootstrapping, you can defer this expense until you are bringing in those bucks.  Yes, your lawyers may cost more then, but you will be making more, so, in my judgment, it evens out.  If money is an issue, which it usually is, I’d go with later.

  • · $399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now. :-)

It still charges $399.  In fact, you can get a package for $299.  But there’s a larger array of choices all the way up to $2999.  I paid $299 for my latest logo from LogoWorks. But there are other choices. When I started out on the Web in 1996, I used a royalty free Matisse painting of people joining hands around the world as my logo.  As I got established and began to see revenue, I paid $2, 000 for a custom logo.  But now, I’ve learned, you can find a logo designer on eLance.com for $125 for a static logo and $150 for an animated logo.  Either LogoWorks, another logo specialty shop which you can Google,  or one you find on eLance.com is suitable.  However, what I particularly like and I think you will like about LogoWorks is that you go down a decision funnel selecting the look and feel you want and have a lot of control over the process and the look and feel of the final product.

  • · $1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy. I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround” the one you use.

A domain name should cost about $10.  I don’t want to quibble but I like to wait until a site is a proven success and bringing in revenue before spending a thousand dollars “surrounding it.”

Kawasaki goes on to say:

“· $0. I spent $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.

  • · 24. However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company. Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

I do understand he’s Guy Kawasaki.  And, as he points out, it takes a lot of experience to get to the point where you could spend $0 to launch a company.  But it will never be sooner than today, so you might as well start.   If you’re known a bit around the web or in your specific field and you put up a good site, you will find your niche and get traffic also.

In concluding, Guy says, in part:

4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors:

1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.

2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.

3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.

4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

I agree.  You can do it for much, much less, a couple of hundred bucks perhaps.  And definitely, “Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

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Web 3.0, Breaking Out Of Our Silos, Getting Smarter

If you happen to be an entrepreneur on the web, like me, whether you’re
building your own blogs and websites or building them for others, you need to keep your eye on the web’s future. That’s where we’ll be competing for eyeballs, relevance and revenue.

Some distilled insight is offered by Richard MacManus in Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web. He analyzes and sets out to distill “a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent “Web 3.0″ concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web.”

It might be a tall order to understand all of that in one gulp, but let’s look for a second at Web 3.0, then gently peek over the horizon to see a tiny preview of what lies ahead. ( Some of it might be a little techie, but for most of us it will work behind the scenes, and we will have simple tools which help us take advantage of the Net’s increasingly intelligent structural and linking dynamics.)

“Web 3.0: What Comes After 2.0 (!)

Last year Greg Boutin loosely defined web 3.0 as “the Web of Openness. A web that breaks the old siloes, links everyone everything everywhere, and makes the whole thing potentially smarter.”

There is a lot of debate about what Web 3.0 is and the term itself is open to derision. In my view Web 3.0 is an unoriginal name for the next evolution of the Web. What’s important to note though, is that there is a difference in the products we’re seeing in 2009 compared to the ones we saw at the height of ‘Web 2.0‘ (2005-08). If Web 2.0 was about user generated content and social applications such as YouTube and Wikipedia, then Web 3.0 is about open and more structured data – which essentially makes the Web more ‘intelligent’.

The smarter the data, the more things we can do with it. The current trends we’re seeing today – filtering content, real-time data, personalization – are evidence that ‘Web 3.0′ is upon us, if not well defined yet. We actually saw a great example of Web 3.0 this week, with Google’s release of Search Options and Rich Snippets. Those features added real-time search, structured data, and more to Google’s core search.”

W3c semantic web stack
Image via Wikipedia

Macmanus goes on to discus “linked data” which is interesting, if pretty techie.  There is a fascinating, if mind blowing, graphic of a Linking Open Data (LOD) project.  He also notes that Google will be a big player in all of this.

Diagram for the LOD datasets
Image via Wikipedia

The bottom line is that, ultimately, we will have a more intelligent web and entreneurs would do well, to position themselves for the future by keeping an eye on linkages.  To  dive into the complexity of it all, go to Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web – ReadWriteWeb.

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Making Money From Activism on the Web

Yea! Obama Bag ready for business, and/or groc...
Image by emdot via Flickr

The Obama Model Web 2.0 – Social activism, bordering on a movement, is a whole new concept. Well, maybe it’s a rebirth and reconfiguration of a Web.1 concept. (According to Humanity.org, these are the top 10 Social Activist Sites: The World Revolution, Ashoka, Changemakers, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Earth Fund, Afribike, Grupa hajdeda da…, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and Youth Against Aids (YAA) ).  But it does use a whole new set of social media tools that did not exist until recently.

Or maybe it’s another transformation of an even older concept, corporate social responsibility or CSR.  Two prime examples are ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, which not only promotes support sustainable and safe and environmentally friendly methods of food production but seeks and supports nonviolent ways to achieve peace and justice as well. Another vendor, Whole Foods Markets, goes to the ends of the earth, literally, to find delicious and unusual products.  Whole Foods then partners with local farmers and producers, even including direct micro-credit loans to their vendors, in order to bring quality to their customers, and, at the same time, lift up emerging economies. It has been a powerful formula.

But now there is a new model on the web, inspired by the Obama’s extremely media savvy campaign. It is a model where activism is not rooted in a bricks and mortar organization but driven, primarily, by viral marketing on the web and the formation of a communities of interest.  Or are they movements?

Whatever you call them, you can use the same model.

