Amigo Archive

Yesterday we reported on the auction of the HeyAmigo email service. The auction just closed with no buyer and no bids. Ryan Carson of Carsonified, makers of HeyAmigo, noted on Twitter, "38 people watching the auction and email questions are starting to come through. Will it kick off in the end? Nervous."

The starting bid was set at $25,000. I think this was a reasonable price for a pre-made, ready-to-launch email service. It will be interesting to see what becomes of the service now… start the auction at a lower price or sell privately to those who asked questions about the auction.

If you are planning to make a bid for HeyAmigo, you have less than 24 hours left. The service is described as, "a service that matches advertisers with email newsletters, and vice versa". The auction is worth checking out as founder Ryan Carson has provided a lot of details on how the service works and the revenue model. The Carsonified team blogged the development process for HeyAmigo on their BareNakedApp blog.

From the auction regarding why they are selling, "We are a small team and we don’t have the man-power to have someone work full time as the product manager. Initially, we hoped we could run the app and maintain our current workload but we just got too busy and Amigo fell by the wayside. We still think it’s an amazing idea that, in the right hands, will make someone a lot of money. The idea of pay-per-click advertising in email still hasn’t been done yet and Amigo is a great start in that direction."

As of the time of this post, there have been no bidders so far. The current minimum price is $25,000 on the eBay auction. They are throwing in free shipping!

Also check out Carson’s "14 things I wish I knew before I built a web app" presentation from late 2006 — the tips still apply today.

Ryan Carson, owner of Amigo and DropSend and also Summit organizer presented, “14 things I wish I’d known before building a web app”. I found his discussion to be clear and well presented. I am certain he could have spoke for 90-120 minutes about the items he listed. Here are the 14 items he presented:

1. Work with people in the same timezone (otherwise you will always be on the phone all day/night)
2. One user database (otherwise you will be in user hell)
3. One ecommerce system (same as #2)
4. Don’t have your coder do the xhtml/css (then he/she can’t focus on the programming)
5. Obsess about your website copy (whats impt to visitors )
6. Work with a top notch hardware partner
7. Don’t cut corners
8. Measure and measure more
9. You are not done when you launch
10. Tea-spoons  (what he was saying is that after you focus on all the big items, there will still be lots of loose ends)
11. Four tips merged into one - provide logos and details for the press, use a monthly csv for invoices, add an about us page, make contact easy
12. add tons of stuff to your faq and support pages
13. Be nice to your nasty customers
14. Tips from the pros – here Ryan provided some quotes from other speakers at the conference

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