Trying to Survive...

Email Newsletters

2006-05-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

I've been sending a monthly email for one of my apartment sites for almost a year now. Not only has the newsletter been a great way to keep subscribers familiar with my site, but they also forward the email on to their friends. There's a lot of talk about viral marketing and building buzz these days, and a simple email newsletter is just one way to help accomplish it. Of course newsletters aren't as sexy as a video that get forwarded on to millions of people, but it still helps. Plus, with about 3,000 subscribers in a highly targeted market, sponsoring the email is valuable to my advertisers.

Sending a newsletter on your own isn't practical for a small business without it's own dedicated mail server. There are a few reasons for this. For one, you don't want to have thousands of addresses in the BCC field. For another, your ISP and whoever else might be hosting your email account tend to limit the number of emails you can send. I've commonly seen the max number anywhere from 200 per day to about 2000 per day. If it weren't for this limit I'd consider buying some software for managing, tracking and sending newsletters. Those 3 features are critical to any newsletter you send.

Since the number of emails I can send is limited, my only option is to use an email sending service. There are tons of them out there, and they can help you send just about any kind of email (not just newsletters). Prices vary. Some charge a flat monthly fee tiered by the number of email addresses you store (regardless of how often you email them), some charge monthly fees tiered by the number of emails you send, and others charge a per email sent rate. Currently I'm using Constant Contact. I get a slight discount because I signed up through my web hosting company and that's why I went with them. They're not bad, but they're not great either. I also just started trying out Microsoft's ListBuilder email service for one of my other apartment search sites. It's lower cost, but much more barebones than Constant Contact. Other services out there include: Bronto, VerticalResponse, JangoMail and MailChimp. Soon I'll write a review of Constant Contact and then ListBuilder. If I try out any other services I'll review them as well.

Maps Maps Everywhere

2006-03-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

Everyday new sites are cropping up that integrate mapping features from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. I even integrating mapping features with my apartment sites a few months ago. This is all possible now that their available for free. Just a few years ago MapQuest offered me lesser functionality for about $4,000 per site. Something I wasn't going to spend for sites that I was working on in my free time. But now that it's free and relatively easy to add maps sites there are a few issues. Today I'll be discussing just one them.

In my last post I made mention of a site that appears to be my closest competitor. The problem with their site (and many others) is an over reliance on mapping. Yes when it comes to housing or any other real estate it's "location, location, location", but I don't believe a map is the best user interface for doing searches. Location and price my be most important to users, but there are a number of other search variables that are also important. I've seen interfaces using a map with the ability to filter on price and bedroom and square footage, but that still doesn't cover all of the options people want in their search. If a map had all of the necessary search options, chances are it's going to be overly complex and just plain messy. So that's all on the search side. For results, I really believe tables rule. People want to be able to make comparisons between listings in way that you just can't do on a map. A table of results provides the easiest way to compare several variables. Don't get me wrong though, maps still add a lot of value, I just think there's a tendency to rely on them too much. Take LaywerMaps.com for example. When I'm looking for a lawyer, location may be one aspect of my search, but I also want to make comparisons on firm size, fields they cover, experience and much more. Using a map as the main search interface just doesn't work. Now for sites where you're not concerned with comparing lots of variables and location is important, then go ahead and make the mapping the core of your site.

Start-Up Investment

2006-03-07T15:58:00.000-08:00

I read about a relatively new apartment search site in the Washington Post Start-Up section yesterday. I'm not going to mention the name of the company, as I don't want to help them with their search engine rankings. I'll write more about my analysis of what they're doing in the next couple days, but today I'm writing about a tangent of what I read. The article states that this company secured some initial start-up capital and is looking to raise an additional $500k. This has been something that's been on my mind over the past several months. Should I be seeking some sort of start-up investment?

