[nabentre] getting started:a few questions/ideas

[Brandon Keith Biggs]

Hello Ty,
I'm no professional myself, but I've been reading and researching myself 
and from what I've read there are a couple things you should do:
1. Make a business plan.
2. start talking to customers about what they would want and get a nice 
list of people who would love to see your product.
3. talk to friends and family about your business and ask them if they 
would be willing to help you fund your costs.
4. Talk to a business attorney about offering stocks and the different 
business structures.
5. attend angel investor lunches.
6. There are some government grants (I'm not sure of the website, but 
the name is somewhere in my books, other people probably know what it 
is) Look for support in your area. You may have an advantage because you 
are blind and a programmer. Also I'm sure it would help if you planned 
on getting your own teem of people together, working for you.
7. See if you can out-source anything to cut down on production costs.
8. Talk to banks about the kinds of loans you can get.

I would suggest you read OPM, Other People's Money by Michael A. 
Lechter. It is on Bookshare.
On another note, I would really like to have a web host that has an easy 
to use accessible interface.
I would also like some people who can do the basic design for a website 
with very little if any royalties and who can help get it so I can just 
upload an HTML document or something in order to update.
If you wanted to be really fancy, you could make a file explorer-type 
application like Dropbox has, but have it as the database of the 
website. That way I could have pages in one folder, app files in another 
folder, pictures in another folder, music in another folder, uploads in 
another folder and that way I can have a backup on my computer, I don't 
need to worry about going into a new system to sort my files and it is 
easier to update.
Some ideas that you may want to consider are:
1. Offering drop-box-like uploading and downloading for audio gamers. 
Developers often hit a cap of how many downloads they can have a month 
with Drop Box, but they still want a free service. So you can offer a 
free service for maybe 1 or 2 games and maybe an add can show up some 
how when a person lists a link. I personally find accessible adds very 
amusing, but it may be better for the game developer them self to build 
in adds into his game while you charge.
2. Some how integrate with Drop box, so I can put some part of my 
database in Dropbox and view it on any device. This would be better than 
trying to compete with Dropbox and making apps for portable devices.
3. Offer a groups hosting that is easy to use. I hate googlegroups and 
Freelists is not good for everything.
4. offer a free website with maybe a very small amount of hosting space 
and only have adds for your website hosting on there.
5. Make it very easy to in bed doodle, YouTube, Facebook and Survey 
Monkey into our website.
6. Offer the ability to update twitter, facebook and linked in when we 
update our website. That way I go to your website instead of facebook to 
write updates. It would also be awesome to have the ability to make 
facebook events and invite all the people on our email list through an 
easy to use interface.

You could maybe charge a little for each tool as either a subscription 
or a one-time buying fee. It would also be cool if you had a CSS 
professional contact website creators and offer to beef up the look of 
their website for a little cost. As a blind person I am really scared 
about looking really dumb to sighted people, but I want to build my own 
webpages. I just don't trust myself with CSS.
I would really like to see some kind of provider like the above come to 
be, so I can use it for all my websites and so people at audiogames.net 
aren't having to combine their dropbox with their games for their first 
several projects.
Also, if someone has a game on a website it looks so much more 
professional, everyone sees a dropbox link and knows that that person is 
new. A website link says to the consumer that this developer knows what 
they are doing. Also, with a website link people can get listed on the 
audio games website.
I was looking at Sam net and really liked their product and interface. 
It just didn't have enough documentation for me to want to buy it. But I 
think using Same Net and Dropbox would be better than trying to compete 
with them.
Thanks,

Brandon Keith Biggs

On 2/25/2014 6:51 PM, Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
> hello all:
> I had a few questions I wanted to run by some of you.
> First, I'd really like to get into the area of web hosting and selling 
> virtual-private servers. There's all sorts of stuff that can be done 
> with this, but essentially it'd be nice to be able to start customers 
> up and host their websites for them--perhaps with an easy interface to 
> get them going.
> While I realize web hosts are a dime a dozen, I want to offer 
> security, privacy and stability as my selling point, together with an 
> easy-to-use accessible panel and some other features that a lot of 
> companies don't really have.
> Given this, I've started looking at setting this up--perhaps by 
> writing all the code and creating the needed services first. While I 
> work on the code needed to manage all of this, I was trying to figure 
> out how I'd actually afford startup costs. I'm in college, so money 
> isn't exactly raining from the heavens; similarly, I don't tend to 
> have much at all left over at the end of each month to throw in 
> savings. Are there good resources for creating startups and funding?
>
> I've also considered marketting a few projects I have on the workbench 
> first, which might help me get going in terms of funding, to the point 
> where I can expand. to that end and to help me, I've had some 
> experience with IOS development and would like to start finding people 
> who are in need of server administration, backend web development or 
> IOS/desktop development. I've seen a few sites that are dedicated to 
> this, but they generally want a monthly fee inn order to get going.
>
> Any advice/information would be greatly appreciated.
>