Incubators

Ayala TBI and DOST both have incubators. Recently opened are Open TBI is along C.P. Garcia Ave. near UP and Ateneo and UP Visayas Cebu College TBI. Both have spaces about roughly 15-30 square meters, which is just enough for a small team of 3-5 developers. It’s enough to get you started working on a prototype and you’ll have access to mentors and neighboring startups.

Virtual Offices and Coworking spaces

Another option if you just want a place to telecommute from time to time and can’t face being at the coffee shop all day is to rent a desk at Proud Cloud’s Hackspace in Eastwood. That’s definitely a “hacker house”, if that’s what you’re looking for. No long-term lease, you can just use the desk for a day or a month, and pay as you go.

With a more traditional business feel are the proliferating virtual offices in the metro. In Makati alone, there are: Worldnet Biz Center (830-0205 – 07 loc 11) and My Office along Salcedo Street and Makati Corporate (893-8909) near Don Bosco, and of course prestigious Regus at Enterprise. You can rent a desk or two for at usually at least 3-6 months for less than P5,000. Get a plan that allows you a few hours of the meeting rooms and conference facilities of the shared office space, so you can have private time for product presentations or customer interviews or skype calls.

Are you ready to step it up? Did I miss any other virtual office or small office options for startups and telecommuters? Feel free to share which ones you’ve tried or would like to try.

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

I wish I can tell you we’ve been busy with our product… and we did put some time into one baby project along with our new intern Ralph… but the start of this year was crazy. One of our partners jumped ship to movie school, we had too little money coming in from web development consulting projects, mainly due to a delinquent customer who was full of promise (and promises), but life goes on! and so do rental payments and salaries — thankfully things are looking up! (Quite!)

So, let me tell you the reality of our dev life — and what I’ve been up to as the enabler (so does that make JP the implementer?) Checks to write, meetings and tasks to delegate and actually work on, clients to interface with and events such as Philippine Web Designers Organization’s Form Function Class and One Web Day 2009 (next Tuesday! September 22 – Earth Day for the Internet).

We’re finally getting our office almost to the way we want it, after a year of bootstrapping. Each developer works on either an iMac or an HP laptop. The workstation has a 22-inch monitor (really liking Samsung P2250) or one of our own old 19″ monitors that JP wants to get rid of ASAP lol, beautiful super slim multimedia keyboard with laptop-like keys (Samsung Pleomax PKB-780 same as Tonio — which you can find for less than P800 if you shop around Festival Mall), and laser optical mouse (Logitech – buy from E-Hub, not from Octagon).

Small Office (not Home Office) Ergonomics

Since being a programmer entails continuous hours of sitting down, the comfy executive chair is a given. Our worktable comes is long enough and spacious enough to fit up to 2 (even 3?) 22″ monitors and extra stuff. We can’t have any of those fugly bulky wood or clerical desks with built-in drawers. For one thing, our chairs wouldn’t fit! haha and they’re too small to fit a laptop and monitor setup. We gotta make the most of our small office!

We debated whether to:

a) get one of those virtualization devices that allow you to share processing power from 1 CPU to 3-5 users. Cheapest option but could be demoralizing for the devs given that, hello, we’re a software company and we have to share computers?
b) desktops for the devs… but they wouldn’t be able to work from home, unless it’s using their own machines. It’s awesomely cheap to build though and easy to upgrade. But what about the data on the local drives? What if there’s a power outage? In short, it’s just too troublesome to think about… So we went with…
c) invest in a laptop for each dev. PC (HP Compaq) for now and as cash flow allows, perhaps provide Macbooks. Of course, there are security risks, especially in our wonderful developing country, since there is no laptop insurance in the Philippines (that I know of). Hey, I just googled and saw that Omnibrokers has computer insurance — but it doesn’t cover theft, more like a glorified warranty.

So now I’m the only one using a desktop (formerly used as dev server with CentOS) and Macbook at home while the others get to use the iMacs and the laptops. I have the biggest desk of them all because I need space to layout papers and attempt to have a GTD workspace.