In the short term, it would be great. For one, I could stop investing all of my revenue back into the company and begin to pay myself. I could kick start my site in new regions by buying a bunch of advertising, and maybe get some professional creative help. I could schmooze clients. I could bring on more people to help shoulder more of the work. I'd probably even feel more important. Though, in the longer term, a bunch of extra funding would only make a miniscule difference.

Maybe I'm jaded because of what I saw while consulting a few well funded start-ups during the dot-com boom. That kind of huge money is of course much harder to come by, and now a business needs to actually have some kind of revenue model. But it still doesn't appear too difficult for a business with a weak model to bring in $500k - 1Mil in funding. The way I see it, if my expenses are fairly low, then why give up a huge chunk of ownership for little, if any, long-term gain? An apartment search site with free listings isn't going to make millions each year. So an investor would have to take huge piece of the ownership pie to make the ROI worth it. Plus I'd hate to divert my time and energy from growing the business organically to finding an investor.

Now if someone came to me and offered to make an investment, and had a specific plan on how that funding would increase the value of the company, I'd be willing to listen. If their investment made more money for both the investor and myself in the long-term, that would make sense.

Business Principals

2006-03-03T15:08:00.000-08:00

One of the principals I founded my company on was to be as frugal as possible while not detracting from the service provided to customers or partners. Not only would this help me in keeping prices lower to differentiate from competitors, but it would also help to maximize profit. After releasing an update to the apartment sites earlier this week, I was alerted that users with Macs were experiencing problems. In the past I've done testing on Macs by going to my wife's place of business or using someone else's Mac. Now that I have some money available to spend, my first inclination was that I should head over to the Apple store right away and get a Mac Mini for $700. I mean, why go through all the hassle of having to find someone with a Mac every time I need to test and/or debug? Well, after some reflection I've decided that I need to stick to my principals. Having to go somewhere else to do a little debugging now and then, or having any other minor (and infrequent) inconvenience is worth not having to pay anything more than a hundred bucks. Plus, with that $700 I can get a decent amount of text ads, or even a terabyte back-up drive. I guess the moral is that the principals that define my business shouldn't just be a result of circumstance (like limiting spending when you don't have the money to spend), but should hold true throughout the lifecycle of the business.

Pricing Options Bad - Simple Good

2006-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

I've found that my customers on the apartment sites want information regarding advertising purchase options to be clear, concise and simple. I can offer a myriad of options including purchasing a single month, monthly recurring to lump sum yearly and then they have the option to pay via credit card or to be invoiced. These are all standard options, but with various discounts that I can offer depending on the options chosen it just gets to be too complicated. I even have a form where you choose what you want and the pricing options you're interested in and it spits out the price and highlights any applicable discounts.

The feedback I've gotten is that it's too complicated. So my current belief is that even though I can offer a lot of flexibility with payments, it's better to offer no more than two options. In fact, I might be better served with having just one option. As I complete some new features that make further testing easier I'll report back what seems to work and what doesn't. For now though, my advice is to keep purchase options as simple as possible. You're likely to lose more customers due to pricing confusion than you might gain with offering flexibility and discounts.

Starting a Marketing Internship

2006-02-24T10:36:00.000-08:00

I've been considering bringing on an intern lately. Balancing technical design and development, sales, marketing and customer services leaves less and less time for each. The pay would have to be either at a minimum level or nothing, depending on my legal and tax requirements. Can you even have someone work for free? I know there are unpaid internships abound, but I also know you can't get around minimum wage laws either. Maybe it's like firing someone. If you fire someone for a reason, it better be a good one that can stand up in court if necessary, but if you fire someone for no reason, then that's ok.

I think it could really help me out, and since work for marketing majors is tough to find, the experience would be tremendous for whoever gets the position. Giving a sophomore or junior marketing major the ability to design marketing strategies and influence decisions is something that I think would be valuable experience. And since I've got websites catering directly to the college market, getting the word out about the position should be extremely easy.

