Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

Web2.0 is about technology, not money

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on May 23rd, 2007 filed in Thoughts, Entrepreneurship


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Reading Mike Arrigton’s recent post at TechCrunch really caught my attention and sparked some thoughts:

“When I look back at the pictures from those early events, I remember good times, and no one was talking about twenty million dollar venture rounds or selling out for a cool $1.65 billion. Companies like Meebo and Sphere literally launched in my living room in front of a couple of hundred genuinely interested people…

..snip..

It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.” - Mike Arrington

It’s true what he said. I’ve been hearing so much about new Internet startups seeking million bucks of venture rounds every month that I’m starting to get sick of it. Web 2.0 startups initially sparked off from tech enthusiasts and bright developers who believes in creating unique applications of their own that they love and hoped other people will love too. Money is not the first thing that comes into the picture. It’s the idea of making a difference that comes first - using Web technology as the backbone. Startups today seems to focus more on chasing the money, getting millions of capitals, and enhance their application with the intention of selling them off to some other giant companies like Yahoo, Google or eBay. This is what I don’t get. We don’t build applications to get capitals. We don’t build applications to sell them off. We build applications because we love it. If at a later time someone chips in offering a deal, then that’s something to be dealt later.

To me, real startup entrepreneurs are those who wishes to “marry” with their idea, developing the application till late at night with their small teams who also believes in what they are doing. Forget about capitals, they don’t mind starting off using their own money and credit cards, bootstrap all the way so that they could see their dream comes true. And they are the people who will cry if they had to sell their application to someone else. Isn’t it interesting to hear people create successful apps out of their garage or apartments? Meebo is an example. These are genuine entrepreneurs. “Profit” to them is the money that comes from the invention itself, not from those venturing rounds or hoping to be bought.

I suggest that you guys read that post in TechCrunch. Some of the comments are pretty interesting read as well.

If only Malaysia could have our own Silicon Valley….

Web2.0 Entrepreneurs… the time is now

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on April 25th, 2007 filed in Thoughts, Entrepreneurship


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Seriously, there’s never been a better time to start a Web2.0 bussiness than today. Maybe people have been saying this since last year during the Web2.0 bubble burst, but if I were to compare between last year and now, I personally think that the current year is the better time to venture yourself in this field. Here are some of the reasons why:

Many Web2.0 sites has emerged - More Web2.0 sites out there means more experiences and examples to be learned from. We hear Web2.0 sites that rises and falls. They had their stories mentioned everywhere, in many places such as TechCrunch, in Web2.0 portals and startup communities, even on their own WebApp blogs. They give you hints on what you should or should not do when venturing in the Web business. These are all valuable lessons to be used as a guide for us in building our own business. Maybe some of you think that more Web2.0 sites means more competition. I doubt it. The way I see it, you can leverage those Web2.0 sites for your benefits. Think social networks and social media.

Hardware costs are way too cheap - For a development PC, you don’t need the latest processor and the latest operating system. An XP on Pentium IV with 512MB RAM would be more than enough to comfortably and efficiently write programs or do design works. That kind of specs will only cost you around RM1500 (USD410) per machine today, maybe even less. Add a flat panel LCD monitor (which now costs only half-a-thousand) and you’ll be more than energized to start developing your web app. But then again most of you already have a good machine to work with so you probably not need to worry so much about PCs. What you may need to worry a bit is the cost of getting your own dedicated server and the cost of an office space if you ever need one.

Availability of many development frameworks - A few years back everyone writes their applications from scratch. Programmers wrote the same repetitive codings again and again and this has wasted a hell lot of time. But worry no more! Today, there are many stable rapid web development frameworks to choose from. We’ve heard of the successful Ruby on Rails. If you’re more of a PHP developer, frameworks like symfony, CodeIgniter or CakePHP gives you a great base to start off writing your applications in no time. For AJAX, we have scriptaculous and JQuery to save the day.

Availability of many development tools - Again, IDEs for PHP suck a few years back. Today, there are Komodo Edit (which I use most often), ZendStudio, PHPEdit and so many other cool IDEs out there complete with their autocomplete features, collapsing of codes, good formatting, nice syntax highlighting, files management, etc etc etc. Some of them are even free! Image-editing softwares has also improved so much that you can do more stuffs with less work.

Availability of multiple resources - AJAX scripts, CSS layouts, framework tutorials, you name it. Everything is out there on the web. You only need to use them. Open source applications can speed up your development. No longer do you need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re stuck with some weird problems, just type the error in Google and there’s a 99% chance that you’ll find a solution.

Blog numbers have quadrupled - There are gazillions of blogs out there ready to talk about your WebApp and do the advertising for you. There is Google Adwords to help you advertise with very little cost. And in desperate moments, PayPerPost is there to quickly bring you to fame.

Social sites are getting too popular - It’s very easy to create a hype around your WebApp nowadays by utilizing the many different social networks available. You only need to have a cool appearance and ideas and your WebApp will go boom.

Hello world!

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on April 12th, 2007 filed in Ramblings


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Ahh… The usual “Hello World” post that comes out immediately after installation. I decided not to delete this post as it marks the date of when I had this blog installed… which also marks the very first day I’m getting serious about building Web2.0 businesses and applications. While I’m at it, I’ll try to explain briefly about what I’m up to and what this blog is all about.

I love the web. I love what people do with it. Everyday we hear of new web2.0 startups building cool, sometimes simple, other times advanced web applications using various types of web technologies. And they look good too. And best of all these applications get a whole lotsa money rolling into them. Now a lot of people came to me and said that making money on the Internet is easy. When I asked how, they went on talking about blogging for profit, writing ebooks on certain niches, creating salesletter minisites to sell digital products or resell master-right copies, dropshipping, google adsense, payperpost and all that stuffs. While yes those things can make money, my gut tells me those are not to be treated as the main real business.. at least not in the entrepreneurial sense. To me, satisfaction in entrepreneurship means realizing new and unique ideas. Ideas that are different. Something creative. Something big. One that has a bit of brainworks to get it done. Something which has value of knowledge in it. The thing that contributes to the community. Developing them. Craft them. Deploy them. Market them. And see the money flowing.

That’s when I started to look into Web2.0. Having an IT background myself, I believe I would be able to indulge myself in this lucrative Web2.0 market. But it’s not gonna be easy as I still have lots of learning curves to go through in this journey. So basically this blog is about building successful web applications as well as how to profit from this business. In this blog I’ll be providing useful tips and tricks on both designing and programming Web2.0 as I go along building my own web applications. I’ll also include marketing and monetizing web apps as part of the topics in this blog. Sometimes I will go down to talk about technical aspects but I will always remember to swim up back to the surface. Let’s see how this goes in my venture