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Chris: This is hard to write, but I feel as if an honest question deserves an honest answer. You don't have enough money or experience to start this company. Y

Chris: This is hard to write, but I feel as if an honest question deserves an honest answer. You don't have enough money or experience to start this company. You need a much better design for your website and your purchasing decisions to date lack business accumen. Spending $2k on SSDs is not a wise choice, and throwing more money after them is not wise either. You underestimate the amount of money it will take to launch this by at least one order of magnitude, if not two, and you overestimate the willingness of investors to invest in pre-traction startups. My advice: Take $300 from the $3k and try to make $350 with it. If you fail, try again until you either have $0k left, or a business that makes some sort of bare minimum profit. If that doesn't sound fun to you, then get a job at a startup and learn as much as you can while you are there. Sorry for the hard words, I was in your position at some point in my late teens, and I wish someone had told me the realities. (The good side is that you will eventually make it. Just keep working hard.) Best of luck.

mtrimpe 13y ago
I want to just second every part of Chris' answer. As for how to spend that $3k? I'd say work on finding a way to articulate your value proposition well enough so that you can convert customers at a high enough rate compared to what your competitors are making. Don't try to service these customers at first and just hand whomever makes it through over to another party (taking a few percent in reseller fees.) It seems like you have a small nugget of a value proposition hidden in your site, which seems to be people who are looking for truly high-performance bare metal servers to rent on demand. I'm pretty sure that for that specific niche a few people/companies can make decent money by having the best combination of SEO/SEM and well converting marketing copy. If you want to get this company off the ground you'll have to become one of those few people and consistently beat the few other players bound to be trying to dominate this market. Testing all this costs almost nothing apart from a few dollars here and there to help test your new design/copy a bit faster. That is what you'd need to make a successful business out of this. If that doesn't sound like fun to you you're probably interested in something else right now and perhaps you should focus your activities around being able to work on the things that interest you...
jchung 13y ago
Really glad that you added a touch of humanity and compassion to this piece of advice. To the OP (Chris, right?): you will eventually make it. "Keep working hard" is great advice. I'd add "keep your eyes open" and "believe in yourself without ignoring the weaknesses you need to work on". The effort you put into the language on your website speaks for itself: you've spent a lot of time and effort on this. But it's not clear what your value proposition is and you're at risk of making a bunch of decisions that will lose you your $3,000. I don't normally recommend the lean startup, but for you I'd strongly recommend picking up that book at a library or bookstore and really internalizing the messages in there. If you decide to continue with your venture, then you need to get out of the building. If you decide to put it on hold for a while, join another startup with a founder you admire and watch her every move. Good luck.
larrys 13y ago
"You don't have enough money or experience to start this company." Agree. Put another way the saying "you have to walk before you can run" (or is it "putting the cart before the horse".) While it is fine to ask questions you also have to narrow down the questions that you ask and show that you are willing to put the time in (as others have) to figure it all out using already available information. I'm reminded of many years ago when a friend wanted me to simply tell him how to start a similar business to the one I was successful at (non tech business). I was willing to fill in gaps in his knowledge of course but I wasn't willing to give him a play by play of things that took me years and years of trial and error to learn or to be his "help desk".
Anonymous238 13y ago
Here's the plan... Pretend you invested $3k in servers and SSDs. Add these services to your site, and try to find your first customer. The bad news, you'll never find them. The good news, it didn't cost you a penny.
smartwater 13y ago
I said something in another thread of his; he posts stuff like this all the time. He has some posts that really SCREAM amateur. I recently blew a 6 figure inheritance on a startup which failed due to medical problems http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769 As a customer, that would concern me, especially when it's a one man show. As a business owner, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. You would be more of a liability than anything. If I were in his position, I'd prove the concept by reselling DigitalOcean. They do low cost SSD VPS. That way it won't cost 5k just to see it flop (or not) Apparently based on people I've talked to who are familiar with the tech startup scene, there aren't any dedicated server providers specifically targeting the tech startup market You mean B2B? There are thousands of them. I am having trouble thinking of a webhost that doesn't target the tech startup market. Geocities or Angelfire maybe? In fact, MediaTemple gives free hosting to a lot of tech startups in exchange for their logo appearing in the footer. I don't know what to say really. There seems to be a huge disconnect from reality. Probably not anymore than most teenagers, if that makes you feel better.
- milesf 13y ago
  Apparently he's around 39 years old, as he was born in 1974 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769
- andrewfelix 13y ago
  "I have extensive experience working with high-end clientele ...For example, I met Calvin Klein on a job I did for him at his penthouse in New York's west side one day." This says it all really.

