It’s Sunday, 8PM. I’ve got Macbook in hand and “Beautiful day” by U2 playing. I’m jamming. We’re jamming. KlickNation is humming along like a well oiled machine. We’re launching a handful of new applications this week on MySpace and Orkut, and will looking into launching one or more external web sites too. We launched an external web site last week, hotamigos.com, as a pilot into the Latin American online market. It’s doing better than we expected, serving up over 70,000 daily page impressions on its fourth day; however, it’s still too early to determine what it all means. We’re very bullish - yet pragmatic at the same time - on Latin America and will be conducting a series of experiments and pilots.

Running a social application company, KlickNation, is an emotional roller coaster.

In the beginning, you accept the congratulations as if you really deserve it if your applications do well. Then, when the numbers fall, you feel you have failed. When it bounces back, it leaves you dizzy and suspicious, and wanting. To me, that about sums about my whole experience in the social application space. It’s tremendously exciting but it does take a toll on my psyche.

I’m about ready to get a double shot espresso over ice and a dollop of foam, and later this afternoon round out my caffeinated system with iced tea. I’ll need this to get through the day, we’ve got a task list of over 30 outstanding items. Ken, my business partner was up earlier this morning knocking things off dutifully and he figured out a clever way to increase click-thrus, on ads, by 5x or higher by making subtle changes to the ad configuration. On some pages we were receiving $0.04CPM we are now receiving $0.40CPM. These subtle changes make a huge difference when you’re serving up hundreds of thousands of page views.

I’m sitting outside my cafe, across the street is the Tuesday Farmer’s Market. I’m wiping the foam from mouth as I down my two-shot espresso drink. For three to four days, our site has attacked by hackers from Russia.

We were snowballed for days. Some of us suspected it, but had no idea that it could and would happen to us. Ken, one of my partners, suspected it early on but I largely dismissed it thinking that it’s something that happens to others - not us. That was naive of me, to think so. I was wrong.

For three to four days, millions upon millions of requests flooded our web cluster, making a significant impact on our cluster’s ability to act as it should. It was pretty bad. Thankfully, Joyent summoned their network techies and identified the source and did their usual magic. Within moments, minutes literally, our site snapped back to its usual self, serving up pages and keeping our uses happy.

The lesson here is when all else fails, get immediate help. We received that from Joyent. Thank you.

- Mark

It’s Monday.  I’m caffeinated.  Double shot espresso machiatto (spelled right?) running through my veins, and I’m pumped.  Why am I so pumped?  Caffeine helped, but I’m pumped because It’s widely rumored (i.e. on Mashable) that MySpace is adding “viral” features to its application platform.  Which means, our applications now have a chance to infect and spread throughout MySpace’s social graph at a lightning pace, virally.  Of course, I’m sure, every other application developer is waiting with bated breath to exploit this viral channel too, where users can “send messages” to their friends to add an application.
Just when our team thought that we could take a breather or two, we’re thrown into a frantic race, again.  And when I say breather, I mean a day or two to rest and recuperate.  In this space, everything moves fast, and success or failure is accelerated to weeks, or days, not months or years.  A day or two late with your product, and your competition will be eating your lunch, dinner and dessert.  There’s no rest for the weary that’s for sure.  The stakes are high.

Get ready.  Set.  Run for your $#$#$ life!!!!

- Mark

Ahhh…some time to journal, and to decompress, music for my soul. It’s been the rare occasion where I find myself with a bit of time to reflect, ponder, and sit back - just for a moment. It’s 8PM and I’m at the office, our office that sits above my cafe.

There’s laughter outside on the cafe’s patio, where families, friends and other interested-yogurt-eaters gather with smile and yogurt in hand, slurping up the last remnants of their cup of deliciousness as if Spring was almost over. It’s days like this that really get me going for some reason. Especially days like today where the air is filled with flowery notes, and cinnamon-sweet-spice, pushed by the velvet breeze just around the corner: I love Spring.

Tomorrow, I head to San Francisco. One of my partners and I are having a meeting with Joyent. Joyent recently inducted us into their Players Club and they’re going to help us scale our back-end infrastructure for our social-application venture. We’re thrilled and honored to be a part of Joyent’s club, and even more happy to know that they have our back. We have numerous competitors in the social networking space. Each competitor is vying for your attention and page views - the coin of land, where a thousand page views equals about $0.40 to $0.60 on the dollar. Not much, I suppose, but they SURE do add up!

My other business partner, Dewey, is at the office too. He was downstairs for a moment handling customer orders before heading up stairs to get some work done. These past few months have been some of our toughest months in the social network scene. We’ve had plenty of ups, and also plenty of downs. Sometimes you think you’ve nailed it, a blockbuster, then only weeks later to see it fizzle out and level off. Each project, each application, encapsulated in it is the team’s hope for something more, for something closer to bringing us to our American dream. It is this expectation that drives us to work the way we do. And why we work the terrific hours towards that end. Most times, we fail to live up to our own expectations, we don’t need anyone else to point that out to us; however, we’ve also made some fantastic gains that have exceeded all of our expectations.

A couple of days ago, a friend from school came by, Charles.  He just returned from China and left me with a handful of China’s currency.  It’s incredible to me to see the world get smaller and smaller.  To see more people acquiring enough disposable income to travel and experience the world, especially people outside the U.S.

Well, now, I’m just rambling.  Time to prepare for tomorrow’s trip.

- Mark (not caffeinated enough!)