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

I’m in downtown Sacramento waiting for the electrician to check out the wiring for some new equipment.

I’ve got a few moments to blog. After several months of market research and analysis we’ve narrowed our list of new business ideas onto the “short list.” The short list contains five ideas - some original, some not. And to some degree, your guess is as good as mine as to which one has the best chance of success: the odds are about one out of five start-ups really make it.

We used the following chart below to help us navigate and frame our discussion on which business idea to do first.

‘Market Attractiveness” on the vertical axis and “Speed-to-Market” on the horizontal axis are the labels, and each axis reads “Low” and “Medium” and “High.”

As a small start-up one of our first priorities is to build capability as a team - and gel. So, being mindful of this, we decided that “speed-to-market” would take precedence over “market attractiveness” for the most part. We want to incrementally build confidence and capability as a team before tackling the larger, more complex projects. I hear that other start-ups have done this too. For example, they’ll launch with a small subset of core features and then release rapid, successive updates during the beta phase. We plan to take a similar approach.

Our CTO, David McQueen, is heading up development and is working in two week release increments, internally. He calls this rapid development. I’m focused primarily on marketing and the user experience. Dewey Pham is in charge of all the creatives and artwork.

Thanks for reading…and wish us luck.

I’m back in Sacramento!

And I’m sitting in what could potentially be our new office space in downtown Sacramento. The space is on the corner of a wonderful street overlooking a plush park, sushi bar, and other restaurants and colorful retail spots.

Our office space is about 700 sqft and should be good enough for up to six people.

This is where the magic will “happen” - I think. If all goes well we’ll have our first product beta launched on July 14th to coincide with Sacramento’s 2nd Saturday Art Walk. Oh Joy!!

It’s really exciting right now and the morale of the team is at an all time high; however, we also know that there is A LOT of work
ahead of us.

Thank you for tuning in…