On August 14th @ 2:30am., After 2+ years of hard work, MyVBO Launches!
The quick history of developments is as follows:
- 2007 was all about the business plan. Drafting out the vision for MyVBO, running business models on startup costs and potential revenue streams, talking to advisors about the idea, more re-drafting. All in all the idea took about 6-8 months to take shape into the site you see today.
- Q4 2007 – Q1 of 2008 was early code development. After 15+ years of being out of code I was right back into it again. Brought on Matt and Jason part-time to do the heavy code lifting, while I focused on the UI layout in Flash/Flex. The ability Flex gave me to create working models without having to go through a layer of developers was absolutely critical in cost savings and time to market.
- April 08: we took in our first round of capital (all I can say is that it was in the 7+ figure range). It took 8 phone calls, and the capital was closed within 4 months. I know a lot of you are asking how could I raise the capital so quick, with so few phone calls.
- I put my own capital in and spent over a year getting the site developed before I went out.
- Everybody on the list had been on the advisor group. They knew what I was up to, and had been asking to invest halfway through the project.
- The lead investor had run a VC fund before. I can’t emphasize enough that having experienced investors around that you can trust is key in the early development of ANY company.
- May 08: off to the races! Brought on Matt full time, and used outside developers and graphics people on a part time basis. A big decision early on was going with Amazon Cloud computing (AWS). We had budgeted over $50K in equipment to get us through development and into production. The money that was not used by going with AWS, put us in an advantageous cash position versus budget. The other beauty of going with AWS is that we only pay for what we use and we can spin up servers to match traffic demand in a matter of minutes. Think of all the capital cost we saved in not having to buy equipment for anticipated demand. Big win here.
- October 08 saw the private beta launch. Friends, family, and people we didn’t know then signed up to give us an early whirl. To all of you who have been willing to put in at least 2-3 hours a week testing, we all say thank you, thank you, thank you…
- We finished 08 ahead of plan and under budget by over 26%. Not bad for an early stage startup.
- Q1 09 saw continued modules put into place and changes made to existing areas based on user feedback.
- Q2: Brought Andrew into the full mix of development, and added more time from other outside resources.
- Q3 has been all about getting ready for launch. Added enhancements based on user feedback, including full Twitter integration. Final UI design going into place, and all those last little minute details that have to be nailed down like friendly messages to users, instead of the code messages that developers get.
While that’s it for now…more posts will be coming as we continue to add functionality and enhancements to the site. We all look forward to adding your feature requests, so please stop by the Customer feedback forum in the connecting section and let us know what you think!
