Morale

I am now live with StakeItOut/Beta. Note the site is only ssl.

In the next couple of days I will explain what it actually is about.

In the first week I will only trickle in new users to make sure that the server holds up and that there aren’t any major bugs I’ve overseen.

As always send me an email at [email protected] and I will add you to the beta list.

Over the weekend and this morning I have been working on getting the final functionality ready of my app before beta. There is just one final feature that is messing me about right now. I feel like I’m nearly there. But now I need to go off to work. I know this is going to be bugging me all day.

However the good thing is once I have got that done it is pretty much a straight forward clean up and deploy. It should be ready then for the first few early beta testers.

What is my app then? Hang on and all will be revealed. As the fundamentals of the app are now pretty much rock solid, I will start adding icing to the cake, which is where the real fun begins. Then I will start letting people in.

I can hint that it is a collaborative tool for micro businesses and other groups who need very strong security. It is not meant as a competitor to Basecamp nor Backpack, but more as a complementing tool.

If anyone is interested in being early beta testers let me know at StakeItOut Beta Request.

Off to work, I’m already late.

[ Just added this to my new series on Antipatterns ]

A mistake I myself have made as well as many other smalltime entrepreneurs is that we have wanted to appear like a business to early. Symptoms of this are things like:

• Incorporating
• Renting office space
• Buying a fax machine (You know a business needs one)
• Fancy stationary
• Fancy graphic designers
• Multiple fault tolerant high availability servers
• Human resources officer (If you’re a startup and have one these you really are on the slippery slope)
• etc. etc.

These are all fine at the correct phase of your business, but don’t waste these huge money suckers without an actual need.

I for example have rented a server which hasn’t really been in use since february. That is ¢49 out the door every month. Stupid really. Now is when I need it and I could have saved ¢147.

I also just bought business cards from VistaPrint because I’m going to Reboot in a couple of weeks and it’s handy to have at such events, but if not it would have been a waste of money at this time.

If you think about it one of the traps that leads to big businessitis is playing a business. This is often necessary if you want to attract venture capital, after all they want to know that you are serious and have things like a fax or an hr department. But really, I think the businesses who really succeed are the ones that focus on their business model and not how they appear outwards.