Archive for the ‘Startup’ Category

Financial Projections

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Wow, can’t believe its so long since I’ve blogged here! Oh well, time to set that straight.

We’ve been really busy over in Calom over the last few months so sorry for the lack of content here.

As somebody who’s just started to hit the investment trail, I thought this blog entry was very much spot on the mark:

http://www.askthevc.com/blog/archives/2009/05/startup-cost-pr.php

And even though it’s early, what’s most frustrating is that I have a clear idea in my head where I want Calom to be in 9 – 12 months time. It’s clear, I know what risks the company faces and I know what work needs to be done. My first milestone is to get our product to market, and that it’s one people will buy. As regards what volume we will have in 3 years, wow, that’s a little bit of pie in the sky. When we get to that stage, projecting for the 18 – 24 months is going to be a hell of a lot more accurate.

Posted in Projections, Startup | No Comments »

Infrastructure on a budget (part 2)

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Continuing on from my previous post there’s lots more useful tools to get you up and running as cheap as possible.

Accountancy Software
This took a while to find. The usual suspects of Sage, Tas books etc were briefly looked at. But I felt they were quite expensive and you had to install software onto your PC. How quaint! So I looked around at online alternatives. In this space there is Freshbooks who some on the Hothouse use and it’s great if you need to bill out your time to clients. I went with xero however. This gives you a clean web based interface and works at approx €23 a month for the service. In here you can keep you bank and credit cards reconciled. Issue invoices, keep track of your expenses and accounts payable. All the basic stuff. You can also give your accountant a login to see how things are looking.

And it would be really neat if some of the Irish banks made their statements available in an electronic format. xero can automatically do the reconciliation for you once it can get bank data in csv format.

With the world converging into cyberspace, taking your accounts online gives you a lot of possibilities that could be useful. One of the more interesting aspect of xero is that they have an API and are encouraging partners to partner with them. This includes Banks (in NZ and the UK), payroll providers, CRM companies. So you can track your customers from the accountancy system directly into your CRM system. Neat!

email and calendars
Here go for Google Apps. While Google have received some bad press about downtime recently, for the price you pay ($0 for basic access) it’s terrific. They include full details about how to get your domain fully set up so all mail looks like it has come from your domain. The google calendar is great and integrates into most mail clients. You can create your own site page for employees, and the control panel makes it a snip to add new users. I’ve seen some startups install outlook and set up some sort of exchange system. But using google has 2 major advantages, one it’s very inexpensive, and 2, you don’t need to be worrying about having to back up your email. If your laptop goes bank in the morning, you haven’t lost 3 years worth of email.

Customer Relationship Management
Being a techie, you can start off for free here using Sugar. Sugar is huge, there’s lot of options in there and you’ll be a while learning it. You can track your customers well, run campaigns etc. You can integrate your crm system with your Google Apps so mail to your clients that are present in the CRM is picked up automatically. I’ve put a CRM in place, even though I don’t have customers yet. But start as you mean to go on, and all my potential leads are being put in there.

Project Management
Calom uses Agile techniques to develop its software, and we use Trac to put coordinate developer activities. With trac you can set milestones, define tasks and activities and show how the overall progress of your application is looking. You can also tell trac where your svn repository is so it can track the commits coming in. In your commit message you can mark tasks with something like “Fixes #10″ and trac will close task 10 automatically for you in its database. So after setting up your milestone with the activities you plan to do, as you complete them, you will be able to see all the commits that affected each task being rolled in. You can also even see the code that was changed. Your Hudson build can also integrate here so that as a build completes, it puts an event into trac. Now you can see the commit with all the details and the status of the build that immediately followed it.

Web Site
I took time to learn how to install and use drupal. This blog is based on drupal as are the main Calom websites. It’s a pretty powerful system and will take some time to get over the learning curve. But there’s a few new books out for the latest version that will help you out. And once you’ve cracked the basics of how its structured, you can become very productive with it.

