Found+READ: Comments by Wayne Mulligan

Wayne Mulligan — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 07:37:53 GMT

Took a lot of guts to give a candid account of what went on at 8020 with the public like that. Giving back to a community of entrepreneurs in order to help them avoid similar mistakes – Right on!

Wayne Mulligan — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:43:13 GMT

If Jon (or anyone else with business experience in China) reads this I’d love to know more about how to set up a company in China as an American. I did my undergrad at Columbia and majored in East Asian Studies with a concentration on Chinese Economics. From what I understand, foreigners can’t own equity in a Chinese corporation – is there some Hong Kong company loophole or something? How did you protect yourself and your stake in the company at first?

I studied in China for a while – I know it must’ve been a challenge to leave the comforts of home for a country so dramatically different – gotta give Jon a ton of credit!

Wayne Mulligan — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:34:18 GMT

At the end of the day your primary goal should be solving problems for the users. And while you certainly need to monetize your traffic at some point you really shouldn’t be worrying about this right before launch. If your co-founders are the tech guys and you’re the “business guy” then you could add a lot more value to your business and your business plan by going out there and cutting strategic partnerships or co-branding deals before you launch.

But if your question is less operational and more conceptual (i.e. “What should I put in the business plan to make it sound compelling?”) then your best bet is to simply find out what the average CPM rates are in your sector, say that you’ll eventually serve advertisements and then use those CPM rates along with traffic estimates to build your revenue projections.

-W

Wayne Mulligan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 21:06:19 GMT

Tony,

You make some great points – I owned and operated a dev shop in the late 90’s. While I don’t find the “only those desperate for business will read RFP’s” to be true, I do agree that the RFP can’t be “too rigid.”

Eliminating your developers or designers from giving any type of professional input is not only foolish but it’s counterproductive. I probably should’ve included that in my article as well. But I do think an RFP is not only valuable for the client, but for the vendor as well. Things always get overlooked in initial phone conversations and most firms need some type of guideline for creating a quality statement of work. That also protects the client from firms who create an overly limited statement of work.

Wayne Mulligan — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:18:33 GMT

I agree—at the end of the day where is a CEO’s time best spent: thinking about how to scale his servers due to a jump in traffic, or working with marketing to get even more traffic?

The only thing I’m waiting on is for Amazon to release some type of persistent database solution.