Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

When I can’t entertain everyone…

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on October 24th, 2007 filed in Ramblings


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Ever since I started this blog, I’ve received numerous amount of requests through my contact form. Some asked if I could be free for programming works, some offered me interesting job positions, some asked for my opinions on their Web 2.0 ideas, some wanted me to review their web apps in this blog, some proposed for becoming business partners while others simply sent supportive messages for my writings. Thank you to all of you and I appreciate every messages sent

My concern now is when people ask me if I could work with them on certain projects. While I do take some of the projects and programming works proposed, I had to pass few of the rest even though I’ve seen some of the most brilliant ideas you guys poured. It’s not that I don’t want to take those projects, but sometimes I just can’t. Allow me to state some of the situations when I just had to say no:

1. I can’t take up big projects that needs to be settled by the next week - because that will only mean sleepless nights with high amount of caffeinated drinks to me, which won’t make me feel any better. If I am to accept external projects, I hope it’s something I can do on a steady progress. No client-work-with-urgent-deadlines please. I prefer working on self-initiated projects.

2. I can’t work on controversial apps - especially when adult content is involved. While I do understand that there’s huge business opportunities for porn-based applications these days, I just can’t find myself working on something I believe to be morally wrong. And even if I do, it definitely won’t go into my portfolio - which means there’s nothing much for me there. I’m sorry if we disagree on this matter.

3. I can’t work on unplanned apps - Even if you can’t provide a complete functional specs, at least point me to some highly-similar apps and sites with the designs you wish it would look like, perhaps some working examples…. anything. A simple naked idea won’t do much. If I have to think 90% of how the app will turn out myself, I’d rather declare it to be mine in the end. Your idea is great, but we need to work together to make it a reality.

With these said, I hope to hear more ideas while keeping the constraints within my ability. Remember that I also have my own projects to work on. So give me some space, and I’ll give you your idea

Let your Web 2.0 application do its own marketing

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on September 30th, 2007 filed in Marketing, Advertising


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One of the most costly part of a web app deployment will usually be on the marketing stage. Web startups spend tenth of thousands of dollars in advertising to get a bunch of audience to use their app. They send hundreds of emails to the many Web 2.0 medias out there such as TechCrunch and Read/Write Web to get some coverage and generate the buzz. They hire expensive PR firms to do the harsh marketing works on their behalf, and they also spent numerous amount of time/money doing offline marketings by participating/sponsoring in seminars, opening up booths and so on.

Nothing’s wrong with any of them. Afterall, a marketing is a marketing. But if you can code your application to do 90% of the effective marketing for you, you can save a huge amount of time and money and focus more on delivering high quality service to your users. Here are some of the ways to do that:

5 ways to let your web app market itself

1. Emphasize on SEO

Search engine is one of the best marketing tool out there on the net. If you can tackle search engine, there’s a high chance that you’ll receive a consistent flow of new users stumbling onto your app each day. Simply focus on the content of your app (allow UGC), use friendly URLs all the way, craft relevant page titles, use tagging folksonomy… and you’re on your way to the top of the search results for a lot of keywords. And remember, meta keywords and meta descriptions DO have its place in SEO, so don’t forget to utilize them as well.

2. Create useful/interesting widgets

People love widgets… especially bloggers. Widgets are small embeddable programs which can be included into any webpages by just pasting in some small chunk of codes into the site. This widget can make use of the information you have in your app to do interesting things. Take an example of Kiva.org, the microloan application which provides a widget that shows the loan status of a person you’d like to help (see example here). Or simply take a look at Flickr which allows users to create a widget of their own photo album and publish it in their websites. Meebo becomes more successful after launching their Meebo Me and Meebo Room widgets. YouTube, SlideShare and many other famous web apps out there also becomes famous because of the availability of embeddable widgets. If your widget is creative enough, everybody will start to use it and it will spread like virus. That’s massive ‘free’ marketing for your app without you having to lift a finger.

3. Allow members to send invites to their friends

Provide a simple page in your app which contains some hassle-free HTML forms to allow your users to invite their friends through e-mail. Call it a “Tell Others” or “Invite Others” page. They can simply key in a few of their friends’ email addresses into the form with a template invite message automatically inserted for them, and hit submit. This method of marketing makes use of the proven “word of mouth” marketing. Believe it, a simple function like this can do wonders. So make sure you have a function like this before launching your app.

4. Provide buttons/badges for members to help spread the word

Happy users will happily volunteer to promote your app — as long as you provide them the tools. Design some nice and cute buttons or badges and place it in a page called “Help us promote” (be sincere) along with the HTML codes of the imagelinks so that your die hard fans can easily help you promote your app without costing you a dime. The cuter your buttons are, the more likely that people will voluntarily place it into their sites. Not only will this help you reach more audience, it will also create the brand for you. Meebo used this method with their GoMeebo and they worked perfectly. You’ll be surprised to see how many people will voluntarily place your buttons into their sites.

5. Leverage RSS

If your web app allows user-generated content, there’s a high chance that you can convert their contents into RSS. As long as the content has a title and a timestamp (and possibly a category), you can definitely ‘RSS’ them. A huge amount of Internet users today rely on RSS on a daily basis. If you don’t provide RSS subscriptions for your app, you’ll lose that amount of potential users. The good thing about RSS is apart from allowing your users to stay updated, they can also be submitted into many relevant websites that accepts RSS feeds. What happens next is when your RSS is updated, it will also be updated to the thousands of readers on those sites, thus reaching more potential users.

Of course there are more ways that you can do to make your web app do the marketing by itself. But I think the list up there are some of the most basic and yet most effective method for passive marketing. It’s a good idea to have all these functions ready before launching your Web 2.0 app.

Neat slide on Cake 1.2

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on September 9th, 2007 filed in PHP, CakePHP, Web App Development


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CakePHP 1.2 has never ceased to amaze me ever since I started my romantic journey with her. Even though it is still marked as in “Alpha” development stage, I find it to be too interesting that I have left the 1.1 branch for good. Cake 1.2 have so many useful functionalities, “bundled” components and that little useful touches which makes it so practical to use and so much easier to implement. In fact I am currently converting most of my existing apps (where some of them were written like spaghettis) into CakePHP for the past two weeks and I just love every minute of it.

Recently, gwoo (one of Cake’s developer if I’m not mistaken) gave a talk on the Orange Country PHP group regarding the ins and outs of CakePHP as well as the latest development on the 1.2 branch. Here are the slides that all Cake lovers should read (also available in PDF format here).

With all the cool new added features that Cake 1.2 has to offer, why would anyone needs to jump to another language/framework?