As set by Tim Leberecht in Obama Inc. – Web activism for profit:

“A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements:

1. A web-empowered volunteer network

2. A presence on Facebook

3. A team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns

4. YouTube viral videos

Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).

Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”

Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.

On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).”

If you have set up something like this or thought about it or want to or know someone who has…. write us. Share.  We can all master this with the help of each other.

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Rorschach Test For Entrepreneurs : If You See Opportunity, Start A Company

I have built start-ups throughout my life and also have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by successful entrepreneurs throughout my life. And I can tell you one thing:  They may be fazed and affected, like everyone else, but they are unstoppable and undaunted by droughts, depressions, recessions, and natural or man-made disasters. Entrepreneurs and steely businessmen or women don’t stop, don’t look back, don’t complain, they just keep on powering through, whatever the tough times are. The key is these people know they are in it for life, good times or bad, and they may have to adjust their strategy but the game remains the same and they’re in it to win it. They just keep on going, like the famed energizer bunny.

I got onto the Net, riding the wave of the Netscape browser, surfing on the crest of an Internet boom, then weathered the dot com bust, really not so much the worse for wear, just with a little belt tightening, as I have learned to be a lean, mean operator, which I recommend to you as well, at least when you’re starting out.  See Start Your Own Small Business Using More Ingenuity, Less Cash.

In  10 Reasons This is the Best Time to Build a Startup, NewsCred Blog gives it’s reasons why it’s a great time to start:

“I’m not a blind optimist, but I think the best suggestion in this situation is simple: forget the depressing “reality” painted by the so-called pundits, and just get on with it. Why? Because I really believe the naysayers are full of it, and it really is a great time to be building a startup. Here’s why:

10) You can’t dwell on what you cannot control and change, so this is the perfect opportunity to concentrate on the present and focus on delighting your customers TODAY. I don’t practice Buddhism, but I think Buddha got it spot on: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future – concentrate your mind on the present moment.”

9) Capital efficiency is your friend (thanks Fred). You always wanted to do it, but now you have no excuse. Optimize spending, optimize investing, optimize hiring, optimize everything. This one is Buddha version 2.0: “Yesterday is a canceled check. Tomorrow is a promissory note. What we have today is ready cash – so spend it wisely.”

8) All your competitors with million dollar burn-rates are in trouble.

7) The current crop of startup winners were all created right after the Dot-Com bubble burst. Naysayers were out in droves in 2001 as well. Look at what happened to some of the entrepreneurs who chose to ignore the doom and gloom and just got on with it. $$$.

6) There are fewer distractions. All the hype surrounding web startups and the Web 2.0 bubble will disappear. Rather than worry about flipping your company or XYZ buying ABC for $100 million dollars, you can focus on your product.

5) Yes, product. In times like these, let your product speak louder than anything else. If you build something people want and need, all you need to do is make sure you can continue providing it. If you stop today, it’s going to be pretty hard for people to get to your product. Don’t disappoint them.

4) Build a great team, and don’t worry about paying them boatloads of money. You don’t have money, they don’t expect money, so its a pretty decent ZOPA (zone of probable agreement). There’ll be plenty of talent available. If said talent comes with high salary requirements, slap them across the face. Then tell them “thanks, but no thanks.”

3) Necessity is a big … mother (of invention). You’re brain synapses should be firing on all cylinders and creative juices flowing non-stop. A little creativity will go a long way, and no one will dismiss your crazy ideas if it can a) save money or b) extend your runway or c) get you sales. Also guerrilla marketing is fun.

2) Remember that business model you’ve been putting away for a while? Well, dust it off and starting focusing on it now. During the good times, things like business models often seem like perks or bonuses. Bad times are a blessing in disguise – you can bring back the biz model and put it front and center. God help you if you don’t have one.

1) You’re an entrepreneur. Your whole purpose of being is so that you can take scarce resources, optimize like hell and get maximum output from the least input. This is your time to shine.

The most important thing to remember is if you quit, there’s a 0% chance of success. Life’s too short to worry, so just go out there and have fun. Build a kick-a.. product that’ll delight your customers.

And don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”

Now, I happen to wholeheartedly agree.  And I can say, looking back, even in the middle of the dot com bust, I said: “Are they kidding?  Not even 10% of the world is on the Net yet. The Net is only beginning.  This is a blip on the map.”   And this is only a blip on the map as well.  Work now and you’ll be better positioned for when the economy roars back as it inevitably will

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The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0

The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 | Fast Company. By: Saabira Chaudhuri

Thought you might like to meet some of the women shaping the future of the Web.  We may not dominate in numbers but, by the power of ideas, women definitely are making their presence felt.  Here’s what Fast Company had to say about Women in Web 2.0:

women-in-web-image1(L to R: Leah Culver, Pownce; Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare; Dina Kaplin, blip.tv; Marissa Mayer, Google; Cyan Banister, Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Page, BlogHer; Caterina Fake, Flickr; Gina Bianchini, Ning; Kaliya Hamlin, OpenID; Mena Trott, Six Apart; Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post.)

“Women have been heavily instrumental in redefining the way we interact online. Here’s a look at the most influential of these.

We’ve heard the stats before — only a quarter of those involved in computer and mathematical occupations are women. And yet, in the ever-evolving world of Web 2.0, women have often been pioneers, redefining the way we interact online. To give credit where it’s due, we tracked down the most influential of these. Our list wasn’t chosen by star power, nor by career altitude. Rather, we feature the biggest innovators.

For the entire article, go to The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 | Fast Company.

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