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.

Sometimes I receive the oddest comments on this blog, I rarely if ever censor anything unless it’s spam, but recently, there has been a commenter who has left a number of nasty comments. Perhaps this commenter doesn’t know it, but my blog keeps track of the IP address and other information for each comment post. And it just so happens, that all the nasty comments came from one person. And it just so happens that we have traced that IP address to its source and learned that this person was making sometimes racist comments during his work hours. Well enough is enough, I personally sent this person a message as my final and only warning to hopefully stop such irrational, childish, and ignorant behavior - or else.

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.