Shoeboxed.com review – receipt and business card scanning, software for scanning

software: Michael GrayPrice: $ 9-$ 50Rating:

Here is a way Shoeboxed works: they send you two envelopes in the mail, put your receipts in the envelope and send them to Shoeboxed. A week or so late you receive e-mail. Now organized your scanned receipts and available online. They are organized/broken down by store, category purchase and credit card. You need a copy of the receipt? There are no problems. Just log in, search with the amount, and you can print a copy of the place.

Below is a review of Shoeboxed.com, receipt and business card scan, service scan.

receipt scanning service and business card scanning, service ... Online organized ... and is completely painless. To be honest keep receipts, accounts or any accounting work is pretty much something I hate. Cannot tell you how many times I will talk with an accountant, it will ask for some receipt will I have and I will have to go collection. I spoke with my friend Merrick of PRLeap earlier this year, and he mentioned he used to scan receipts and then organize receipts online service. I give it a try and liked the service and eventually I have to write this review.

Here is a way Shoeboxed works: they send you two envelopes in the mail, put your receipts in the envelope and send them to Shoeboxed. A week or so late you receive e-mail. Now organized your scanned receipts and available online.  They are organized/broken down by store, category purchase and credit card. You need a copy of the receipt? There are no problems. Just log in, search with the amount, and you can print a copy of the place.

One of the best thing about Shoeboxed is, is painless to use. I just put my receipts in the envelope every day and it in the mail at the end of the month. Also I have a rule in the Inbox folder, which forwards incoming receipts of secret e-mail address and it goes exactly in my account. Also I can use my iphone to take a picture of Bill and send it in. .. in a few seconds, my online receipts are organized.

They have several options for different plan. If only the will to use the iphone, is free. If you want to mail in receipts, it starts $ 9.95 and goes to 49.95 per month. More receipts must be sent higher costs. If you want physical copies again will need to be in the "classic" or $ 19.95 a month, (this is what I use).

Two of the other services they offer are business card scanning and scanning of documents. Include important documents and business cards in your envelope and they are scanned and in your account. This is all quite painless.

Although this is a great service are certain matters which must apply themselves. I contacted Shoeboxed and speak with Sonny Byrd, who was actually happy to answer the following questions:

I am sending you a lot of confidential information, such as full name, address, social security number, credit card numbers, etc. what kind of precautions you take to make sure that my information is not used inappropriately, or that I do not become a victim of identity theft.

This is actually quite accurate. Proceeds from the law cannot contain credit card numbers (other than the last four digits, which does not constitute a threat to confidentiality) or social security numbers. Receipts do not include addresses, other than that of the supplier. Bills, invoices, notices and statements may be with more detailed personal data and happiness we are fully equipped to protect users from data loss or theft. We use exactly the same SSL encryption practices such as online banks and providers of medical information. Also we are TrustE certified site. We protect your physical documents on paper very intense when they are in our possession. Our cutting-edge operations facility is held tightly under lock and key, including 24/7 video surveillance and security key-card access. All of our staff are rigorously trained and examined, including subject full criminal background. We are proud to is long becomes the data of our users secure and will continue to do so.

What are some tips you can give to people to make sure they are getting the most from the service?

Make sure that you monitor your use! Easy to send in envelope or two, or use Shoeboxed Mobile for several business trips, then let your paper clutter back in disorder. Only be careful with your usage and remember to keep the submissions coming in your Shoeboxed account. In this way you will always be safe and sound for your taxes, the General Ledger, and in the case of IRS audit.

Each company has customers that find uses for their products, they never would have thought of. Have you had that yet, and may share it with us.

Sure! While Shoeboxed is known for the processing of receipts and business cards, you can actually send almost any paper document in us for processing in your account. This opens us to get many many unusual things. We have had users, send pictures to us, mathematical papers and received even a random sock!

Thanks to Sony.

I'm been Shoeboxed customer from March onwards and love the service. For $ 20 a month I get a receipt for the scan, get the Organization, business card scanning and document scanning, with almost zero additional effort. I can 100% recommend them using service. You give them a try with a free entry. I think you will find that it is extremely useful service that allows you to get more important tasks in his life.
Photo credit: Carly and art

View the original article here

My Tech Startup Journey: Learning How To Fund A New Software Company

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com has always been a sounding board for my own use as an entrepreneur. From the day I started blogging I wrote about what I was up to with whatever business I was focused on at the time.

Blogging is fantastic for all kinds of business reasons, but it’s also great as a tool just to write about what you are doing, which of course is at the heart of blogging (let’s not forget blogs started as online journals – “weblogs”). You can use your blog to get feedback, to even get therapy when you need it, or just to express what you are up to and see what happens.

I’ve gone from writing about my proofreading business and an English school (with an office in the real world), general entrepreneurship and blogging, internet marketing, creating information products and everything in between.

This year the trend continues and once again I am doing something new, something different, at least for me anyway. Let me tell you what I have been up to and thinking about…

As you probably know I’ve got a start-up called CrankyAds.com.

I’ve never called any of the other businesses I’ve created start-ups. They were lifestyle businesses, or even just hobbies that happened to make money. That’s not to say that some of them couldn’t have become start-ups (some people would have called them start-ups even if I didn’t), I just never felt like that was the direction I wanted to take them.

Why you might ask? It just seemed like too much work.

I viewed start-ups as a stepping stone to hiring staff, taking on investors, creating all these dependencies in your life all in the hope of creating something big.

I was against big on many levels. Making good money while maintaining lots of freedom was my goal, and as far as I could tell, start-ups were not about lifestyle or freedom.

That all changed of course when I decided I was ready for these sorts of dependencies, and I was excited about creating a company that was much bigger than just me.

CrankyAds is my first attempt at a true start-up. The mindset is different, the goals are different and the way the business is starting is different too.

I’ve got partners and contractors working on the project already, and we plan to have employees as well – in fact we can’t succeed without them. To scale we need help, and that’s something new to me.

We are also just about to start seeking out seed investors, strategic partners who can offer both financial support and strategic value.

It’s amazing how much work is required to make software. CrankyAds is barely out the doors and we’ve already put in a lot of man hours.

Although we are nearing our first 1,000 users as I write this, we really have only released half of what CrankyAds is. Our next major milestone is the release of what we are calling the “CrankyMart”, our marketplace to help link our bloggers (website owners) with sponsors (advertisers who want to spend money to reach new audiences).

We expect to roll out the CrankyMart in May, which will finally see us with both pieces of our company in the real world, serving people, so we can collect what we need most – feedback from actual customers.

In true lean startup spirit (our team have become devotees of the Lean Startup model, proposed by Eric Ries), which we have come to embrace more and more as our budget decreased and our schedule lagged on, we focus on releasing basic prototypes of our services so we can “get something out there” and start servicing real customers. From there we can iterate and build features, knowing a lot more about what people really want, not just what we think you want.

We have huge plans for what CrankyAds can do, and if the vision we are refining turns out to be successful, it will be unlike any other ad network out there. However we’ve realized to help us maintain growth and focus on what is important, we need a little propping up from investors. We’re not in need of millions of dollars, but just enough to help us expand our technology to meet the needs of our audience.

Hence I’m doing something else I’ve never done before – I’m looking for investors.

It’s funny how things change. I never used to find techcrunch.com all that fascinating. It seems like a website that just reports one capital raising announcement after another. Now, since I am learning all about how to fund a startup, suddenly all this appears so much more interesting.

Silicon Valley suddenly appeals a whole lot more too. While I’ve always wanted to visit the home of so many VCs and Angels and startups before, more so just to hang out in such a tech orientated city, now I want to go there and participate in the movement.

The idea of working on a startup surrounded by others who are also working on startups is very exciting. It is like finding a place where you are no longer the odd one out for being an entrepreneur.

The CrankyAds team has evolved into what I see as a good core set of roles. We have one person working the code, another working design and another helping secure sponsors for clients. My role is what you might expect from a CEO/Founder – I have the connections to help with distribution, but I’ve also realized that part of my job is making sure we have the funds to keep this thing going (which I have heard is fairly typical for a founder).

