Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

1. Get a name and a URL. If you are a goofy web 2.0 business pick something really stupid like Twinklefish (actually we built this as a joke but it ranks right up there if you search Web 2.0). The URL must be .com- all others are stupid. And if you are thinking of using a clever country code like .tv be aware that said country could decide, at any time, to close you down or sell the domain to someone else.
2. Get a data host. We’re using Media Temple because they claim (we’ll see soon) that they can handle big traffic spikes. Don’t cheap out here. Guy put his goofy Truemors site on Yahoo (what was he thinking?) and they closed him down because he got a lot of traffic. We’re paying $50/month for real servers not a partition on a hard drive somewhere. Don’t save 40 bucks just to risk going down. D’oh!
3. Incorporate. Yes you need a lawyer. Not just to do the docs (their paralegal knows more about this than they do) but to get you set up for the big time. Pick a lawyer who knows the whole start-up thing and can get you meetings with VCs and angels. Don’t use your brother-in-law. We’re dropping a few grand here. We’re a C corp because we may want to raise some money and we are developing media properties which we may want to sell.
4. Get two iPhones as soon as they come out. Get the new flash-based ultralight backlit LED Macbooks (oh yeah, they don’t exist yet). We need to be mobile and, while I love it to death, I don’t want to haul my weighty MacBook Pro everywhere. The idea is to be able to walk onto a plane with one bag that you wouldn’t mind walking a few miles with daily. We’re starting this business to liberate ourselves not to get tied down to a lot of stuff.
5. Read The Four Hour Work Week
6. Get a fake receptionist and a toll free number that redirects to your iPhone.
7. Figure out your business idea and how to monetize (make money with) it. Why is this number 7? Hey, it sure looks like its way down the priority with an awful lot of start-ups. Take a look at Techcrunch- everyday there’s a new company that vaguely states they’ll make money with advertising after they build traffic. I work for an ad agency and I’ve got news for these guys: We’re not interested in traffic for traffic’s sake. We need relevance, places to put ads that will reach specific audiences, not geeks who send each other Twitters. To monetize traffic you need repeat users who have a specific interest that is related to buying or selling something. Read that sentence again. One more time. The keywords are ‘repeat’, ’specific’, ‘interest’ and ‘buying or selling’. We have a model that tightly addresses all of these and the things that they need to purchase are big ticket enough to allow us to make a decent profit by promoting them. No, we’re not monetizing our first media site through advertising although we could.
8. Hire some Indian programmers. Don’t use Russians, they’ll steal your idea and spam a billion people with it.
9. Get a good partner, someone you trust and who has a complementary skill set and a work ethic. I’ve been through the bad partner problem (he stopped working just as I was selling a ton of work) and it really sucked (like almost-bankruptcy suck). Mike and I worked together for a year and we know each others strengths. I’m a marketer and he is the web/SEO/SEM guy. In case you can’t tell, marketing is our focus, not technology.
10. Do it now. Don’t wait, don’t try to launch a perfect product, just do it. Read Getting Real from 37 Signals to cut though your clouds of doubt. It’s a free e-book download and they know because they did it for real.

We’re in the middle of all these things. Stay tuned for more blow by blow coverage of our start-up.