Midnight Oil

I got a new job! Starting April 23rd, I will be a Senior Software Engineer at Vitrue, helping them develop their embeddable video platform. I honestly don’t know a lot of details yet, but it seems to be a themeable, embeddable YouTube-like video platform. The twist is that companies can keep complete control over the posted content. From a corporate standpoint, that seems a little easier to stomach than the wild-wild-west of YouTube.

Best of all, I’ll be networking and meeting other young entrepreneurs like myself. The best place to meet startup-oriented people is, you guessed it, at a startup.

My greatest fear is that I will have less and less time to work on Obsidian Portal and RioFlexPay (link coming soon…). Oh well, I can always sleep less.

Before we switched to Slicehost, we had our VPS on Rimuhosting. I must say that I was very pleased with Rimuhosting’s service, and we never had any problems with stability. We eventually had to switch to Slicehost anyway because it was simply cheaper and we’re on razor-thin margins here.

Still, switching hosts is not a trivial process, and you have to factor in the switching effort when deciding if the price differential is worth it. If you’ve found a cheaper host and are thinking about jumping ship, the very first thing you should do is contact your current provider and see if they’ll match the new host’s price. That’s what we did initially with Rimuhosting. They didn’t match the deal, but they did give us a little more RAM for free. That tided us over for another month or two before we decided we wanted to give Slicehost a shot.

So, for posterity, and to help other bargain hunters, here is the letter I sent, and Rimuhosting’s response.

I’ve been a Rimuhosting customer for several months now. In general I am happy with the service, although my server seems to be getting more and more sluggish in recent weeks.

Due to the performance issues, I began shopping around for alternatives and I came across Slicehost ( http://www.slicehost.com/ ). Since they’re a competitor, I’m sure you’re already familiar with them.

According to their price list, they will give me 256MB RAM plus more disk space for $20/mo, compared to the 160MB of RAM I’m getting for $29. For me, the RAM is the big deal, and the extra storage is just icing on the cake.

I am seriously considering moving to slicehost, as I am finding that the 160MB I currently have is eaten quickly by Tomcat, mongrel, and MySQL. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I have been seeing some very serious performance issues lately, with slowdowns on ssh as well as terrible response times from the web server. This could be due to not enough memory on my VPS, but I’m concerned it has to do with too few CPU cycles being devoted to the VPS.

In all honesty, I would rather not switch hosting companies, as I have been pleased with the level of service from Rimuhosting. In addition, moving a VPS installation is no small task and I do not relish the idea of trying to replicate all my settings on a new machine. Still, Slicehost’s pricing plan is very attractive.

Before I make any decisions, I would like to ask what sort of plan you would be willing to offer in order to compete with Slicehost. If you could offer a combination of more RAM and a lower price, it would go a long way towards tipping the scales in Rimuhosting’s favor.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Micah Wedemeyer
http://www.aisleten.com

Their response to me:

Hi Micah,

I’ve added some additional memory to your VPS:

[root@obsidianportal ~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           300        148        151          0         16         55
-/+ buffers/cache:         76        223
Swap:           95          0         95

Also moved your current pricing from 39.95, to where our current MiroVPS2 plans are, at 29.95 a month.

We feel that we offer a good value for the service we provide. We appreciate your business and hope you will stay with us.

I saw an article in the New York Times the other day about working 10 hours a week and making $10 million a year. The article profiles Markus Frind, who started an online dating website, Plenty of Fish. The main thrust of the article is that Markus barely works at all and just sits back raking in cash. Are there any other web entrepreneurs out there who are sick and tired of hearing this story over and over? This is all I ever hear, and I secretly dream about it while working on my projects, but it doesn’t match up well with the real world of late nights and no money.

Hmm, let’s look through the NY Times article and see what the keys are to creating a cash-cow website:

• Just sit down and create a site as an experiment in teaching yourself a new programming language.
• Ignore the interface and usability. If stuff looks bad, just say, “Users don’t care about that.”
• Forget about customer service and moderation. Crowdsource it to the forums.
• Don’t charge users for anything. Rely 100% on advertisements.
• Lie in your hammock and collect checks.

Ok, I’ll admit, this is the life I want to live. This is the dream of all us web guys. However, I’m starting to suspect that the vast majority of “successful” web entrepreneurs invest a lot more effort and reap much smaller rewards. How many of us out there are pulling in $50, $100, or dare I say it, $500 a month from our projects? If I could get Obsidian Portal to generate $100 a month, I would be ecstatic. After paying off the hosting fees and whatnot, my take-home would probably be less then $1/hr. Still, it’s a goal to shoot for.

