Andrei

This is somehow a reply to Guy Kawasaki’s “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09“. I don’t want people to think that I have some issues or something with it. I’ve read a few months ago his post about the creation of Truemors.com. I liked the idea, wasn’t revolutionary, but it was a new approach to social bookmarking. Yesterday I tried to post a story from one of my websites and I was disappointed by the upload/post part of the website. It’s a ten-cent app that will upload your entries to a db, put them on the first page, until a “Truemorist” will delete it for no specific reason. Let’s take a closer look at the post form:

• It will ask for your name (no account!), and you can post as John Doe, Danny De Vito or even Arnold Schwarzenegger, no one will know for sure.
• Then you’ll need to fill in the e-mail and you could use johndoe@microsoft.com because it’s not gonna be used for confirmation or anything else.
• Worst categories list I’ve ever seen. I won’t even insist on that.
• The “Headline” … h e a d l i n e … wtf happened to “Title” ? 🙂
• and now… the hugest BS damn thing in this site: “Your Truemor”. Now this is the point where everything gets fucked-up. It’s just a simple textbox . So you type, you enter your story and then you click submit. And then… “AAAARRRGGGHHH !!! where are my links?” Exactly. To insert a link in truemors.com you need tot type the HTML code. Who the hell is still doing this when we have web2.0 apps, WYSIWYG editors, user-management platforms. It’s the damn 21st century.

So, Guy Kawasaki spent $12,107.09 on truemors.com, by doing this

1. $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.
2. $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.
3. $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. 🙂
4. $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. [this is a little over $20 per domain]

when the real thing would go like this:

1. $0. WordPress (donate to the good guys there)
2. $0. WordPress Skin (a little donation to the theme creator would surely help)
3. $0. The logo that anyone can do in Photoshop/Illustrator/Gimp
4. $600. You could spend $600 or less on registering domains. [hey, you didn’t buy truemors.ro. it’s only $61 at rotld.ro and it’s a one-time fee. see? bargain :)]
5. $4824,14. I’m not into legal stuff, I’ll take Guy’s advice on this one, but I’m definitely sure that I could find something cheaper even in the US.
6. $190.8. Two-year “Crazy Domain Insane!” package at DreamHost, making me forget about problems like bandwidth or disk quota, downtime, hacking, etc.

A little math reveals it all: without the legal fees, my truemors would cost less than $790.8 and a little brain effort, while Guy Kawasaki’s truemors goes up to $7282.95, more than 9 times my expenses, but no brain activity was required.

As a conclusion: if you want to start your Internet business and you don’t have some active brain cells, then PLEASE start playing Lemonade Tycoon in real life. Sincerely, it’s not a cool thing to show off when you’re stupid, and it’s even crappy when you bring evidences. At the end, I want to congratulate Guy Kawasaki for showing one more time what you can do when you have lots of money, a stolen idea [remember digg?] and no fuckin’ brains.