Initially I funded CrankyAds myself before I had partners. Then when Walter my first partner came on board and we continued to use our own personal funds and time to keep things going. That was until we ran out of money, which happened earlier this year. We had a budget, and most of it has gone into development of our software thus far.

Before I never truly understood why people needed funding. Why not just self-fund? Either use your own money or funnel back in money from your new business to keep it growing. I can see now that sometimes the numbers are not going to work that way, and in fact you find yourself in a some annoying catch-22 situations where funding can help you bridge gaps.

It’s amazing how so many times you find yourself in a situation where you need to work on one thing, that leads to working on something else, but without that something else, the first thing doesn’t work.

It’s especially true with the model we are using with CrankyAds. We need two groups of core people to make the business function and balancing the needs of both groups is a challenge, especially given how co-dependent they are. Like eBay with the need for both people bidding and listing things for auction, we need to satisfy website owners and advertisers, and need enough of both groups to have a viable business.

In short, we rely on network effects, which is great once you gain traction, but it takes some time to reach that tipping point. I feel we are close, but not quite close enough to carry us through to the next stage without funding.

CrankyAds could benefit from a period of focus on simply attracting new users (the supply side of the equation), learning what people want, and developing features to meet those needs (we are doing all these things, just not 100% of the time).

However, if we did just this, well, we won’t make any money. That’s fine if you have a huge amount of capital in the bank you can rely on for a while, but we don’t.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s forcing us to think about profitability today and really push something out to market to see if people use what we are creating. We are focused on core functions and unleashing them to the world even if we would feel better spending more time fixing bugs and developing features.

This budget constraint has lead to another unexpected challenge: With only a finite amount of hours available from each team member, what goals do we focus on?

For example, most of my tangible contribution to our company thus far has been letting people know about CrankyAds. I’m the marketer, basically the entire source of distribution to this point. That’s what I should be of course, giving my background as a blogger, my connection to the blogging industry and you, my reader.

I’ve also had important roles in terms of deciding strategic direction and what features I would want as a user of the product. Since I was the first blogger using CrankyAds (I was the first customer), that helps when it comes to deciding what features people want (it’s good to be your own customer).

My latest task, as I mentioned, is to seek funding. This is a very important goal, in fact it’s possibly the most important goal right now. Unfortunately to work towards this goal I have to take time away from other tasks, things I could be doing to expand exposure for CrankyAds.

Instead of spreading the word about our tool, I’m writing an investment prospectus, attending events to meet potential investors, reading about funding, etc. I enjoy these tasks, but part of me feels incongruent. I feel like I should be spending time on building on what we have done so far – and I have one massive marketing to-do list for CrankyAds – yet I’m putting all that on pause while I look for capital.

It’s ironic too, that to impress potential investors you want to show some solid early adoption numbers and initial sales, proof that people are using your product and your business model works. Yet to get funding, you have to devote time you could spend on creating more of this initial proof, to hunt for and negotiate with investors.

Remember how I mentioned we face many catch-22 situations? Yep, this is one I’ve experienced during the startup phase.

We’ve had similar challenges with Walter, my co-founder and lead developer. He’s put in thousands of hours coding CrankyAds. He could put thousands more just in feature develop for the core service – the CrankyAds ad manager – but we have to test our business model too, so we need our marketplace. It is the side of the business that can deliver revenues for us.

If we had funding, one of the first people we would hire is another developer. This would result in Walter having an extra pair of hands. I’d like to hire two more developers, I know speed of implementation is critical, so the more people working the code, the better.

This would allow Walter to focus on one area, while other team members work on the huge list of development needs we have. We could do more and act quicker. We could have been in a position to go after funding months ago with more developers, yet we need the funding to pay them. Catch-22, again.

Regardless of these catch-22 situations, and our frustrations that come from having lack of resources, I am confident we can find the right investors and move on to the next phase. We have a good product, some solid early results and plans for the future to become a successful, self-sufficient company.

Just the idea of having a year or two worth of capital in the bank so we can work on delivering a great product, is very exciting. It will mean everyone in our team can focus 100% on what they are good at – developers developing, designers designing, and marketers like me, spreading the word – and we can do so 100% of the time.

My next job is to write a prospectus to send to certain key people who I think would make ideal investors. If you know anyone any investors who are in the blogging or online advertising industries, or who I should get in touch with, please send them my way (email – supportATcrankyads.com).

And of course, if you are a blogger and have yet to use CrankyAds, please go play with it and let me know what you think (leave a comment to this article). It’s knowing what you want as a customer that can help us the most, so we cherish feedback from people who use our product.

Yaro Starak
Seeking Funds

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The Challenge Of Developing A Software Startup

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota

I’ve been working on CrankyAds.com now for over a year, although there have been a few start-stop sessions, so it hasn’t been exactly all-steam ahead during that time.

Developing software is a lot of fun, when you have the people who can make your vision a reality. Thinking of how you want something to work in your head and then seeing it work in real life is very gratifying.

On the flipside though, it’s just as frustrating to realize how many features you are NOT including because you simply don’t have the funds or the manpower to complete them.

When I first began development of CrankyAds I figured a quick and dirty version could be done in a couple of months to offer the core features. The development company I hired seemed to agree, and quoted a timeframe that slightly exceeded my expectations (although I always add one or two extra months on top of my expectations because nothing goes according to plan).

As development continued, I realized that no, this was not going to be quick and just developing the basics was going to be challenging.

Last year I left the development company and partnered with a friend, Walter, who has been our lead developer and co-owner ever since.

Walter is a talented programmer – very talented – but he’s still only one man. Part of our development process has been prioritizing what needs to get done and in what order. The prioritizing part isn’t too hard, what is difficult is creating features and then making sure they work for most people in most environments (different browsers, operating systems, wordpress installations, plugin conflicts, etc).

We’re fairly confident that for the great majority of people we now have a stable set of core features that deliver the service much how I envisioned it would. Just saying that is satisfying, it’s taken a long time to get to this point.

Now I can say with comfort – go use CrankyAds, it works and provides value.

Walter has been working hard at the start of 2012 to roll out a few new features, aspects we highlighted as important and worthy of focusing on first.

Here’s what we have been up to –

One of the most annoying things I experienced using other advertising management systems is inaccurate statistic tracking. The software I used would say that the ads on my site get X amount of impressions and Y clicks, yet the advertiser would tell me their stats, usually click tracking software or just Google Analytics, would report back something else.

 

Unfortunately my ad software stats were always more than what the sponsor recorded, sometimes as much as ten times as much, which didn’t make me look good.

The problem you see is that most ad management tools track non-human impressions and clicks. These are “bots” sent out from other services designed to collect information from your website. If the bots count as humans in your stats, you are artificially inflating your numbers.

Google Analytics is apparently quite good at eliminating bots from their data, which is why so many webmasters trust Google. I previously used webalizer or awstats, two server log analyser stats packages which usually come with most web servers. Unfortunately these stats packages also count bots. I remember comparing numbers and Google Analytics reported back as much as 30% less traffic than what I thought my site had with awstats. It was a shock, but it taught me how important it is to have accurate statistic tracking.

We had the same problem with CrankyAds until earlier this year. We were counting quite a few bots in our numbers, which I suspected we were because Google Analytics was reporting a certain number of impressions for EJ, yet CrankyAd campaigns on EJ were delivering as much as 50% more, according to the numbers.

Walter recently finished some updates to CrankyAds that we believe has eliminated this problem. We’ve taken out the bots to the best of our ability and now CrankyAds data is a more accurate reflection of what your true human visitor count is.

If you want to read more about how we did this, Walter writes about bots at the CrankyAds blog.

Prior to using CrankyAds I used to have just plain old paypal links for payment because the ad management tool I previously used only handled ad rotation, not payment management. Although it was less automated this way, I had complete freedom over pricing options.

