Collaboration Chronicles

This last weekend was another episode of Stirfry Startups.  I believe it was episode 3.  I showed up late on Saturday and Sunday but was still able to get a lot of work done.

Stirfry Startups has had a specific focus at each weekend it was hosted.  This weekend it was design.  We each took turns sitting in the “hot seat” while everyone else lambasted our website design.  In my case, I presented this site and Collab21.com, which I’m working on merging.  I finally have a plan, now I just need to execute on it.

But to get to that plan was a lot of falling on my face.  “Change the sub-heading text”, “use reflexive verbs”, “the colors on CollaborationChronicles.com suck ass, fix them”.   The best advice was from Sean.  He asked me a few questions and then said “You need to put what you just told me in writing.  I have no idea what your company is about by looking at your site for 6 seconds.  You need to explain it so that people who may be interested will stay for more than 6 seconds.”  This was paraphrased, but you get the idea.

Well, I hadn’t given it that much thought.  Now I have, and that’s important.

Since I wasn’t the only person who sat in the hot seat, Sean came up with a term to describe this process.  It’s called “group strapping”.  He ruminated on the idea overnight, and on Sunday described it to us this way: “normally you pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you start a company.  ‘Group strapping’ is everyone pulling up each other’s bootstraps.”

Once we get good at this and can prove it, we’ll be in a position to offer it as a service to other groups.

A common question experienced business people will ask of new business owners is “how will you fund your business?”  This is a topic that allows for  creative solutions and requires meticulous documentation.

Money

Solutions

I can think of a few ways to fund a business: take out a loan, borrow, throw a fundraiser, use savings, steal.  But good businessmen will use their experience to add to this list and will also know how to improve what already works.

An example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV.  I’ve used Gary as an example before, but I can’t stop watching his video podcasts, and reading all of his twitter posts.  I’ll admit that I’m a little fanboyish.  But I guarantee that I’m not the only one.  Gary admits that WLTV wasn’t making money for at least a year.  He used his earnings from the success of building Wine Library, a liquor store in New Jersey, to fund WLTV until became sustainable.  Now he’s adding to his business in ways unthinking to him when his business was young.

Not everyone has that opportunity.  Collab21, for example, started with 7 people living paycheck to paycheck or worse.  Until I realized that we needed better focus in terms of wealth, wisdom and work, we were just hoping that our goals would come to life out of thin air.  Starting and running a business means catering to those three things simultaneously.

A bank is not going to give you money unless you can prove to them that you’ve done your homework and have goals.  Don’t confuse a desire with a goal.  Desires are those that fade, mutate, or aren’t achievable.  Winning the lottery, chocolate treats and a predictible stock market are desires.  Goals are described in a previous post.

Use your goals to think of creative ways to fund your business.  If using a bank is not an option, think about fund raising opportunities.  If you do not have time to plan or host a fund raising event, how long will it take to reach your goal by saving?  What else can you do (work) to raise funds (wealth) so that you can sustain your business to reach your goals (wisdom)?

Documentation

When capitalizing a business, it’s important that you document money coming in and going out.  I would personally recommend following GAAP.  It will get you started on the right foot, even if you’re only saving $100 a month.  The research required in setting up and keeping books with carry a lot way in your business.  Without doing the due diligence in the beginning, this topic will be ignored and could lead your business down a path of trouble.

Question

What creative decisions did you make in your business that affected it?

I was writing an article for our blog @ Collaboration Chronicles. The article talks about using Wordpress to manage websites and I wanted to show people, using a screencast, how to install Wordpress. I came up with the idea for One Minute Wordpress as a novel idea to show off the power and speed of deploying a Wordpress install. In my attempts to speed through my installation, my best time was around 3 minutes. I needed to get rid of some of the inefficiencies in my method of installing.

I remembered an article on Hackaday called WordPress 2.7 upgrade in one line.

I read through the article and liked the curl method much better than the wget approach I was going to use.

So taking from the Chris Finke’s Twitter post I modified it to suit my One Minute Wordpress Installation.

Open the Terminal and ssh into your server:

ssh username yourserver.com
then type:

curl http://wordpress.org/latest.zip -o “wp.zip” && unzip wp.zip

This will download and unpack the latest Wordpress release. We’ll use the web based config tool to create your wp-config.php file.

O.K., so I solved the big issue, which eliminated my local computer from the equation and allowed me to download and unpack straight to the server. This shaved a huge chunk of time that was wasted on redundancy. I am still working on a solution so you can use a php script on your server to create the mysql database without needing to log in to your host’s webpanel. I’ll update the site oneminutewordpress.com as soon as I finish up on that side of things, but for now you can revel in the glory of a one minute manual Wordpress Install. Here’s a link to the site:

and the step by step instructions.

I’ve been playing around with Wordpress for about two years now.

I started off using it for typical blog posting, del.icio.us bookmark posting, and a host of other blog/social media type solutions.  I began looking into using it to deploy multiple users and blogs for a side-project I was working on with William Hodges call Resellr (private for now).  We checked out Wordpress MU.  It allows for multiple users and blogs to be installed either as subdomains i.e.,  rob.collaborationchronicles.com or as directories within the domain i.e., collaborationchronicles.com/rob .  This is a great tool as it allows the domain admin to control any aspect of the Wordpress install, such as themes, plugins, etc., all from within the Wordpress MU admin screen. This was a great solution for allowing multiple users to login and post items, photos, etc. More recently I’ve been using Wordpress to act as a stand alone website with all the functionality of a blog (time relevant post, heirarchy, tags, categories), but with the functionality of a website (newsletter, contact us, flickr photos).  We can use the power of Wordpress as a dynamic webapp that can pull content from a variety of social media sources.  With the extensibilty of Wordpress paired with the community of developers creating wonderful solutions Wordpress really is a great fit for websites. I’ll give you a case example of how I used Wordpress to create a fully function website on the cheap and in a hurry.

Claremont Food not Lawns is a local community organization that help to spread awareness about food sources and help people convert their lawns into wonderful gardens.  I met them at a Wednesday night Green Market in Claremont.  They said they needed help to get a website up and running, as the site that they currently had was unfinished.  They had one of the vital components to making a sucessful website: content.  I met with Mary Beth and Todd to determine their budget and what they needed done.  As a community organization they were going to need the following:

• Monthly Newsletter
• Email contact page
• An events page
• Photos
• A news page (this is where the newsletter content will come from)
• Various information pages (how to volunteer, articles, etc.)
• A Youtube video post
• A link roll, resources, friends, etc.
• A way track traffic
• A way to automate the monthly newsletter

I determined that Wordpress would be a great solution for their needs and began creating the framework for how the site would function.  I compiled a list of the plugins I would require to accomplish this task.

In term of functionality here are the plugins that I use to handle my needs.

Askimet – For comment spam, it comes installed with Wordpress, simply active the plugin and enter your API key from Wordpress.com

Google Ultimate Analytics – Google tracking for websites.  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/
Tan Tan Noodle Toolkit – For handling remote Flickr set as  albums on the site.  http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Photos

Photos Claremont Food Not Lawns via kwout

Google XML sitemap plugin- To create XML sitemaps and auto submit to search engines: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Sitemap
Contact Form- To handle emailing from a form on the site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Example: Claremont Food not Lawns Contact Us

Google Calendar- To pull events from a shared Google Calendar: http://code.google.com/p/wpng-calendar/

Example: Claremont Food Not Lawns Events Calendar