So week #1 of Startup Sauna is over. It was pretty busy so it went really fast. 2 of the bigger sessions of the week were dedicated to pitching and even though they had slightly contradictory advice both were really good.

On Tuesday we’ve spent almost the whole day with Mike Bradshaw and tried pitching without slides for a random number of minutes. We just had to fetch a pool ball from a bag before we went on stage and the number on it told you how long your pitch should be. Challenging, interesting, useful.

Then we had a team-building exercise. As a totally introverted  geek I was skeptical and “annoyed” by the fact at first but it turned out pretty cool. We were randomly divided into 6 teams and had to make 2 dishes. And we actually even managed to win by just taking edible stuff and making a salad out of it :)

On Wednesday Juha Ruohonen had a session on pitching and we tried to pitch again. This time the time was known upfront (2 minutes), still no slides. Very good tips and feedback.

And then in the afternoon we had a chance to pitch to actual VCs from Infocomm Investments. Just like that. On day 3 of Sauna. It’s unclear if the investors were actually interested in our batch as real potential investment targets but it was a really good real life practice nevertheless.

On a side note there were only a few PCs in the room and they hooked up to a projector without a hitch, but half of the Macs failed :P

Overall I kind of thought that pitching tips and advice is always the same and generic, but these 2 days proved me totally wrong and were very good, useful and to the point.

Then on day 4 we had 1on1 meetings with coaches. Every team got to meet a different set of coaches. We get to meet 6 of them and they were really good. That was were I realized that even though Finland is only slightly bigger than Lithuania in terms of population, we have still a huge way to go in terms of startup ecosystem people. It’s hard to explain this but I’d say that Ilja Laurs, the only startup “god” in Lithuania, would fit in there but not stand out. And that was only the first batch of coaches.

Overall we got mostly positive and useful feedback and were really challenged by 1 coach which didn’t feel all that great emotionally but was really to the point and extremely useful.

The last day consisted of the weekly summary session called “Kick the shit out”. Luckily no shit was kicked out (at least not that I know of) and we will continue sharing the Aalto Venture Garage with all the awesome teams next week.

But that’s not all. On Friday night we had a housewarming party at Goodbuzz’s recently rented apartment and even though someone (no, not me, I’m always driving here) had too much to drink and got pseudo-offensive, hopefully the other guys understand that it was vodka talking and we will continue to have the awesome atmosphere in the batch we had so far.

And to wrap this up  (I should take more pictures) here’s a pic of a nice Finnish tank:

So we are here in Finland and Spring ‘12 batch of Startup Sauna kicked off yesterday.

Finding a place to stay in Helsinki wasn’t an easy task and the upcoming Hockey World Cup definitely doesn’t help. The best price/performance option we were able to find was about 20km away from the Aalto Venture Garage and it takes about 1.5 hour to get there using public transportation. So we made a decision to go by car. This also allowed us to bring more stuff (monitors, etc.)

The trip and Helsinki sightseeing

Luckily the trip was pretty uneventful. Except for missing a Hesburger in Parnu due to a new road that goes around the city, there were no surprises. The most memorable thing was a ferry trip from Tallinn to Helsinki.

And the most memorable thing on the ferry was the sheer amount of alcohol Finns were buying to bring home. Looking at their carts I don’t think I could consume that much alco in a year.

The trip took the whole Saturday and on Sunday we went shopping for stuff for the apartment to the nearby huge shopping mall appropriately called Jumbo. The funny thing is that it hosts 2 different enormous supermarkets next to each other.

And then we went for a sightseeing walk around Helsinki center. The weather was nice, the city is nice, great stuff!

Startup Sauna Day 1

The official part of Startup Sauna was scheduled to start at 3pm but we’ve arrived to Aalto Venture Garage early – around 10am.

That turned out to be a good idea because even though there’s probably enough room for all the teams, we brought our monitors and wanted to secure a suitable desk. I’m also a little picky about chairs (due to the old programmer’s back) and the ones we have upstairs are really good. So, without further ado let me introduce the Finnish AdDuplex HQ:

At 3pm the official program started, the teams were introduced, orientation given, t-shirts and flip-flops presented and the heat is officially on.

The first guest was Christopher Karltorp – CEO of Zerply – who gave a horror story talk with a happy ending which mostly concentrated on their struggles fundraising. It was both scary and inspirational and a really interesting story. Add a little Aaron Sorkin and you can get a decent Social Network sequel.

