Yes, it's a serious award and in case you think I deserve it, click on the image below and put Marcelo Calbucci under "Best start-up founder"
This is this first phase of the award where the top 5 people/companies with the highest number of nominations will compete on a second round of voting.
Since I started Sampa I thought on ways that I could make donations part of our business. The problem is that we don't have any hard cash to donate. Our revenue is so small that even if we donated 10% of it, it wouldn't make a difference. We also don't produce anything that we could donate in kind and our service is already free, so charities can use it anyway.
However, just a couple of weeks ago I had an epiphany.
We could point hundreds of thousands of web pages to a charity and have a dramatic impact on their PageRank as well as referral from a Sampa sites. If we assume a low CTR like 0.5% we could generate more than 100 clicks per day to charities. The "web value" those clicks can be the equivalent of thousands of dollars per month if you are buying a CPC or CPM campaign.
But you might challenge me and say that telling users to add a link to a charity is just a 3-4 step on any web service. We removed most of those steps and made it a single step during the sign up process. Now, when you sign up for Sampa you have a immediate opportunity to choose a charity. Even if you are super lazy you can do it.
Basically, if your service allows a user to create a profile, a webpage, a blog, a wiki or any other UGC, just give them the choice to pick a charity. It's that simple.
There is a lot of debate about running Linux or Windows on the enterprise. Usually, each side throws lines like "Linux is not really free" (because of Total Cost of Ownership), "Windows is too unsecure", "Linux is slow to fix vulnerabilities", "Windows is too expensive", yada, yada, yada.
But what if you are starting a new tech-company? In other words, a lot of the points of the discussions above are null. All the IT will be done in-house by experts (your team), the systems will be tight-secure because you know how to disable services and close the unneeded ports. Etc.
Ok, so if security, reliability and functionality are not an issue, what is it? For me it ends up being two simple things: Knowledge and Price.
Knowledge is simple. If you know Windows, use Windows. If you know Linux, use Linux. If you know both...
Microsoft's Price Sucks for Startups!
I envy the LAMP guys, not because of the technology which I think is slightly behind Microsft's (VS + C# + .NET), but because they have way less concerns about pricing and licensing.
Let's hypothesize that you are starting your own web-based technology company. You and 2 other friends get together and make the big decision to do this. Two of you are developers that will work on the product, one will be the business guy. You guys didn't make the promised millions of dollars in stock options so it's not like you don't have to worry about paying the bills.
If you are a web-based tech company, this is the minimum (debatable) hardware and software requirements for you:
1 Server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 for Email, SharePoint, Domain Controller, etc.
1 Server running W2K3 Server as the front-end for the web-based app.
1 Server running W2K3 + SQL 2005 as the backend
2 Desktop machines for Development, with VS 2005 Pro, Office 2007, Windows XP
1 Laptop for the business guy, with Office 2007 + XP
A few assumptions about this scenario is that Source Control will be done in one of the existing servers and through some Open Source option (like SubVersion or CVS), because Microsoft Source Control solution is just outrageously expensive, you'll be buying your servers without software and that you are using a co-location facility.
How much will all that software cost? $7,775 according to Amazon.com's price.
That is for software alone! This is a pretty hefty price tag for a bootstrapped startup.
The problem is that Microsoft prices its product mostly for Enterprise consumption. Do you think Boeing cares if the $5,000-dollar server they just bought comes with a $900 Windows Server license? Maintaining that server alone will cost an extra $5,000 over the course of 3 years, so the price of a Windows Server is less than 10% of the TCO of it.
But startups don't think like that. 3 years? We might not be in business so I can't use that kind of math. I wish Microsoft would have some kind of special discount or package for startups and don't tell me about the Microsoft Empower for ISVs because it doesn't apply for web-based applications.
Just on the last week or so Edgeio and BlogNation have hit the floor. And now there is rumors that OmniDrive is facing the same end result.
I got to be honest with you all. Every time I hear a company has gone out of business I feel a bit of relief. First, because Sampa has outsurvived them. Second, and more importantly, because it brings a bit of sanity back into the Web 2.0 world.
