This internet stuff is tricky business. I love this blog because it requires such little financial investment. I pay $10/year for the domain and about $80/year for hosting. And that’s where the cash investment ends. I put in $90 (and obviously sweat equity) and get back $10,000+ for a year. That’s a pretty darn good rate of return if you ask me. This blog is easy to manage. MANteresting.com, however, is proving to challenge my inner miser.
This crap can get expensive. Fast.
Yesterday, we were lucky enough to get a few mentions on some pretty popular websites. Which lead to some pretty popular people tweeting about us, Guy Kawaski, a cofounder of Flickr, a Vice President of Tubmlr, and someone with 1.3 million twitter followers all giving us some shoutz. This lead to a flurry of traffic, and a flurry of headaches. Within minutes MANteresting went from stable unknown website, to “OMG our servers are down because we are getting hammered with traffic.”
Do you know how frustrating it is to have people want to see your website, but instead they get a 502 “this website is broken” message upon arrival? It would be like going to Krispy Kreme and being told they’re out of donuts. Or Nordstrom Rack and being told they are out of shoes. If people want to give you their money, or in our case check out our website, we gotta be ready for it.
So our site crashed and was terribly unstable for a good hour or two. What a wonderful problem to have, but still a problem. We were already paying $85/month for hosting. We had to decide if we should pay for an upgrade.
The obvious choice is YES, upgrade and give the users what they want. But reality is, many of the people who were clicking through to our site, probably wont be back. They were simply following a trail and checking it out. Many signed up, but many didn’t. So do we pay for an upgrade that might only be necessary for a day or two?
You’re darn right we do! Haha. If we want this thing to succeed we can’t afford to NOT let people see us. Every user gained is another step closer to internet domination.
So my pockets are running significantly deeper with MANteresting than compared to PDITF. In fact, I’ve spent more in the last 1.5 weeks on MAN, then I have in the last three years on PDITF. I guess the saying “you gotta spend money to make money” really is true. Or in this case I guess the saying is, “we gotta spend money to get seen by a lot of people, which will hopefully lead to acquisition or monetization”. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but you get the point.
We’ve also had people reach out wanting to partner with us, take a stake of the company and help us in its development. This is a particularly awkward stage of life because we are so new we don’t even know the full potential of our site. It could fizzle out and be a dud, or it could literally turn in to a million dollar idea. Makes it real tough deciding how much of our cash flow we are willing to put in to it (keeping us sole owners), and at what point we should probably accept/seek funding from third parties.
Frick. This business stuff is terribly confusing, particularly when your business strategy at this point completely ignores generating revenue. Here’s to hoping things keep getting more problematic. And by problematic I mean awesome! We like awesome. MOAR AWESOME PLEAZE!!!