Finding a Lawyer for Your Startup

2006-02-21T23:54:00.000-08:00

A little over a year ago I was faced with finding a lawyer to help get the business formed. Having grown up with a lawyer for a father (or perhaps I should say a father for a lawyer) it was ingrained in my mind that it's extremely important to get professional legal advice with just about anything you do. Spending a few hundred dollars now can save you thousands of dollars later, plus you'll save yourself a lot of frustration and anxiety. So the trouble was finding legal counsel in the Seattle area. My father wasn't going to cut it since he doesn't practice in Washington. His advice was to use Martindale-Hubbell's Lawyers.com. If it wasn't for his suggestion, I probably would never have used the site. Not because I didn't know about it, but because a site with that name seems to me like a source for cheesy ambulance chasing personal injury lawyers. Maybe it had something to do with billboards they used to run near Hobby airport in Houston. Using the site I narrowed down the list to about 5 firms in Seattle (here's a link to the small business category). I contacted each via email rather than phone in an effort to weed out firms that might be significantly behind the times. I got about three responses by the next day and never heard from the other two. After explaining my situation and the services I thought I needed I got quotes from all three. To form a single member LLC including any state and local registration fees I was quoted $2200, $1700 and $700. The larger quotes were from small-to-medium sized firms with about 5 or so lawyers. The $700 quote was from a single lawyer firm (she had an assistant). I had been advised by my father to expect the cost to be around $500 as the work generally requires filling out standard documents and can lead to more work for the lawyer down the road. So that left the single lawyer firm, which also might be an advantage because she might be more in-tune with the issues facing a small business. I called her office number and got the voicemail for her cell phone. To me that just seemed to short sited. When a business uses a cell phone as their main number it just doesn't seem right, especially for a lawyer. This brought me back to square one. I decided that restricting my search to Seattle meant I was getting only downtown firms, and I'd have to pay downtown prices. By expanding my search to the nearby suburbs I got much better results. Lower quotes and firms that dealt with internet related businesses. Therefore my advice is if you're in a major urban area look for a lawyer in the burbs, find someone with clients in your field and do you're best to ensure their reputable. Oh, and in case you're wondering I went with Zeno, Drake and Hively in Kirkland.

Support Your Startup with CafePress

2006-02-17T11:56:00.000-08:00

CafePress has been a life-saver for getting my other ventures off the ground. I didn't mind making an initial cash infusion to get the apartment sites off the ground, but that's all I would have done. Taking a big drop in pay to get my own thing going was bad enough, but had I needed to make regular investments from my own funds to keep things going would have meant the end a while ago. Thanks to having multiple CafePress shops I've haven't had to use any personal funds whatsoever to keep things afloat. If you're trying to get your own venture started, and could use an extra revenue stream to get things going I recommend opening your own shop. Focus on a niche that you know and that's under-represented. You just need to be able to come up with a few designs and then do some pay-per-click advertising. CafePress does the rest. Now that my apartment sites are starting to bring in their own revenue, the extra CafePress revenue just means I can get things moving even faster. If you do decide to sign up with them, use this link so I can get a referral credit (every dollar counts!).

Meetup - The Entrepreneur Meetup Group

2006-02-16T16:56:00.000-08:00

I've been hoping to make it over to one of the Seattle Entrepreneur Meetup Group's get-togethers listed on Meetup.com for the past 8 months or so. They're meeting today, but I'm just not sure if it's a good idea yet. I'd hate for someone to hear specifics on what I'm doing and then decide to create some additional competition. Not that competition is all that bad. So far I've outlasted several others who've tried to emulate what I'm doing with the apartment sites. Of course, their attempts all sucked. My worry is if someone with great talent and deep pockets tries to do the same thing. I am of course lacking one of those attributes. Right now the sites aren't at the level of maturity where I would feel comfortable in even hinting at some of the secret sauce of my enterprise. Maybe sometime soon I'll feel I've created a significant enough barrier to entry. I think there might be some benefit of meeting with others who might be in the same boat. Not only from helping with business issues, but also working mostly on my own means I've only met a handful of people since moving to Seattle a year and a half ago. Maybe in the next month or two... Besides, I can't make it to today's meeting because I'm trying to be good about hitting the gym 6 days a week and it's at the same time as my workout.

