iBegin Blog

So the first day of our donation drive, and we have raised a total of $42.00.

Not a bad start. Still, we need roughly $250 a day to reach our $10,000 goal. Time to turn it up a notch

I count my lucky stars every day. I have been very fortunate in life, and could not have gotten where I am without the kindness of strangers. In return, I try to help those that need a little bit of help.

So when the first signs of winter hit this week, I was wondering how I could help build more value in iBegin and also do something related to charity.

With that in mind, I am happy to announce our Toronto Donation Drive 2006.

Visit the page for more information, but it is as simple as possible: add a review or picture to iBegin, and we will donate to charity. The more you contribute, the more we will donate. We have no top.

I hope we can donate $10,000, and would love to donate above $25,000. So help me out, and spread the word.

Update 2:04 pm: I just updated the donation drive page. It now clearly marks how much has been raised for charity (as of this moment, $25.50). Remember - you have to do nothing special. Just add reviews/pictures like normal. Absolutely win-win.

The blog design has been updated. It fits in with the theme of the site, and it should be much easier to read now.

Update August 24: Finally updated the RSS feeds to be full. Been meaning to do that for a while.

I had a few motivations in setting up this blog. One of them was to be akin to the most excellent Signal vs Noise blog. For those unfamiliar with 37 signals, they are a small business that has created subscription-based products. Safely profitable, they espouse the ideology that less is more (something we also believe in). Their blog serves as a place to not only discuss their own products, but also related issues of design and usability.

The latest buzz these days is the demise of Kiko (link goes to eBay auction). One of the first calendar applications, and one that also generated a lot of hype (the auction proudly links to the usual suspects of web2.0ness). Good for them, but it also underlined a general problem - not only do many companies overlook a viable business model, but they also overlook a viable traffic model. Looking at the eBay auction, the site generates roughly 4,000-5,000 pageviews a day. Without a single mention on any of those mentioned news-sites, iBegin Toronto is already generating double the pageviews. We had a model for garnering that traffic, and its execution has been pretty spot on. The result? Instead of relying on the clearing-houses for web 2.0 news, we have kept our eye on the prize and have been growing well.

Related to this is the beautiful model of hype and hysteria to drive a product. I mentioned my attempt to circumvent the hype, and I think that helped a lot. Instead of being rained with platitudes about how disruptive our model was, and how web 2.0 our design was, we contacted a few bloggers, got some very valuable feedback, and moved forward. We were never a ’stealth-startup’ nor did we ever bother with having to raise capital (admittedly, we are already a profitable web development firm). Again, we focused on our product, and let people mention us if they so desired. Did we email bloggers? Of course we did - it would have been negligent not to. But fancy parties and trade-shows involving a small niche that simply want to know the next cool-kid on the block? No thanks. We took a detour around the buzz. Instead, we created a philosophy that kept us grounded and focused.

And the proof is in the pudding. I mentioned it earlier, but we are generating over 10,000 pageviews a day, and are growing nicely. Venture capitalist approaches are almost into double digits. A major media company wants our technology backend to help power their local search results. And with the recent addition of ads, we will be profitable within a few months (the servers were expensive).

Not a bad start - I can’t wait to see the numbers once we expand

We have now served over 100,000 searches over at iBegin Toronto. The next 100,000 should be much faster.

UPDATE August 16, 2006: Just uploaded a new version (1.2.1) of iBox. Only file updated is ibox.js

Just released v1.2 of iBox. Please redownload the .zip file if you use it (only ibox.js was updated).

Also wanted to thank JC&JC for their work on the new iBegin design. Easy to work with, and quality work from A to Z.

Excuse the mess, but the re-design is up.

Key pages to note:

iBegin Toronto frontpage
Listing page (eg Red Lobster)
Profile page (mine is linked)

If things are broken (or even on the old design), please let me know. Still squashing stuff left and right, but it should be 99% good now.

The reason for the redesign? Two of em:

1. Ads. The current integration of ads is about as ‘ad-infested’ as I want to go. It should cover the costs of the servers, and then some. I’m not an idealist thinking some magical ‘monetizing solution’ (to be buzzwordy) will fall into my lap. The Adsense ads relate well to the content of the page, and they are not intrusive/annoying/excessive. Quite a few pages do not even have ads.

2. Space. Really my main reason, the original design did not account for the growth of the iBegin feature list. Even worse, it had one critical flaw - it did not have the search box properly integrated. The redesign makes the search facility of iBegin (where it really shines above other local sites) obvious and easy to see.

I also wanted to point out the use if iBox and iSpell (not sure if we will release that one - needs pspell installed). Using our above example of Red Lobster, you can see iBox used for the ‘Email a Friend’, ‘Submit a Photo’, and ‘Login’ links (if you need it). iSpell is nicely positioned for use with the Add Review option. I still need to integrate the Feedback Mechanism into our search facilities.

Also will be releasing an updated version of iBox soon - hopefully within 48 hours.

Hope you like the new design, and be sure to leave any comments.

Things have been slightly slowed as I am preparing to move. Yep, I just moved 8 months ago.

The new iBegin design is being integrated, and it is looking nice. I hope to have it ready within 3-4 days. One thing we did add that we have not released is iSpell - a simple (and again, lightweight) inline AJAX spell checker (those popup ones are just ugly). Not sure if we will because it requires pspell installed on servers. After that, one more widget to release, and I think we will have done our contribution