And then was traditional Wednesday BBQ (on Monday this time). We had burgers and most people had beer, but not me, because I’m driving and Paulius is younger than my car insurance would allow. But that could be a good thing. Beer is ridiculously overpriced here anyway.

So, that’s it for now. The easy part has ended and serious stuff starts today…

Photo by Ewan-M

A couple of days ago I’ve read Loic Le Meur’s post on having to let half of his team at Seesmic go. I’ve never met Loic, but from what I’ve read and seen and from couple of minor online interactions he seems like a really nice guy and a hard working entrepreneur. I’ve also used quite a few of Seesmic’s products over the years. So I have nothing but respect for him and it was pretty sad to read the a/m post.

About a year ago I have inadvertently insulted Loic in comments on his blog

This wasn’t my intention and could be attributed to my limited command of English. By “mediocre” I meant “quite good” and by “quite good” I mean “good, but there are better options”. I wrote it a year ago and I still mean it – for most apps it doesn’t make sense to spread thin and try to cover as many platforms as humanly possible. It doesn’t matter if you are quite OK on 5 platforms if on every one of them there are more popular options.

I basically use 3 devices: my main PC, our home living room PC and my Windows Phone. I have Seesmic apps installed on all of them, but I don’t use them on any. On my main PC I use MetroTwit because it’s the best twitter app for Windows. On my Windows Phone I use rowi because it’s the best twitter app for Windows Phone. And on our multi-tenant home PC I just use twitter.com because it’s good enough for the glance-and-go nature of that computer. I don’t care about using the same “brand” of the app on every platform. I’m happy to use different apps on different platforms for the same task as long as these apps are the best for me on that platform and that usage scenario.

Even for social networks, where it would seem that being everywhere is the only way to go, it’s not always true. Instagram, for example, is only available on iOS and “coming soon” on Android. And one may argue that it is successful because it stayed focused and small (in terms of team).

Why am I writing this? We’ve been pretty successful on one platform and I’m under a constant peer pressure (as well as internal pressure) to expand into other platforms “with way more fish”. Most of the time I resist it and I’m pretty sure that would be a bad idea at this stage, but sometimes I feel urges to go “big” myself.

I blame it on the VC oriented startup culture. Due to the nature of venture capital they can’t be interested in “how your are going to change your niche”. They want you to tell them “How are you going to change the World?”

Changing the World could be your end play, but I think you should only go there once you have nothing important left to do in your neck of the woods (be it niche, location or platform).

I’ve been honored to be interviewed by Scott Hanselman on his great podcast – Hanselminutes. We’ve talked about AdDuplex, startups in general and doing them from Lithuania in particular. Check it out.

I’ve blogged about my attempts to understand the cost structure of serving (publicly over HTTP) large amounts of small files from Azure Blob Storage (or CDN for that matter). It was more complicated than it had to be and I’m still not sure I understand the reasoning behind it, but at least the answer was clear – you pay for both bandwidth and transactions if you serve files publicly from Azure Blob Storage.

Last week I had a pleasure to attend TechDays Belgium and I just couldn’t miss an opportunity to communicate my feedback on this issue to Scott Guthrie himself. I’ve also talked about it with Windows Azure MVPs Maarten Balliauw and Panagiotis Kefalidis. The funny part about this – they all start their responses with …

… but transactions are dirt-cheap!

Even though my beef/confusion is with pricing structure rather than actual costs, let’s get this “cheap” argument out of the way. Suppose you serve 100 millions of ~7kb files out of your blob storage per month. This could be design elements of your site, your CSS or JavaScript files or small banner ads (in my case). CDN would probably be a more appropriate solution for these scenarios, but the pricing structure and costs (more on this later) are identical so it doesn’t matter in this context.

Let’s see… We serve 100 million 7kb requests. That’s roughly 700GB of bandwidth. Since the pricing for North American and European bandwidth differs from rest of the world, let’s assume that 500GB goes to NA/EU and 200gb elsewhere. By entering this data into Azure pricing calculator we get this:

Transactions would cost us approximately as much as bandwidth. So no, transactions are not dirt-cheap. At least not in all scenarios.