Television Advertising on the Cheap

2006-02-13T00:05:00.000-08:00

I found a cheap way to advertise on TV today. Spot Runner has a catalog of a what seems to be a hundred or so generic commercials for a multitude of industry segments. First you select a market and then choose your industry. You then are able to view handful of pre-made commercials. Once you find one you like, you enter in your business name, phone number and website and they'll add it to the narration in a couple predetermined insert points. They also ensure that the commercial you choose hasn't already been used in the markets you selected. When I tried an apartment related commercial in the Ann Arbor area I was quoted $300. On top of that I would need to pay for air-time. For a $1000 budget I could get a commercial to run quiet a few times on the cable channels. Of course for a $1000 budget I could do a ton of search engine ads that would specifically reach my target audience. I'll be passing on Spot Runner, but if you've got a business that targets a wide demographic I would consider it.

Something is Afoot

2006-02-01T00:02:00.000-08:00

Getting property owners to add listings to the apartment sites has always been a challenge. The listings are free, and we offer lots of extra features that people usually have to pay big bucks for, so it's always been perplexing why there's so much hesitation in giving it a try. I've had owners threaten to call their lawyers on me thinking I'm trying to scam them because there's no way it's free. I've also had owners tell me they don't want their rental units on the Internet because that's where all the pornography is and they don't want to be associated with that. In fact, I've been hearing that specific reason for years and years, and heard it even a couple months ago. There must be someone out there spreading this "wisdom". Well, starting last week on two of the sites, a bunch of property owners started signing up and adding listings out the blue. Since the site serve to different geographic areas, the only explanation is that property owners share some sort of Borg-like hive mind... Whatever the reason it's good news. Not just for the business, but for students looking for apartments. Now I just need to get them to do the same thing with understanding that 1 year of additional advertising pays for itself in about a weeks time.

My Story

2004-03-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

Who am I?
I currently run a small company that operates several web sites. Most of the sites serve the apartment and rental communities at various universities. A couple other sites primarily provide an extra income stream. Previously I was a Senior Consultant with BearingPoint working on global trade management processes and systems, as well as doing some work with document management systems and web-based systems. I left that job to not only get away from the weekly travel, but also to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams and aspirations. And it's that journey that I write about on this site.

Who's this site for?
This site is intended for anyone looking to start their own business, or anyone who just did start their own business. If you've got a job, but dream of starting your own business your in the same boat I'm in, and I bet there's a lot of commonality between what I'm going through and what you're going through. I'm hoping this site can open up some dialog about what works and what doesn't. Is the grass always greener on the other side, or is running your own business actually better than working for the man? Hopefully I'll be able to provide some insight as I learn for myself and share my experiences. So if you know someone who might find this site useful, feel free to let them know. A community of readers who provide feedback is not just good for me, it's good for the readers too.

Blog Update

2005-08-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote a post (yes it's been a while), but I had to remove it because there were some really strange formatting issues going on. Well that's all fixed now and I've posted it today. If you use Blogger and are getting strange formatting problems then you should check out this.

Something for Nothing

2005-08-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

On Monday I launched my third apartment site. Getting the site configured and preped takes about 8 hours. Getting listings on the site is another story. Adding listings requires visiting property owners in person and explaining the premise of the site and the benefits. Essentially a property owner gets free listings and usually in short order they start getting referrals via email. They don't pay a cent for this, and we've found that it can be a huge boon to their business. So they should be rushing to be added to the site, right? Wrong.