We’re conscientious with using the laptops though. Cornell University recommends for full-time laptop users:

• position this on your desk/worksurface in front of you so that you can see the screen without bending your neck. This may require that you elevate the laptop off the desk surface using a stable support surface, such as a computer monitor pedestal.
• use a separate keyboard and mouse. You should be able to connect a keyboard and mouse directly to the back of the laptop or to a docking station
• use the keyboard on a negative-tilt keyboard tray to ensure a wrist neutral posture
• use the mouse on an adjustable position mouse platform
• follow the postural guidelines for working at a computer workstation

More photos of our fab green office. It’s mostly just my workspace — pardon the image quality, just using the camera phone. Will have to ask Flicker Happy Photographers where the other photos are.

Startup Purchasing and Financing Tips

Since furniture and computer equipment enable us information workers, that’s got to be foremost in your considerations in setting up an ergonomic office, aside from choosing an accessible location and preparing your downpayment for the office, and having a credit card, checking account, cash box, and some place to store files.

But since these are big-ticket items you’ll be using for a long time, it makes better sense to use longer-term financing. Well, that’s what business advisors will tell you — use long-term financing (loans, stock investors) for long-term assets, short-term financing (credit cards, short-term personal loans) for short-term expenses. So if you can loan from business angels or generous titos or titas that would be perfect. So that you can pay them back in a year or two, or when able. But if you really don’t have a choice, take advantage of 0% installment plans, whenever possible. The cash price is sometimes a bit less than the listed price, but in general, spreading out payments over a few months is better for your cash flow than paying a chunk of cash at the beginning.

Now if only I can find a good-looking reasonably-priced laptop stand. There’s your peek at running a startup office!

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

So I’m looking for freelance designers or developers, software startup teams, and entrepreneurs from the Pinoy Web Startup community who want to be around like-minded people and share a workspace with them. CoWorking has been popular in Seattle, Philadelphia, NYC, among others. You pretty much do it already when you bring your laptop to a coffee shop with WiFi. In our Workspace, you can just bring your laptop and work on your own desk and interact with your neighbors when you like. We can have networking events and learning sessions to hone our technical skills.

Please answer the PinoyWebStartup Community CoWorking Survey so that we can find out how you can best benefit from a collaborative workspace.

Special thanks to Oklahoma City CoWorking Collaborative and CoWorking.

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

If you have read Marie’s post of our interview, you are probably wondering the logical and technical aspects of using Amazon Web Services and how you can apply this technology towards your growing startup business. Well, let me share with you how we are using these services and what are the factors that led us to rely on this new (or not so new) technology. Most of the details I will share with you are based on my experience as a technical lead for high-traffic websites such as torrentspy, myspace and fandango, and how we apply them for pinoy.Fm’s infrastructure.

Defining the Problem

Virtualization or the use of grid computing (sometimes referred to as cloud computing) is not for everyone. There are advantages and disadvantages you have to weigh in to be able to make a decision on whether this platform is good for your business. What we need for Pinoy.Fm was purely computing power. Not storage. Not banwidth (although this seems to come as a prerequisite for any web-related application). In fact, we need not only extra computing power but one that is scalable. By that I mean, we can expand or reduce that computing power as we find necessary. And it goes with it, that we only pay for what we use.

Finding the right solution

If you are facing a similar challenge, then virtual computing may be right for you. So we came up with quite a number of possible solutions to address the issue:

1. Buy extra dedicated servers to enhance our streaming capability.
2. Build our own servers and get a reliable co-location service.
3. Use grid computing.

Solution #1: Buying Extra Dedicated Servers

Sure this approach can easily address the problem. We don’t have to worry about hardware maintenance. We just need to find a reliable host, buy maybe 5 to 10 servers, we might even get a discount and a 5-star customer support treatment. But alongside this approach comes the problem of reliability. If we buy servers to just one host and their network went down, so is our business. Buying from multiple hosts can easily solve that issue but then we have to deal with a lot of people if we need to upgrade or do maintenance on these servers.

