Dogster

During my 12+ years building and managing very large corporate Web sites, one thing was always clear. There were defined policies and procedures about how files move to production and "go live". Typically files required multiple signatures depending on the type of file and which app they belonged to. As I moved up the ranks into management, it was my responsibility to make sure that nothing ever made it onto the live servers inadvertently. With Sarbanes-Oxley in place, this required even more documentation for file moves and definable policies for production servers. It was also important to keep all of our servers current - some of the farms I've worked with had hundreds of servers in them.

Yet with many startups I speak with, there is (many times) no application documentation, nor commented source code. Over the past week I've seen two situations where some policies and procedures could have saved time and money. Dogster CEO Ted Rheingold speaks about his search engine mishap and my hosting provider Mosso accounts for the other mishap.

Ted has a great post documenting the importance of checking files that are moved to production and keeping things in order. His group moved a search engine robots file into production that shouldn't have gone up. What this did was cause a huge drop in search engine related traffic to Dogster. Ted says it didn't account for a large monetary loss but had the issue continued unnoticed, it sure could have.

Ted concludes by noting, "it’s about being vigilant in keeping a holistic view of your whole web app and keeping it as small and efficient as possible even as your project gets more and more complex." I'd say I agree and disagree. It's about realizing that as a startup grows, it's not as easy to keep track of the files and the people behind those files. I am never pushing extra paperwork and documentation, but there is always some minimum required level so that simple things like this robots file don't happen again with something more important.

Our hosting company Mosso had an issue last Friday with one of my Web sites. I won't go into the entire issue now but my site was down for nearly 10 daylight hours. This cost me money on two ends. On one side I was trying to fix the issue all day and on the other side, I couldn't write content here on CN because I was working on the code issue.

After the issue was resolved, Mosso staff posted the following message:

We did not realize at the time that a change was made to php.ini over 6 weeks ago, but never applied because we had simply not restarted Apache since then. When we made other configuration changes and forced Apache to restart it picked up on the rogue, untested change that was made to php.ini many weeks ago. But initially the warning messages went away - so we thought we were on to a fix. Site owners were unprepared to see a bunch of new messages that "broke" their sites, and it certainly looked fatal.

Again, someone made a change that was probably not documented and was left in development. So when the site was moved into production, all hell broke loose. Some percentage of Mosso's customers were in some way affected by this issue which ranged from just showing warning messages all day through sites that were not functioning.

I had a great conversation once the issue was resolved with Rob La Gesse who is the new Mosso Director of Software Development about how they plan to make sure this never happens again. I will have more about that conversation when I post my full Mosso review.

As your startup grows, it's important to remember that as more people touch the code, the servers and the Web services, policies need to be put in place to make sure issues like the ones above never arise.

With AOL's acquisition of Bebo yesterday, and now discussion of a possible KickApps acquisition by AOL, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some other content candidates for AOL acquisition. If AOL is going to get serious about stepping back into the major leagues, they need more top notch content sites. All of these acquisition ideas would work well with Userplane, AIM, ICQ and Bebo, all AOL-owned companies.

CafeMom

This NY-based startup is targeted at moms and would be an excellent complement for AOL's branded Web sites. CafeMom is currently serving 100 million pageviews and an average of 200 pages per user per month. This would make a great place for Platform-A and could be an extension for the Bebo "engagement marketing" platform. (our coverage)

Dogster/Catster

A niche social network for barking and meowing, Dogster and Catster could fit into the AOL branded sites as well. An acquisition of Dogster and Catster by AOL would give both sites new distribution opportunities along with a new advertising partner. (our coverage)

TripAdvisor

I am guessing that a decent percentage of TripAdvisor users are already AOL customers, either as dial-up, broadband or Web site visitors. TripAdvisor is currently owned by Expedia but I think the match would be better with AOL -- could replace the AOL Travel site. The TripAdvisor network serves pages to 60 million unique visitors a month and includes 8 web sites including my favorite, SeatGuru. (our coverage)

SimplyHired

It seems in the time since I started CN there's been chatter here and there about SimplyHired being acquired by someone. It's a better acquisition target than going after a job site as SimplyHired would give AOL the best of both worlds: all the job listings from the major job boards plus the ability to enhance listings to generate even more revenue. The publisher job board option would give AOL a potential "in" to publishers to push Platform A and other potential partnerships. (our coverage)

Which services do you think would be a good fit for AOL?

Editor's note: KickApps is a sponsor on our sister site, HTMLCenter.

Yesterday, Dave McClure, Ted Rheingold, Hiten Shah, Jia Shen and Todd Vernon took to the stage for a panel about startup analytics. The room was packed and the discussion was great. The guys dressed up like pirates and said "AARRR" 24,217 times. Here are some of the net takeaways.

If you do good analytics you can make booty (booty is the pirate term for money). You must test, test and then re-test all of your marketing ideas. Just because one is doing well, that doesn't mean there isn't a better one still.