But it’s not about the price - it’s about pricing structure

It took me a while, but now I understand how these things are priced. What I don’t understand is why? The most often repeated selling point of all the cloud services is “Pay for what you use”. So forgive me if I want to understand what I use when I’m billed for transactions. I understand that storage space costs something, I understand that bandwidth costs something, but I don’t understand where is the cost of “transaction”. It looks just like a HTTP request to me and for some odd reason I don’t get billed for HTTP requests to my web roles, huh? Does it cost Microsoft twice as much to serve 700gb in 7kb files than 700gb in 700kb files?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there’s no cost associated with so called transactions. I’m just saying that it’s not communicated well enough.

What about CDN?

It was suggested by Maarten and Panagiotis that there are no transaction costs for CDN. I was pretty sure that we’ve researched that option and there was a transaction cost too, but who am I to argue with 2 Azure MVPs ;) Back home I’ve checked that I was right and that there is a very good reason why they thought otherwise. Here’s how the CDN portion of advanced pricing calculator looks:

Yep. No slider for transactions. When you hover the “?” you start getting some hints:

And only when you click the “Learn more” link it becomes crystal clear:

So, WTF do you want, Alan!?

Well, when I’m sold into “pay for what you use” model I want to actually understand what I use. And as I mentioned above it’s not very clear to me in this case. To be honest, I think the only reason why this pricing structure exists is because it was just copied from Amazon S3 in the early days:

and for CDN:

Except Amazon calls transaction “requests” which is way more clear in my opinion. Other CDN providers like CacheFly or MaxCDN/NetDNA don’t charge for transactions/requests (at least at the first glance).

So, most of all I’d like to see the transaction/request costs go away even if it doesn’t make the service cheaper overall. I don’t care how big margins on the bandwidth prices are as long as the end price is competitive. I would understand that I “pay for what I use”. Unfortunately this would skew the total costs for different scenarios dramatically. So I don’t expect it to change in a foreseeable future.

At the very least I would like to see this cost structure explained clearly. I figured it out but it took me some time and from conversations I had on twitter it’s pretty clear to me that everyone except those who are deep into Azure (MVPs, MS people) couldn’t answer my question by just looking at the site.

Here’s my feedback on what could and should be improved (if changing the pricing structure is not a feasible option):

1. Explain what “transaction” is and why it is billed. Why are public HTTP requests to the Blob storage billed and HTTP requests to the Web Role are not? (I think “request” is a much better word saving a lot of explaining.)
2. Mention public HTTP blob serving scenario explicitly. Billing in public HTTP blob serving scenario is confusing in the current state of things. Use of the word “transaction” clearly doesn’t help.
3. Include a transaction cost slider in the CDN portion of the advanced pricing calculator. It’s really confusing currently and looks like a hidden cost. Even Azure MVPs were fooled by it. It’s obvious that mere mortals would be too.

So, this is what I think. I know it looks like a rant, but I just want to make the product better and provide feedback from the average customer’s point of view. This cost structure makes Azure and Amazon CDN (and storage) services unattractive to projects serving large quantities of small files and I’m just not sure that there’s a good reason for Microsoft and Amazon to shut these customers out.

I’m 36 and, believe it or not, I have never been on anything that could pass as a business trip until 2 years ago. I was on 1 such trip in 2010, 5 in 2011 and in February 2012 alone I’m going to go on 4 (well, technically the “month” covers January 31st and March 1st, but who’s counting?).

So here’s a list. Come say “hi”, if you are nearby.

UK Windows Phone User Group (January 31st, 2012)

I will be presenting my “Developer’s Guide to Windows Phone App Marketing and Monetization” at January meeting of WPUG in London. It’s free and there was even a careless promise of a free round. Really no reason not come. Plus all you Brits get a chance to make fun of my accent too.

TechCrunch Baltics, Riga, Latvia (February 9th)

I was fighting my conscience on whether I should go there, but it said that I should get out of my comfort zone of hanging with developers and go and hang out with entrepreneurs, angels and VCs instead. So, here we go.

MS TechDays, Belgium (February 14th-15th)

After booking this I’ve realized it’s going to be the first Valentine’s Day without my wife in ~18 years we are together. But ScottGu is keynoting, so what can I do, honey!?

Mobile World Congress, Barcelona (February 27th – March 1st)

I was too cheap to shell out 2000+ Euro for the full pass, especially considering it mostly includes what looks like boring sessions of telco CEOs. So I’m going on an Exhibition Pass which covers App Planet (sub-)conference and it should be the most interesting part of it for me anyway. There will be some Nokia developer conference on the first day of it. Should be interesting and you have to apply for it and be approved by the organizers (I think). So will see how it goes. Looking forward to it and at least +15C in February!

