Jennlog

Yallery.com is still softlaunched — meaning that we’re not “officially” promoting our services while we work through some important issues and implement remaining features.

That said, early this month, I presented our service at the Denver Boulder Founders Meetup and the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup to share our progress with the local tech and entrepreneurial communities.

As I discuss Yallery.com with people, it became increasingly obvious that I needed something other than old and unrelated business cards to hand out. I was also planning a trip to Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico and thought a postcard would be handy as they are the promotional “lingue franca” of the Gallery industry. I designed and ordered some cards and postcards.

Another obvious need was stickers — It’s a Web2.0 rule I think. I began to look around and ask friends about sticker printers. It came down to two companies, and ultimately one — a local company named Sticker Giant.

Yallery.com moves into meatspace

John Fischer, founder of Sticker Giant heard that I was considering another company to print up our Yallery stickers and made an incredibly generous offer to print up our stickers. I’ve had one of each on my Powerbook since they arrived and they are high quality. Thanks John, we’ll be ordering our future stickers from you.

I was highly impressed with the quality of the product from my initial Overnight Prints order — the postcard and my business card were produced in Kentucky and matched my design exactly. Unfortunately, my second order was produced in California and while the reverse is the same quality as my original card, the front gradient and colors look extremely washed out — very dull and ultimately inconsistent. My email to Overnight Prints about this was ignored and I think my future printing will be done by someone else.

Wow, so this is my first post in March. I’ve been meaning to post but I’ve been busy with Statuspalooza and a number of other things this month.

I ended last month in California, working on a contract in Sacramento. I returned to Boulder on March 1.

The next week was a very busy event week for Tech/Start-up folks in Boulder with Open Coffee, Silicon Flatirons’ IP Law Panels at CU and the NewTech Meetup all occuring on Tuesday, then the Tech Cocktail event happening at The Foundry on Thursday.

On March 13th, the Boulder County Business Report published an article about the Boulder TechBootstrap project Patti Miller and I have been developing.

Statuspalooza took a fair bit of my attention and energy this month, because not only did I need a new work visa, but I needed a new passport. With the exception of a very grumpy US immigration agent (who felt I had misrepresented my experience to the US government in 2000 and therefore demanded that I re-substantiate my claim to work in the US on this application or be denied entry), it all went very smoothly.

Statuspalooza Tour 2008:

1. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Arrive Toronto
2. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Photos taken
3. Wed March 19, 2008 - Morning: Passport Application submitted
4. Thurs March 20, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Picked Up
5. Mon March 24, 2008 - Afternoon: US Visa Application Approved
6. Mon March 24, 2008 - Evening: Depart for Denver

I spent the week at my parents’ place. It was nice to relax for a while and visit over Easter, which I haven’t done in years.

There’s a Yallery update that’s about half finished that is meant to standardize our css implementation. I hope to create a more formal document structure that will enable an easier fix for Windows browser issues (mainly font sizing and layers). I’ve also spent some time looking into IE6 fixes and workarounds and concluded that there will never be an IE6-compatible version of Yallery, so upgrade your old nasty Windows browser.

Lastly, Billie the neighbor cat has gone missing. He hasn’t been by to visit in over a month and a half, so it’s been pretty lonely without my keyboard-hogging head-butting bud around.

This post answers the questions I was pondering in my Foreign Entrepreneurs and US Visas post last November.

In November, I was working full-time on Yallery dev, writing our pitch and talking with angels and VCs with one eye focused on fundraising and the other towards applying for an Entrepreneur (investor) visa as my TN-1 visa status expired in March 2008. I was also entertaining the notion of returning to Canada after nine years in the People’s Republic of Boulder if the fundraising and visa situation couldn’t be worked through.

Well, a lot has changed since November.

A couple weeks ago I created Boulder Tech Bootstrap with Patti Miller — a Wiki + Forum community resource and information sharing site for people starting and operating new tech companies in the Boulder-Denver region.

