Jennlog

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.

Lifelock,

No. I did not provide an “affiliate” with permission to sell you my email address.

Neither you or your “affiliate” bothered to authenticate the ownership of my email address after it was provided to you or them through fraudulent means. I dare you to prove that you or your “affiliate” acquired my email address from me.

This is the second time you have spammed me with this weak “You are receiving this email because you opted to receive messages from us or one of our affiliates” scam.

Stop.

Edited to add:

It appears as if some of their website “contact us” email addresses that I emailed with a request to stop spamming me the first time (and never received a reply or obviously any action) have added my email address to their personal “email deny” lists.

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
<tami@lifelock.com>
(reason: 553 Sender is on user denylist (Mode: normal))
<member.services@lifelock.com>
(reason: 553 Sender is on user denylist (Mode: normal))

Irony.

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.

So I came home from a meeting yesterday afternoon to a notice taped to my front door:

I did a little exploring and realized that this house is a few doors away from me:

It should be quite the show as they round the corners and get to the power/cable/telco lines running across the street.

My neighbors suggested that the new owner is having the house moved to his property out of town rather than rip it down like everyone else — Now that’s a commitment to recycling.

I was walking by my front tree today and I saw one of the squirrels going to town on one of the stumps left by the tree guys a few months ago.

I then noticed that all the stumps left on the tree were running (literally dripping) with maple sap.

Welcome to Spring Thaw in Boulder.

At the last Boulder OpenCoffee Club meeting, Patti Miller suggested an idea that would enable the Boulder tech start-up/bootstrap community to share resources online. We’ve been working on it steadily since then and will be launching the site as a Wiki+Forum at this morning’s meeting.

The address is: http://boulder.techbootstrap.com

(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.

The Cat House

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.

Driving by the watermain break 30 minutes ago

Looks like a few thousand gallons a minute pouring onto Baseline and then down the hill towards Broadway.