Wow, what a day. In the last 16 hours, I’ve:
- Worked a full day at the office, where I wasn’t skimping on the day job. Really!
- Created a Delaware LLC through LLC.com. Cost: $327 for “Complete” package.
- Opened a very affordable single-user SOASTA CloudTest account for functional testing of my service. Given the coding death march I’m about to embark on, I need automated ass-coverage. Cost: [hidden]/month. I hate the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” services as well … a big waste of time to have to engage a sales rep when your in a rush to “start right.” But in this case, it’s worth it. My day job is a multi-user license holder with SOASTA, so I knew what kind of goodness I could get. I was shocked at what I could get for the price as a single-user license. CALL/EMAIL THEM. It’s worth it. While you’re talking to them, tell them to put the prices up the site.
- Got a one-week trial account for Ylastic. Cost: $0.00 (so far). I’m comfortable with Amazon Web Services, so don’t think I need the whiz-bang of RightScale, and I definitely don’t want to pay RightScale prices if I go past the vaugely-defined limits of their free developer account. I’m definitely building for the cloud; it would be insane not to.
- Signed up for Chartbeat, a really cool monitoring/reporting service. I considered Pingdom for monitoring, but when I saw what else I could get with Chartbeat, it was a no-brainer. May have to use something else to monitor my service’s underlying API, but Chartbeat should do the job for the site with eye candy thrown in! Not a replacement for Google Analytics, but a cheap add-on. Cost: $9.99/month.
- Bought a wildcard SSL cert from RapidSSL. SSL hosts needed for API plans, as well as account management portions of the app. Also need SSL for PayPal callbacks, and while that could have been self-signed … now that I’ve got a wildcard cert, I don’t need to self-sign. Sweet! Cost: $199/yr
- Set up account with ProtoShare. See earlier post about that.
- Made a tentative selection on where I’m going to get business cards/conference handouts printed. 4by6.com — 100% recycled paper FTW! Initial sign-up problems on the site (reg form fail) were remedied pretty quickly, and served as a good reminder of the importance of ongoing functional testing. Those guys should check out SOASTA! Cost: Free account, order TBD. Got a discount code by clicking a Deck ad on A List Apart, so final cost TBD.
- Decided to continue using my existing Unfuddle account for Subversion hosting and ticket tracking. Cost: $9/month
Now off to finish CruiseControl setup so that my code workflow will be in place *before* I start prototyping on ProtoShare and coding.
A couple of notes on thoughts of the day. I started off with some of the common “oh-shit-you-just-can’t-bootstrap-a-successful-internet-app-anymore” self-doubt. Even though I’m bootstrapping, I’m spending an uncomfortable amount of money, and everywhere I look I see 4-5 person teams who have in-house design sensibility, etc, and it just freaks me out. I was pretty successful calming these thoughts by remembering that quote from Jeff Bezos … something like “Don’t wake up at night worrying about your competition. Wake up worrying if your customers are thrilled with your service.” Something like that. It’s cool if other people kick ass, as long as I kick ass too.
A clear sign of the day’s productivity was the 8pm email from my bank saying that my debit card had been disabled due to “unusual activity”. No shit: just unleashed a ton of atypical charges all in one day. Got it sorted out with a fully-automated confirmation process on my cell and my home number, so at least I didn’t have to waste time talking to someone.
Spent a few moments after getting kids in bed by pumping back up with these blog posts:
The Best Equity is Sweat Equity – Mark Cuban post. Particularly timely reading today. Was my first time reading it, after seeing a tweet from @dcancel.
Fear is the Mind Killer of the Silicon Valley Entrepeneur – Dave McClure, from whom tough love springs eternal. If I can’t have a drill sergeant yelling in my ear while on this death march, at least Dave’s out there with posts like this.
Bring it, insane timeline. I can sleep when I’ve launched.
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Found you via Twitter… I dig your enthusiasm! McClure is a good guy to be inspired from: my company, BrowserMob (same space as SOASTA), has been chatting with Dave and some of his companies, like Twilio, for advice. I see you’re a SOASTA fan… would love to get your read on our service. We even put our pricing right there on the site
Comment by Patrick Lightbody May 19, 2009 @ 1:00 pm