I try to minimize options so as not turn away potential advertisers with a “paradox of choice” (give people too many options and they end up making none), but I did like to offer alternatives – the option to pay in advance for campaigns and receive a discount the further ahead you pay.

 

Initially CrankyAds didn’t have this feature built it. You set one price for each ad zone. After initially showing our first BETA of the software to Pat Flynn, he mentioned things like offering discounts for longer term campaigns, and maybe having coupon codes too. We had these ideas on our to-do list, but thanks to Pat’s feedback and my own needs on EJ, we decided to expedite the alternative pricing options in CrankyAds.

A couple of weeks ago we rolled out the feature. You can now add as many additional pricing options per zone as you like. For example you could have a per month fee, another fee if they pay for three months in advance, and another option for six months in advance. My usual formula is to offer the equivalent of one month free out of every six months paid for in advance.

This is a feature we knew CrankyAds had to have. People need to rotate their own ads on their site, either to promote affiliate products or their own products. It’s also a good tactic to have some ads running on your site when you first start offering sponsorship so it doesn’t look too empty, which is a form of negative social proof to potential new sponsors.

You want to balance having an “advertise here” banner informing potential sponsors you accept ads, but you should also have some ads of your own running too (unless sell to enough sponsors of course). You need to get a good mix to keep your advertising interesting to users and to attract new sponsors.

CrankyAds is built to help you sell ads to sponsors, however if you want to use it just as an ad management tool to rotate ads, you don’t have to sell ads. You can just rotate your own.

When CrankyAds first launched the only way to upload your own ad into the system was to effectively buy an ad on your own site, skipping the payment part unless you want to give yourself money. You would then login to the manager and approve your ad. Not an ideal solution, but functional.

In one of our team meetings we discussed how to make uploading your own campaign easier and more intuitive. It took quite a bit of brainstorming to come up with the best way to integrate this into CrankyAds. We wanted a simple solution, but it was difficult to come up with something that didn’t clash with or make the ad buying process for paying sponsors more confusing.

It’s amazing how hard creating “simple” is. It required about two hours of tossing around ideas before we found what we ended up developing…

 

A simple tab inside the existing CrankyAds manager that says “upload campaign”, which then takes you to a page where you choose which ad zone you want to ad the campaign to. The campaign then appears inside the regular manager area, but instead of listing a price, which is what you see for sponsored campaigns, you see an “internal” notification. This tells you that the campaign is internal – added by you the publisher.

You can then manage the campaign as usual, canceling it or changing the media whenever you want to.

There’s probably an even simpler way to do it, but for now I like what we have created. It makes CrankyAds a simple to use ad rotator too.

These three features are helping CrankyAds become a more robust and valuable tool. I personally know this as a blogger using CrankyAds here on EJ, not just as a founder.

We’re working hard to continue to develop the features we think people want, given what we also deem a priority.

In the spirit of user feedback and to help make CrankyAds better, I’d love to hear what your number one most wanted feature is?

Please leave your suggestion as a comment reply.

Since EJ is a chronicle of my own entrepreneurial endeavors, you will see more posts like this as we continue to develop CrankyAds. I hope you benefit from learning about our start-up process.

Yaro Starak
Starting-Up

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Shoeboxed.com review – receipt and business card scanning, software for scanning

software: Michael GrayPrice: $ 9-$ 50Rating:

Here is a way Shoeboxed works: they send you two envelopes in the mail, put your receipts in the envelope and send them to Shoeboxed. A week or so late you receive e-mail. Now organized your scanned receipts and available online. They are organized/broken down by store, category purchase and credit card. You need a copy of the receipt? There are no problems. Just log in, search with the amount, and you can print a copy of the place.
Below is a review of Shoeboxed.com, receipt and business card scan, service scan.
receipt scanning service and business card scanning, service ... Online organized ... and is completely painless. To be honest keep receipts, accounts or any accounting work is pretty much something I hate. Cannot tell you how many times I will talk with an accountant, it will ask for some receipt will I have and I will have to go collection. I spoke with my friend Merrick of PRLeap earlier this year, and he mentioned he used to scan receipts and then organize receipts online service. I give it a try and liked the service and eventually I have to write this review. Here is a way Shoeboxed works: they send you two envelopes in the mail, put your receipts in the envelope and send them to Shoeboxed. A week or so late you receive e-mail. Now organized your scanned receipts and available online. They are organized/broken down by store, category purchase and credit card. You need a copy of the receipt? There are no problems. Just log in, search with the amount, and you can print a copy of the place.

One of the best thing about Shoeboxed is, is painless to use. I just put my receipts in the envelope every day and it in the mail at the end of the month. Also I have a rule in the Inbox folder, which forwards incoming receipts of secret e-mail address and it goes exactly in my account. Also I can use my iphone to take a picture of Bill and send it in. .. in a few seconds, my online receipts are organized.
They have several options for different plan. If only the will to use the iphone, is free. If you want to mail in receipts, it starts $ 9.95 and goes to 49.95 per month. More receipts must be sent higher costs. If you want physical copies again will need to be in the "classic" or $ 19.95 a month, (this is what I use).
Two of the other services they offer are business card scanning and scanning of documents. Include important documents and business cards in your envelope and they are scanned and in your account. This is all quite painless.
Although this is a great service are certain matters which must apply themselves. I contacted Shoeboxed and speak with Sonny Byrd, who was actually happy to answer the following questions:
I am sending you a lot of confidential information, such as full name, address, social security number, credit card numbers, etc. what kind of precautions you take to make sure that my information is not used inappropriately, or that I do not become a victim of identity theft.
This is actually quite accurate. Proceeds from the law cannot contain credit card numbers (other than the last four digits, which does not constitute a threat to confidentiality) or social security numbers. Receipts do not include addresses, other than that of the supplier. Bills, invoices, notices and statements may be with more detailed personal data and happiness we are fully equipped to protect users from data loss or theft. We use exactly the same SSL encryption practices such as online banks and providers of medical information. Also we are TrustE certified site. We protect your physical documents on paper very intense when they are in our possession. Our cutting-edge operations facility is held tightly under lock and key, including 24/7 video surveillance and security key-card access. All of our staff are rigorously trained and examined, including subject full criminal background. We are proud to is long becomes the data of our users secure and will continue to do so.
What are some tips you can give to people to make sure they are getting the most from the service?
Make sure that you monitor your use! Easy to send in envelope or two, or use Shoeboxed Mobile for several business trips, then let your paper clutter back in disorder. Only be careful with your usage and remember to keep the submissions coming in your Shoeboxed account. In this way you will always be safe and sound for your taxes, the General Ledger, and in the case of IRS audit.
Each company has customers that find uses for their products, they never would have thought of. Have you had that yet, and may share it with us.

Sure! While Shoeboxed is known for the processing of receipts and business cards, you can actually send almost any paper document in us for processing in your account. This opens us to get many many unusual things. We have had users, send pictures to us, mathematical papers and received even a random sock!
Thanks to Sony.
I'm been Shoeboxed customer from March onwards and love the service. For $ 20 a month I get a receipt for the scan, get the Organization, business card scanning and document scanning, with almost zero additional effort. I can 100% recommend them using service. You give them a try with a free entry. I think you will find that it is extremely useful service that allows you to get more important tasks in his life.
Photo credit: Carly and art
View the original article here