Are you coming to any of these events? Comment here, drop me a line or ping me on twitter. And if you see me there, don’t hesitate to say “hi”!

Photo by Konstantinos Papakonstantinou

Back in the pre-internet days advertisers could hardly track anything and they had to calculate RoI on their offline ad campaigns based on some assumptions, approximations or secondary data. They were aware that their data wasn’t accurate so they understood that all of their conclusions based on the scarce data aren’t facts, but just their best educated guesses.

These days on the internet we have referrers, cookies and other stuff that lets us track the whole path of our users from our ad somewhere, to their first visit, to the purchase of our product. Sure, quite often we can see that customer A came from site B, looked through our site, returned to it in a few days and made a purchase. Hooray!

Based on this data we start to believe that we can track everything and now we can measure RoI of our campaigns by simply comparing money we’ve spent on it and amount it generated in sales based on data provided by our tracking/analytics software. This type of measuring success is prevalent in blogs, podcasts and books on entrepreneurship these days and we are used to looking at it as the absolute truth. Because we have the data to prove it!

Unfortunately we can only track something and not everything.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

We are tracking the sales funnels for amCharts. We get pretty good data for quite a large portion of sales and can tell where they have originated. That said the most popular source of sales is Google search for “amcharts”. Yes, “amcharts”. Not just “charts” or any other generic term, but our exact name. This means that the majority of sales come from people who already knew something about amCharts. This could be someone who has heard about amCharts from a friend. Or someone who has clicked on our ad while doing chart library research at home on his iPad and then came back via Google search from his computer at work the next day. Or a CEO (or some other guy with a credit card) who has been told by his developer to buy amCharts. All of these sales could have initially originated from a campaign that could’ve been declared a complete waste of money based on the tracking data we have.

Another example with a different angle. One of the best music albums I’ve bought last year was Velociraptor! by Kasabian. Let me try to track the chain of events that led me to the purchase. I’ve heard about the band and some of their songs before, but have never bought any of their music. The catalyst of the purchase was a remix of the song “Days Are Forgotten” by DJ Z-trip. I’ve heard it on Z-Trip’s site, then went to the Zune store on my PC a couple of days or even months later and bought the album. I’m pretty sure there’s no trace of this chain anywhere. So Kasabian’s record label (or whoever cares) has no idea that money spent on commissioning Z-Trip and LL Cool J to do the remix resulted in the sale. But lets go deeper. Why did I go to Z-Trip’s site in the first place? Because he was DJing at the party of MIX11 conference I’ve attended last year. So I guess part of the referral credits should go to Microsoft? But why did I pay attention to the name of the DJ at MIX11 and have no idea who was DJing at MIX10? Because I already knew who Z-Trip was, even though I’ve completely forgotten by that time. Back in the early 2000s I’ve listened to Linkin Park a lot and their lead-vocalist did vocals on one of the songs on Z-Trip’s album. And I don’t know who was responsible for turning me onto Linkin Park.

As you can see human mind can trace some events back along a chain of events that none of the tracking software can pick up. In the above mentioned case it even failed at the very first step which would definitely be of interest for a music bands management.

The bottom line is that the fact that we can track something gives us an illusion that we can track everything, but the next couple of times when you buy something online try to analyze if the seller of the product can trace your purchase back to the original source of your interest in this product. And when you notice that they can’t, think about your own campaigns and how you believe you know the RoI on them.

We are in the process of designing new major features for AdDuplex. So we were discussing some implementation/architecture choices for a future release. Part of the implementation we were planning to pursue included serving of content directly from public container in Azure Blob Storage over HTTP.

Since Azure (as most of the Cloud solutions) is a “pay for what you need/use” type of arrangement we had to look at pricing for Windows Azure Blob Storage and decide if our proposed implementation was the best choice from the cost effectiveness perspective.

The price for the blob storage consists of 3 components: storage space, bandwidth/traffic and transactions. Space pricing is clear, bandwidth pricing is clear, but what is transaction??

The explanation next to the transaction slider in the pricing calculator doesn’t help much:

You pay based on the average amount of data you store during a billing cycle and the number of read/write transactions you make to it during that period.

Again: what’s the definition of transaction in this context? Browsing the Windows Azure site doesn’t help much.

The most comprehensive resource on the web (at least the one I was able to find) explaining Azure Storage billing in detail is this blog post by Brad Calder from 1.5 years ago. Let’s see if it helps.