mtrimpe 13y ago

I want to just second every part of Chris' answer. As for how to spend that $3k? I'd say work on finding a way to articulate your value proposition well enough so that you can convert customers at a high enough rate compared to what your competitors are making. Don't try to service these customers at first and just hand whomever makes it through over to another party (taking a few percent in reseller fees.) It seems like you have a small nugget of a value proposition hidden in your site, which seems to be people who are looking for truly high-performance bare metal servers to rent on demand. I'm pretty sure that for that specific niche a few people/companies can make decent money by having the best combination of SEO/SEM and well converting marketing copy. If you want to get this company off the ground you'll have to become one of those few people and consistently beat the few other players bound to be trying to dominate this market. Testing all this costs almost nothing apart from a few dollars here and there to help test your new design/copy a bit faster. That is what you'd need to make a successful business out of this. If that doesn't sound like fun to you you're probably interested in something else right now and perhaps you should focus your activities around being able to work on the things that interest you...

jchung 13y ago

Really glad that you added a touch of humanity and compassion to this piece of advice. To the OP (Chris, right?): you will eventually make it. "Keep working hard" is great advice. I'd add "keep your eyes open" and "believe in yourself without ignoring the weaknesses you need to work on". The effort you put into the language on your website speaks for itself: you've spent a lot of time and effort on this. But it's not clear what your value proposition is and you're at risk of making a bunch of decisions that will lose you your $3,000. I don't normally recommend the lean startup, but for you I'd strongly recommend picking up that book at a library or bookstore and really internalizing the messages in there. If you decide to continue with your venture, then you need to get out of the building. If you decide to put it on hold for a while, join another startup with a founder you admire and watch her every move. Good luck.

larrys 13y ago

"You don't have enough money or experience to start this company." Agree. Put another way the saying "you have to walk before you can run" (or is it "putting the cart before the horse".) While it is fine to ask questions you also have to narrow down the questions that you ask and show that you are willing to put the time in (as others have) to figure it all out using already available information. I'm reminded of many years ago when a friend wanted me to simply tell him how to start a similar business to the one I was successful at (non tech business). I was willing to fill in gaps in his knowledge of course but I wasn't willing to give him a play by play of things that took me years and years of trial and error to learn or to be his "help desk".

Anonymous238 13y ago

Here's the plan... Pretend you invested $3k in servers and SSDs. Add these services to your site, and try to find your first customer. The bad news, you'll never find them. The good news, it didn't cost you a penny.

smartwater 13y ago

I said something in another thread of his; he posts stuff like this all the time. He has some posts that really SCREAM amateur. I recently blew a 6 figure inheritance on a startup which failed due to medical problems http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769 As a customer, that would concern me, especially when it's a one man show. As a business owner, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. You would be more of a liability than anything. If I were in his position, I'd prove the concept by reselling DigitalOcean. They do low cost SSD VPS. That way it won't cost 5k just to see it flop (or not) Apparently based on people I've talked to who are familiar with the tech startup scene, there aren't any dedicated server providers specifically targeting the tech startup market You mean B2B? There are thousands of them. I am having trouble thinking of a webhost that doesn't target the tech startup market. Geocities or Angelfire maybe? In fact, MediaTemple gives free hosting to a lot of tech startups in exchange for their logo appearing in the footer. I don't know what to say really. There seems to be a huge disconnect from reality. Probably not anymore than most teenagers, if that makes you feel better.

milesf 13y ago
Apparently he's around 39 years old, as he was born in 1974 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769
andrewfelix 13y ago
"I have extensive experience working with high-end clientele ...For example, I met Calvin Klein on a job I did for him at his penthouse in New York's west side one day." This says it all really.