My Tech Startup Journey: Learning How To Fund A New Software Company

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com has always been a sounding board for my own use as an entrepreneur. From the day I started blogging I wrote about what I was up to with whatever business I was focused on at the time.
Blogging is fantastic for all kinds of business reasons, but it’s also great as a tool just to write about what you are doing, which of course is at the heart of blogging (let’s not forget blogs started as online journals – “weblogs”). You can use your blog to get feedback, to even get therapy when you need it, or just to express what you are up to and see what happens.
I’ve gone from writing about my proofreading business and an English school (with an office in the real world), general entrepreneurship and blogging, internet marketing, creating information products and everything in between.
This year the trend continues and once again I am doing something new, something different, at least for me anyway. Let me tell you what I have been up to and thinking about…
As you probably know I’ve got a start-up called CrankyAds.com.
I’ve never called any of the other businesses I’ve created start-ups. They were lifestyle businesses, or even just hobbies that happened to make money. That’s not to say that some of them couldn’t have become start-ups (some people would have called them start-ups even if I didn’t), I just never felt like that was the direction I wanted to take them.
Why you might ask? It just seemed like too much work.
I viewed start-ups as a stepping stone to hiring staff, taking on investors, creating all these dependencies in your life all in the hope of creating something big.
I was against big on many levels. Making good money while maintaining lots of freedom was my goal, and as far as I could tell, start-ups were not about lifestyle or freedom.
That all changed of course when I decided I was ready for these sorts of dependencies, and I was excited about creating a company that was much bigger than just me.
CrankyAds is my first attempt at a true start-up. The mindset is different, the goals are different and the way the business is starting is different too.
I’ve got partners and contractors working on the project already, and we plan to have employees as well – in fact we can’t succeed without them. To scale we need help, and that’s something new to me.
We are also just about to start seeking out seed investors, strategic partners who can offer both financial support and strategic value.
It’s amazing how much work is required to make software. CrankyAds is barely out the doors and we’ve already put in a lot of man hours.
Although we are nearing our first 1,000 users as I write this, we really have only released half of what CrankyAds is. Our next major milestone is the release of what we are calling the “CrankyMart”, our marketplace to help link our bloggers (website owners) with sponsors (advertisers who want to spend money to reach new audiences).
We expect to roll out the CrankyMart in May, which will finally see us with both pieces of our company in the real world, serving people, so we can collect what we need most – feedback from actual customers.
In true lean startup spirit (our team have become devotees of the Lean Startup model, proposed by Eric Ries), which we have come to embrace more and more as our budget decreased and our schedule lagged on, we focus on releasing basic prototypes of our services so we can “get something out there” and start servicing real customers. From there we can iterate and build features, knowing a lot more about what people really want, not just what we think you want.
We have huge plans for what CrankyAds can do, and if the vision we are refining turns out to be successful, it will be unlike any other ad network out there. However we’ve realized to help us maintain growth and focus on what is important, we need a little propping up from investors. We’re not in need of millions of dollars, but just enough to help us expand our technology to meet the needs of our audience.
Hence I’m doing something else I’ve never done before – I’m looking for investors.
It’s funny how things change. I never used to find techcrunch.com all that fascinating. It seems like a website that just reports one capital raising announcement after another. Now, since I am learning all about how to fund a startup, suddenly all this appears so much more interesting.
Silicon Valley suddenly appeals a whole lot more too. While I’ve always wanted to visit the home of so many VCs and Angels and startups before, more so just to hang out in such a tech orientated city, now I want to go there and participate in the movement.
The idea of working on a startup surrounded by others who are also working on startups is very exciting. It is like finding a place where you are no longer the odd one out for being an entrepreneur.
The CrankyAds team has evolved into what I see as a good core set of roles. We have one person working the code, another working design and another helping secure sponsors for clients. My role is what you might expect from a CEO/Founder – I have the connections to help with distribution, but I’ve also realized that part of my job is making sure we have the funds to keep this thing going (which I have heard is fairly typical for a founder).
Initially I funded CrankyAds myself before I had partners. Then when Walter my first partner came on board and we continued to use our own personal funds and time to keep things going. That was until we ran out of money, which happened earlier this year. We had a budget, and most of it has gone into development of our software thus far.
Before I never truly understood why people needed funding. Why not just self-fund? Either use your own money or funnel back in money from your new business to keep it growing. I can see now that sometimes the numbers are not going to work that way, and in fact you find yourself in a some annoying catch-22 situations where funding can help you bridge gaps.
It’s amazing how so many times you find yourself in a situation where you need to work on one thing, that leads to working on something else, but without that something else, the first thing doesn’t work.
It’s especially true with the model we are using with CrankyAds. We need two groups of core people to make the business function and balancing the needs of both groups is a challenge, especially given how co-dependent they are. Like eBay with the need for both people bidding and listing things for auction, we need to satisfy website owners and advertisers, and need enough of both groups to have a viable business.
In short, we rely on network effects, which is great once you gain traction, but it takes some time to reach that tipping point. I feel we are close, but not quite close enough to carry us through to the next stage without funding.
CrankyAds could benefit from a period of focus on simply attracting new users (the supply side of the equation), learning what people want, and developing features to meet those needs (we are doing all these things, just not 100% of the time).
However, if we did just this, well, we won’t make any money. That’s fine if you have a huge amount of capital in the bank you can rely on for a while, but we don’t.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s forcing us to think about profitability today and really push something out to market to see if people use what we are creating. We are focused on core functions and unleashing them to the world even if we would feel better spending more time fixing bugs and developing features.
This budget constraint has lead to another unexpected challenge: With only a finite amount of hours available from each team member, what goals do we focus on?
For example, most of my tangible contribution to our company thus far has been letting people know about CrankyAds. I’m the marketer, basically the entire source of distribution to this point. That’s what I should be of course, giving my background as a blogger, my connection to the blogging industry and you, my reader.
I’ve also had important roles in terms of deciding strategic direction and what features I would want as a user of the product. Since I was the first blogger using CrankyAds (I was the first customer), that helps when it comes to deciding what features people want (it’s good to be your own customer).
My latest task, as I mentioned, is to seek funding. This is a very important goal, in fact it’s possibly the most important goal right now. Unfortunately to work towards this goal I have to take time away from other tasks, things I could be doing to expand exposure for CrankyAds.
Instead of spreading the word about our tool, I’m writing an investment prospectus, attending events to meet potential investors, reading about funding, etc. I enjoy these tasks, but part of me feels incongruent. I feel like I should be spending time on building on what we have done so far – and I have one massive marketing to-do list for CrankyAds – yet I’m putting all that on pause while I look for capital.
It’s ironic too, that to impress potential investors you want to show some solid early adoption numbers and initial sales, proof that people are using your product and your business model works. Yet to get funding, you have to devote time you could spend on creating more of this initial proof, to hunt for and negotiate with investors.
Remember how I mentioned we face many catch-22 situations? Yep, this is one I’ve experienced during the startup phase.
We’ve had similar challenges with Walter, my co-founder and lead developer. He’s put in thousands of hours coding CrankyAds. He could put thousands more just in feature develop for the core service – the CrankyAds ad manager – but we have to test our business model too, so we need our marketplace. It is the side of the business that can deliver revenues for us.
If we had funding, one of the first people we would hire is another developer. This would result in Walter having an extra pair of hands. I’d like to hire two more developers, I know speed of implementation is critical, so the more people working the code, the better.
This would allow Walter to focus on one area, while other team members work on the huge list of development needs we have. We could do more and act quicker. We could have been in a position to go after funding months ago with more developers, yet we need the funding to pay them. Catch-22, again.
Regardless of these catch-22 situations, and our frustrations that come from having lack of resources, I am confident we can find the right investors and move on to the next phase. We have a good product, some solid early results and plans for the future to become a successful, self-sufficient company.
Just the idea of having a year or two worth of capital in the bank so we can work on delivering a great product, is very exciting. It will mean everyone in our team can focus 100% on what they are good at – developers developing, designers designing, and marketers like me, spreading the word – and we can do so 100% of the time.
My next job is to write a prospectus to send to certain key people who I think would make ideal investors. If you know anyone any investors who are in the blogging or online advertising industries, or who I should get in touch with, please send them my way (email – supportATcrankyads.com).
And of course, if you are a blogger and have yet to use CrankyAds, please go play with it and let me know what you think (leave a comment to this article). It’s knowing what you want as a customer that can help us the most, so we cherish feedback from people who use our product.
Yaro Starak
Seeking Funds
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The Challenge Of Developing A Software Startup