On the Yallery front, Michael and I removed the “Invite Wall” — and now anyone can view the art or create an account and share their own art (my personal Yallery Collector Dashboard is here: http://yallery.com/jennr). I’m considering it to be in a soft launch state while we continue development.

After a lot of great feedback, I accepted that Yallery was not going to interest investors until there was a demonstrable membership base and revenue (no matter how much I believe in the value and novelty of art relationships). Yallery is still a “project” and the revenue is still a far ways away — removing the Invite Wall will improve the membership base situation.

I also accepted that I could no longer afford to support myself while I worked full-time on Yallery and started to put out my feelers for consulting work. And so, next week, I start some product development & advisory consulting for a company just outside of Sacramento. It’s a short contract that may go longer-term if we gel.

What this all means is I’ll be re-upping my TN-1 for a year due to my new Management Consulting gig in California and will be sticking around in Boulder while I work part-time on Yallery.

And now that this has been sorted out, I can set some milestones for the year:

My Yallery milestones for this year will be to get it working correctly on Windows browsers, implement the revenue generation components of Yallery, grow the membership and start operating the marketplace features.

My professional milestones for this year will be to add the most value I can to my client’s products.

My personal milestones for this year will be to get out of debt, restart saving again and get out and enjoy friends, life and love more than I did while I was in startup mode.

It’s going to be a good year.

At 10:30pm last evening, I pushed the 2-week effort known as “Public 1″ to production.

New in this revision is Search, the Visitor user, a new registration method, a new password recovery method, a new member directory method, a new public home, some ideas leading to a new private-user home and more than enough bug crunching to have me looking forward to bed right now.

There’s still a bunch (well, a bunch of bunches) to do, but it’s looking ok.

Yay us.

(this post is cross-posted from the Yallery Blog)

Late last week, I sent our active membership an email notifying them that Michael and I were unable to continue working on Yallery.com full time and there would be a major change to the service.

Yallery is almost two years old and has been my and Michael’s full-time focus since it began. We had planned on attracting more developers and some funding to pursue the execution of our plans, but at this point it is still just Michael and I.

I can’t blame the investors I met with, who’s reactions to our plan were universally “it looks really cool, but I’m not sure there’s a large enough market to make an investment”. We don’t know the size of our market well enough to answer that question. We have a good idea, but there are a number of variables that make any attempts to guess meaningless while our service is hidden away from the world.

The Web 2.0 ethic has encouraged developers to “Release early and release often” — to get your product out the door and into the world as quickly as possible. Yallery was my first web-based service since the early 1990s, and it’s probably unfortunate that I was somewhat stuck on the Web 1.0 “Push it when it’s polished” approach.

We had hoped to have a certain amount of features and functionality implemented, tested and “polished” before we threw open our doors to the public. But, two years on and meagerly self-funded, we’re looking at diminishing returns if we continue to hide a ton of work behind a sign-in screen.

Therefore, we’re removing the “Invite Wall” and will soon allow any visitor — artist, collector or gallery — to create a free, unlimited account on Yallery. With the removal of the Invite Wall, we will also be creating a new home page that will welcome all visitors to view and interact with the the art created, owned and sold by our members.

As bummed out as we should be right now, it’s a very encouraging and exciting time for us — we are about to introduce our two year old baby to the world. Quite a few of my friends have thought we were crazy for hiding such a great site and not opening it up earlier.

There will be problems — the fact that it doesn’t work right on IE is probably the largest right now (but it does work on FireFox and Safari). We also have a bunch of bugs identified and there are a lot of partially implemented features that we will resolve as time allows us — but we are not giving up.

Things may take a little longer to accomplish, but we still have a long, feature-filled roadmap for the site. We’re going to be working part-time until we can maybe return full-time some time in the future. In the meantime, we hope to find some people who like Yallery and feel at home enough to share their art with us.