There are five parts to the customer lifecycle:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue
• in other words... AARRR

3 business models

• get users
• drive usage
• make money = and hopefully its profitable money
• you must turn the users and the usage into money or get bought

Pretty graphs mean nothing if you don't do something with it - and perhaps give one metric to each team member to manage

If using landing pages, do lots of tests - the panel said that mentioning the referrer was beneficial "Welcome from Forbes"

Below $20/month is a good number to hit, people seem to stay with this and won't go through the hassle of cancelling

Hiring a blogger part-time could be a good way to build seo for the company terms

Ted from Dogster explains that by making dynamic landing pages increased registrations

• They got 2,000 registrations but lower numbers of activations - 60%
• Not all activations become active members
• Realized that the terms that they want to rank for don't appear on the home page
• Got more traffic via organic changes than in a month they spent $90k in online ads

Lijit realized that by testing different entry pages, they were able to increase signups and activations by a large percentage.

Dick Costolo, CEO and co-founder of Feedburner, has been giving me a lot of free advice lately. I got to see him and Steve Olechowski at the Future of Web Apps and hear a little bit about being acquired and working for Google. Then he gave a must-watch presentation on their entrepreneurial experience and has been writing some great blog entries on similar topics. Dick’s got four start-ups under his belt and I took notes constantly.

I first met Dick in June 2004 when Kevin Werbach took pity on me and gave me a pass to attend Supernova. Not only had Dick just decided that txting ruld, but that making it easier to share and consume RSS feeds was very important. He was right on both. What they did with Feedburner was stunning. They made structured XML mark up extremely sexy and business-friendly.

But I’m wasting your time. What you should be reading are my below notes from Dick’s presentation and his recent blog entries on first hires, exit fallacy and start-up offices.

Come inside for my notes »

Dogster CEO Ted Rheingold was the first CN interview I conducted just over a year ago. I was impressed from the first minute I met him both on his business acumen but also with his strategic visions. I can only imagine what he was thinking as he was coming to meet a no-name, new, no traffic blogger :)

Today, Ted sent over some very impressive stats about Dogster and Catster:

• Over 17.5 million distinct friend-to-friend connections have been made
• Over 3 million photos have been uploaded
• Over 20 thousand videos have been uploaded (video only started this year)
• Over 10.8 thousand member-established and -driven groups have been created
• There are over 100,000 locales now in our dog and cat friendly Local Listings
• There are over 4,000 adoptable pets available on the site right now.

They also launched the 2007 version of their coolest pet contest. I wonder if any cats will be twitter'in about their entries. Check out the contest details.

The reason for their success is (at least) three things: a passionate team of employees who are actively involved with the site community, a leader who is active in the tech community, and a fun, active, affluent community. Dogster is like the Yelp of dogs. Some startups have one or maybe two characteristics, but all three is a huge step towards profitability and long-term growth. Of course I would like to belive the real growth happened after our interview. :-P

Traineo and Dogster.com have teamed up to encourage canine fitness by creating a "Fitness with Dogs" group on Traineo. Traineo and Dogster are two of my favorite sites, not just because both are great services, but because both founders (Alasdair McLean-Foreman and Ted Rheingold respectively) are great businessmen.

From the Traineo site, "Humans are not the only ones who need exercise. Man's best friends also need to walk, jog, or hike just like their owners. To encourage you and your dog to stay fit, traineo has teamed up with Dogster.com - the alpha dog of pet focused communities - to launch a "Fitness With Dogs" Group. Group members can exchange dog friendly exercise routines, workout tips, and fitness success stories."

Check out our previous Dogster and Traineo coverage.

Day #21 in the CenterNetworks Startup Tips Month come from Ted Rheingold from Dogster.

Ted's Tips

• Entrpreneurship is akin to living your life on a roller-coaster. Highs and Lows happen weekly every week of the year. To steel yourself for the lows, avoid over-celebrating the highs.
• Picking the right founding partners is the most important of your whole company. Do not enter into relationships with any unknowns such as capabilities, professional expectations and aspirations, working requirements for the first 3 years, trustworthiness, adaptability. You are, in effect, marrying these people. Make sure there is not a premature divorce.
• Line up a diversified list of advisers early. Look for people that have both the time and interest. If their primary interest is money, they are probably not ideal.
• Spend as little money as possible to prove your model. Strive to prove revenue models while you prove customer adoptions.
• Run your business as a business based upon tradition business practices. It's heartbreaking to invent the next Rubik Cube only to learn that you can't even get the money back it cost to develop.
• Get management and finance books and read them. While you may be great at inventing new technologies, running a business is just as important a skill.

Ted Rheingold, CEO, founded Dogster & Catster as a way for people to unite around their common passions. At Dogster, Inc., Ted sets the company's strategic direction and growth, though he's still a coder at heart. Prior to founding Dogster, Ted's entrepreneurial and leadership skills were honed running the web services company One Match Fire, which he founded in 2002.

Recently I attended the Future of Web Apps Summit in San Francisco. After the event, I had a chance to sit down with Ted Rheingold. Ted is the founder of Dogster.com and Catster.com, two very successful passion-centric communities. Ted will share with us how he came up with the idea for Dogster, what Dogster is and future plans. He will also provide some thoughts on the future of the web and some tips for success. We thank him for spending the time with us for this interview.

Ted Rheingold from Dogster/Catster discussed passion-centric communities. I thought his presentation really hit on the key points to create success with a PCC. Here are some of the notes from his presentation.