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota
<P>I’ve been working on CrankyAds.com now for over a year, although there have been a few start-stop sessions, so it hasn’t been exactly all-steam ahead during that time.</P>
<P>Developing software is a lot of fun, when you have the people who can make your vision a reality. Thinking of how you want something to work in your head and then seeing it work in real life is very gratifying.</P>
<P>On the flipside though, it’s just as frustrating to realize how many features you are NOT including because you simply don’t have the funds or the manpower to complete them.</P>
<P>When I first began development of CrankyAds I figured a quick and dirty</EM> version could be done in a couple of months to offer the core features. The development company I hired seemed to agree, and quoted a timeframe that slightly exceeded my expectations (although I always add one or two extra months on top of my expectations because nothing goes according to plan).</P>
<P>As development continued, I realized that no, this was not going to be quick and just developing the basics was going to be challenging.</P>
<P>Last year I left the development company and partnered with a friend, Walter, who has been our lead developer and co-owner ever since.</P>
<P>Walter is a talented programmer – very talented – but he’s still only one man. Part of our development process has been <STRONG>prioritizing</STRONG> what needs to get done and in what order. The prioritizing part isn’t too hard, what is difficult is creating features and then making sure they work for most people in most environments (different browsers, operating systems, wordpress installations, plugin conflicts, etc).</P>
<P>We’re fairly confident that for the great majority of people we now have a stable set of core features that deliver the service much how I envisioned it would. Just saying that is satisfying, it’s taken a long time to get to this point.</P>
<P>Now I can say with comfort – go use CrankyAds, it works and provides value.</P>
<P>Walter has been working hard at the start of 2012 to roll out a few new features, aspects we highlighted as important and worthy of focusing on first.</P>
<P>Here’s what we have been up to –</P>
<P>One of the most annoying things I experienced using other advertising management systems is <STRONG>inaccurate statistic tracking</STRONG>. The software I used would say that the ads on my site get X amount of impressions and Y clicks, yet the advertiser would tell me their stats, usually click tracking software or just Google Analytics, would report back something else.</P>
<P>&nbsp;</P>
<P>Unfortunately my ad software stats were always more than what the sponsor recorded, sometimes as much as ten times as much, which didn’t make me look good.</P>
<P>The problem you see is that most ad management tools track non-human impressions and clicks. These are “bots” sent out from other services designed to collect information from your website. If the bots count as humans in your stats, you are artificially inflating your numbers.</P>
<P>Google Analytics is apparently quite good at eliminating bots from their data, which is why so many webmasters trust Google. I previously used webalizer or awstats, two server log analyser stats packages which usually come with most web servers. Unfortunately these stats packages also count bots. I remember comparing numbers and Google Analytics reported back as much as <STRONG>30% less traffic </STRONG>than what I thought my site had with awstats. It was a shock, but it taught me how important it is to have accurate statistic tracking.</P>
<P>We had the same problem with CrankyAds until earlier this year. We were counting quite a few bots in our numbers, which I suspected we were because Google Analytics was reporting a certain number of impressions for EJ, yet CrankyAd campaigns on EJ were delivering as much as 50% more, according to the numbers.</P>
<P>Walter recently finished some updates to CrankyAds that we believe has eliminated this problem. We’ve taken out the bots to the best of our ability and now CrankyAds data is a more accurate reflection of what your true <STRONG>human visitor</STRONG> count is.</P>
<P>If you want to read more about how we did this, Walter writes about bots at the CrankyAds blog.</P>

<P>Prior to using CrankyAds I used to have just plain old paypal links for payment because the ad management tool I previously used only handled ad rotation, not payment management. Although it was less automated this way, I had complete freedom over pricing options.</P>
<P>I try to minimize options so as not turn away potential advertisers with a “paradox of choice” (give people too many options and they end up making none), but I did like to offer alternatives – the option to pay in advance for campaigns and receive a discount the further ahead you pay.</P>
<P>&nbsp;</P>
<P>Initially CrankyAds didn’t have this feature built it. You set <STRONG>one price</STRONG> for each ad zone. After initially showing our first BETA of the software to Pat Flynn, he mentioned things like offering discounts for longer term campaigns, and maybe having coupon codes too. We had these ideas on our to-do list, but thanks to Pat’s feedback and my own needs on EJ, we decided to expedite the alternative pricing options in CrankyAds.</P>
<P>A couple of weeks ago we rolled out the feature. You can now add as many additional pricing options per zone as you like. For example you could have a per month fee, another fee if they pay for three months in advance, and another option for six months in advance. My usual formula is to offer the equivalent of <STRONG>one month free</STRONG> out of every six months paid for in advance.</P>
<P>This is a feature we knew CrankyAds had to have. People need to rotate their own ads on their site, either to promote affiliate products or their own products. It’s also a good tactic to have some ads running on your site when you first start offering sponsorship so it doesn’t look too empty, which is a form of <STRONG>negative social proof</STRONG> to potential new sponsors.</P>
<P>You want to balance having an “advertise here” banner informing potential sponsors you accept ads, but you should also have some ads of your own running too (unless sell to enough sponsors of course). You need to get a good mix to keep your advertising interesting to users and to attract new sponsors.</P>
<P>CrankyAds is built to help you sell ads to sponsors, however if you want to use it just as an ad management tool to rotate ads, you don’t have to sell ads. You can just rotate your own.</P>
<P>When CrankyAds first launched the only way to upload your own ad into the system was to effectively buy an ad on your own site, skipping the payment part unless you want to give yourself money. You would then login to the manager and approve your ad. Not an ideal solution, but functional.</P>
<P>In one of our team meetings we discussed how to make uploading your own campaign easier and more intuitive. It took quite a bit of brainstorming to come up with the best way to integrate this into CrankyAds. We wanted a simple solution, but it was difficult to come up with something that didn’t clash with or make the ad buying process for paying sponsors more confusing.</P>
<P>It’s amazing how hard creating “simple” is. It required about <STRONG>two hours</STRONG> of tossing around ideas before we found what we ended up developing…</P>
<P>&nbsp;</P>
<P>A simple tab inside the existing CrankyAds manager that says “upload campaign”, which then takes you to a page where you choose which ad zone you want to ad the campaign to. The campaign then appears inside the regular manager area, but instead of listing a price, which is what you see for sponsored campaigns, you see an “internal” notification. This tells you that the campaign is internal – added by you the publisher.</P>
<P>You can then manage the campaign as usual, canceling it or changing the media whenever you want to.</P>
<P>There’s probably an even simpler way to do it, but for now I like what we have created. It makes CrankyAds a simple to use <STRONG>ad rotator</STRONG> too.</P>
<P>These three features are helping CrankyAds become a more robust and valuable tool. I personally know this as a blogger using CrankyAds here on EJ, not just as a founder.</P>
<P>We’re working hard to continue to develop the features we think people want, given what we also deem a priority.</P>

<P>In the spirit of user feedback and to help make CrankyAds better, I’d love to hear <STRONG>what your number one most wanted feature is?</STRONG></P>
<P>Please leave your suggestion as a comment reply.</P>
<P>Since EJ is a chronicle of my own entrepreneurial endeavors, you will see more posts like this as we continue to develop CrankyAds. I hope you benefit from learning about our start-up process.</P>
<P>Yaro Starak<BR>Starting-Up</P><IMG class="attachment-thumbnail wp-post-image" title="The Easy Way To Make Squeeze Pages, Sales Pages " alt="Optimize Press Logo" src="file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/ABS/Auto%20Blog%20Samurai/data/google%20Adesnse/wwwenterepreneursjourneycom/optimizepress-e1319523015162-150x62.jpg" width=150 height=62 Membership_Sites="">Every internet marketer needs squeeze pages, sales pages and membership content sites. These are the tools of our trade. Optimize Press makes setting up these pages easy using just WordPress. Learn more by reading our Optimize Press review...