For around €60 a month, you can end up with a pretty strong architecture that doesn’t require a huge amount of ongoing maintenance. Plus you’re ready to scale should you find new staff coming on board.

Start as you mean to go on!

Posted in Budget, Startup | No Comments »

Infrastructure on a budget (part 1)

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Thought I’d share the choices I made to help me manage my company and software development processes. On of the advantages of having a technical background is you really can slash the costs to pretty much nothing, particularly when it comes to developing your application and introducing automation.

Hosting
First thing you’re going to need is some form or server which will host and save all your work. I wanted to start as I meant to go on, which meant properly saving code and docs into centralised repositories.

For VPS I’m using a company in US called Slicehost who will provision a UNIX server with a distribution of you choice on it. You’ll need to be a Linux fan as they wont do you Windows, but you’ll save on Cost. I’ve been using them for a year now and its never been inaccessible. Prices start at $20 per month.

I use Blacknight for my domain names and update all entries there to point to my slicehost servers. Prices here are some of the most competitive I’ve found for domain names.

Both of these organisations have terrific customer service if you ever need to have to call them.

Backups
After you have created your repository, make sure to get automated backups sorted out straight away so you can sleep a lot easier! You can pay your VPS provider for the service, or get another company. I use a company called rsync.net who simply provide disk space, and a secure means to access it. An extra offering I avail of is multiple geopgraphic copies. So once you sync it up to their serves in one location, they copy it to another location to make extra sure your work is save. These guys charge you per GB of storage. There are plenty of other companies out there in this space, but because of the support for Linux and excellent getting started material went with rsync.net.

Version Control

I went with Subversion here. It’s pretty trivial to install, and best of all free. Once you have this up and running on your server, back up the database using rsync.net and you’ve got a solid setup. In fact if you really want cheap, host your repository directly on rsync.net.

Automation

For this you have a good deal of choice, but for me there’s one application that wins hands down here – Hudson. This will seemlessly integrate with your subversion repositories and monitor them for changes. If you use ant or maven to automate the build cycle of your code, integration with this is trivial. Then with the really neat plug-ins you can publish twitter updates about build status, look at the trends in your build and run all your tests. I’ll talk more about Hudson in another post.

Bizspark

Bizspark is Microsoft’s program for start up that gives you access to their software. It’s free to join and you can get licenses for pretty much every application they produce. It’s an amazing resource and even just using Office 2007 mean’s you’re saving a fortune. Of course if it’s just Office functionality you’re after, there’s always Open Office, but for me functionality design of Office 2007 is a no brainer.

To be Continued…

Posted in Budget, Startup, Technology | 1 Comment »

Joe’s Goals

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

A little plug for this web app, one of the few that I found on the web and instantly liked. It has a really simple interface that allows you to define the goals that you need to achieve (and the ones you don’t want to be doing either).

For such a simple interface it’s really quite clever:

    You only see today’s goals and the previous 6 days worth. So your main focus is on today and it’s reinforced by looking at how you performed recently.
    Adding / Removing goals is a snap.
    Registration is simple and painless.
    If you like, you can share the high level details with everybody on your blog site of Facebook page

Worth a look.

Joe’s Goals

Posted in Motivation, Startup | No Comments »

How to fail successfully

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Those of us on Hothouse 15 have been busy these last few weeks getting business plans put together and been forced to think a little bit harder after we get kicked out (oh ok, “Graduate”!) at the end of April. It’s an excellent exercise in that you really need to have thought through your business idea in some detail, and then write it down. For me the financial side of things has been a huge learning curve and I’m so glad to have spent time on them.

I came across this really good presentation this morning on the Information Arbitrage blog this morning and thought I’d share it.

SIIA Previews Presentation 2009
View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: siia failure)

Some good food for thought in there if you’re in the startup game.