We are a startup, our time is better spent doing something productive, not calling different technical support centers because we upgraded our servers and needs a reboot. Another downside is maintenance, so we have 10 dedicated servers, if we upgrade our algorithm, we need to push those changes to 10 servers. If you’re a technical person like me, you know how painful it is to push changes on more than 1 server.

Our website is a user-generated content site. This means that most (if not all) items you see on our site are user-submitted. That includes audio uploads. Having 10 dedicated servers would mean we have to push the all data to each server to keep them synchronized. That alone would probably consume our monthly bandwidth allowance since we have 200 mp3 uploads per day, not even considering around 300 avatars. So this approach quickly drops off the list.

Solution #2: Building Our Own Servers

This is the fanciest idea of all. I, myself, have never been in any company that doesn’t build their own server. Torrentspy, for example, we build our server, we test them by making them game servers for a month, and then deploying them for production. How fun is that?

But we don’t have the cash. We are a startup, remember? A decent server can run at least $6000-$10000. And that’s not the best you can get. Although the colocation service might save you some money, a nice 10Mbps connection runs at $88 per month. This seems feasible except for the fact that, after we spent all that money in buying those servers, we are faced with the same problem as buying dedicated servers. Worse is colocations normally does not offer support, at most you can get is a 2 free reboots per month.

Solution #3: Grid Computing to the Rescue

All these issues are gone when you talk of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). No hardware problems, nor any issues related to that. Pushing changes to your application is very simple too. You just have to rebuild your base image once, then restart all your instances to use that image and your done. Synchronization of data was a problem at first. Until we learned that you can use Amazon’s other service (Amazon Simple Storage Service) as a backup platform and you can mount them to any instance you wish. So what we did is build a base image, attach our S3 storage to the base image and we just fire up any instance we need. Thus giving us enough computing power to stream at par with Last.Fm. Except that we only have 3 people looking over these stuff on a part-time basis compared to their 100+ employees. And we only have to move our files once, on a central location mounted on any of our server instance.

Amazon EC2 is highly reliable. This is the same infrastructure where amazon.com runs their business. Unlike Google App Engine, in it’s infancy, and yet to prove its reliability. Sure Google network is reliable, but does it run on the same platform as the one they are selling you?

Taking it to the next level

One thing I’ve learned about online business is keeping things simple. We tried to follow that at Pinoy.Fm. With torrentspy, we used to have 14 million page views per day. And only 3 people maintaining it. That’s a lot of traffic for such a small team. How did we do it? Automation. Almost everything is automated, and it is what we are doing with Pinoy.Fm. Another great service from Amazon is SQS. We use this platform for our automation. At Pinoy.Fm, we collect hundreds of thousands of information every day. Who befriends who, who listens to what, who rated what tracks, what is the popular track today, who sent what to who. These are all bits and pieces of information that requires processing power above your regular request and response algorithm. And we use SQS and SimpleDB to process these information. Thus bundling Amazon’s web services into our system saves us money since exchange of information between EC2 instances and S3 is FREE.

The next thing we are doing is automating the process of scaling of our server instances. The image below shows the performance metrics on one of our server instance.

• Green – streams being processed
• Blue – the requests on queue
• Red – the cpu consumption
• Yellow – IO operation on current streams

We are planning to take grid computing to the next level by analyzing the red line. If at any certain time, the red line goes over say 50% and this is true for all instances running, then our system can automatically fire up a new server to supplement the demand. Likewise, if it falls below 30%, we can program our system to automatically kill the server with the lowest cpu usage. Once in place, this tool can save us a bunch of money plus give us more time to do other things than worry about our infrastructure. This tool is currently being developed and we are planning to release it as an open source project.

There are a lot of grid computing products out there. And in full view, this may not seem to be the right product for you. But if your facing the same challenges that we have, it might be well worth your time to try and play with it. With some technical skills and determination to save some money, you can make technology work for you, for less.

More info on Amazon SQS, SimpleDb, Amazon EC2.

