By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

Because of Truemors, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.”

1. 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

2. 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

3. 7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

4. $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

5. $4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something. Here’s a breakdown of what I got for this amount of money.

6. $399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now. :-)

7. $1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy.

8. 55. I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround” the one you use. Yes, I could have registered fewer and spent less, but who cares about saving a few hundred bucks compared to the cost of legal action to get a domain away from a squatter if Truemors is successful?

9. $12,107.09. In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

10. 1.5. There are 1.5 full-time equivalent employees at Truemors. For me, it’s a labor of love.

11. 3. TechCrunch wrote about Truemors 3 times: the leak, the leak with a screen shot, and the opening. I wish I could tell you I was so sly as to plan this. Michael Arrington thought he was sticking it to me. Don’t stop, Michael!

12. 261,214. Much to my amazement, there were 261,214 page views on the first day.

13. 14,052. Much to my amazement, there were 14,052 visitors on the first day.

14. $0. I spent $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.

15. 24. However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company. Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”

16. 405. Because some people had nothing better to do, there were 405 posts on the first day.

17. 218. We deleted 218 of the 405 posts because they were junk, spam, inappropriate, or just plain stupid. Interestingly, half the bloggers complained the site was full of junk. The other half complained that I was deleting posts. :-)

18. 3. A mere 3 hours went by before the site was hacked, and we had to shut it down temporarily. I was impressed. The hacker who did this might be the next Woz. Please contact me if you are.

19. 36. A mere 36 hours went by before Yahoo! Small Business told us that we were inappropriate for this service because of our traffic.

20. $29.96. Our monthly break-even point was $29.96 with Yahoo!

21. $150. Because Yahoo! evicted us, our monthly break-even point quintupled to $150. If you’re interested in buying a monthly sponsorship for $151, you’d make Truemors profitable. :-)

22. 2. A mere 2 days went by before Truemors was called the “worst website ever” by the Inquirer.

23. 246,210. Thank you God for the Inquirer because it caused 246,210 page views. Yes indeed, there’s no such thing as bad PR.

24. 150. A week before we launched, if you typed “truemors” into Google, you would have gotten 150 hits.

25. 315,000. Eleven days after the launch, “truemors” had 315,000 hits in Google. I can’t figure out how this can be, but I’m not arguing.

26. 4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors:

    1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.

    2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.

    3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.

    4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

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I recently saw a presentation called Meet Henry and loved it, so I asked its creators, Ethos3 Communications, to help me create a presentation based on these experiences. Here are the slides that go with this speech.

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As part of the growing world of Truemors, there are two Truemors add-ons to announce:

• Trickler is a standalone application that provides a ticker-tape interface to Truemors.

• AffinityBar is a Truemors toolbar for FireFox and Internet Explorer.

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Here’s the bottom line: Whether Truemors succeeds or not, I learned a helluva lot. One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company. With products like WordPress, MySQL, and Salesforce platform, things are a whole lot cheaper and easier these days.

For not a whole lot of money and time you can get something out there and see if it works. If it does, hallelujah: there’s no better time to raise money than after your prototype is scaling up. Indeed, you may not ever need to raise money. Fyi, there is no worst time to raise money than when you have nothing but an idea. Actually, there is a worst time: When you’ve burned through the first million, and you haven’t shipped or gotten any dogs to eat the food.

I end with a truism (as opposed to truemor): There’s only one way to find out if your idea will succeed, and that’s to try it, so go for it.

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PS: We’d love to have a few more “truemorists.” These are folks with “accounts” at the Truemors site. Anyone can post via voicemail, text, email, and online submission, but truemorists can create, edit, save, and delete their truemors. Also, their names appear in green to distinguish their posts from those of non-truemorists.

Comments

[Carson Danfield]

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[James Brown]

Does the $120M from Spinvox investors count in the $12K?

You should share all the facts.

[Yadira]

I really like your post, you show how to do some thinks great and how to improve another, this learning process done by you can help to other to make things better and easiest.
Thanks for taking your time to explain it to all of us.

[B Kurlek]

It all goes to show you the power of technology as compared to the old norms.
Blogs have democratized the web to a great degree as have other more recent forms of technology.
A blog means that most people can now have a webpage. No hosting arrangements . No ftp etc etc. People in the third world with some internet access can now publish worldwide their point of view.
Rather amazing when you consider it was not long ago that the berlin wall was a dividing zone.
To put it into perspective one little ad in a small country newspaper costs more than a year of moderate premium hosting for most with 24/7 tech support and advanced features.
www.bayareaword.com

[boo]

sososo! How does one create this type of site or a religious site like i am creating for my MSc in the UK, i am really interested. please help because i am also a believer bot h in you and my faith.