We can’t all be Digg, YouTube, or Facebook, but that’s OK. Success has different levels, and if we can just generate enough income to justify the amount of time we spend working on the sites we love, then that’s success. I just wish the media would profile a few more of us who live on the wrong side of profitability, work until 3:00 in the morning, and jump for joy with every subscription or CafePress T-shirt we sell.

Are you like me, barely scraping by (or not, as it were)? Drop a comment when you take a break from furiously writing code or begging someone not to cancel their account…

We have finally gotten to the point where we are ready to start offering subscriptions to Obsidian Portal. We don’t expect there will be a lot of interest, but it’s always a sort of chicken v. egg problem. If you don’t have paying subscribers, then it’s not worth the effort to make the features. Conversely, without the features, no one is going to pay. On second thought, I guess it’s not chicken and egg, it’s pretty clear: you need features or no one will pay.

Asking for payment means you will need to be able to accept it. Currency on the web is passed almost exclusively via credit cards (except for PayPal…), so that’s the direction we need to go in. That requires us to select a credit card processor. For today, we will be looking at TrustCommerce.

I won’t go into the details of how credit card processing works, mainly because I don’t really understand it myself. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of middle-men, and they are all trying to take a cut. Each cut is either a percentage of the total charge or a flat fee or both. So, a typical fee structure might be $0.30 flat fee plus 2.5% of the total transaction.

Note: If you don’t care about the analysis and just want to see a rundown of their prices, then jump to the pricing.

Go easy on me; it’s my first time

When selecting a processing agent, our first priority right now is ease of use. We don’t expect there will be a lot of people signing up for our premium service, so we don’t want to expend a lot of effort on a payment system only to never see it used. Also, we’re willing to pay a higher rate to the processor since 3% of $30/month is a lot different than 3% of $30,000/month. I’ll pay 3% vs 2.5% if the 3% service takes 2 hours to implement and the 2.5% service takes 10. So, for us, ease of use trumps competitive pricing.

Since we’re talking about subscriptions as opposed to purchases, there is a recurring element to the payments. Since we want easy-to-implement solutions, we are scoping our search to only include the payment processors that offer a recurring service. This is a very important thing to note, especially if you’re in the same boat. A 1-time payment processor model (like Google Checkout) just will not work if you want to do subscriptions. The main reason is that you will have to store the users’ credit card info on your server in order to pass it to the payment processor each billing cycle. Do not do this! There are actual laws and regulations detailing what sort of security procedures you have to maintain in order to hold that sort of sensitive data. It’s much easier to simply pay someone else to deal with that crap. If you do choose to store their info in your database, you should be looking for a lawyer right now, not a payment processor.

Just plug in your credit card info

In Rails, ease of use means finding a plugin. I write a lot about plugins on this blog, so why should credit card processing be any different? Doing a quick Google search led me to the TrustCommerce subscription payment plugin.

Finding this bit of code brought a smile to my face, as I thought I had just finished 90% of the work. Sign up for an account, drop in the plugin, and wait for the money to roll in. Too bad there were a few red flags that derailed the money train.

Sitting by the phone

TrustCommerce does not list any pricing on their website. Instead, they say you have to sign up for a test account, and then you’ll be contacted. Not a big deal, I guess. So, I signed up for a test account.

The first red flag went up when I did not get an immediate callback. Sure, I signed up at 11:00pm Eastern Time, but that’s normal business hours in Internet time. In other words, if you’re an Internet company that requires phone contact, you had better have someone manning the phone at all hours. A lot of Web jockeys like me have a regular 9-5 job that precludes us from doing our business dealings during normal business hours. I want to deal with companies that understand this and have staff available during my normal business hours.

Red flags: 1

The ball sits in my court

The second red flag went up at their lackluster eventual response. My cell is in a dead zone at work, so whenever I leave for lunch, I get all my messages. On the day after requesting contact, I had a voicemail message from TrustCommerce. Still no pricing info, just a short message to call them back. Seeing as how I was busy, I couldn’t do it right away. Then I forgot. Dead silence on their end. No e-mails, no more calls, nothing.

