BumbleBee Garage - You gotta start someplace!

My rant and why I am doing this alone and the reason it is called BumbleBee Garage.

I have spent the last year looking for partners to open new websites. I have offered partnerships in many of my exsiting websites and I always arrive at the same point.

Nobody wants to work.

They all hear that Google, YouTube and others started with a few guys in their garage. What they seem to overlook is the 18 hour work days and the fact that the people knew what they were doing when they started.

Every Tom Dick and Harry thinks they can start a website for $10, work a couple of hours a week and be the next google or myspace.

I have the greatest respect for the google boys. I also know that for one, they have technology that no other company has been able to duplicate. They only lasted 6 months in their garage before moving up. They did not start with $10 and a lack of knowledge or technology.

They paid $800 a month for the garage, which is cheap, but still more than most people realize. They launched the initail site on the Stanford servers with the university footing the bandwidth and hardware bill untill google was just too expensive to manage, so they moved it to a garage untill they could expand.

To make it in this industry, you need one very key element, technology. Once you have technology, you need a marketing team better than any other. You need a market and you need the resources to run the business until it makes money. Then you need the right team to manage the business growth.

When I launched the automotive classified Buzztrader.com I spent $3000 a month on google ads, and another $5000.00 a month on mailings for about 6 months straight. I hired sales people to cold call car dealers and ran newpaper and magazine ads. I mailed out hundreds of t-shirts to classic car dealers and car clubs with ads for the website. The site runs on a $25,000.00 server and consumes several T-1's of bandwidth. Luckily I already had DNS servers and a network in place to suport the other functions driving the wesite, so I didn't spend extra money on any of that. Needess to say, that does not run out of my garage, it is in a datacenter on a POP. The site is the result of 6 months of programing and 2 years of marketing. Yes it has 25,000 daily visitors, but not because they just showed up for the hell of it.

I have spent nearly $250,000 on hardware and twice that on programing and advertsing to sell website hosting for $10 a website. I work 7 day weeks where a short day is 14 hours.

Then people tell me they have a big idea. Just clone myspace, but for old people or dogs or somethig like that. Build them the site, for no money and they will give me 10% of the profit from the website. Gee, thanks for the offer.

I get so offended when people tell me they can start out of their garage on a few dollars and a few hours a week. All they need is someone to build them a website.

Everyone thinks they can buy the YouTube software for $25 and open a site and sell it for 1.6 billion on ebay.

An article on forbes.com quotes "YouTube, which garnered 12.9 million unique visitors in March, doesn't care what viewers watch, as long as they keep tuning in. Making money is another matter: The site, which has raised $11.5 million in venture capital in the last year, didn't see a penny in revenue until March, when they cautiously began selling ads. Meanwhile the site's bandwidth costs, which increase every time a visitor clicks on a video, may be approaching $1 million a month "

The site costs $1 million a month just in bandwidth not including any other operting costs. A million dollars a month and no income yet? Yes, that is absolutely correct.

Did people miss the fact that YouTube started with 11 million dollars in Venture Capital? Do people even have a clue what it takes to run a sucessful website? What it takes to develop technology? Or how much it costs to impliment real technology? Has anyone even priced entry level servers?

The answer is NO!

People think that ebay runs on a shared server for maybe $20 a month in hosting fees. People think they can open google with a dedicated virtual server for about $25, they have no clue that google has 100,000 servers. They have no clue that a cheap server has finite limits and can only manage 256 simultanous connections, not 256 million. The have no clue that a meg of bandwidth is $500 or that rackspace is $1000.00 a month and 100 servers take up several thousands racks, never mind your own data center. They have no clue what it takes to manage a network of servers and keep them running.

Still, they think they can open a website with no experience and kick us seasoned web developers in the ass and laugh all the way to the bank.

It is offensive when someone thinks they can do what we do when they can't even operate their own computer. To treat us like what we do is simple and worthless. To act like they can learn as much as a computer PHD by reading a couple of pages online or watching a get rich quick DVD. It is demeaning to the profesionals when people think you can become one in a few short hours.

I am tired of people that think they can compete with walmart. I am tired of people that think they can start ebay but don't know how to build a website or even send an e-mail. I am tired of people in general that just don't get it.

I get sick of people that are tooo lazzzy. I get tired of people thinking my sites are just $10 websites. And now I have just given up on trying to find any reasonable people to work with.

When you spend a year writing software to run a website and you see people on freelance websites asking for clones of it for $100, you just laugh. But that is what people think you are worth. And that is what they think it takes to be a google or myspace.

For all those reasons and more, now its just me and my computers and my GARAGE. Crawling and building databases. No whining partners in the background complaining about working too hard. Just computers that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I truely belive that with the right partners to work with I could dive any website to googledom. But I also realize it could take a lifetime to find that partner.

With a search engine, I can do it myself. I can build the programing and manage the network. Since the database is self sustaining, I just need to keep the servers running.

That is why I have chosen to begin the automotive search engine now. And the name BumbleBee Garage is a salute to all the bone heads out there that think these businesses actually do start in a garage and require the same effort as a weekend garage sale with a budget that wont even buy a pizza.

If you want to compete in this market, before you waste some webmasters time with lavish dreams, do some research. Learn the facts and dig deep into your pockets.

I am in fact running the servers from may garage. But only so I can say I started in my garage. It seems to be the only way you can get respect these days. I probably have about $100,000 worth of equipment that is left over or spares for my hosting business. And my overhead would put most people in the poor house.

Still, with out a corporate office in Sillicon Valley, I am just a garage based startup yeiding the Web 2.0 stigma now attached to any new website.

That is my rant and I am sticking to it! I am sure there are thousands of web developers that share my pain.