Thank you

boo!

[Jakob]

Hi Guy,

Your site is now about a month old. Could you let us know a little about your traffic during this period?

[Adam]

My god, how ignorant are people on the internet, $12,000 bloody hell you have 0 business sense.

[jones]

Guy took a lot of heat on this one, but you have to give him credit for taking it like a man. Many bloggers (Presentation Zen, for example, or Tim Ferris) in his situation would have deleted the posts that they considered 'abusive' or even mildly critical.

I commend Guy Kawasaki for showing us what it means to be a man!

[Traderhut]

Hi,
I've created a site (http://www.traderhut.com) , and have product to sell (some of it unique, that you can't get ANYWHERE else, such as a Wordfare! game) - but the thing that I've not figured out is how to get 26,000 hits "the first day" It seems to me that mostly you got lucky / were well known and as such, sure, it cost *you* $12K to start the site, but for a 'normal' unknown person such as myself, I'd spend that $12K on advertising and still not be able to drive 26,000 people per *month* to the site.

Do you have any suggestions for generating traffic to a site?

-Thanks,

-Chert
---
http://www.traderhut.com
All sorts of cool things...

[Denis]

Hello Guy,

Great story. I am on a mission. I want to start my own startup on a 1000 bucks budget...

Here's my story: http://quebecvalley.com/2007/06/20/the-1000-challenge/

Wish me good luck :)

[Dan Lester]

In saying "there's no such thing as bad PR" you really are falling for venture capitalist style hype over stats and figures.

Just because you get a quarter of a million hits, you consider the inquirer article to be "good". Talk about good/bad traffic - these armies of visitors are being directed to your sight precisely just to laugh at it. Waste of your bandwidth!

Of course, it generates hype for genuine users, and some readers of the article will be sympathetic, etc. But I think your assessment that it was "not bad PR" was a bit premature as soon as your hits went up.

[Wayne]

yah, i was thinking about CSC.
at least you have prepare $12k to burn for a year though (not including SMS traffic)

[Nikolaj de Fine Licht]

truemors.com looks horrible in Firefox/Mac. I'm not impressed. May be a good idea effectively brought to the market, but does it make a difference? No, not at all. First time you disappointed me, Guy!

[Shankar]

Guy, as you mentioned in another post of yours, each company needs to associate itself with one value/service. That is not coming out clearly in this case. Assuming you want to run it for a few years, it will evolve with the type of people who like to use it most - a core Web 2.0 feature - something Digg learnt the hard way recently. How you will let it evolve is upto you.

[Wayne]

Guy, could you say some more details how the coder hacked your site?

[Mike G]

Great post. Now I'd challenge you to us Micro-preneurs (did I just invent a buzzword?) how to generate buzz and traffic for free if we're not Guy Kawasaki!

[www.JerryWFranklin.com]

Hi, Guy:

Is there any food left? Sorry I'm late to the party.

Great stuff! Launching a site is "all of the above." Your concept is great!

All the best! Jerry
PS: I love leftovers....go any?

www.JerryWFranklin.com
www.BlueSkyBrothers.com

[Christie]

Love it!

Cheers-

Christie

[Daryl Chia]

Good infor there, I like the details of your site, pretty much explains your steps in creating your own site

hows your earnings so far?

Regards,
Daryl
Free Gifts
http://www.jobscreation.com/optin3/TAF-Step1_3.html

[Susan carter]

this was quite funny, believe you spent way to much, have a look at a real web 2.0 applicaton

http://www.sogrimey.com

if you need designs in the future we will be more then happy to take your money

[Wallace]

it is not worth to pay $399 for the logo i think.

[Marc]

I think you just discovered what many of us independednt webmasters have known for years.
Quietly making a nice chunk of change out of the limelight. I think you still spent way too much though.

[Rafael Imas]

There's no doubt that you could launch a web 2.0 company and maybe even make a lot of money, but you can't believe you'd get any innovation from this ammount of effort.
Not far in the future we'll be able to build this kind of websites with one click and $9.99, but the next google won't be comming out of this.

[zakky]

Thank you for this post Guy. Makes me wanna just go out there and try stuff out.

Thank you so much.

[Jeff the Great]

I LOVED this post. It is timely for me as in Feb. I started working on a similar project....we utilize a european programer, have only paid him about $100, and have had about 25,000 hits since mid march.

It hasn't made anyone rich yet, but it also hasn't made any of us broke!