We finally have some definition of transaction:

Transactions – the number of requests performed against your storage account

Judging by this succinct definition we may conclude that we should consider each request to a PDF we’ve posted publicly to the blob storage as a transaction. OK, but let’s read further (emphasis mine)

Each individual Blob, Table and Queue REST request to the storage service is considered as a potential transaction for billing. Applications can then control their transaction costs by controlling how often and how many requests they send to the storage service.

OK, so if I place a PDF into blob storage and it is accessible publicly as http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/mydoc.pdf and then it’s picked up by CNN.com and linked from there, there’s no way I can control “how many requests I send to the storage service”. So I would guess this case should not be a subject to transaction billing.

Then we have this:

Each and every REST call to Windows Azure Blobs, Tables and Queues counts as 1 transaction (whether that transaction is counted towards billing is determined by the billing classification discussed later in this posting)

Again, there’s no definition what is considered a “REST call” here, but GET request over HTTP is probably a “REST call”, right? So, by this point I got totally confused and I decided to let the twitter enlighten me. After some back-and-forth Neil Mackenzie (Azure MVP) concluded:

OK, I believe Neil, but how am I supposed to know that someone accessing my public file is “A single GetBlob request to the blob services”? Still, at this point, I was convinced that each such request is basically billed twice: once for the bandwidth and the second time for transaction. But just to make sure I decided to make an official support request to clarify this once and for all and I got this answer:

As discussed over the call every single request coming to our blob is considered as a transaction. Hence we count this transaction as a storage transaction and this component will be shown in the invoice.

So, there you have it. I’m not sure if the concept is logically flawed or just a structured way to charge you more, but I’m sure it has to be explained in simpler terms and definitely cover this simple public blob scenario.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that if there’s a cost associated with each transaction someone has to pay for it. It’s perfectly clear with bandwidth or storage. You can argue about the prices, but it’s pretty obvious it costs something. But with these “transactions”… I don’t know. I need more clarity.

What do you think? Is this a logical billing structure? Do you understand where’s the per-transaction cost to Microsoft that is then passed to you in this scenario? Should you be charged a transaction fee for each request of a public image on your site? Honestly, it doesn’t make much sense to me.

After my first startup was killed by the evil IP thieves I’ve lost faith in entrepreneurship… I’m just kidding. I was just finishing school, then university, then getting married, then getting my first “real job” at a bank, etc.

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik

The Meeting

By 1999 I worked at a small company (with a big name). There was huge financial crisis in Russia and our CEO had lots of bets on several projects that fell through due to the events in the eastern neighbor. So the salary was always a couple of months behind. But we were expecting our daughter, therefore switching jobs wasn’t on my radar at the time. So I set up on a mission to find some side work.

I’ve responded to an ad of a local company looking for freelancers to work on some web project for some US company. I’ve been offered the job as was one other guy. We’ve met to discuss that project for a couple of times (I’m not even sure I remember what it was) and then were told that the project fell through and our services were no longer needed. Little did I know that I will end up working with the dude till this day.

So we were out of our freelancing gig, without anything to replace it with, but still willing to do something.

The most popular site on the internet at the time was Yahoo! (I think). And it wasn’t the huge behemoth it is now. It was mostly a manually managed directory of web sites on the internet. Yeah, it was actually possible to manually manage a list of all the meaningful sites on the internet at that time. I could have navigated to a category of interest and see all the sites about, say, web development.

That was great, but how do I know when one of these sites posts new content? Believe it or not there were no RSS readers (or RSS feeds for that matter) and stuff like that at the time. So the only way to know when there is a new article on 4 Guys from Rolla – a hugely popular ASP developer site of the time – was to actually visit the site.

AC not DC

So my idea was to create a directory of content for web developers. Or as we called it “The Content Directory for Web Professionals”. I’ve pitched the idea to Martynas after he promised not to screw me over and implement it without me. Classic first time entrepreneur move. Fortunately he thought it was a good idea too and turned out to be a cool guy in general.

We have started working on the project. Martynas did the public part of the site and I did the administrative part. It’s funny that even in 1999, coming up with a decent .com domain name that was not taken, wasn’t easy. After a lot of deliberations and domain name checks we’ve settled on ArticleCentral.com.

On some day in 1999 ArticleCentral went live.