Now a lot of people may disagree with me on this, but I think they should have been hitting my inbox and voicemail pretty hard. “Mr. Wedemeyer, we’re still interested in talking to you about blah blah.” or “Send us an e-mail with the best time to call you.” That’s how the mortgage people behaved when I used LendingTree. Sure, it was annoying, but you knew they wanted your business. To me, an anemic response indicates that someone isn’t really serious about recruiting me as a customer.

Red flags: 2

Little fish: prepare to get fried

When I finally did get in touch with someone from TrustCommerce, he was quite happy to answer my pricing questions. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post that info, but since they didn’t expressly forbid it, here you go:

Basic pricing

• $95 1-time fee
• $20 / month
• $0.20 / transaction

Citadel (recurring payments)

• $145 1-time fee
• $10 / month
• $0.10 / month / billing id (ie. subscription)

Holy crap! $240 just to get started, plus an additional $30 per month, just to be allowed to use their service? Seeing as how I expect Obsidian Portal to be making around $10 / month, at least until we can recruit more people, this is insane! I politely said thank you to the salesman, hung up the phone, and started writing this post.

I guess I see these huge front-loaded fees like this: If you’re making enough money that the fees don’t matter, then you already have a lot of subscribers, which means you’re already handling credit cards. Maybe their service is so great compared to the competition that it’s worth it for the big boys. But, if you’re a small time operator like me, forget about it.

Red flags: 240 + 30 / month

The search continues

Although I said pricing was not our top priority, the front loaded fees with TrustCommerce completely invalidate them as a viable option. It would be a very long time before we paid off the initial investment, and with our none-to-clear business prospects with Obsidian Portal, that’s a gamble I’m not willing to take.

In the next exciting chapter we will be looking at Amazon Flexible Payment System (FPS). This new web service from Amazon is meant to rival Google Checkout and PayPal. I’ve been extremely pleased with S3, and maybe they can do one better with FPS. Stay tuned to find out.

First, let me make something clear. I don’t design in Microsoft Word nor Adobe PDF (and I’m sure I’m not alone), so how come I can only find templates for business cards in these formats? Unable to find a “good” quality template for the 8871^TM Matte White Ink Jet Clean Edge 2″ x 3 1/2″ Business Cards I have made the basic template available here. I hope you find it useful.

 Avery Business Card Template for Adobe Illustrator

This template should work with the following Avery Business Card Templates:

Avery Business Card 25371
Avery Business Card 27870 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 27871 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 27881 Matte Coated
Avery Business Card 27882 Matte Coated
Avery Business Card 28371 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 28373 Glossy Photo Quality Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 28877 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 3612
Avery Business Card 5371
Avery Business Card 5372
Avery Business Card 5376
Avery Business Card 5377
Avery Business Card 5870
Avery Business Card 5871
Avery Business Card 5872
Avery Business Card 5873
Avery Business Card 5876
Avery Business Card 5878
Avery Business Card 5881 Color Laser
Avery Business Card 5882 Print to the Edge Color Laser
Avery Business Card 5911
Avery Business Card 8271 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8272 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8371 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8372 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8373 Glossy Photo Quality
Avery Business Card 8374 Magnetic Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8376 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8377 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8471 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8476 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8571 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8870 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8871 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8872 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8873 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8874 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8876 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8877 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8878 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8879 Clean Edge Ink Jet

Recently, I went to a meeting of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs. They sponsored a presentation by John Sherrod of Primedia regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

All in all, it was a good talk, and I didn’t feel too sleazy for being there. I was worried that an SEO talk would devolve into discussions of how to fool Googlebot into putting you at the top of the list for keywords like ’stud’ and ‘teen.’ Luckily, John stressed one main point on how to best climb the charts: provide high quality, original content that has value to your readers.

Beyond that, he gave many good tips that are applicable across a wide variety of sites. I’ll list off the ones that I was quick enough to write down.

John’s Tips

Make sure your links are spider-friendly

When the search engine spiders reach your page, they will rely on you to navigate them around. The only way they can find their way to all your pages is if there are links providing navigation to the each page. Also important, these links should be text links, not flash. The text of the link helps the spider identify the keywords to associate with the material on the page. Further, some links are incomprehensible, such as Flash or Javascript links. The more plain text you have, the friendlier it is to the spider.