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

Bank Accounts for Startups – TITF 101
Bank Accounts for Startups – Open a Business Checking Account

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

“In a keynote address at the ministerial panel on “Digital Prosperity”, Dr Robert Atkinson said that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is supercharged capital and unlike the technological revolutions of the past, the ICT revolution’s engine will not run out of gas,” Zafar Anjum shares in a Computerworld Malaysia article.

Why don’t I read anything like that pertaining to the Philippine ICT environment?

From Digital prosperity: Potential and challenges

“Putting a tax on IT is not the thing to do; it is going backwards,” Dr. Atkinson said, speaking on what nations should do to benefit from IT.
Not imposing tariffs on many ICT products, actively encouraging digital innovation and transformation in all the main sectors (health, retail and government) are some of the basic measures countries could adopt to promote IT.
Dr. Atkinson’s mantra for APEC nations’ success employing ICT included actively encouraging universal digital literacy and universal broadband and digital technology adoption. He referred to the effective initiatives of South Korea. The country, for example, put in place free computer classes and arranged for free computers for meritorious students.
Tax, regulation and weaker protection of intellectual properties would have a harmful effect on the ICT-enabled growth of a nation, he added.

It’s hard enough running a startup and recruiting good talent, but also having to deal with taxes? Philippine startups usually have to take on outside client work just to survive since apps often don’t generate income right away, especially if you’re targeting Filipinos. If not generate revenue through services, then developers live in savings, mooch off their relatives, or sustain from their ‘other paying job’. This is probably the case everywhere else in the world but isn’t it just always more painful when it’s happening to you?

Barangay Micro Business Enterprise Law

I’ve asked our consultant/accountant to apply for Barangay Micro Business Enterprise certification (still waiting). Commonly referred to as BMBE, this law grants a variety of incentives. You can qualify if this is your main source of livelihood and majority of your employees are based in the same city.

• exempt from income tax
• exempt from minimum wage law
• access to special window for financing needs of BMBE – I don’t know yet how exactly this works
• technology transfer, production and management training, marketing assistance programs for BMBE beneficiaries

Government Grants

As I was trying to work out the “Funding” part of our business plan, I couldn’t find any government grants fit for freelance web developers/web startups/IT/SaaS. It could possibly make life easier. I’ve tried the Commission on Information and Communications Technology, Department of Trade and Industry, Department of Science and Technology, and others. Oh, I did find one from DOST, will tell you more in a later post.

IT Venture Capital Fund of 2007

House Bill 1664 is pending with the Committee on ICT as of August 13, 2007. Spearheaded by Representative Roilo Golez of the 2nd District of Paranaque, the bill says that the government should allocate at least P1 billion for the Philippine venture capital fund as seed capital to local technology ventures. Erwin Oliva shares more about the law entitled An Act to Accelerate the Development of Information Technology Startup Companies by Providing an IT Venture Capital Fund and for Other Purposes.

What are the best practices of other governments that the Philippines could learn from?

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

Popular web applications have made it to the final round, including Facebook, Fresh Direct, kayak, and Survey Monkey.

Startups developing their applications should definitely follow their example. Don’t be like those companies that “invest” in template-from-1999 websites and can hardly be bothered (or don’t know how to) to see if their links actually work or if their font is even readable.

You take into account user experience in your version 1… and all the versions thereafter. Not everyone can afford a dedicated UX team or a usability lab but there are workarounds. From an alpha version, followed by iterations. These iterations are then triggered the continuous feedback systems set in place from the start.

There’s feedback directly given to the development team which can be coursed through ticket systems, user forums, contact forms and email messages (tip: use IMAP so you can sync across different team members and prepare template responses), CRMs, phone reps.

Then there’s the tracking of actual on-the-ground user-session data — and understanding that mass of data.

To track user behavior is essential to making any software effective — if the software vendor were really dedicated to serving his customer and not just out to make a buck.

Brick-and-mortar companies like consumer goods or fashion apparel get their user feedback only through indirect methods. They sit down with focus groups, ask survey questions, hire mystery shoppers, or place a customer service hotline on their product. Their end-user has to exert actual effort. They have to rely on samples as opposed to 100% of their user base.

