Site Development

I took the initiative to draft a requirements document for the site which wasn't too difficult. I based the entire thing off of a great open source asp portal that I used for the My Baby Updates(MBU) site called ASP-Nuke. I also worked on incorporating the company and drafted a "Corporate Governance" document that was to serve as an operating agreement for the LLC we formed. This didn't take long and development was soon under way.

I decided that instead of starting off with the MBU source, I should upgrade to the latest version of the released ASP-Nuke code. This brought in several new features and removed the worry of having to undo a lot of modifications to the original source that I did to make ASP-Nuke multi-group enabled. Having the latest version in hand, I set off to create the user interface. I decided on a clean layout using an orange and blue color scheme (tribute to UF). I contacted Jeff, the graphic artist that I used in the past, to come up with a logo to round out the interface.

By November we had the skelleton of the system working. I had incorporated the subscription management system, the credit card processing interface, user managment and pretty much everything else except for an automated method of collecting data and posting the tables. I wound up taking responsibility for the interface to the data service. Initially I contacted The Financial Times Interactive Data (FTID) group for access to end of day equities and options data. I wound up speaking to Ami Nappi. This would turn out to be the most unprofessional person I've ever encountered in my life. She started off telling us that the cost for the data feed would amount to roughly $4 per user per month with no minimums. I thought that was great and I asked her to move forward in setting up test accounts on their server and providing more detailed documentation. After several weeks, with few returned calls, the price jumped up to close to $20 per user with a $1000 per month minimum. We went through four more iterations of this type of haphazzard behavior before I found out that the product they were selling me wasn't capable of offering us the data we needed. I ended up wasting two months due to Ami! The funny thing was that I would later receive a call from another FTID rep excusing Ami's behavior and asking for our business back. It was too little too late by then, I had already chosen another provider.

After the debacle with FTID I contacted Thomson Financial Services. I was quickly hooked up with their rep in Ft. Lauderdale and ended up speaking with a specialist for the Data Stream product. After getting an NDA from me, they set me up on a test server that had lots of problems. I worked through a lot of them and ended up developing a system that was capable of doing what we needed to do. The Thomson data feed would end up costing around $3K per month so we decided to use the temporary method Dr. X found until we had sufficient cash flow to justify the expense.

I've always wondered how every successfully business person is able to recall the details of the journey that brought them to success when they publish their biography. I can hardly remember what I did yesterday let alone recall what I was doing when I first thought about starting a company (not that I'm a successfully business person or anything like it (yet))! I'm also a little peeved that I couldn't find a good blog out there about anybody going through a startup.

I like everything that is entrepreneurial. I like coming up with ideas, thinking through the business model, roughing out a prototype and working out the financials. Unfortunately, I haven't hit on a winning combination of ingredients yet. I think I'm on my fifth start up venture right now. Here's a brief chronology of my experiments with details to come in another post:

1. R.A.W. Sound and Detailing


2. Cush Consulting, Inc.


3. Innovative Media Systems, Inc. (MyBabyUpdates.com)


4. ScribeCenter, L.L.C.


5. Insight Investments, L.L.C. (CoveredCallPro.com)

There are also a few other projects that didn't make it out of the incubator stage. Namely mfgSuite.com and LocalEats.com. I toyed around with prototypes with these, but I didn't have a very good process for evaluating the business end.

I started this blog a few weeks back so that I can capture the details of the latest project, Insight Investments, L.L.C. and our website http://www.coveredcallpro.com. Insight Investments provides a covered call screening service for investors through it's coveredcallpro.com web site. The service sells subscriptions to a handful of covered call tables that are updated on a nightly basis. Insight has three principles: Dr. X (President and CEO), Mr. Y (VP and CFO) and myself (VP and CTO). [names removed]

I had worked with Dr. X before on a few side projects but nothing serious. He and Mr. Y approached me in the July/August 2003 timeframe with the basics of this project. I tried my best to get the guys to do the same level of preliminary research that I've done in the past but it seems that before I knew it, we had agreed on a launch date of November 3, 2003 for the site.