Here we go with another one of my New Year’s Resolutions. This one is personal, and one that took me almost a month to face — It’s time to focus on me.

I can honestly say that I’ve given everything I had into Yallery, and then whatever else I could find — so I could give it a full-time effort. My standard of living has gone from pretty darn excellent when I left my last full-time engagement in August 2005, to pretty darn close to where it was when I was touring Canada with bar bands and living in my recording studio in the late 80s.

It’s with a heavy heart that I step back from having Yallery as my life and start looking to rebuild my health, repay debts, and exercise the other parts of my experience that are of some value to other founders — other companies.

I believe that there is a place for Yallery as a community and as a useful service for the artists and collectors who will find us. Michael and I are not giving up, we’re moving it to a part-time focus until we may spend more time on it once more. We’re going to continue to develop; We’re going to continue to support; We’re going to continue to evangelize the site to both artists and collectors as a place to share art; We’re going to continue to seek out cleaver minds and bright hearts to help us make our vision a reality.

My next post will detail some Yallery changes occuring in the near future. In the meantime, if you are looking for some executive assistance of the technical persuasion, ask me for my resume — my email address is jenn@jenn.com.

One of my 2008 resolutions is seeking out and developing more partnerships with people and companies.

I’ve been operating websites since 1994. Not as long as some, but early enough that I have acquired a few domain names. Most of the names below were registered as "Web 1.0" projects that came and went as companies or projects that were started, acquired or dissolved.

During the last year, I’ve developed (I think) a more cooperative view about the creation of websites and Internet-directed efforts. I have witnessed the excitement in spontaneity and strength of teams as people join and participate in Startup Weekends around the world. I have servers, I have domain names and I have some experience with Internet stuff — let’s talk about creating something new.

Yallery is my primary focus and has been my full-time job for almost two years. While it is still a few months away from an unrestricted launch, I’ve been working on tour.net and ShowMedia to figure out and learn some technical and programming stuff to bring back to Yallery. I would love to work with others on turning the domains below into useful, prosperous products and/or services. Email me at jenn@jenn.com or leave a comment below. (Truth be told, I’m also interested in speaking with developers and designers who may wish to get involved at an equity level in Yallery, tour.net and ShowMedia.)

This post is an invitation to start a dialog with marketing and technical folks about working together on new ideas. This post is not an invitation for “domainers” to tell me about a great google/yahoo ad parking scheme.

The contents of this post have been rumbling around my head now for a few months. As many people know, I am Canadian and I’ve been in the US variously since 2000 on a TN-1 work visa to allow me to provide Management Consulting services for the clients of a Boulder film and video systems integration firm named GWH&a (if you were at the first Startup Weekend, you were in their office).

As so much of my focus is on getting Yallery.com to market, I decided to limit the most recent visa renewal to only six months. This means my current US Work Visa ends in March 2008 and short of getting a new visa qualification, I’m going home to Canada.

GWH&a has been really really good for me. The people there are awesome and we’ve done some amazing projects together. When I first came to Boulder in January 1999, I’d just finished writing a report for the Canadian Senate on media over IP networks and was scheduled to chair a panel at Spring COMDEX in Chicago on “Integrating IP, Voice, Video and Data”, but I didn’t have much else going on. Wyndham and his clients brought me opportunities I would never have had, had I remained in Canada. I will always be in a huge debt to him.

But, I am an entrepreneur. I left my last “9-5 job” in 1989 (at a Canadian bank-owned discount brokerage house … I even took the Canadian Securities Course) to work full-time at my recording studio. I’ve always had the weakness of taking the chance on where my heart takes me.

I’ve never had the “big exit” that so many entrepreneurs dream of, but I’ve done okay. I’ve experienced some failures also. For example, in 2000 I began and then ended my last company with a personally guaranteed $80,000 line of credit plus my personal credit cards — all maxed — plus interest — and eventually paid off. Before that there was a company I founded with two others where no money was made at the end but the majority of our team and efforts survived together as part of a new organization — that was all I could have asked for.