The Challenge Of Developing A Software Startup

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota

I’ve been working on CrankyAds.com now for over a year, although there have been a few start-stop sessions, so it hasn’t been exactly all-steam ahead during that time.
Developing software is a lot of fun, when you have the people who can make your vision a reality. Thinking of how you want something to work in your head and then seeing it work in real life is very gratifying.
On the flipside though, it’s just as frustrating to realize how many features you are NOT including because you simply don’t have the funds or the manpower to complete them.
When I first began development of CrankyAds I figured a quick and dirty version could be done in a couple of months to offer the core features. The development company I hired seemed to agree, and quoted a timeframe that slightly exceeded my expectations (although I always add one or two extra months on top of my expectations because nothing goes according to plan).
As development continued, I realized that no, this was not going to be quick and just developing the basics was going to be challenging.
Last year I left the development company and partnered with a friend, Walter, who has been our lead developer and co-owner ever since.
Walter is a talented programmer – very talented – but he’s still only one man. Part of our development process has been prioritizing what needs to get done and in what order. The prioritizing part isn’t too hard, what is difficult is creating features and then making sure they work for most people in most environments (different browsers, operating systems, wordpress installations, plugin conflicts, etc).

We’re fairly confident that for the great majority of people we now have a stable set of core features that deliver the service much how I envisioned it would. Just saying that is satisfying, it’s taken a long time to get to this point.

Now I can say with comfort – go use CrankyAds, it works and provides value.
Walter has been working hard at the start of 2012 to roll out a few new features, aspects we highlighted as important and worthy of focusing on first.
Here’s what we have been up to –
One of the most annoying things I experienced using other advertising management systems is inaccurate statistic tracking. The software I used would say that the ads on my site get X amount of impressions and Y clicks, yet the advertiser would tell me their stats, usually click tracking software or just Google Analytics, would report back something else.

Unfortunately my ad software stats were always more than what the sponsor recorded, sometimes as much as ten times as much, which didn’t make me look good.
The problem you see is that most ad management tools track non-human impressions and clicks. These are “bots” sent out from other services designed to collect information from your website. If the bots count as humans in your stats, you are artificially inflating your numbers.
Google Analytics is apparently quite good at eliminating bots from their data, which is why so many webmasters trust Google. I previously used webalizer or awstats, two server log analyser stats packages which usually come with most web servers. Unfortunately these stats packages also count bots. I remember comparing numbers and Google Analytics reported back as much as 30% less traffic than what I thought my site had with awstats. It was a shock, but it taught me how important it is to have accurate statistic tracking.
We had the same problem with CrankyAds until earlier this year. We were counting quite a few bots in our numbers, which I suspected we were because Google Analytics was reporting a certain number of impressions for EJ, yet CrankyAd campaigns on EJ were delivering as much as 50% more, according to the numbers.
Walter recently finished some updates to CrankyAds that we believe has eliminated this problem. We’ve taken out the bots to the best of our ability and now CrankyAds data is a more accurate reflection of what your true human visitor count is.
If you want to read more about how we did this, Walter writes about bots at the CrankyAds blog.
Prior to using CrankyAds I used to have just plain old paypal links for payment because the ad management tool I previously used only handled ad rotation, not payment management. Although it was less automated this way, I had complete freedom over pricing options.
I try to minimize options so as not turn away potential advertisers with a “paradox of choice” (give people too many options and they end up making none), but I did like to offer alternatives – the option to pay in advance for campaigns and receive a discount the further ahead you pay.

Initially CrankyAds didn’t have this feature built it. You set one price for each ad zone. After initially showing our first BETA of the software to Pat Flynn, he mentioned things like offering discounts for longer term campaigns, and maybe having coupon codes too. We had these ideas on our to-do list, but thanks to Pat’s feedback and my own needs on EJ, we decided to expedite the alternative pricing options in CrankyAds.
A couple of weeks ago we rolled out the feature. You can now add as many additional pricing options per zone as you like. For example you could have a per month fee, another fee if they pay for three months in advance, and another option for six months in advance. My usual formula is to offer the equivalent of one month free out of every six months paid for in advance.
This is a feature we knew CrankyAds had to have. People need to rotate their own ads on their site, either to promote affiliate products or their own products. It’s also a good tactic to have some ads running on your site when you first start offering sponsorship so it doesn’t look too empty, which is a form of negative social proof to potential new sponsors.
You want to balance having an “advertise here” banner informing potential sponsors you accept ads, but you should also have some ads of your own running too (unless sell to enough sponsors of course). You need to get a good mix to keep your advertising interesting to users and to attract new sponsors.
CrankyAds is built to help you sell ads to sponsors, however if you want to use it just as an ad management tool to rotate ads, you don’t have to sell ads. You can just rotate your own.
When CrankyAds first launched the only way to upload your own ad into the system was to effectively buy an ad on your own site, skipping the payment part unless you want to give yourself money. You would then login to the manager and approve your ad. Not an ideal solution, but functional.
In one of our team meetings we discussed how to make uploading your own campaign easier and more intuitive. It took quite a bit of brainstorming to come up with the best way to integrate this into CrankyAds. We wanted a simple solution, but it was difficult to come up with something that didn’t clash with or make the ad buying process for paying sponsors more confusing.
It’s amazing how hard creating “simple” is. It required about two hours of tossing around ideas before we found what we ended up developing…

A simple tab inside the existing CrankyAds manager that says “upload campaign”, which then takes you to a page where you choose which ad zone you want to ad the campaign to. The campaign then appears inside the regular manager area, but instead of listing a price, which is what you see for sponsored campaigns, you see an “internal” notification. This tells you that the campaign is internal – added by you the publisher.
You can then manage the campaign as usual, canceling it or changing the media whenever you want to.

There’s probably an even simpler way to do it, but for now I like what we have created. It makes CrankyAds a simple to use ad rotator too.
These three features are helping CrankyAds become a more robust and valuable tool. I personally know this as a blogger using CrankyAds here on EJ, not just as a founder.
We’re working hard to continue to develop the features we think people want, given what we also deem a priority.
In the spirit of user feedback and to help make CrankyAds better, I’d love to hear what your number one most wanted feature is?
Please leave your suggestion as a comment reply.
Since EJ is a chronicle of my own entrepreneurial endeavors, you will see more posts like this as we continue to develop CrankyAds. I hope you benefit from learning about our start-up process.
Yaro Starak
Starting-Up
Every internet marketer needs squeeze pages, sales pages and membership content sites. These are the tools of our trade. Optimize Press makes setting up these pages easy using just WordPress. Learn more by reading our Optimize Press review...

My Tech Startup Journey: Learning How To Fund A New Software Company

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com has always been a sounding board for my own use as an entrepreneur. From the day I started blogging I wrote about what I was up to with whatever business I was focused on at the time.
Blogging is fantastic for all kinds of business reasons, but it’s also great as a tool just to write about what you are doing, which of course is at the heart of blogging (let’s not forget blogs started as online journals – “weblogs”). You can use your blog to get feedback, to even get therapy when you need it, or just to express what you are up to and see what happens.
I’ve gone from writing about my proofreading business and an English school (with an office in the real world), general entrepreneurship and blogging, internet marketing, creating information products and everything in between.

