01. Strange Start
In 2002, a guy approached me about making a “hot or not” site where you upload a picture and everyone rates it. I began to add extra features, messages, forums and things like that. After six months, the guy kicked me out. I had grown the site to 5,000 users and developed a bit of a following, so I went out on my own. After a year my site was growing at a rate of 10% per day. There were about 30,000 users then. Today there are around a million. At that point, I didn’t own the name (enternexus.com) or the hosting. All I had was the code.
02. Make Money
Right around that time I switched names to Nexopia and launched Plus to cover our expenses. Plus is our subscription service; it’s how we make most of our money. It lets people pay for additional features like being able to colour their profile, or see recent visitors. We had advertising from day one, but it didn’t bring in much. Online is very much dominated by ad networks and agencies, players like Google, Tribal Fusion and DoubleClick. When you start out, you can’t approach a company like Dell and ask them to advertise on your site because you’re too small. You have to go through an agency. They’ll approach a company like Dell on your behalf and say, “I think you should advertise on these 100 websites,” and you happen to be one of them. Certain advertising networks are better than others. Do some research. I talked to about 100 before I found the right one.
03. Grow Big
Website overhead is almost nothing. You don’t need a big laboratory. It’s something you can grow over time. I started my site on a shared hosting program that cost $5 a month, but as things grew the cost quickly escalated because we needed more servers and a stronger code. Compared to most sites, Nexopia has a very high CPU usage. That’s because each page has several ways users can interact. It has information about the user that is signed in and the user that is being visited. It has blog entries, which change frequently. All of these things require a powerful code, and plenty of server power. Part of our growth was stunted because our code couldn’t handle all the traffic thrown at it. I wish I planned for that.
04. Go Viral
Part of Nexopia’s rapid growth is thanks to the site itself. Try to make whatever you’re working on good enough that news of it will spread by word of mouth.
05. Make Time
For pretty much a year and a half Nexopia took up my time and my money. Instead of going to the movies or buying junk food, I spent it on servers. Instead of lying on the couch, I was setting up servers. As things progressed, I got busier. At one point, I was a full-time student at the University of Alberta, working a summer job and still tinkering on the site. During exams I did my studying and still put in 80 to 90 hours a week on the site. That was my hardest month of work ever.
06. Let Go
I have always said that if the right price came up, with the right circumstances, I would sell Nexopia. But to be honest, I don’t know if I could. It’s pretty much been my life for the last four years.
Category: Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
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