Friday 28 June 2013

DNS Not so easy!

I was pondering today how any one else does this.  I was wearing many hats today and with Dave away I am wondering how anyone actually gets a tech start up done if they have no idea on the technical details.  I suppose that is why so many people need tech co founders.  Not that I think in this case Dave could have helped me out.  I could have asked Andre but I have some pride...

So the topic of the post is about DNS stuff and I'll get to that but I also wanted to reflect on the different tasks I did today.

I started this morning working on a side startup where I'm helping out with some tech.  That's kind of good in that it's inspirational for me to see other companies get there with their work.

On Oddswop I worked on booking in marketing for the launch, picked up some brochures, paid some invoices, worked on terms and conditions, had a look at some of my Founder Institute assignment work, did some admin on things like Mailchimp, Google Apps, reviewed Gumtree as a competitive product, tried some tools which won't work for me -- I was thinking of relisting some Gumtree ads on Oddswop to give it some extra content but I just condone it... , updated Sendgrid and then tried to review my domain names as I want to go live with the .au site.  I have my .au with a company in Australia and the bulk of my domains with Godaddy (just so I don't have to set up another account).  And now I wish I just put everything through Godaddy just to make it easier for myself.

I re-looked at using DNSMadeEasy as they have been emailing me reminding me that my trial will end in early July.  And I have been told it's better... and more redundant.  But I never did do anything about it other than type in a couple of domains I owned.  But after accidentally stuffing up the .au domain by trying to update the Google Apps account details I thought I better put some effort in moving at least that one across.  Wow!  I thought I was somewhat cluey.   But I had to do some research on my http redirect as I'm never sure if I 301 or 302 is the permanent redirect and what is a 'hard' URL?  I had to search about  ANAMEs (it's a DNSMadeEasy specific thing) and then I had to test it and being impatient and waiting for DNS changes sometimes isn't that easy and I end up going through dodgy proxy sites.   I find it amusing when I read the docs or watch the videos and I still have barely an idea what is going on.  Why can't they give real examples on how a company would likely use it rather than speak technobabble.  Sometimes technobabble needs Google translate too!

The other thing in the last couple of days is that I want to one of those Women Entrepreneur events.  Usually I try and avoid them as I am just not into that type of thing.  I think it's the lack of balance.  I am hardpressed to work out a time where I worked in a balanced or female oriented environment... so maybe I do like it unbalanced but not where there are no males in the room!  It was a Google Sudo event and they had Naomi Simson (RedBalloon) and Jo Burston.  Both were fantastic to listen to.  Not the American sort of "pow wow" type thing but genuine stories on what they did to get a start.  From Naomi's naive start to Jo's gutsy move to gain the attention of an experienced investor it's just great to hear.

I was so impressed I pushed myself to chat to Jo and thank her for her inspirational talk.  And lo and behold she is friends of Benjamin Chong's.  So I've got a coffee date with Jo... as long as I graduate from FI!  I've also asked for the Heads Over Heels program application form so I'll get that sorted too in the next week or so.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

Intermittent mutterings of a startup

When speaking with Tom Frazier yesterday (who is a Director of the Sydney chapter of Founder Institute) he suggested that I blog about my start up 'doings' beyond what Oddswop is doing.  So here goes nothing!  Yet another blog.  I know people do this for a living and blog a lot but as much as I like updating and being updated blogging is something that isn't that natural to me.

It'll be valuable as I can see what progress we have made as an organisation and how I've improved also in terms of what and  how I'm doing things.  So it could contain the innane things like my comment about testing out a standing desk (which is top of mind as I'm very aware of my standing rather than sitting - but at least I'm not slouching) or more serious stuff like agreeing to commissioning a Brick film for the explainer!  It'll be exciting but was more money that I'd rather not part with but I do think it'll be a break through.  I don't think I've seen a Brick explainer before (hmm after a quick google I only found an animated Lego explainer!

I should do a quick precis of where we are at...

Oddswop is in development with 73Robots (Andre use to work with me back in CompuServe days and is doing this as a reference job so paid but certainly more invested in this than any normal vendor would be!)
Development or at least the requirements documentation tarted in around March...

I signed up for Founder Institute again in March to give Oddswop the best chance it could have for getting off the ground and successful.

We've approached UNSW and UTS in different guises to see if we can test the market with them and use them as a target marketing market (ie concentrate marketing efforts on them).  Other target markets include parents and backpackers as well as ex-pats.

We coined the term "Oddspots" for the photo tagging side of things.  This was thanks to Garry Visontay who mentioned that we should think about coming up with our own term.  It didn't take long for "Oddspots" to come to me.  It will be "odd" as they aren't really spots but rather squares!

The plan is the launch in late July at UNSW.  Originally it was at o-week but I've been told that it's called "Welcome Back Day" and happens on 29 July.  Phew a few more days up our sleeves to get things right.

The best and latest development is that I emailed a few of my friends in powerful places within IT departments and asked them if they'd be interested in the whitelabel version of Oddswop for their corporate intranet.  This is where they would run a subdomain version of Oddswop and post to it which would share it with all their internal staff as well as the Oddswop community.  The thinking is that we'd run it as a Freemium model where they can have it for free if it's locked to share it to everyone in and out of their organisation but a paid for version could get rid of fees and / or allow posting only to the internal community.  We got our first expression of interest from Ticketek!!  So that was super exciting!

The other big recent news was access to the development server where I can now see the listing side of things!

I'll put musings for today on another listing.  Thank goodness there is the ability to email to this blog otherwise I don't think there is much of a chance of me keeping all the blogs up to date.