Lookery.com

Every time I get a new company going, it gets easier and easier to focus on the new mission and lay the infrastructure off on someone else. It’s always nerve-wracking to rely on others for mission-critical functionality, but fixing other people’s problems is a lot quicker than doing everything yourself. The social add-ons to MyBlogLog went up quickly because we were able to add them onto Cloudspace’s existing infrastructure. At Lookery, we’re following Mashery’s lead whenever possible, which means running as much of our service as we can on Amazon Web Services, and seeing whether or not we can go even further. Like Mashery, we hope to own no infrastructure beyond our laptops yet reliably provide a monster-sized set of services.

Technical Operations

Dave brought the service live in ten days from founding (06 July to 16 July), because he based it on OpenAds which is a great boost, though our application strains it a bit. Aside from that bit of open source, we’re all services, all the time. Even OpenAds is going to be re-hosted on Amazon’s virtualized EC2 platform over the next few days, so we can duck many of the systems administration tasks and never even consider whether or not we’ve bought enough rackspace, power, bandwidth, storage space, or whatnot.

Not surprisingly, we’re going to be intensive users of Mashery’s API services, particularly as Facebook-specific capabilities are added. Being on EC2 makes all the data traffic between Mashery and Lookery free, which will be no small savings in upfront cash and back-end administration.

Sales and Marketing

I’m a convert to Highrise by 37Signals. Like many people in my job, I’m not the most disciplined account manager (we’re still looking for someone who is, btw), but Highrise keeps me in that dataflow — contributing via email BCC and getting info out via RSS. It’s the lowest friction CRM that I’ve encountered so far. Rex, who is filling our publisher management slot, and I have done pretty well with the deluge of interest and customer service requests so far. I think it will scale to at least the workgroup level, which means we should be good for a year.

To respond to the leads that come in before a real dialog starts, we’re using Constant Contact to send out almost-daily informational emails to on-ramp publishers and advertisers.

To communicate with the world, it’s WordPress, MyBlogLog, and Mashery.

Commerce

Paypal’s a great boon to everyone and we love ‘em, but I find myself hoping Amazon’s new payment web service is up to snuff.