Posted in Startup, failure | No Comments »

Top 10 reasons for properly incubating your business

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

In Ireland you can get a huge amount of support to start a business. Sometimes you have to do a lot of digging to get the information and support your require, but it’s there. Queue the Enterprise Programs, they help you with your search and support. There are a number of programs that are run around the country and they specialise in taking you & your idea and providing intensive support to aid you standing on your own two feet.

Some of the programs include:

I’m on the Hothouse Program and due to finish in April. I can’t believe how quick the time has gone by! It occurred to me though, there’s lots of great benefits to do one of these programs and so in no particular order, I offer my top 10 reasons why you should apply.

You meet other like minded Entrepreneurs

If you’re on your own, starting a business can be a lonely thing to do. You have help from your family and friends, but if you stop doing what you do, your business development will stop with you. Coming from full time employment, it’s even harder, all of the supports you had as an employee are gone. It helps to work with people who know what you’re doing and can keep you encouraged!

Free office space

It mightn’t be the most plushest of spaces you’ve worked in, but for those of us who left to our own devices would spend more time doing odd jobs around the house the office space lets you get focused on your task at hand.

Lots of training

Most programs will give you 2 days training a month on various topics. For techies coming into the real world, having to think about financial projections, sales planning and marketing gives you a better appreciation of what it’s going to take to be successful. Engage with the guys teaching you and you’ll really learn. Some of these trainers will take you way outside your personal comfort zones. This is good.

Learn the value of numbers

I thought my idea was super cool when I started here. And yes it still is, but now I can talk about it in terms of what matters – how will I create and grow a sustainable business that can make money for all involved? Financial projections are a hard, you’ll be knee deep into Excel before you know it. But being able to tell when or if you need capital, for what, and what type is invaluable to you being able to effectively plan your business development.

Access to apply for CORD Funding

In a nutshell, CORD represents the transition from the relative comfort of full time paid employment, to being able to fund yourself completely from your business. It’s €38K in value, pays half of your previous years salary and gets you onto the radar of Enterprise Ireland.

Network Contacts

One thing you learn quickly is you can’t build a business on your own. But there’s a big network of people out there who been through the program you’re on and they may have opportunities for you. Mention you’re on the program and you’ve started to get respect and have a better platform to talk to them from.

Advice

There’s hardly a day goes by without you picking up some tip or trick or totally earth shattering, business and life changing piece of advice. I can’t tell you how many things have changed to my idea since talking with people in here.

Library access

Most incubation centres are associated with a college and in the case of Hothouse you’re student of DIT . You have to produce a business plan to graduate with your Diploma in Business Development. But you get access to the college’s library. Lots of good stuff in there to help you out with your market research that you might otherwise have to pay for.

Work with people of very different backgrounds

The range of skills and backgrounds on your program will be huge. Talk to your classmates, learn from them and you’ll be the better of it. You will see different ways to view the idea you are developing, lessons from their background that might save you a fortune in time and money. Or even a swap of skills and both sides are further along, at a lower cost, then they would be if they were on their own.

Gentle Competitiveness

Maybe not gentle, but it’s amazing how the progress of others on your group stirs you up to stop surfing, twittering and blogging and maybe, just maybe, spend more time developing your business…

And on that note, back to work I go.

Posted in EPP, Hothouse, Startup | No Comments »

Thanks for dropping in

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Ok, I’ve been holding off on this blogging thing for a while. I’m not one to start something without having put some thought and planning into it to make sure it doesn’t die quickly afterwards. So now that it’s started, what do i want to talk about it?

Well, I’m starting a business, developing software that will change how we find and consume media in our increasingly connected world. So there’s a few things that make for good talking points (for me at least):

    Taking the plunge moving from full time secure employment to creating a startup
    Experiences with Enterprise Ireland in getting you off the ground
    Life on the Hothouse business Incubation program
    User Interface design
    Java, OSGi, Linux and all that wonderful technical stuff
    The highs and lows of starting up
    Random stuff as I come across it

I’m sure things will change over time, but that’s the starting point for now.

That’s about it for now, back soon.

Posted in Hothouse, Startup | 1 Comment »