We’re quite lucky that web applications can log user behavior more religiously — even track all of it. Marketers, developers, and business owners are capable of understanding their users through visual representations with adorable names like heatmaps and confetti.

• Omniture
• Google Analytics, SiteMeter
• CrazyEgg. Free/Premium accounts available
• Clicktale. Listen to Clicktale CEO Tal Schwartz Free/Premium accounts available

What startup web applications, live right now, from the Philippines can you say truly takes into consideration UX? If you track user behavior, what tools do you use?

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

Where are the women-founded startups? Chris Shipley, Executive Director of DEMO, points out the painful lack of women founders who try to launch at their events. DEMO is the premiere semi-annual conference for launching tech products.

Out of the 30 web startups I have profiled since January 2008 for Pinoy Web Startup, a tech blog that features web techologies from the Philippines and Asia, I’ve listed less than 5 women principals.

Continue reading Women 2.0 – Where are the Women-Founded Startups? [BlogHer]

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team

You want to form your own web startup — but your friends or parents don’t understand. I don’t want to get into revenue model or framework discussions with you just yet. I just want to share with you issues I dealt with starting out — and consequences of some I still have to deal with today. This is written with a Metro Manila, Philippines setting in mind but should be easily replicated elsewhere.

1. Unleash the Entrepreneur within

Not everyone is born business-minded. If you weren’t the type to sell chocolate or pad paper to your elementary classmates, you can catch up on the entrepreneur way of thinking by joining meetups of SME groups (e.g. Pinoy Business, Entrepreneurs Society of the Philippines, Entrepreneur magazine events).

Till early 2007, I worked as a management trainee at a multinational and part-time graduate student. Now I dedicate all hours to our company — and I’ve never been happier. If you have a day job right now and can’t let go because you have bills to pay, make time at nights or weekends. Even if it’s just a few hours a week to meet with potential partners or IM them during your coffee break — just get started.

If you’re not quite ready to network yet, get ready with some bedtime reading:

• A Student’s Guide to Startups by Paul Graham
• The Art of the Start (Download Free Excerpt) by Guy Kawasaki
• The Barriers to Starting Your Own Business by Matt Inglot
• 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed by Steve Pavlina
• 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job by Steve Pavlina
• Top 5 Reasons to be an Entrepreneur by Matt Inglot
• 10 Myths About Self-Employment by Steve Pavlina
• 10 Steps to Open for Business by the Sloan brothers
• Why to Not Not Start a Startup by Paul Graham
• How to Start a Startup by Paul Graham
• Y Combinator Startup Library

2. Save at least 3 months worth of living expenses…

Then if your ego can take staying in your parents house and living off their good hearts and house help for a while, how about moving back? Then just buy yourself and your dad some golf shares for when you sell off your company in a few years.

Go ahead and go full-time in your new company — if you believe in at least one of: a) yourself, b) your vision for your company, or c) the high risks and rewards of entrepreneurship.

Start learning how to make a budget, stick to it, and see where you can cut corners. I used to buy nice clothes or shoes at least once a month or whenever I eye a sale; since starting our company, I’d buy a nice dress every quarter or so — and no new shoes! But when the stakes are high, you’re willing to forego a lot — to gain a lot.

This personal fund is on top of raising startup and working capital for the company.

3. Find 1 or 2 partners

A web startup is not a web startup without multiple founders. Exceptions exist but, in general, 3 is a good number to spread the risk and the labor.

Honestly, finding a partner in Manila is tough. Pigmata co-founders JP and Mau were college classmates so they understand how each other work. The three of us clash sometimes but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re all committed and still honest with each other.

As I learned from Dr. Saimond Ip from McKinsey at the 2007 HPAIR Business Conference, if you’re the business guy and you have a programmer partner, the programmer’s the star and he gets the bigger cut.

And, please, if you’re just having an informational discussion (a.k.a. getting to know), don’t bring out your NDAs. Don’t be such a fool that you think your business idea is so great that you can’t even share it to friends or prospective partners. Your idea is just that –something not concrete. And it will never become reality if you don’t let go of that fear.