Who would have thought that selling something for free would be so difficult. Free means that there's got to be a catch. So 95% of those that we talk to don't believe that we're legit. One owner of a medium sized property management firm even said she was going to alert her lawyer about us. We encouraged her to do so. We're still waiting to hear back... I've even considered charging a nominal amount at any new sites that are launched to improve the number of listings we get.

Overall this is really frustrating. Our business model requires us to sell the listings for free, and then once the property owner starts getting results we sell them on additional advertising to increase those results and put a little money in the bank. So we have to makes a sales effort twice for each customer. Once for the free service and then a second time to actually make money. And by "sales effort" I just don't mean a single contact. There's the initial visit, phone calls, emails, mailings and sometimes follow-up visits. At least I have one trump card that I'm able to pull that often results in sucess: Testimonials. I encourage sketical property owners to contact the owners on the first apartment site. When they do, they always add their listings. The trick is getting them to take even take this step.

Every once in a while I do come across a property owner that gets it. They jump on site and load it up with their listings right away. In essense they make the site their site. We advertise and they directly benefit. It actually works out for us too. After a while skeptical property owners start to conact us and ask what they have to do to get listed.

An Update to this Site

2005-04-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

I've been concerned that this site gives a little too much information about my Apartment sites, and that it can be quite easy to come across this site. Especially if you're a competitor looking specifically for this information. This, in part, is why I haven't been posting much about my progress. I've also just competed removing any references to the Apartment sites that directly name them. From now on I'll be referring to the original site as the Apartment Site, and the others collectively as the Apartment Sites. Hopefully this update will trickle back to the search engine caches soon enough.

Idea #1

2004-03-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

I'm reluctant to give the full details on all eight business ideas just yet, as I don't want to inspire competition before I even get off the ground. But I will reveal enough to give you a picture of where things stand.
An undisclosed Apartment Site (name protected to prevent competitors from getting extra info from this site) This was the first idea I came up with back in college. In 1998 my roommate and I began the initial concept development on the site. The idea was to provide a service to college students to help them find apartments. The concept was unlike other apartment search sites of the time because it was focused on students only. The Apartment Site was the prototype and the plan ~~was~~ still is to launch the site at other universities as well. To-date the site is functional, has a fair number of visitors and is ready to actually generate some revenue. The only problem is selling the advertising. Since I live in Houston, and the potential advertisers are in Indiana, in person selling is difficult. I've taken one trip to visit with potential advertisers, and they indicated a high level of interest, but I have yet to get a commitment. This leaves me with a couple of options.
1) Shut the site down and forget about the whole idea.
2) Find someone local to do some sales leg-work. It is a college campus, so there have got to be some students looking for experience.
3) Forget about the location for the current site and focus on a location closer to where I actually live and get myself out there to sell.
4) Find another revenue source that doesn't require face-to-face selling.

There are a few other lesser issues which I'll go over in the near future, but getting the revenue portion of the model is the biggest problem. Stay tuned for the details on idea #2 later today.

That is not my bracket...

2004-03-31T13:24:00.000-08:00

I know I've still got to get to describing ideas 3-8, but I've been really busy trying to fit in time to finish the web development for idea #6. Idea #6 is like the Apartment Site as it's a content driven information site. Advertising sales is the revenue model. As I haven't had a lot of luck in getting ad sales for the Apartment Site, I do have some concerns. Idea #6 was supposed to be simple to implement and quick to get started. Therefore I thought it was worth taking a gamble on. Well I've been spending my free time trying to get the site developed, and as it turns out, it's become much more of a beast. It's still not as complicated as what's going on behind the scenes on the Apartment Site, but it's not something I can churn out in a couple weekends. I started this site by putting together a few screen mock-ups to help me flesh out the idea. Then I went to work on putting together a text only version of the site that's fully functional (which I'm still doing). Once the site is fully functional I'll begin the design work and clean up the site. Once this is all done all of the technical work should be complete. Then it will be time to populate the information, sell advertising and market the site. I'll post the details on the site once it's fully functional, and I'll even post the address to solicit some feedback from all three of you readers out there.