This year the trend continues and once again I am doing something new, something different, at least for me anyway. Let me tell you what I have been up to and thinking about…
As you probably know I’ve got a start-up called CrankyAds.com.
I’ve never called any of the other businesses I’ve created start-ups. They were lifestyle businesses, or even just hobbies that happened to make money. That’s not to say that some of them couldn’t have become start-ups (some people would have called them start-ups even if I didn’t), I just never felt like that was the direction I wanted to take them.
Why you might ask? It just seemed like too much work.
I viewed start-ups as a stepping stone to hiring staff, taking on investors, creating all these dependencies in your life all in the hope of creating something big.
I was against big on many levels. Making good money while maintaining lots of freedom was my goal, and as far as I could tell, start-ups were not about lifestyle or freedom.
That all changed of course when I decided I was ready for these sorts of dependencies, and I was excited about creating a company that was much bigger than just me.
CrankyAds is my first attempt at a true start-up. The mindset is different, the goals are different and the way the business is starting is different too.
I’ve got partners and contractors working on the project already, and we plan to have employees as well – in fact we can’t succeed without them. To scale we need help, and that’s something new to me.
We are also just about to start seeking out seed investors, strategic partners who can offer both financial support and strategic value.
It’s amazing how much work is required to make software. CrankyAds is barely out the doors and we’ve already put in a lot of man hours.
Although we are nearing our first 1,000 users as I write this, we really have only released half of what CrankyAds is. Our next major milestone is the release of what we are calling the “CrankyMart”, our marketplace to help link our bloggers (website owners) with sponsors (advertisers who want to spend money to reach new audiences).
We expect to roll out the CrankyMart in May, which will finally see us with both pieces of our company in the real world, serving people, so we can collect what we need most – feedback from actual customers.
In true lean startup spirit (our team have become devotees of the Lean Startup model, proposed by Eric Ries), which we have come to embrace more and more as our budget decreased and our schedule lagged on, we focus on releasing basic prototypes of our services so we can “get something out there” and start servicing real customers. From there we can iterate and build features, knowing a lot more about what people really want, not just what we think you want.
We have huge plans for what CrankyAds can do, and if the vision we are refining turns out to be successful, it will be unlike any other ad network out there. However we’ve realized to help us maintain growth and focus on what is important, we need a little propping up from investors. We’re not in need of millions of dollars, but just enough to help us expand our technology to meet the needs of our audience.
Hence I’m doing something else I’ve never done before – I’m looking for investors.
It’s funny how things change. I never used to find techcrunch.com all that fascinating. It seems like a website that just reports one capital raising announcement after another. Now, since I am learning all about how to fund a startup, suddenly all this appears so much more interesting.
Silicon Valley suddenly appeals a whole lot more too. While I’ve always wanted to visit the home of so many VCs and Angels and startups before, more so just to hang out in such a tech orientated city, now I want to go there and participate in the movement.

The idea of working on a startup surrounded by others who are also working on startups is very exciting. It is like finding a place where you are no longer the odd one out for being an entrepreneur.
The CrankyAds team has evolved into what I see as a good core set of roles. We have one person working the code, another working design and another helping secure sponsors for clients. My role is what you might expect from a CEO/Founder – I have the connections to help with distribution, but I’ve also realized that part of my job is making sure we have the funds to keep this thing going (which I have heard is fairly typical for a founder).
Initially I funded CrankyAds myself before I had partners. Then when Walter my first partner came on board and we continued to use our own personal funds and time to keep things going. That was until we ran out of money, which happened earlier this year. We had a budget, and most of it has gone into development of our software thus far.
Before I never truly understood why people needed funding. Why not just self-fund? Either use your own money or funnel back in money from your new business to keep it growing. I can see now that sometimes the numbers are not going to work that way, and in fact you find yourself in a some annoying catch-22 situations where funding can help you bridge gaps.
It’s amazing how so many times you find yourself in a situation where you need to work on one thing, that leads to working on something else, but without that something else, the first thing doesn’t work.
It’s especially true with the model we are using with CrankyAds. We need two groups of core people to make the business function and balancing the needs of both groups is a challenge, especially given how co-dependent they are. Like eBay with the need for both people bidding and listing things for auction, we need to satisfy website owners and advertisers, and need enough of both groups to have a viable business.
In short, we rely on network effects, which is great once you gain traction, but it takes some time to reach that tipping point. I feel we are close, but not quite close enough to carry us through to the next stage without funding.
CrankyAds could benefit from a period of focus on simply attracting new users (the supply side of the equation), learning what people want, and developing features to meet those needs (we are doing all these things, just not 100% of the time).
However, if we did just this, well, we won’t make any money. That’s fine if you have a huge amount of capital in the bank you can rely on for a while, but we don’t.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s forcing us to think about profitability today and really push something out to market to see if people use what we are creating. We are focused on core functions and unleashing them to the world even if we would feel better spending more time fixing bugs and developing features.
This budget constraint has lead to another unexpected challenge: With only a finite amount of hours available from each team member, what goals do we focus on?
For example, most of my tangible contribution to our company thus far has been letting people know about CrankyAds. I’m the marketer, basically the entire source of distribution to this point. That’s what I should be of course, giving my background as a blogger, my connection to the blogging industry and you, my reader.
I’ve also had important roles in terms of deciding strategic direction and what features I would want as a user of the product. Since I was the first blogger using CrankyAds (I was the first customer), that helps when it comes to deciding what features people want (it’s good to be your own customer).

My latest task, as I mentioned, is to seek funding. This is a very important goal, in fact it’s possibly the most important goal right now. Unfortunately to work towards this goal I have to take time away from other tasks, things I could be doing to expand exposure for CrankyAds.
Instead of spreading the word about our tool, I’m writing an investment prospectus, attending events to meet potential investors, reading about funding, etc. I enjoy these tasks, but part of me feels incongruent. I feel like I should be spending time on building on what we have done so far – and I have one massive marketing to-do list for CrankyAds – yet I’m putting all that on pause while I look for capital.
It’s ironic too, that to impress potential investors you want to show some solid early adoption numbers and initial sales, proof that people are using your product and your business model works. Yet to get funding, you have to devote time you could spend on creating more of this initial proof, to hunt for and negotiate with investors.
Remember how I mentioned we face many catch-22 situations? Yep, this is one I’ve experienced during the startup phase.
We’ve had similar challenges with Walter, my co-founder and lead developer. He’s put in thousands of hours coding CrankyAds. He could put thousands more just in feature develop for the core service – the CrankyAds ad manager – but we have to test our business model too, so we need our marketplace. It is the side of the business that can deliver revenues for us.
If we had funding, one of the first people we would hire is another developer. This would result in Walter having an extra pair of hands. I’d like to hire two more developers, I know speed of implementation is critical, so the more people working the code, the better.
This would allow Walter to focus on one area, while other team members work on the huge list of development needs we have. We could do more and act quicker. We could have been in a position to go after funding months ago with more developers, yet we need the funding to pay them. Catch-22, again.
Regardless of these catch-22 situations, and our frustrations that come from having lack of resources, I am confident we can find the right investors and move on to the next phase. We have a good product, some solid early results and plans for the future to become a successful, self-sufficient company.
Just the idea of having a year or two worth of capital in the bank so we can work on delivering a great product, is very exciting. It will mean everyone in our team can focus 100% on what they are good at – developers developing, designers designing, and marketers like me, spreading the word – and we can do so 100% of the time.
My next job is to write a prospectus to send to certain key people who I think would make ideal investors. If you know anyone any investors who are in the blogging or online advertising industries, or who I should get in touch with, please send them my way (email – supportATcrankyads.com).
And of course, if you are a blogger and have yet to use CrankyAds, please go play with it and let me know what you think (leave a comment to this article). It’s knowing what you want as a customer that can help us the most, so we cherish feedback from people who use our product.
Yaro Starak
Seeking Funds
If you don't know which keywords have the traffic and make the money, you are wasting your time. Market Samurai is the leading keyword research tool that all serious internet marketers use.Discover how it can help you in our Market Samurai review... 

My Tech Startup Journey: Learning How To Fund A New Software Company

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Entrepreneurs-Journey.com has always been a sounding board for my own use as an entrepreneur. From the day I started blogging I wrote about what I was up to with whatever business I was focused on at the time.
Blogging is fantastic for all kinds of business reasons, but it’s also great as a tool just to write about what you are doing, which of course is at the heart of blogging (let’s not forget blogs started as online journals – “weblogs”). You can use your blog to get feedback, to even get therapy when you need it, or just to express what you are up to and see what happens.
I’ve gone from writing about my proofreading business and an English school (with an office in the real world), general entrepreneurship and blogging, internet marketing, creating information products and everything in between.

