The journey of a Bay Area startup: Cloud and You

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Cloud & You · 830 Stewart Drive · #110 · Sunnyvale, CA 94085
 

Hey Everybody,

Its been a while since we gave an update. Well, alot has happened…again! Lol! 

Well it turns out that, you get what you pay for! So our last developer that joined on board, well his life got too busy. GF, new work, love and passion so there was no time really for us. We thus decided to go back to a very old friend of ours. A team actually that also was the starting developing team for AirBnB. James as we call him is a deep and wise man. He is professional and his team works nonstop! Of course as i was saying, you get what you pay for and thus we are paying for it! But the piece of mind is well worth the price. 

And this things are coming slowly but surely and we are still massively bootstrapping ourselves which i think is a great thing about us. Our ability to sacrifice and put the money where it matters. At the same time, its also why things are slow for us because we lack funds (heck 2 of the cofounders are unemployed and working full time on the start up) but its also our motivation to not give up and push it until the end. 

New platform: PHP and it seems to be working much better. At least we are more familiar with PHP codes. 

We also received our check from Cauzoom, the crowd sourcing fund raiser we held. We managed to raised $500!!! Not bad for a small team like us. Alpha is almost done, basic things such as sign in etc… work. But the bread and butter is still in the works. 

Hopefully, we can give our readers some good news soon so pray for us! 

-Zen Master

We will be going to Vietnam to prospect a couple of Java and JavaScript developers. Yes, we are actually going that far. Why? Because we know their language and they are cheap. Yes, we are outsourcing, but as you know, we are also bootstrapping!

They will follow our tasks as soon as we get there. We will explain to them our product and will have them code. We will not come back until at least some functions are completed. In the meantime, Kam will stay put here in the US and work with our designers and an in-house developer. 

We will bring Gokul on board. He is our in house Java developer and will help us get our product out. He is an intern and will be joining our team as soon as paperworks are done.

Khalid will finish the mocks and we will have him continue doing the next upcoming pages. After we come back from Vietnam we will give Goku the written codes and have him continue the work. We have chosen Java over Ruby on Rails because it is more scalable. Everyone knows Java and its more efficient to work with others. Ruby just doesn’t cut it to my standards.

I am also quitting my job. Two people working will be more efficient, faster, focus more and will understand how everything ones. One person doing everything is very tired!

I took the first step to quit my job. 

Jean-Marc and Kamneel had met Chris Yeh from PBworks on Friday and Chris really liked our idea! Very happy to hear that they actually met him and was given some advice. No investment yet but I am sure there are things we can work out with him in the future :)

I have been building a team for our business and let me tell you it hhas been pretty hard. Hard work pays off though right? I mean if its easy everyone would have done it. Anyway, there are couple of people who are willing to step in to join. With the help from Monte and his friend, maybe ththis week we can narrow the excellent ones from the good ones.

I have joined Rackspace for the heck of it. Slow. Well maybe because it was only 2gb of memory. In sure it’ll be faster if I picked 15gb LOL.

Our deadline is November 16th. That is the day we gotta finish our prototype! As of now we really need programmers! Someone who is hip, young, in school and enjoys working with people like us!

This week we would need to email our attorney too. We haven’t heard from him or them actually. Hello Peter are you there? Give us a ring would ya?

As you guys might know, we have been working our muthafuckn’ ass off this week. So far got in touch with a lot of cool people that are willing to help on our project. Went to have a coffee break with Tuyen and learned a lot of new things we should take in consideration.

Please if any of you guys are working in building a startup, please please do your research. Do all the things you have to to get more and more information on your competitors and market!! I honestly tell you we did the research on those two, but the main thing we didn’t research on was asking for help and the technology side! We are going backwards. We are actually supposed to work on getting and building a good team months ago, buy now we are trying to do that task in 2 months. So please research on what you need done, gather up your team, then execute. We tried to do the reverse!

Besides that, Khalid is working on our coming soon page so we can have it coded soon. We also went to Yard House to meet up with Monte and Duy. We are probably going to work with Duy and have him do our mock up pages now. He is a UX designer and currently working with people in the field.

Anyway, we are bootstrapping hardcore on this. We shouldn’t splurge on having fun now. It’s getting serious and we should focus on our future. So guys who are starting up save yo cash and use it for your business. You might need it!

Just my kudos.

Ciao