We have been hard at work improving DotNetKicks since taking it over last year. We improved the design, fixed dozens of outstanding bugs, added threading to comments, and recently totally rewrote the homepage. The new homepage is based on a new algorithm that will help new stories get to the front page early and keep the front page more fluid and interesting.

Now that we have reached many of our technical goals with the site we are ready to start promoting it more and working to make it the best place to find and discuss .NET news.

We are going to hire a community manager who will help us with these goals. To start with this will be a part-time position that includes helping to promote the site, encouraging good discussion and posting new links. Our ideal candidate will be someone who loves the site and wants to help make it better. You should be passionate about .NET and the .NET community and ready to take on this challenge.

If you are interested in applying shoot me an email at james at dotnetkicks.com.

-James

In June of 2009 I helped to buy DotNetKicks. The site wasn’t really moving forward and I had noticed traffic was dropping mostly due to infrastructure issues so I banded together with two other people to form DotNetKicks LLC and buy DotNetKicks. For the last six months we have been working on a huge update to the site including an all new skin, a karma system, drop kicking and much more. For more information on the update check out this post over on the new DotNetKicks Blog. For why I got into it, keep reading.

Lately I have realized that I rarely read blogs anymore, I get the majority of my news from Twitter or from Hacker News. Hacker News is an incredible community and I wish we had something like that in the .NET community. I think DotNetKicks is the closest thing we have to it, and my goal over the next year or so is to build it into a Hacker News like community. The changes you saw launched today and the changes you will see in the future will all be towards the goal of building a strong community of excellent .NET developers.

In this release we added a karma system because it will help us control the spam problem and it will help to recognize the people who have contributed to building the community.

We added the ability to down-vote because it will let those recognized members of the community help decide what shouldn’t reach the front page, you won’t be able to just get 5 of your friends to kick a post to the front page. The front page should be a reflection of the community and right now it isn’t

We also reduced the page load of the site drastically to make it easier and faster to use the site.

So what else is on the way? My next goal is to increase the amount of comments on the site, so we are going to add threaded comments, allow up and down votes on comments, and make it much easier to leave a comment.

I would love to hear your feedback on the new changes and what you would like to see in the future.

-James

When I took over The Lounge back in December of 2007 I looked at it as a great way to make a little extra money each month, but not a ton more than that. As it grew, and after I launched Ruby Row, I started to see that advertising networks could be a good little business. I liked working with publishers and the advertising sales side wasn’t all that hard. As time passed though I began to realize a couple of things.

I am competent at sales, but not much better than that. I am bad at organization and scheduling and I don’t have the nerves to handle doing things like cold calls. I figured out I am basically good at customer relations and taking orders, but not pushing sales. This is of course a large part of running an advertising network and when I realized I didn’t want to do sales for a living it made me realize that building ad networks might not be the best business for me. I am in talks with a company to actually take over most of the sales for The Lounge which will help that network grow and keep the sales burden off of me, this alleviates the long-term issue but when starting a network it would be tough to outsource the sales from the beginning.



The second thing I realized is that most publishers aren’t that faithful. They will quickly leave your network for the next big thing or the next network that offers them a better rate. I am actually lucky in that most of my publishers feel some allegiance to me, but after a number of them left to a competitor and put the future of the network in jeopardy I learned that I couldn’t rely on allegiance alone and made some compromises that hurt my overall margin. This is something you constantly see with the larger networks, they all fight over large publishers and push their rates lower and lower.



When I decided to go full-time on The Lounge and Ruby Row in January my plan was still to build additional networks to get myself to a sustainable level of income and then see where to go from there. I started to build The Branch, a network focused on advertising to Twitter users. I made a couple of mistakes on The Branch. The first was I did not realize how general the Twitter audience had become by this time, at one point it was a very influential group of people but in the last 18-24 months it has become almost as general an audience as Facebook. My second mistake was that I tried to launch with some of the largest twitter applications out there, which put a huge sales burden on me. Launching an ad network is an interesting problem since you need to get publishers to commit to draw advertisers, but if you don’t draw enough advertisers quickly enough you can’t keep the publishers. Needless to say The Branch didn’t work out and I ended up shuttering it before it even officially launched.



After the failure of The Branch I started to think about why The Lounge and Ruby Row have done so well. The Lounge continues to grow because I know the .NET community, I know the publishers I want and I know what companies to approach about advertising. Ruby Row continues to grow because of my great partner on the project, Geoffrey Grosenbach, and because it is such a great niche market. I am also somewhat involved in the Ruby community so I know who I want in the network and what companies to approach. In both cases I had an inside person in the community which made all the difference.



My next thought was to simply find a good contact in another nich community to try and launch a network, I have tried to do this in a number of other niche markets and have had a hard time finding a reliable, motivated individual to partner with. It turns out I got very lucky with Geoffrey and finding people like him in other markets wasn’t going to be easy.