As a side note, I'm having a helluva time avoiding some stupid mistakes in my PHP code. Forgetting a semi-colon at the line ends can be tough to find, but I swear my computer is adding extra brackets into my code just to piss me off.

Basic Advertising

2004-08-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

I got a deal on mousepads from CafePress a while back and decided to order up a few mousepads for the Apartment Site to mail to my most likely advertisers.

Because of the move and all, shipping took a while and a friend had to re-mail them from Houston to Seattle. I have them now and they look pretty good. So will little trinkets help get advertisers to commit to placing some ads on the site and paying actual money? Time will tell I guess... I'm hoping at least if they get used, it will be a daily reminder to them that they might want to purchase some ads. Well, ok, I don't have hundreds of them. In fact, I have five. Maybe I should have bought more, but the half off deal is over, so I'll just have to make do. Before sending them I need to put together some good literature to accompany them and make a couple updates to the advertising sections of the site.

Slow Going

2004-11-04T13:18:00.000-08:00

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I made a lot of progress in getting things rolling. Yesterday and today seem to be painfully slow. By making accommodations for potential merchandising customers with CafePress's servers having problems once again, and an even bigger problem of having Interland (the web host for the Apartment Site wipe out 4 years of email stored on their servers, I'm burning a lot of time. I can't wait to actually get working on bringing in revenue from the Apartment Site and the other apartment sites, but unfortunately these problems, and a multitude of others are causing delay. Any recommendation for a good Windows platform web host?

Another Week

2004-11-12T16:58:00.000-08:00

Well, I think I've come up with a new name for the company. Once I get it all set up, I'll reveal the name. I'm beginning to learn that having your own company, and running it from your home, will require some discipline in separating work time from non-work time. I'm putting work in at all times of the day and night and on the weekends as well. Taking a vacation will be a difficult decision to make as well. Over the holidays I'll be visiting my family, but I expect to have internet access so I can still get work done. For now though, I think it's important to put as much time in as possible to get things rolling. Earlier today I sent out a few emails to suitable lawyers in the area in hopes to get this company legal soon. Hopefully I can have a legal entity before the end of next week. I've also been working on replacing the last remnants of old code on the Apartment Site. I'm hoping to finish up with recoding and improving the site before the end of the weekend. And on top of that I hope to have some holiday related designs completed before the end of the weekend as well.

Finally... Progress

2005-03-15T19:59:00.000-08:00

Finally making some progress with updating the entire apartment site to ASP.Net. By Friday we should have some of the new functionality running on the live server.

Feeling the Pinch

2005-03-14T19:29:00.000-08:00

It's been almost 5 months since I quit my job. I'm happier, less stressed, get to see my wife more often, and the few gray hairs I had are now gone. The only problem is my financial status. Our household income was in the 6 figure range, now it's a lot less. So much less that we're burning through about a thousand dollars in savings every month. This isn't a surprise, my wife and I knew that this would be the case after I quit my job. It sucks to go through any of our savings, but if all goes as planned we should make up for it financially when my business gets rolling a bit more. In the meantime I'm being a little more frugal. It's not that I didn't look for deals before, but now I try to keep most lunches under $1 (hello PB&Js), and look for any other deals. I've also had to scale back on entertainment. $9 movie tickets are too much, and thus I haven't been in months. Overall though I'd rather be where I am now as opposed to where I was before quitting. Money isn't everything, and my happiness is worth eating into a bit of my savings. Unless of course the savings runs out (which is not part of the plan), then money will become a little more important.

So Where Have I Been?