I’m not saying shout about your idea to the whole world, but at least share it with people you trust to get insights and refer you to the right people. Alain Raynaud says it well in one of our Facebook discussions on attracting technical talent:

"You need to find someone that trusts you. That means a friend, or a friend of a friend. It’s highly unlikely that you will find on the Internet a random developer that really means to help you. Recommendations are really important.

Next, you need to pitch your idea and convince that person that it’s worth investing time for what will most likely be no income. Since the likelihood of any early-stage startup to ever get funded or generate any revenue is probably below 1%. The convincing is the most difficult step.

Assuming that person is convinced and excited about the idea, then you need to work out a deal. Stock, future cash compensation, whatever makes sense."

• 17 Pithy Insights for Startup Founders by Dharmesh Shah
• The Three Musketeers from Getting Real (37 Signals)
• The Dark Side of Startups: 5 Corrosive Co-Founder Conflicts by Dharmesh Shah
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Amazon link) by Jessica Livingston (Foreword by Paul Graham)
• Keep Your Startup Co-Founder Closer by Ryan Roberts
• Finding a Co-Founder by Adam Kalsey
• 5 Tips for Finding a Business Partner or Co-founder by Steve Nielsen
• Further Thoughts on Finding a Co-Founder/Partner by Dharmesh Shah
• CoFounder and PartnerUp

4. Register your company

Both partnerships and corporations have to register with heavy paperwork at the Securities and Exchange Commission. (You can now fill out the documents online and just bring the signed notarized printouts to SEC.) In a general partnership, you need at least 1 general partner and have the others as industrial partners, contributing only labor and not money. The general partner, unlike the industrial partners, is liable even with his personal assets for any loss or liabilities. It might get ugly when you’re discussing what profit sharing is equitable. On the other hand, in a corporation, profit sharing is based on how many shares you’ve paid for.

• Starting a Business in the Philippines
• The Ultimate Guide to Starting Your Own Business (A Handy Resource Book for Filipino Entrepreneurs) – Entrepreneur Philippines Special Edition
• The Startup Name Game by Dharmesh Shah
• Business Forms and Legal Documents by Center for Small Entrepreneurs

5. Have a common conducive workplace

Our open-air garages may not quite qualify as office space but living rooms, bedrooms, or guest rooms with A/C could.

If you don’t have available workspace in your house, a virtual office can start you off. After a few months, rent and set up your own office space (. Just use the computers and WIFI router you already have but invest in nice ergonomic chairs, A/C, lighting, and drinking water — you want to be comfortable to code for hours.

• Find office space for rent through a broker, walk door-to-door, Craigslist, Sulit, or the Buy and Sell paper available at 7-11.
• Get help choosing a broadband provider at PinoyDSL forums
• How to Successfully Get Work Done in a Home Based Business by Matt Inglot
• The 6 Coolest Offices in the World
• Organizing My Home Office on VideoJug

6. Raise funds from your own pocket and from family and friends

Easier said than done. Sourcing venture capital funds isn’t that popular yet locally but you can tap family and friends. Filipino startups also usually offer client services to generate revenues while developing their apps or waiting for their product to takeoff.

• Fund Yourself from Getting Real (37 Signals)
• How to Fund a Startup by Paul Graham
• How to Build a Web Startup – Part 1 by Carsonified
• 12 Learnings from My First Turn as CEO by Jason Goldberg
• Raising Capital: Friends, Family, and Fools by Dharmesh Shah
• The Hacker’s Guide to Investors by Paul Graham
• An Introductory Guide to Startup Funding by Ben Yoskovitz

7. Focus your efforts

Outsource your non-core competencies, like bookkeeping, government filings. Do-it-yourself is okay if it doesn’t take that long or you really just can’t afford it

Prepare yourself to live and breathe your company. I gave up my car and comfortable living at my parents’ to stay in a cheap condo so I can be near our office.

Stay together and stay happy. Host a team-building with your partners to align yourselves. We regularly indulge ourselves at good restaurants. Work hard and play hard!

Quick Feedback Survey

Please let us know what you think about the site. It won't take more than 5 minutes!

From: Pinoy Web Startup Team