So my focus has completely shifted away from building new advertising networks. I am not saying that I won’t launch a new network in the future, if the right individual or idea comes up I would definitely do it, but I am not relying on it to float my business anymore. My focus has shifted for the moment to building Ruby Row and The Lounge into the largest and most successful networks they can be to keep my business sustainable while I work on my next big idea… which I am not yet ready to talk about.



The real lesson I have learned is that the idea you start out with probably won’t be the idea you end up with. So don’t hold on to it too tightly and don’t worry about failure, its just the quickest way to learn.



-James

I recently had a chance to interview Scott Porad the CTO (Cheezburger Technology Officer) at I Can Has Cheezburger for a site called CodersLife. In the podcast I talk with Scott about the technologies they use to build one of the funniest sites on the web. We talk about ASP.NET, PHP, application architecture, the cost of using Microsoft tools and technologies, hiring at a startup, startup strategy, and much more.

Its definitely worth a listen (of course I am biased).

-James

Last week my latest contract wrapped up. It was originally supposed to be a six month contract but ended up going over 18 months. I first went independent and formed Infozerk back in 2004 and since that time I have spent the majority of my time on long-term contracts. The stability of a long-term contract is nice, but sometimes it can feel too much like being a full-time employee. My main issue with this contract was that it was hard to find the time I need to dedicated to The Lounge and Ruby Row to make sure they are doing the best they can.

Going forward I am going to avoid both long-term contracts and full-time contracts, but more importantly over the next 2-3 months I am going to focus full-time on The Lounge and Ruby Row (and building other new networks). Over the last 12 months both networks have done very well and while they aren’t generating enough revenue to justify quitting consulting completely, my hope is that by focusing full-time I can get to the point where I won’t need consulting anymore very quickly.

This is slightly contrarian to my normal stance that people should wait to quit their job until their project is generating enough revenue to completely replace their other income (either consulting or full-time job) but I feel strongly that I can’t grow these networks and business past their current state without being able to spend all my time on them. I have also had this in mind for quite some time so I have saved money in the business and can continue to pay myself my normal wage for long enough to justify taking this chance. I do feel this is very different from just saving up money and quitting to try out a project that isn’t making any money as The Lounge and Ruby Row are making enough to make me feel much more comfortable about quitting.

I am incredibly excited to have this chance to focus full-time on this project and really see if I can make it work. Over the next 2-3 months I hope to launch a number of new networks and continue to grow The Lounge and Ruby Row. I am also going to start working on a transition to Amazon EC2 to enable me to continue to grow in the future.

I plan on blogging about it every step of the way.

-James

My guest post over on 47hats is now live. I wanted to detail some of the recent things I have been doing to help me focus better, and Bob was gracious enough to let me do a guest post over on his site.

Let me know what you think.

-James

Lots of people posting excellent startup advice (although you have to wade through the useless posts). Here are the ones I found useful:

How to save money running a startup from Jason Calacanis – I think the dustup over the "workaholics" comment is just people looking for links, pretty sure Jason meant people who love their job and are passionate.

Saving Money on Startups from Fred Wilson – Reaffirms many of Jason’s points with some great real-world examples.

A Couple of My Rules for Startups by Mark Cuban – Lots of good stuff here, love the advice on SWAG and keeping the organization flat.

-James

I picked up a great quote from the Refresh The Triangle meeting the other night:

"Copy is the easiest and often cheapest thing to fix." – Jeffrey Zeldman

This really got me thinking about the role that copy plays in design. I often find myself leaving copy till the end, almost an afterthought, and rush to get something up to "fill the space" so I can go ahead and launch. This is pretty evident in the front page of 22books, I can definitely write a more compelling mantra for the site then what I tossed together hours before going live.

I think this problem is best represented by the use of lorem ipsum text. Designers often use lorem ipsum text to fill in the parts of a design where the customers copy should go. The idea behind this is that using real text would distract you from the design, and lorem ipsum is gibberish for most of us. (wikipedia has an interesting history and examination) The problem is that this obviously is pushing the task of writing this copy to the very end where it will be shoe-horned into the rest of the design. Don’t have enough text to fill up the space? Then you either end up with a poor design or text that rambles and rambles to fill space. This is the same problem with using pre-defined site templates.

I am working on a re-design of The Lounge and I am going to make the first step coming up with the copy and what I want to get across, then build the design around that copy.

The text of your site is arguably the most important part of your site, leaving it to the end is a bad idea.

-James

I ran across this good article over on vitamin and it is definitely a good read. The article covers the efforts from start to finish for a site called ImThere and the issues the team ran into in and how at one point they had to scrap it and basically start over. If you haven’t checked it out vitamin has a ton of cool articles like this one.

-James