2005-03-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

So I'm sure you've had many sleepless nights wondering what I've been up to and when I'm going to add my next post. I've been doing a ton of coding over the past many weeks trying to get the entire apartment site converted over to ASP.Net. Some of you know what I'm talking about, some think it's cool, some think doing this yucky, and others have no idea what ASP.Net is. Let's just say it means that I have to recode the entire site - which is a lot of work. I'll be in Texas in a few weeks, so I'd like to have all of the coding done before then so I can turn visit a few school in the area to promote the site, but it's not looking like I'll have the conversion done by then. Why do I need to have everything converted you're asking. Well, I can't answer that just yet. Let's just say that there are some big improvements that will be made once I'm done. That's also part of the reason why I've been somewhat quiet on this site. I'll be able to say more soon. I've got some other things that have come up so I'll try and post those things over the next few days. Keep on Truck'n!

Time Fries When You're Having Fun

2005-03-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

I'm glad I haven't made any promises about posting more often... Well, for those that are reading this, I've made it easier for you to find out when things get posted here. Let your eye wander over to the new colorful links on the right side of this page. See them there? Towards the top? Know what they are? Yes? Great. If not, let's just say they're an easy way to help subscribe to this site. There are a lot of websites and programs out there, but let me suggest going over to my.yahoo.com and creating an account (if you don't already have one). Or even better, just click on the link and it will let you create a my.yahoo account and add this subscription at the same time. Don't like Yahoo, use the MSN one... Once that's done, just click on the "+My Yahoo" link and subscribe to this site. It's pretty simple. Now will someone please subscribe so there isn't that big "0 readers" icon?

Toll Free Vonage

2005-01-24T23:54:00.000-08:00

I use a VoIP number at home (and therefore my home office as well). For those unfamiliar, VoIP stands for "Voice Over Internet Protocol". In essence I have a box, called a Telephone Adapter, that lets me get telephone service over the Internet. For what I was paying for local phone service through Southwestern Bell, I now get unlimited local and long distance service, plus all the features one could want. There are several services out there ranging from small startups, to larger startups to companies like AT&T that offer this service. I use Vonage and have been pretty pleased. The only complaint I have after using it for almost 3 months is that when I call people there can be a two-second delay from the time they answer until I'm able to hear them. This usually means I don't hear the person say "hello". But I save a ton... And it's 3 cents per minute to Europe. If you're interested in Vonage, let me know so I can send you a discount coupon that gives us both something.

For a little bit of additional money I just bought a toll free number. I decided to do this while searching for a lawyer (more on that in a future post). One attorney that I found online had her own practice. All I knew about her was what I found online. She was active in community business issues, had some additional financial background and had a focus on small technology startups. We communicated via email, and her fee was more reasonable than the other firms I had communicated with. To arrange a meeting I called the phone number on her website. Getting a voicemail wasn't a problem considering I knew it was a one person firm, getting her cell phone voicemail was. Using your mobile number as your company's main number is bad. Mobile numbers are just that, mobile. Mobile tells me that the company could just pick up and vanish any time. Needless to say, this attorney was no longer a candidate for me.

Learning a lesson from this experience I learned that for my own company it would be important to do what I can to make things seem as stable as possible to clients and anyone else who I was doing business with. Having a national reach I decided it was important to get a toll free number. Vonage offers toll free numbers, and when I checked into it yesterday I saw that I could get an 888, 877 or 866 number. But which would be best? Does everyone know about these (somewhat) newer toll free area codes? Well today I decided that 888 would probably work out best. I went to the website to order the number and only 877 and 866 were available choices. Man that sucked. Time to try and finagle the 888 number. I called customer service and put on the charm to find some way to get the 888 number. At first I was told that batches of new numbers are made available once a week and that I should continue to check back and see if 888 becomes available again. After some more pleasantries I was told to call back next week and ask for the number then as some numbers are kept in reserve and not release for online purchase right when they become available. So I hung-up hopeful that I would get my 888 number within the next week or so. Well I just checked before retiring for the night and low and behold there it was, an 888 number. But wait, what was that? An 800 number was now available as well. So surprise surprise I choose the 800 number. Now I've got a number better than an 888 number, even better than an 877 number, way better than a local number, and soooo much better than my mobile number.