Avoid URLs with lots of query string variables

I can’t say much to this one, since I don’t know how the spiders work. John, however, claims that they do not like URLs with lots of query string variables. In any case, these URLs are definitely not friendly to users, and they look ugly in a search result. Instead, allow the URL to express some sort of organization of your site. For example, compare the following two URLs:

http://mysite.com/products/jewelry/gold/diamond-tennis-bracelet

http://mysite.com?cat=44&subcat=92&prodId=2412145

Which one is more descriptive? They could be talking about the same thing, but it’s impossible to tell from the URL.

In the Rails world, URLs like this are fairly easy to achieve, thanks to routing. By implementing a few routes, you are able to clean up your URLs and make them look nice and pretty. Take a quick look at the official manual on routing and you’ll see just how easy it is.

On Obsidian Portal, we are trying to use nice, easy to read URLs for as much as we can. Currently, we’re not doing as well as we could, but that’s mainly because we have so many features we’re trying to implement. Making URLs look pretty is not exactly at the top of the list. However, we have had some success with campaigns and game content. For example, http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/kensing takes you directly to my campaign, called Kensing. In another example, http://www.obsidianportal.com/game_contents/show/memory-steel, takes you to an item I created called memory steel. That URL could use some cleanup, but you get the idea.

Unique <title> tag on every page

The search engines place a lot of weight on the words they find inside the title tag. So, make sure every page has keywords in the title. Personally, I am not a big fan of long, jumbled titles that are just a mish-mash of keywords. Instead, give each page a meaningful title that happens to contain 1 or 2 keywords related to the material presented on the page. This will give it a nice appearance in the search engine result pages.

Establish a baseline for your current stats

Before you can get better at anything, you need to know where you currently are. For search engines and page views, you need to establish your current baseline and then track your stats over time. Probably the easiest way to do this is by setting up a Google Analytics account. It provides a nice graphical view of how you are doing over time.

use link: on your competition

This is an excellent strategy for finding out why your competition ranks better than you. Go to Google and enter:

link:your.competitors.site.com

This will return a list of all the links (that Google knows about) to your competitor’s site. You may discover that they have several high-ranking incoming links that could also apply to you. Track these places down and see if you can get yourself listed there as well.

New friends and plans for next month

Besides listening to the SEO presentation, I also met a few Ruby on Rails developers here in Atlanta. Calvin Yu and Neil Green are members of the ATLRUG (Atlanta Ruby Users Group) and they’re working on a new site, but they asked me not to discuss their project just yet, so I’ll keep it under wraps.

Next month’s meeting will be a round-table discussion of various web technologies (such as RoR). I cornered the organizer after the meeting and offered to sit in as a RoR “expert.” Just don’t tell him how little I know

Ryan and I have been going back and forth about starting a business for a while, and it seems that we are equally in the dark about the whole thing. Luckily, up to this point, we have not been doing much of anything that one might call business-like. That’s not to say that we do not behave professionally as software engineers, just that so far we have not really thought in terms of money.

Recent events, though, have forced the issue into the front. Ryan has been becoming more and more popular as a regular at various web guru meetups in San Diego. He has promised for a couple weeks now to put up some postings about some of what he has learned. From what he tells me, our work on Obsidian Portal has drawn some attention. Besides the content of the site, people have questions about how we designed our software, how Ryan is handling the layouts, and various other technical aspects of the site. Assuming people like what the answers we give, I want them to be able to remember us and make contact in the future, if they have further questions or ideas for us.

So, the basic need right now is to get some business cards printed that we can hand out at various events. Seems simple enough, right? Well, sure, but what to actually put on them? We needed a name!

For several years, Ryan has been sitting on a domain name that he has used for his personal e-mail address and some other small projects. I never thought much about it, but just the other day, he suggested it for our company. In truth, I was quite flattered that he would do this. As a namer of all things (goldfish, house plants, bicycles, you-name-it), I know the value of a good name. If you use your best name on a goldfish, and it dies the next day, then not only have you lost your pet, but you have also lost a great name. So, for Ryan to offer the name like he did, it shows he actually has some confidence in what we are doing. Plus, it is just a really great name.

So, without any fuss or agonizing or complicated domain-name mangling, we made the decision to name ourselves…AisleTen! It has a great sound, is easy to remember, and even has a pseudo-definition.

To sweeten the pot, Ryan has been working on a logo and a business card design. Take a look for yourself:

All we need to do is find an inexpensive print shop and crank a handful of these out. From there, we can start to build an identity as a couple of sharp guys trying to make the web a better place.