For the next several years we were doing daily rounds around the sites in our database and [selectively] list new articles. Users would come to ArticleCentral, check the new articles, suggest other articles and rate them (sounds familiar?). It was possible to filter articles by category and rating, search through our article database. We even had a “tracker” – a piece of JavaScript that you could embed into your own site and show newest content from ArticleCentral. I totally forgot about that and, frankly, was shocked when I remembered that we had that in 1999 :) One may argue that the web didn’t come a long way since then.

Later on we’ve added a sister site for hardware articles and reviews.

We had several mailing lists sending out thematic updates to thousands of web developers and designers. We were writing editorials for our weekly newsletters and we had a weekly poll. After several years coming up with editorials and poll ideas became a real chore. Fortunately later in the life of the project we were approached by a young guy (I think he was still in high school at the time) who was willing to write the editorials and think of new poll ideas and we happily delegated these to him. After ArticleCentral he got “promoted” to HotScripts where he still blogs regularly.

We’ve sold quite some advertising on our site and in the mailing lists at rates that would make any modern content publisher salivate. Unfortunately traffic at the time was a joke looking from 2012, so great rates didn’t materialize into nice red Ferraris and beach houses.

The Exit

Anyway, by 2001-2002 the dotcom era was long over. We were pretty bored with the project and it was too early (on the internet scale) for us to come up with something that would transform AC into what later materialized as Digg. We decided that it was time to make an EXIT. Even though we didn’t know the term at the time. So we have just published a splash page on the site that it was for sale.

This was a long shot, but we were contacted by a couple of parties and, while I was on vacation in Turkey in September of 2002, closed the deal. I doubt that I’m allowed to disclose the amount of the deal, but lets just say that it paid for the vacation and I still had some change left.

This concludes a story of how I became a serial entrepreneur with one successful exit. (Haha. Sounds cool when I put it this way). But I have a couple more startup stories up my sleeve.

I got my first computer when I was about 13-14. It was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum Plus. I had it hooked up to a black and white TV that was probably smaller than my current phone. Well, maybe not the phone but probably smaller than my Kindle. And you had to load software from cassette tapes.

My first computer. Photo from Planet Sinclair.

USSR was living its final years but it still was USSR. There was no way to buy legal games or applications for the computer. To get some games you had to go to some basement and buy a service of recording pirated games to your own cassette (getting cassettes wasn’t a small feat either, but that’s another story). Another option was to copy games from friends or a “pusher” – someone who didn’t own a basement, but was selling pirated games anyway.

A friend of mine knew such a pusher. But at the time parents bought me my ZX Spectrum the guy was away and I couldn’t get any games. All I had was a computer manual. Funny thing is that computers of the time had programming tutorials right in their manuals. So out of boredom I taught myself some basic BASIC. This has probably defined all my life and the fact that I basically don’t play games.

Scan of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Plus Manual page from Retronaut.

Anyway, the pusher came back and delivered some games and I played them, but I was already hooked on programming.

After some small scale projects I set out to make a game. At that time the most popular TV show in USSR was a “Wheel of fortune” rip-off called “Поле чудес” (The Field of Wonders). So it was only natural that I wanted to make a computer game for that. I don’t recall how much time I’ve spent on it, but after some time it was ready and I’ve hosted a game with my parents and their friends. One of my father’s childhood friends was a programmer and he complemented me on the game, so I thought I was an awesome developer. I’ve shown the game to my “pusher” and he complemented me on it too. He even asked me to record a copy for him, so he can play at home.

I was young, I was born in USSR and I had no entrepreneurial aspirations at the time. I just made some product and was happy when people told me it was cool.

One day I went to a “basement software store”. There were printed catalogs of all the pirated games and applications you can get recorded on your cassettes. I’ve noticed The Field of Wonders on the list made by someone else and was excited to see what other programmers did and how does my game stack up against theirs. So I paid the guys to record me that game among others and went home.

When I loaded the game, my jaw dropped. It was my own game with all the copyrights and logos replaced with some other logos. When my friend came over he recognized the name of the “company” as the one our “pusher” used. The guy just took my game “rebranded” it and made some money. I’m pretty sure he didn’t make anything worth mentioning, but I didn’t make anything at all. I’ve actually lost a few cents by paying those basement pirates for my own game! So I was pretty upset, but I didn’t care much. I was even proud that my software was good enough for someone to steal and rebrand. I didn’t buy games from that pusher anymore, though.

That’s the story of my first startup and one of the milestones letting me pretend to be a serial entrepreneur. I’ll blog about my later endeavors in future posts.