Business and Design in 2010
Start-ups, Business Transaction Economics, Products, Brands, and Spotting Losers
11.25.2012
5%!o(MISSING)f something is better than 100%!o(MISSING)f nothing.
2010 was a long, awesome, and crazy year. In the beginning of the year I had Joseph Nees still working with me in the new Jetscram office on 320 W Ash. Joe moved home in Q2, then landed a job with Somerset in his home state of Alabama. Jetscram got enough business to sustain and I got a lot of legitimate offers to join forces on startups.
I learned a lot about business relationships, economics of business purchasing, how to start a new business, create a product, fail at new business, and how to spot a loser.
By the end of the year I own 6 start-ups, and developed 7 web software products.
Affluent Prospects came September 2010, Lindsey Chip Nagy and Scott North came to me to program a system for users to login and look at organized databases of well to do people. The software only went so far. If you are going to make a start-up, be in the same room as your team. Physical Energy and Mental Struggle is important to feel as a team, it make you stronger.
March 2010 Spinning 33's was conceived. Spinning 33's was an online record shop that Gabe Galvez and I were going to front on a 10,000 deal for a one million records. Site and brand was created, but nothing accumulated after the record deal fell through.
MEPBN, the mechanical electrical plumbing business network.
Pitchfork was a software I was writing on the side that would accumulate leads by picking off peoples information my crawlers found on the internet. You would house leads, edit, followup on them and build out their information. The word pitchfork was a perfect name to me, the graph is a sales metric and meshed into the Trident in a funny, but ok way. I love how you only see arrows at first, as they represent a sales metric, but it's really a pictchfork/trident. I stopped developing the software, I felt like it would have legal trouble.
Bamboo is a content management system I wrote and designed for my Jetscram clients January of 2010. It was the fifth or six iteration of the Jetscram Control Panel. I felt this version could be sold and used by other developers, so I branded it and built a templating system with it. I had 12 paying websites on the system, about half of them still use it, the rest we have converted over to Zesty. You can see some screens from Bambo in this article posting.
Lex Aranea, which translates from latin into english is "Law Spider". It's May 2010 and the idea was to take Bamboo, rebrand it and only market to lawyers, and charge a lot of money reoccurring. At the time bamboo was only getting $19-$29 a month on clients. I had a team of two to market it, while Jetscram would build the sites. The team wasn't ready for business, and the project was closed. Notice in the logo form you see the Jetscram "<" angle brackets all facing another to make the X, I later use this method to create the Zesty Z.