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In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 13 & 14:

13 – Don’t waste time that others do better
(plus it’s free or almost free)

Any company needs a number of basic processes and applications such as Email, calendaring, time tracking, billing, version control, task tracking, etc. And quite a number of startups had in the past first to invest a couple of person weeks in installing your email server and all the rest (We know what we talk off… ;-(

Today that’s a different matter: All these basic applications are yours for free are almost for free. Examples include Google Apps including Email, Calendaring, Office Applications, Paymo and Mite for time tracking, Beanstalk and others for version control, Highrise for CRM, Memonic for online research.

Focus on what really counts – your product or service – and don’t waste time on what others do better.

14 – Get early agreement – do mockups

And off you go. All set up, your product idea clearly spelled out (at least that’s what the founding team thinks), now it’s just a question of execution. Or so you think.

Countless number of times we came across situations where even seasoned teams thought they had spelled it out, only to discover after implementation that there is a notable gap between what different stakeholders thought the product should do and the implemented product actually does.

We suggest a different approach: Do mockups early on.

Put on paper (digital paper is also okay) what you want the application to look like and to work like. You will see that often the initial agreement disintegrates once you start doing mockups only to emerge with a stronger consensus on what the application really is supposed to do.

In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 9 & 10:

11 – Bend the rules

This is no call for cheating. Yet if you register that high speed Internet connection as a private individual you receive five times the speed at a third of the cost compared to a company registration. So go for the private plan and save big bucks.

In case you make it as a company you anyway will want to upgrade to a speedier connection at some point and go for a company account at that very moment. In case you don’t make it, you saved a great deal of money.

The same goes for a number of other services. And anyhow, you are at the start of your company life. You are in a difficult transition phase from this being your totally private idea to the infant stages of a company. And infants need a lot of leeway. A bit of bending the rules helps.

12 – Forget tapes, do online backups

“Yesterday all my backups seemed so far away…” Backups are important. Full stop. Or you may suffer a fate similar to Magnolia, a once acclaimed social bookmarking service, rivalling Delicious. Data corruption plus no backups doomed the service for good.

Today backups is no longer that nightmarish tape box, difficult to setup and difficult to maintain. A number of nifty online backup options do exist. We here at Memonic made good experiences with vendors such as Jungle Disk. A number of similar services do exist.

Basically it’s cloud computing again, as in fact you backup your data to an online storage (Amazon or Rackspace in the case of Jungle Disk) with the vendor providing the software to do the backups and in case required restore the backups. Bonus tip: Test your backups.

In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 9 & 10:

9 – Never buy hardware at list prices – Never

As said in the last post, we bought a development server at CHF 7’000 for increased flexibility. The official price was way over CHF 10’000.

The hardware business compares quite often more to an oriental bazaar than to everyday low prices of your local supermarket. Also hardware vendors like Dell, IBM, HP know list prices. But it is like on the bazaar in Marrakesh: People paying list prices are tourists.

How to get a discount? Compare offerings, ask straight for startup rebates, and if all this doesn’t help, announce an imminent order two days before the current quarter ends, but only if we can talk price again…

10 – It’s a virtual world

So, you bought your fat server; now what? Employ virtualization. The concept is long known: Emulate or “virtualize” on a fat server another computer.

Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments.

Sure you loose a bit of performance because the virtualization software mimics the actual physical hardware. With ever faster machines and ever more memory this is no roadblock to virtualization. There are however three big gains: Less space, a more flexible development environment, and less initial investment.

Last week we were at the Internet World in Munich, where we received the 3rd prize of the startup competition "Business Idea 2010". For us a great fair to show to product and to listen to quite a number of valuable feedbacks. 

^{(Picture by Yu-Cheng Chou)}

©Chregu / CC BY-SA 2.0

Yesterday we had the monthly Webtuesday meeting in Zürich, Switzerland. Chris and myself showed in quite some detail how we are building the Memonic platform from a technical point of view. We presented our usage of HTTP web services, presented some services as examples and showed what technologies and products we use to power the platform.

See the slides (PDF, 400k) for lots of details.

Additional background information is available from past talks:

• Scalability with HTTP
• Memonic on AWS

In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 7 & 8:

7 – The best 10$ you’ll ever spend

Sounds like too good to be true… And actually it is a very sweet deal.

The basic infrastructure of most startups is the notebooks of the founders. Business plans, specifications, tasks lists are managed with the usual office suite. And soon the big version chaos hits. Nobody knows which version is the correct one, where to find the current specification, which tasks are completed.

There is a neat solution to this called Jira (Task tracking), Confluence (Wiki) and later for software development Greenhoper, Bamboo, Fisheye and Crowd. Each of these software packages goes for 10$ for 10 users per year.

Result: A systematic approach to work. And the best 10$ ever spent.

(Discloser: We do not have any shares in Atlassian or commission agreement. Why we’re fans? We run two successful startups - local.ch and memonic.com - on this setup.)

8 – Use cloud computing

Our most expensive investment so far was a development server with a price tag of CHF 7’000.- Our second most expensive investment was our office furniture from IKEA. A chair, a desk, a conference desk, and some small furniture pieces. That’s it.

We haven’t invested a dime into our entire life infrastructure. Instead we rent. The magic words are “Cloud Computing”. In our case we rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Instead of investing heavily upfront into our life infrastructure, we rent on an as-you-go basis the required computing infrastructure (storage, processing, etc.). And it’s cheap: our February bill totalled 157$.

Consequence: A much-reduced capital requirement.

Gestern fand bei Leumund ein gemütlicher als Kaffeegipfel benannter Erfahrungsaustausch statt. Toni und Dorian haben Memonic vorstellt. Später kam Andreas von Gunten mit einem iPad vorbei. 

Danke Euch Teilnehmern - Andreas, Bastian, Christian, Daniel, Donat, Gustavo, Heinz, Karin, Markus, Ralph, Roland, Samuel - für Euer Feedback. Ganz speziellen Dank an Christian für die Organisation sowie Markus und Gustavo für die Infrastruktur. 

Hier ein paar Eindrücke:

Yesterday the Internet Briefing Developer Conference took place in Zurich, Switzerland. All the talks were about current technology trends and were of great quality. I did a talk about scalable applications with HTTP - basically I showed how we build our architecture at Memonic.

The background material is available in a separate Memonic Set for the HTTP Scalability presentation. That Set also includes the Slides.

Christian Leu, besser bekannt als Leumund, organisiert am Samstag in einer Woche einen gemütlichen Erfahrungsaustausch bei sich zuhause. Das Thema: Flüssige Information, d.h. wir stellen Memonic einem interessierten und kritischen Publikum vor. Teilnahme frei - Alles weitere auf dem Blog von Leu. 

In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 5 & 6

5 – Time tracking pays

Well time tracking sounds so big lame company. And yet the effort pays. Why? It’s not about control but about the allocation of your most precious resource: Time. We simply want to know for what topics / development efforts we invest how much time. And to keep track of this only time tracking will do.

6 – Start with a good founding contract

Startup euphoria often obscures the fact that the majority of startups fail. Or that the business plan requires substantial rewriting. Or that a team member quits for perfectly valid reasons (A great love on the other side of the planet). Each point for itself is plenty of potential trouble.

For that reason a number of subjects should be dealt with before. Amongst them:

• - Decision-making among the founding shareholders
• - Exit clauses (for voluntary and non-voluntary leaving) inclusive of a formula for the repurchase price for the shares
• - Additional shareholder obligations of the founders (E.g. what happens with your shares if you divorce?)
• - Right of first refusal, pre-emptive right and tag along right