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

[Steven C.]

LOL
That was a hilarious read.

Quite inspirational as well. Perhaps I should just clear my weekend and stop making excuses :)

[tehnyit]

I wonder if you got the services of ElectricPulp and Logoworks cheaper because of the PR that this project would generate for them? Those figures that you mentioned seems quite cheap.

[scoocher]

Guy - I admire your verve and as for your basic post: I am not impressed.

I think the site is below par (I'm not a tech-industry guy - have no scores to settle or ego's to boost). And it's not apparent from your post that any real money will be made or, more accurately, that you have created a sustainable business model(I may be,heretical, may be proved wrong).

The reason for my comment is the broad and sacred space given lately to 'bootstrapping' in entrepreneurial lit. and especially in the developer world. Much of the buzz seems to be constructed around a false dichotomy, i.e., you either bootstrap your way to success (with the moral righteousness of being frugal) or you mindlessly blow a bunch of investor money. My view is that BOTH options are concurrently available: be intelligently scrimpy and wise about where every dollar is going AND at the same time invest heartily in a great idea that has been properly vetted and staffed with world-class talent (even if outsourced). What you did was cool, but I propose that you could have exponentially multiplied the posted numbers by investing more $$ in a few carefully selected areas (e.g. site design,"good" PR, etc.).

The story could have been better. Just because it was cheaply implemented doesn't mean it's high-value. I guess your emphasizing how much closer so many aspiring entrepreneurs are than they think to getting a product out there (specifically in the web 2.0 world).

My take is that it's just as risky, if not moreso, to UNDER-INVEST in your idea than it is to overinvest....

Would love to hear other views....

[iTodo team]

Guy, could you describe, how the coder hacked your site?

[Keith Johnson]

Hello Guy:

Thanks for the blog and advice. I am both inspired and concerned. Inspired because Web2.0 is an exciting new platform, however, the idea of collaboration and collective intelligence does not necessarily equal profits and one's ability to turn technology into the green stuff that pays bills.

So, again, what you have presented hits me twofold: part inspiration, and part real concern about the financial viability of web2.0 in helping businesses to pay their bills and stay afloat..there already is so much free stuff on the web...now with web2.0 it is goint to get even worse!!

Your comments/feedback are welcome.

Regards, Keith Johnson, Hollywood, FL

[minimediaguy]

Thanks for an informative and funny post. I riffed off it this morning:
http://minimediaguy.org/2007/06/07/the-real-guy-talks-tools-trash-numbers/

[100 Dollar Website]

Wow this is cool.
I thought web 2.0 riches only came to those with best expertise in web development.

The fact that you made a successful web 2.0 company without making website yourself is eye-opening.

[Matt]

Not to say this wasn't cool, but add to all that the value that the name Guy Kawasaki brings. A lot of us might be able to do a project at a similar cost - and probably get bought out too! - if Guy Kawasaki was a partner!

[leonope]

Hi Guy,

this is a great idea and it´s done very well. It shows that anybody can do good biz with little money and small budget.

Cool to read this story and realize that there´s definitely no limit in the web :)

Kind regards

[Paul]

It definitely helps if u r a 'Guy' when u launch a company/website. Responses is definitely different.

[Jones]

Wait, a minute you're an "expert" on startups, and you spent more than a $1000 on domain name registration? Hahaha! LMAO

[Nick]

Great article to start with. I can perfectly relate whatever you have said. Because I wasted one full year thinking about getting a perfect site.

Now, I just concisely broke my obsessions and went ahead to start some blogging site.

Thanks again and you are my GOD!!!!

[justin]

To me, Truemors would have been better if you:

1) Spent some money to have some juicy content prepared for launch to be submitted by random people.
2) Focused the product to a specific topic. Digg started out with technology only. Truemors could do celebrity gossip?

On another not, maybe truemors could be more photobased (picture of lindsay lohan in accident taken by cell phone and sent to truemors) and better reward the Smart Mobs.

[p_unit_33]

hey all -- check out yadayadamobile.com. they are about to offer free cell phone service (up to $100 per month) and you get to keep your phone, phone number, etc. i just signed up. anyone else heard about yada yada mobile?

[Thijs]

Poor Guy! I have a number for you: number of websites needed to destroy your reputation: 1.

[netbiznewbie]

guy --

enjoyed the breakdown ... thanks! but a quick question, as i've never dealt with this sort of thing, on points 19 - 21 ... why were you dumped? how is your b/e point calculated? why did it jump 7x? just color me curious.

[Mikepk]

Guy, I was going to post a quick comment seeing if you were interested in a (free) private label version of the Grazr widget for your truemors feed but now, much to my disappointment, I see you've removed the Grazr widget from your blog.

I'd love to know what made you decide to remove Grazr. We have a very robust infrastructure that can handle large amounts of traffic (we sailed through being 'techcrunch'd' without even a hiccup) so I'm assuming performance wasn't the issue.

If you're still interested in a private label Grazr widget (with the truemors logo, potentially even a custom search based widget using GrazrScript) drop me an e-mail.

[Whoops]

OK, here's a "truemor": I just scanned the comments below and Ray's Jun 4, 2007 12:33:34 AM posting was so LOL funny *I* damn near messed myself. :-)

[TG]

I wonder how many people who yell that it's too much money actually ever have been involved with running a business. I have the feeling that most still live in the basement of their parents...

[rolling eyes] Guess again, sir. For some of us, $12 grand still is a very serious chunk of change, and we have a spouse and kids...no basement dwelling here, and believe it or not, no malt liquor bottles, pizza crusts or lotto tickets littering the floor either. Sheesh pal...

12K is peanuts for setting up a business

For a REAL business with an ACTUAL PLAN FOR PROFITABILITY, yes, I'd agree with you. But of course that doesn't describe Guy's venture, now does it?

So Guy spent a little over $12,000 and had a lot of fun doing it. Guys do the same all the time, only they do it in, say, Las Vegas ;-)

[The Shack Man]

$4,824.14 for legal fees...

What did the lawyers do for you? Did they come up with your terms of use? Do you have a privacy statement? Do tell!

[Saulo Silva]

Interesting project your got there. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

One feature I noticed is missing on that site is user registration. Not only I believe it would have made it more popular, but also you would have had less issues with spam and inappropriate content.

[Oli Rhys]

Interesting numbers - but totally irrelevant!

The whole point of business is to make money, not how carefully you spend what money you have!

It would seem to me that Web 2.0 is all about hype - getting cheap eyeballs and selling them!

Could you repost in a month or so and let us know when you've started making money?

[st_labrat]

Love the low cost VC free DIY Co. Hate the "everything goes website". Looking forward to the modified version. (current one is truemor 0.2?). Hopefully, it is just a version for test the water... not the grand vision.
Best wish.

[hindustan]

thanks for the info

[visible.mobi]

Why did you have to spend so much on legal fees ?

http://hindustan.mobi
http://visible.mobi