I’m also a consultant. I am great at combining things, people and ideas together based on a desired goal. I love making things work. I love the society-changing affects of experiencing media over the Internet — I’ve loved it since the MBone and the announcement to the “rem-conf” mailing list about some new beta software called “Real Audio” from a tiny company named Progressive Networks.

My last solid consulting contract (and income) ended August 2005, by my request after many extensions. I spent the subsequent six months pondering opportunities and traveling a ton to visit friends, explore and decide what to do with my life — London, Seattle, San Francisco, Sydney (2x), Singapore, Toronto, Los Angeles.

After clearing my head, in March 2006 I began fleshing out the idea that would become Yallery.com. This would be the first Internet start-up that I’d done that would be based from one of my passions. I’ve been working on Yallery.com full-time since then, with some rare 1-2 week contracts as I am needed.

Legally, I would say that Yallery.com is more of a project than a company right now. I really want to make Yallery.com a US corporation, with operations in Boulder but without some type of longer term ability for me to stay and work here in the US, I’ve been holding off on doing any type of registration.

The US visa system has an entrepreneur visa qualification called an “E-2″ for “Treaty Investors”. Essentially, the US government wants you to bring “a substantial amount of money” to the US and cause that money to be spent on creating jobs for americans and in return you are allowed to stay in the US for renewable two year periods as long as you are connected to that business. Just what “a substantial amount of money” is to the US government varies depending on which Web sites you read, but it tends to average about $100,000.00.

There is another qualification called an “EB-5″ for “Greencard Investors”, which provides a greencard to 10,000 investors every year provided they each invest $1,000,000 into a business and create ten or more full-time jobs for at least two years.

So, to stay in Boulder and make Yallery.com a US corporation, I need to show the US government that I’ve personally invested at least $100,000 into Yallery.com. To make things a little easier, the INS/ICE will consider “sweat equity” as long as it is balanced by some type of third-party valuation and/or investment.

I do think Michael and I are at a point where we could receive an impartial valuation of Yallery.com that would place a value of my contribution to be above $100,000, but without some cash on the balance sheet, I think the US would deny me an EB-2 application. Bootstrapping isn’t much of an option.

So, today is the first day of what will surely be a stressful time. Will Yallery be a US Corporation? Will it be a Canadian Corporation? Will I go back to Toronto or take a chance on Vancouver?

Only time will tell.

(and if you need some technical management help, I’d be happy to engage for 1-2 weeks at a time as your project requires — Bootstrapping is some hard stuff!)

Yallery launched its first Beta over the weekend (Beta1). It spent more time in QA than we’d scheduled because of some site environment differences between the dev servers, qa server and production — Totally messing with our minds as features would work flawlessly on two of three environments or one of three. We got through it and launched and we’re now working on our first Beta1 revision.

We (well, I — but I am trying to convince Michael to start posting) launched a Yallery Blog too. It is really great to finally be talking about Yallery after so much effort.

Yay us.

I’d be surprised if anyone reads my blog on a regular basis other than my mom (Hi Mom) or certain friends (Hi Dana) and co-workers. But I apologize for going almost a month without an update anyways.

When my parents left, the quest for Beta began almost immediately. I’ve been working with Michael, Chris and Brian with the Yallery ‘Private Beta’ milestone quickly approaching in October. I’ve also starting to meet people about our first round of outside funding. The next two months are going to be make it or break it months.

I’ve been pondering the tactical plan we’re going to use in our initial approach to the market. Based on a week of solid modeling and discussions with alpha members and the Yallery team, I think we’re going to make some exciting changes for all member types. (not that this will matter to the 99.9999% of members who follow and will never know there was anything ever planned differently)

Lastly, If you are an artist or an art collector and stumbled upon this post for some reason — And you can keep a secret for a few months, I am happy to give you and nine others a free lifetime “premium” account to Yallery if you agree to give us with some feedback.