This year the trend continues and once again I am doing something new, something different, at least for me anyway. Let me tell you what I have been up to and thinking about…
As you probably know I’ve got a start-up called CrankyAds.com.
I’ve never called any of the other businesses I’ve created start-ups. They were lifestyle businesses, or even just hobbies that happened to make money. That’s not to say that some of them couldn’t have become start-ups (some people would have called them start-ups even if I didn’t), I just never felt like that was the direction I wanted to take them.
Why you might ask? It just seemed like too much work.
I viewed start-ups as a stepping stone to hiring staff, taking on investors, creating all these dependencies in your life all in the hope of creating something big.
I was against big on many levels. Making good money while maintaining lots of freedom was my goal, and as far as I could tell, start-ups were not about lifestyle or freedom.
That all changed of course when I decided I was ready for these sorts of dependencies, and I was excited about creating a company that was much bigger than just me.
CrankyAds is my first attempt at a true start-up. The mindset is different, the goals are different and the way the business is starting is different too.
I’ve got partners and contractors working on the project already, and we plan to have employees as well – in fact we can’t succeed without them. To scale we need help, and that’s something new to me.
We are also just about to start seeking out seed investors, strategic partners who can offer both financial support and strategic value.
It’s amazing how much work is required to make software. CrankyAds is barely out the doors and we’ve already put in a lot of man hours.
Although we are nearing our first 1,000 users as I write this, we really have only released half of what CrankyAds is. Our next major milestone is the release of what we are calling the “CrankyMart”, our marketplace to help link our bloggers (website owners) with sponsors (advertisers who want to spend money to reach new audiences).
We expect to roll out the CrankyMart in May, which will finally see us with both pieces of our company in the real world, serving people, so we can collect what we need most – feedback from actual customers.
In true lean startup spirit (our team have become devotees of the Lean Startup model, proposed by Eric Ries), which we have come to embrace more and more as our budget decreased and our schedule lagged on, we focus on releasing basic prototypes of our services so we can “get something out there” and start servicing real customers. From there we can iterate and build features, knowing a lot more about what people really want, not just what we think you want.
We have huge plans for what CrankyAds can do, and if the vision we are refining turns out to be successful, it will be unlike any other ad network out there. However we’ve realized to help us maintain growth and focus on what is important, we need a little propping up from investors. We’re not in need of millions of dollars, but just enough to help us expand our technology to meet the needs of our audience.
Hence I’m doing something else I’ve never done before – I’m looking for investors.
It’s funny how things change. I never used to find techcrunch.com all that fascinating. It seems like a website that just reports one capital raising announcement after another. Now, since I am learning all about how to fund a startup, suddenly all this appears so much more interesting.
Silicon Valley suddenly appeals a whole lot more too. While I’ve always wanted to visit the home of so many VCs and Angels and startups before, more so just to hang out in such a tech orientated city, now I want to go there and participate in the movement.

The idea of working on a startup surrounded by others who are also working on startups is very exciting. It is like finding a place where you are no longer the odd one out for being an entrepreneur.
The CrankyAds team has evolved into what I see as a good core set of roles. We have one person working the code, another working design and another helping secure sponsors for clients. My role is what you might expect from a CEO/Founder – I have the connections to help with distribution, but I’ve also realized that part of my job is making sure we have the funds to keep this thing going (which I have heard is fairly typical for a founder).
Initially I funded CrankyAds myself before I had partners. Then when Walter my first partner came on board and we continued to use our own personal funds and time to keep things going. That was until we ran out of money, which happened earlier this year. We had a budget, and most of it has gone into development of our software thus far.
Before I never truly understood why people needed funding. Why not just self-fund? Either use your own money or funnel back in money from your new business to keep it growing. I can see now that sometimes the numbers are not going to work that way, and in fact you find yourself in a some annoying catch-22 situations where funding can help you bridge gaps.
It’s amazing how so many times you find yourself in a situation where you need to work on one thing, that leads to working on something else, but without that something else, the first thing doesn’t work.
It’s especially true with the model we are using with CrankyAds. We need two groups of core people to make the business function and balancing the needs of both groups is a challenge, especially given how co-dependent they are. Like eBay with the need for both people bidding and listing things for auction, we need to satisfy website owners and advertisers, and need enough of both groups to have a viable business.
In short, we rely on network effects, which is great once you gain traction, but it takes some time to reach that tipping point. I feel we are close, but not quite close enough to carry us through to the next stage without funding.
CrankyAds could benefit from a period of focus on simply attracting new users (the supply side of the equation), learning what people want, and developing features to meet those needs (we are doing all these things, just not 100% of the time).
However, if we did just this, well, we won’t make any money. That’s fine if you have a huge amount of capital in the bank you can rely on for a while, but we don’t.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s forcing us to think about profitability today and really push something out to market to see if people use what we are creating. We are focused on core functions and unleashing them to the world even if we would feel better spending more time fixing bugs and developing features.
This budget constraint has lead to another unexpected challenge: With only a finite amount of hours available from each team member, what goals do we focus on?
For example, most of my tangible contribution to our company thus far has been letting people know about CrankyAds. I’m the marketer, basically the entire source of distribution to this point. That’s what I should be of course, giving my background as a blogger, my connection to the blogging industry and you, my reader.
I’ve also had important roles in terms of deciding strategic direction and what features I would want as a user of the product. Since I was the first blogger using CrankyAds (I was the first customer), that helps when it comes to deciding what features people want (it’s good to be your own customer).

My latest task, as I mentioned, is to seek funding. This is a very important goal, in fact it’s possibly the most important goal right now. Unfortunately to work towards this goal I have to take time away from other tasks, things I could be doing to expand exposure for CrankyAds.
Instead of spreading the word about our tool, I’m writing an investment prospectus, attending events to meet potential investors, reading about funding, etc. I enjoy these tasks, but part of me feels incongruent. I feel like I should be spending time on building on what we have done so far – and I have one massive marketing to-do list for CrankyAds – yet I’m putting all that on pause while I look for capital.
It’s ironic too, that to impress potential investors you want to show some solid early adoption numbers and initial sales, proof that people are using your product and your business model works. Yet to get funding, you have to devote time you could spend on creating more of this initial proof, to hunt for and negotiate with investors.
Remember how I mentioned we face many catch-22 situations? Yep, this is one I’ve experienced during the startup phase.
We’ve had similar challenges with Walter, my co-founder and lead developer. He’s put in thousands of hours coding CrankyAds. He could put thousands more just in feature develop for the core service – the CrankyAds ad manager – but we have to test our business model too, so we need our marketplace. It is the side of the business that can deliver revenues for us.
If we had funding, one of the first people we would hire is another developer. This would result in Walter having an extra pair of hands. I’d like to hire two more developers, I know speed of implementation is critical, so the more people working the code, the better.
This would allow Walter to focus on one area, while other team members work on the huge list of development needs we have. We could do more and act quicker. We could have been in a position to go after funding months ago with more developers, yet we need the funding to pay them. Catch-22, again.
Regardless of these catch-22 situations, and our frustrations that come from having lack of resources, I am confident we can find the right investors and move on to the next phase. We have a good product, some solid early results and plans for the future to become a successful, self-sufficient company.
Just the idea of having a year or two worth of capital in the bank so we can work on delivering a great product, is very exciting. It will mean everyone in our team can focus 100% on what they are good at – developers developing, designers designing, and marketers like me, spreading the word – and we can do so 100% of the time.
My next job is to write a prospectus to send to certain key people who I think would make ideal investors. If you know anyone any investors who are in the blogging or online advertising industries, or who I should get in touch with, please send them my way (email – supportATcrankyads.com).
And of course, if you are a blogger and have yet to use CrankyAds, please go play with it and let me know what you think (leave a comment to this article). It’s knowing what you want as a customer that can help us the most, so we cherish feedback from people who use our product.
Yaro Starak
Seeking Funds
If you don't know which keywords have the traffic and make the money, you are wasting your time. Market Samurai is the leading keyword research tool that all serious internet marketers use.Discover how it can help you in our Market Samurai review...