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2012: The Year I “Outsourced Everything”

Corey — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:50:27 +0000

15 years ago, to start business that relied on servers, databases, and distributed computing, with built in monitoring, redundancy, fail-safes and logging, you would have needed a staff of IT professionals.

Today, I just built a service launched on Heroku. Every part is built and monitored by an outsourced team of professionals. All I do is build the pipes to connect them.

Distributed Workers: Heroku Dyno’s using Resque built on Redis (managed by Redis To Go)
Database: Mongo managed by MongoHQ
Service Monitoring: StillAlive
Log Management: Heroku Logging + Loggly with archiving to Amazon AWS bucket
Exception Management: Exceptional (though, exploring Airbrake)
SSL: Piggyback SSL on Heroku (for now)
Deployment: git on Heroku
Tasks: cron on Heroku

When speed is not mission critical, out-sourcing the management of each of these components helps me know that everything will just work.

I don’t have to worry about database backups, monitoring, or building a visual management unit — MongoHQ does that for me automatically. I don’t have to worry about managing Redis — Redis To Go does that. Building an exception dashboard? Exceptional did it. Making my logs easily searchable and archiving them for me? Loggly did it. Application monitoring? A few easy recipes on StillAlive and I’ll get e-mails when things go wrong.

The best part is, in “building” an app, I can do it for almost zero cost. Once I get everything up and running, I can increase my “plans” as need be, so I scale my costs as the application grows.

2012 will be the year I outsource everything.

Lessons from my Father: Money Isn’t Just Money

Corey — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:40:23 +0000

When my father was raising money for BeFree, he found himself in a tough situation: Michael Dell was on the phone, asking to invest in an already oversubscribed round.

There were two choices: tell Michael Dell “no,” or cut back the other investors.

My father chose the latter, hoping to leverage the relationship to get Dell as a customer and get access to Michael’s Rolodex.

Two weeks after announcing Michael’s investment, Dell announced that they signed a deal with BeFree’s #1 competitor. On top of that, Michael never felt comfortable opening his Rolodex. He went on to make something like 20x his investment in BeFree.

On the upside, our family did get some pretty cool Dell Family holiday cards.

What’s the point? Money isn’t just money. My father made a strategic decision about who to let invest in his business. It may not have worked out, but the thinking was dead on. All entrepreneurs should think long and hard about who they let invest in their business: it is a hugely important decision that you will have to live with for a very, very long time. You might as well think of it as a marriage. Do your due diligence on the investor:

Make sure your goals are compatible. Do you want long-term growth or a short-term hit?
Does the investor have a history of supporting entrepreneurs or blowing them out at the first sign of dark clouds on the horizon?

Recognize that you don’t HAVE to take money from investors that aren’t right for you and your business.

Lessons from my Father: Looks Can Be Everything

Corey — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:59:52 +0000

My father was looking to hire a new employee for his business Microamerica. The interview was scheduled for really early in the morning, so my father was the only one in the office. This also meant that my father’s car was the only one in the parking lot; or, at least, that is what Mr. Bill thought. My father had actually parked his new Porsche behind the building, so the only visible car in the lot was the ’63 Falcon that belonged to the overnight cleaning crew.

Despite liking the business, Mr. Bill almost turned down the offer because he thought my father’s car wasn’t nice enough. This may seem shallow at first, but it was being used as a metric to see if my father’s previous businesses had been successes.

Another anecdote that my father told me was how he used to host VC dinners at our house when he was trying to raise money. In conjunction with going to VC firms, he would have them over for dinner and try to have his house do the speaking, hoping that the VCs would leave saying, “if he has a house this big, his previous companies must’ve been big successes, and therefore he must know what he is doing; so let’s give him some money.”

Yes, these are examples of incredibly shallow human behavior: but that is the truth of our nature. Sometimes, we are very shallow creatures. We often have expectations of how people should dress or behave in certain positions.

A study in Inc. magazine claimed that success in start-ups largely depended on the CEOs ability to convince stakeholders that the company is operational. Stakeholders are more likely to work with you if you appear to know what you are doing. The study goes on to say that the founder’s education or previous experience were not indicators of success.

Lesson from my Father: ”Start-ups are like a game of chicken — never let anyone see you sweat. You may be dying on the inside but the world has to see you smiling.” Do all the little things to show stakeholders you are a real company. Strong leadership is key. Always be sending out letters and proposals from your office, and celebrate every success you have.

tl; dr: First impressions are often lasting impressions. Dressing and acting the part can often do a lot of instill confidence in those with whom we are speaking. People are often influenced by these factors, whether they are conscious of it or not. Use that to your advantage!