There are just too many bad companies, and the noise level is just too high to get good press, good investors and good employees. Every time you go to meet with an investor they ask if you are a competitor of XYZ, and you never heard of XYZ before. And, to make matters even worse, XYZ is not even close to what you do, but all that they think is that there might be a similarity, thus it's *crowded*.
Sampa will outsurvive most Web 2.0 companies because we are not built in a feature idea. We are full business with a full product. We are not built with 10,000 lines of code outsourced to some second class development company. We've built a tremendous amount of IP. And we are not running our business like it's 1999. We spend, but spend wisely. And, finally, the most important thing of them all. We proved that people are desperate for products like ours and that *our* product is sticky.
Yes, there is the revenue issue, but we are doing well on that front and it can only get better from here.
I wrote a few times before about this topic and this week there was a great example that can be used to illustrate the problem.
First of all, if you are ever attacked publicly in a blog, forum, website, wiki or whatever, you must respond! You must respond in as many always as you can, as fast as you can and make sure that every single word you write reflects the facts of the situation.
Case in point, Sam Sethi and Michael Arrington spat. This is a long thing so I won't go in detail, but you can read Sam attacking Michael and Michael's response.
It's a bit clear that Sam is a problematic person (just being politically correct here). You might think that for a case like this you just ignore and let it die, after all, what's the value of a wacko saying bad things about you? No much, right? Wrong.
Most people on the Internet, when they are looking up for stuff about you, will not do background check on every person that said something about you. If you don't react to something like this, you are letting just one voice be heard. So, speak up and tell your side of the story. Just be as fact-based as possible, because everything, I mean *everything* you write on a blog post will *never* be erased from the Internet. Search Engines and Blog Search Engines will cache it and you don't have control over it.
And the right way of responding is to write your own blog post on your own blog, so nobody can remove it, and, also leave a comment on the original blog post attacking you. Odds are that comment will be deleted, but if it's not, better for you.
Amazon Web Services just released their new service: SimpleDB. This is a pretty brilliant idea and peoplearetakingnotice.
But there are two pieces that bloggers are not paying attention to, or they didn't realize (after all, most of them are not developers)
I felt the service was so interesting I checked the API and how it works and bam! I was hit in the head.
Did anyone say X.500?
My first realization is that it's not a Database, it's a Directory Service!
Ok, most people (even developers) would not know what a Directory Service is even if you hit them with an Active Directory book on the head. Anyway, if I remember correctly of my years on Exchange Server (98-99) while working on the Active Directory integration, a Directory Service had a few peculiarities that differentiated it from a traditional database.
First of, each object (this is what a "record" is called on a Directory Service) can contain different attributes and the schema can be changed on the fly (a bit more complicated than that).
The next interesting aspect is that a single attribute (field) can have multiple values, just like the Amazon SimpleDB! This means if I define attribute "UsedBy" I can set the values to "Realtors" and "Brokers". On traditional relational databases you'd need 3 tables to do something like this.
Finally, a Directory Service allows a hierarchy of objects, meaning instead of Tables you have nodes (which are container objects) and objects hang out of those nodes. Oh oh, SimpleDB doesn't have that, so all my theory goes down the drain.... Not really, they provide a thing called "Domain" which, if you want to (but you don't), can be used as a hierarchy.
And the best application for SimpleDB will be...
Calling SimpleDB a database or a directory service doesn't change what it can do or what people can do with it, it's just a convention. What matters are the nice products that will come out of that, and IMHO, one of the most interesting one will be...
A search engine!
What? Somebody will built a search engine on top of SimpleDB to compete with Google? Nah! Somebody -- lots of body, actually -- will be able to built their own site search service on top of SimpleDB.
Imagine that Redfin is not a gazillion-dollar VC-backed startup. They are just getting started and want to index all listings from MLS to do a kind of search that you cannot do directly to the MLS database. They can put all that data into SimpleDB (the flexible schema is a huge plus) and not have to worry about having Terabytes of data on their own database. Do you know how much it costs in time and money to maintain a Terabyte database? A lot. There is backup, there is perf issues, there is hardware redundancy, etc.
The only thing missing from the SimpleDB API to provide some serious "site search" capability is a way to rank attributes when doing a query.
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October, 2007