PuppyCopter Pre-pre-pre-launch

So a bunch of us crazy hardware and software hackers got together one day and decided we were going to do a startup. And that startup would be called PuppyCopter. 

Before we ever wrote our first line of real application code, there was a lot of pre-pre-pre-launch items we had to take care of to bootstrap the organization itself. The following is a list of services and tools we used to get off the ground, as well as some very personal, very biased observations about our experiences with them:

DNS: GoDaddy

Yes, their domain manager tool punches you in the face every time you try to use it, but their prices are decent and I already had an account with them. I guess advertising works?

Email, Calendar, Docs, Mailing Lists: Google Apps

As soon as you purchase your domain, get the rest of your infrastructure configured via Google Apps. E-mail, calendar, and docs are all a joy to use. And at $5/per user per month, it's a really good value.

Placeholder Page: LaunchRock

So you have the domain but you don't actually know what you want to say about your startup - may as well go with a placeholder. I had a very pleasant experience using LaunchRock for a previous startup in 2011, so we came back to them for PuppyCopter. I don't know what happened in the intervening two years, but this time around it was disappointing - clutzy UI, too many mandatory fields that I don't care about, and most importantly I could not figure out how to make widget embedding work when we transitioned away from LaunchRock as the main landing page to an actual website.

Website: Heroku

After being thoroughly disappointed by Google Sites for serving up static pages, I decided to just slap together a silly Python/Flask app mostly serving up a static website - Heroku lets you host it for free at a small scale, and as a extra bonus it was easy to tack on some backend code to support our prototyping and demo efforts later on.

Blog: Blogger

After being thoroughly disappointed by Google Sites as a blog platform, we switched over to Blogger. It works and has enough of the basic social media integration that Google Sites lacked. 

T-Shirts: Rush Order Tees

You can't be a real startup without t-shirts for your team, supporters, investors, and friends. I shopped around a couple local t-shirt design and printing shops in SF, but none of them had less than 2-week turnaround times and in most cases small-run (<50) unit costs were close to $20/t-shirt. Screw that. 

Searching for a t-shirt printing shop online was painful until I learned a couple rules:

• If they don't have an online design editor, pass - life is too short to screw around in Photoshop
• If I have to interact with a human being or wait for an automated system to e-mail me a pricing quote, pass - I need these t-shirts done NOW. I'm not wasting a day waiting for someone to read some numbers off a spreadsheet.
• If they're not quoting a date when I get the t-shirts delivered to my door, pass - I don't care how long it takes once the design is "approved". I care about when the t-shirts arrive in a box at my home. 

The Rush Order Tees folks totally took care of business and had some of the cheapest unit prices and the fastest turnaround times. Their designers also did a great job of "cleaning up" my hastily slapped-together online t-shirt design within 24 hours and for free, which is how it should be.

Stickers: SickersBanners

Sometimes you want to give your fans a little something-something, but you can't quite afford to shell out $20/each to give them t-shirts. So what do you hand out? Stickers! Stickers are awesome and everyone loves them.

Surprisingly, stickers are one of those things that have lead-times comparable or worse than t-shirts. I don't know why, and I honestly don't care why. Also, surprisingly few print shops have online design widgets - many of them ask for a "print-ready image". Despite the best efforts of a rather unhelpful employee at a local printshop to educate me on what makes an image "print ready", I decided that once again that I have better things to do with my life than mess around with CMYK settings in Photoshop. So I scoured the internet until I stumbled upon StickersBanners which hit the magic trifecta of having cheap prices, incredibly fast turnaround, and an online designer that took any 'ol image file I gave it and let me tweak it.

Pizza: Round Table Pizza

Startup planning sessions run on pizza. Unfortunately most pizza in this city is somewhere between disgusting and embarrassing. There is the occasional pizzeria that rises above the pack to achieve mediocrity, and every once in a while it even becomes tolerable. In my humble opinion, Round Table is one of the most consistently tolerable pizza places available for delivery in SF. I miss New Jersey.

Social Media: Facebook Twitter

Better snatch up those corporate pages and handles before someone else does.

Big Data: Hadoop

It's 2013. If you don't have a Hadoop set up, you're not WebScale. And if you're not WebScale, you're not even close to being PuppyScale.